Environmental suffering: Perspectives on the drought in Chile from the voices of small farmers and experts
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Abstract
The political and economic reforms implemented during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) in Chile led to the approval of the Water Code, which established water as a market-tradeable resource. This legal framework has shaped the foundations of current debates on the prolonged drought affecting north-central Chile since 2011. The purpose of this article is to examine the intersubjective perspectives that different social actors construct around the water crisis and the ways in which these stances are connected to discursive macro-strategies that either support or challenge inherited neoliberal practices. From an interdisciplinary approach that brings together systemic functional linguistics, human geography, history, and critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes two types of sources: interviews with farmers in the municipality of Combarbalá and documents produced by the think tanks Instituto Libertad y Desarrollo and the Centro de Estudios Públicos. The findings reveal a significant contrast in the role that dialogic contraction assumes in each actor’s voice. While the farmers’ testimonies contract dialogical space to express collective resistance in the face of water scarcity, the texts produced by the think tanks reinforce the legitimacy of water rights privatization through dialogic contraction and the topos of disaster.
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