"O Bermejo flui pelos campos da empresa que fumega e nem sequer temos uma torneira": A região do Chaco como um território hidro-social

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of past and present modes of use, appropriation, intervention, and management of water resources in the Chaco region of Argentina. To this end, it reconstructs the long-term interactions between society and environment, considering water as a strategic resource that different actors dispute for material and discursive control. Specifically, the focus of the article is on the provinces of Salta and Chaco. Although it is possible to identify a wide variety of basins and sub-basins within this hydro-social territory, the manuscript focuses most of its arguments on the Bermejo basin, in order to understand both the imaginaries that constructed the historical ways of thinking and managing this territory, and the current discourses that are updated in the light of the advance of extractive frontiers. The methodological strategy is based on information collected and constructed in previous research, complemented with in-depth interviews, field notes and documentary, statistical, cartographic, photographic, newspaper and legislative sources. On this basis, the main dilemmas faced by the management of the water issue in the hydro-social territory under study are pointed out. In this sense, we will focus on the unequal distribution of water and the tension between the recurrence of periods of water shortage and/or excess. In both cases, it is interesting to show how environmental and sanitary burdens are distributed heterogeneously and what are the main projects and arguments elaborated by the main actors involved.