Women, Resistance, and Extractive Development: The Case Study of the Marlin Mine

Abstract

Women’s activism in response to large-scale mining is a topic largely unexplored in the existing social movement literature. This oversight is significant for the Global South, particularly in Latin American where mining expansion has been occurring since the 1990’s and is leading to increasing numbers of conflicts between mining companies and the communities hosting them. The strategies that anti-mining activists employ and the responses of their opponents (i.e., community members, mining and state authorities) are influenced by a wide range of factors, and one of these is gender. Using a case study analysis of Goldcorp’s Marlin mine in Western Guatemala and drawing on extensive field work conducted in the communities near the mine, this thesis examines women’s resistance strategies (categorized here as blockades and protests, legal complaints, and everyday activisms) and counterstrategies (violence, criminalization and cooptation) employed by the mine and its supporters against them. The thesis demonstrates that in both the strategies and counterstrategies, gender is a salient component in the tactics of both groups.