Ghost Towns and Geoglyphs: Exploring Chile’s Atacama Desert

We embark on the first part of a series by Jack Eidt to spotlight the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, and its rich yet troubled history with mining. Banner Photo credit: Osceola Refetoff from drone footage of the abandoned saltpeter mining town of Oficina Salitrera Iberia in the Antofagasta Region of Chile.

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Nitrate Mining and the History of Chile’s Atacama Desert

This is the first part of a series by Jack Eidt who joined the artistic residency of Osceola Refetoff, a Canadian-American visual artist and photojournalist, in Antofagasta, Chile. Supported by SACO Cultural Corporation, this residency places a spotlight on the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, and its rich yet troubled history with mining. We delve into the environmental and social impacts of mining in this region, the historical context of Latin American exploitation, and the legacy of colonialism and neoliberal policies. Featuring poignant quotes from local authors and music that reflects Chile’s cultural heritage, this episode is a profound exploration of eco-justice, history, and art.

Spanish Translation: Historia del Chile y el desierto de Atacama

Here is a quote published in Antofagasta in 100 Words by Fundacion Plagio

“I was coming from the airport, my first steps into the city of Antofagasta. I couldn’t believe there were no trees, that there wasn’t a measly bush in that entire expanse of land, an arrival into the desert in all its magnitude. Not a stream marked the silhouette of the natural world, dry channels were seen in the distance, a memento of some ancient runoff. I had arrived in the most barren land I had ever known.”

Constanza Morales Gajardo, 28 years old, now Antofagasta resident.

“Pampa: The desert road, arid and sweltering, brings silent and tired men. A landscape, enervating and tragic, lonely tombs of deserted mining towns fill lost spaces of others who have passed. I contemplate their tanned skin, unfathomable eyes that see forever. The stones of the pampas hide secrets of lovers erased in time. An abandoned square, trunks that were once trees, laughter of ghost children, trains that pass and do not pass leaving their wake of faded times in lost seasons of life–dust upon dust, winds of the past, the desert road was lost in the recesses of my soul.”

Rosa Forttes Gajardo, 79 years, Antofagasta, Chile

Historical Context and Colonial Legacy

The episode explores the economic motivations and political maneuverings that have led to the region’s exploitation, including the devastating impact of colonialism and neoliberal policies. The late Eduardo Galeano, published his seminal work from 1973, Open Veins of Latin America – Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. It serves as a guiding narrative in this show, revealing the systematic stripping of the continent’s resources and the resulting poverty and underdevelopment.

“Poverty is not written in the stars,” wrote Eduardo Galeano, “underdevelopment is not one of God’s mysterious designs.” It is instead the product of Imperial design and Galeano reveals the full horror of what followed when “Renaissance European ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of Indian civilizations.” –From Stephen McCloskey’s review of ‘Open Veins of Latin America’

Coups and Dictatorship: A Recent History

We start with the semi-recent history of Chile in the 1970s, a place in the midst of the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende. He was the first Marxist ever to become President in a democratic election, and his focus was to bring equality and liberty to the people of this South American nation. He soon nationalized the telephone company and the copper industry, both with a long history of foreign control.

STORY: Historic Political Transitions in Honduras, Colombia, and Haiti

Salvador Allende said:

The Popular Unity government represented the first attempt anywhere to build a genuinely democratic transition to socialism – a socialism that, owing to its origins, might be guided not by authoritarian bureaucracy, but by democratic self-rule.

Salvador Allende

As Eduardo Galeano, the late Uruguayan writer of the famous 1973 book Open Veins of Latin America – Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, no country in South America was safe from the history of 500 years of exploitation and colonization.

Here is a quote from Salvador Allende as his government was overthrown which would lead to his death:

“They have the power, they can overwhelm us, but social processes do not stop, either with crime, nor with force.”

The Disaster of the “Chilean Economic Miracle”

Chilean writer Isabel Allende called it “the day we buried our freedom,” on September 11, 1973 a military coup ended a century of democratic tradition in Chile and began the decades-long dictatorial reign of General Augusto Pinochet. Similar US-backed CIA-planned coups followed in Uruguay and Argentina as part of Operation Condor, they caused massive upheaval and destruction in Central America in the 1980s, and they continue today. Consider the recent coups in Honduras and Bolivia, sanctions and attempted coups in Venezuela and Nicaragua, and parliamentary coups in Paraguay and Brazil.

Under Pinochet, coupled with Milton Friedman’s free market economic reforms by his Chilean (University of) Chicago Boys, the worst violation of human rights happened – repression, torture, concentration camps, censorship, imprisonment without trial, and summary executions–thousands of people were disappeared. Salvador Allende committed suicide as the National La Moneda Palace was bombed, the poet Pablo Neruda died under suspicious circumstances, the singer Victor Jara was killed in the National Stadium along with so many others.

Thus the “Economic Miracle” maybe worked for the elite but general people suffered under the autocratic privatization schemes and a whole generation of intellectuals, artists, and activists became exiles. Pablo Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, wrote with prescience: “Tyranny cuts off the head that sings, but the voice at the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and out of the darkness rises up through the mouth of the people.”

STORY: Tribute to the Late Urban History Provocateur Mike Davis

History of Nitrate Mining

We look back into the centuries of intensive mining in the Atacama Desert of Chile, which all started with silver, then guano, saltpeter or sodium nitrate, later copper, and now a massive rush to expand lithium production. Each boom and bust cycle has marked the landscape with countless abandoned towns and mines — each a time capsule of lives lived and choices made. Saltpeter or sodium nitrate mining began in the 19th Century, an example of the illusory fortunes of Latin American resources in the world market, that the lithium boom threatens to repeat.

It started with pelican and seagull droppings coating the coastal rocky cliffs for rainless generations shipped to the old world to revive exhausted European soil. Nitrates found in the desert soil of the pampas of then Peru proved an even more valuable commodity, used as a fertilizer, an explosive (or what is sometimes called a fertilizer bomb), or rocket fuel.

In the Pacific or Saltpeter War of 1879, Chile took territory from both Peru and Bolivia, controlling the Atacama Desert and mining interests. The impact of the lost nitrate income to Peru was massive and debilitating. Bolivia lost its Pacific port, but also the most productive copper mine, Chuquicamata, which continues in production until today.

Workers from these South American nations and beyond lived in company towns and forged, in the words of the UN Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO), a distinctive communal pampinos culture, despite the harsh conditions.  That salitre culture and the associated towns are now mostly gone since two German scientists figured out through the Haber–Bosch process how to chemically fix nitrogen from the air–this white gold–on an industrial level. Eventually nitrate mining for saltpeter became a losing proposition, the Chilean economy went into a tailspin, and the bust followed.

Interview with Don Victor Loyola of the Municipal Museum of Maria Elena

We interviewed Don Victor Loyola, a former miner who now works for the municipal museum in Maria Elena. His firsthand account provides invaluable insights into the history of mining in the Atacama and the devastating effects of the industry’s boom-and-bust cycles. He discusses the devastating loss that the end of the nitrate boom was for Chile, that started with the Great Depression in 1929. Communities that are built around single-industries, company towns effectively. When that company decides to close up shop, nothing is left for people to live on, and towns and ways of living can be ended.

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Indigenous Presence and Geoglyphs

The Atacama Desert is also home to a rich Indigenous history, evidenced by the thousands of geoglyphs that dot the landscape. These ancient works of art, created by the region’s early inhabitants, offer a glimpse into the spiritual and practical lives of the people who once thrived in this harsh environment. The episode explores the significance of these geoglyphs and their role in the transportation networks that connected ancient South American civilizations.

A Call to Action

As we reflect on the Atacama’s past and present, it becomes clear that the region’s future depends on a commitment to eco-justice and sustainable development. This episode serves as a call to action, urging listeners to consider the long-term impacts of mining and the importance of protecting both communities and ecosystems.

Music Featured

Violeta Parra “Gracias a la Vida.”
Victor Jara “The Right to Live in Peace.”
Illapu “Raza Brava”

For an extended interview and other benefits, become an EcoJustice Radio patron at https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio

And Poetry of the Lost Saltpeter Towns

The Anglo Lautaro Nitrate Company Ltd. settled the saltpeter town, Chacabuco, in 1924. Synthetic nitrate crumbled the mining industry leaving it abandoned less than 15 years after formation.

Although deserted by the nitrate miners, Chacabuco became the home to a prisoner concentration camp during the Pinochet coup regime between 1973 and 1974. After seizing power, Pinochet sent thousands of political activists, intellectuals, and those opposing his regime to “detention centers” throughout Chile one such being the deserted town of Chacabuco. It’s architecture of surveillance worked well for the military as they reused the nitrate workers’ residential units as cells for political prisoners. Although we have been told that Chacabuco remains surrounded by approximately 98 lost landmines, left by the Chilean military. It is a tourist site now and can be visited without risk of being blown up. As long as you don’t go wandering.

Oficina Salitrera Chacabuco

By Wilfredo Dorador A.

Published 2007 in El Alfrarero del Tiempo by Editorial Numinor

Wilfredo Dorador is the father of the renowned University of Antofagasta academic Cristina Dorador, who specializes in the study of the microbiology of the salt flats of the Atacama that are so threatened by the present lithium boom. We did an interview with her, which we will share later.

Oficina Salitrera Chacabuco

By Wilfredo Dorador A.

These are the streets
of my early childhood.
This is the salt
the loneliness that overwhelms them.

This is the home of the absent sea.
And there are hands like the bread of the new encounter.
The pepper and its breeze,
the neighborly voices,
the pupils, the longings of my beloved;
the rumor of kisses that return.
Joy is the swarm towards the origin.
And there is laughter resurrected from long ago;
then, the names, the hitches.
It is my town revived
in its naked forces;
the sun that raised its energies,
crack of the reverberations;
will of endless fire.
In this square I learned spring
and in the backyard nostalgia
and orphaned forests,
I argued for knives.
And in this place the chains, the shackles
that silenced consciences of human crickets.
Next the rafts rotted,
the dynamite went over the top,
and the dogs cried all the absences.

 

I am the last redeemed oak.
The angel of frost sings
corollary and cross of fire.
A crown of tin
is more of a being than thought.
I am the becoming of enpampaed seas,
I belong to the abyss of another time.

 

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Victor Loyola has a thirty year history working in the mining industry in the Atacama Desert of Chile and presently works in tourism at the Municipal Museum in María Elena, Chile.

Jack Eidt is an urban planner, environmental journalist, and climate organizer, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder of SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs.

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Executive Producer and Host: Jack Eidt
Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats
Episode 229

All photos by Jack Eidt except the banner image.
Banner Photo credit: Osceola Refetoff

Source

McCloskey, S (2021) ‘Open Veins of Latin America: A Re-Appraisal 50 Years On’, Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 32, Spring, pp. 130-138.

Updated 21 August 2024