Rationalizing accumulation in an urban-industrial sacrifice zone: Nearshoring and other contradictions of “reviving” the Santiago River, Mexico

Abstract

The Upper Santiago River Basin is home to the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara, to one of the country’s main industrial corridors and to one of its most polluted rivers, the Santiago. River pollution has sparked a socioenvironmental conflict where organizations in the riverside communities of El Salto and Juanacatlán denounce the uncontrolled urban and industrial expansion that has turned this territory into a sacrifice zone. In this paper, I explore the contradictions and absences of a state-level strategy initiated in 2018 for the Santiago River, and the role of the state more broadly in managing and leveraging an environmental crisis to rationalize further capitalist accumulation in the river basin. Industrial activity has expanded in the region since the river strategy was launched and through the period of the CoViD-19 pandemic. At the same time, the river clean-up strategy has not only been deficient in actions to control or reduce industrial sources of pollution. A partial and utilitarian view of water resources marginalizes the issue of the fragmentation of the river through dams and water diversion for urban water supply and irrigation, as well as of uncontrolled groundwater extraction in the basin. In this paper, I focus the analysis on the role of the state as an “environment making” institution (Parenti, 2016), in adopting a narrative of environmental crisis to justify investments in wastewater treatment infrastructure at the same time as investment attraction policies and scant environmental oversight exacerbate the causes of the socioenvironmental crisis in the basin.