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On Care for Our Common Home: Ecological Materiality and Sovereignty over the Lempa Transboundary Watershed

Citation: Montoya, Ainhoa (2021) On Care for Our Common Home: Ecological Materiality and Sovereignty over the Lempa Transboundary Watershed. Journal of Latin American Studies, 53 (2). pp. 297-322. ISSN 1469-767X

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For over a decade, Salvadorean grassroots movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) pursued legal innovations with the aim of protecting their water sources from potentially polluting industrial activities such as mining. They initially drafted bans on mining that would preclude the extractive-based development path embraced by neighbouring countries. Eventually, they scaled up their approach and devised a draft proposal for a transboundary waters treaty that addressed the challenges that the ecological materiality of international watercourses poses to national de jure sovereignty. In so doing, the transboundary watershed has become a useful heuristic, a spatial trope to which Salvadoreans have turned to substantiate their claims to sovereignty over the Lempa River waters that El Salvador shares with pro-mining Guatemala and Honduras – claims imbued with an ethics of care rooted in wartime politics and Catholic morality.

Creators: Montoya, Ainhoa (0000-0001-7052-4318) and
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X21000249
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X21000249
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Subjects: Latin American Studies
Sociology & Anthropology
Keywords: water, watershed, mining, sovereignty, politics, juridification, care, Catholic morality, ecotheology, Central America, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, anthropology, political anthropology, legal anthropology, ethnography, Latin America
Divisions: Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Collections: The Legal Cultures of the Subsoil
Dates:
  • 29 March 2021 (published)
  • 1 December 2020 (accepted)

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