Trash Land: The Lo Errazuriz Landfill and the Politics of the Periphery in Santiago, Chile

In 2020, in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic, 5000 squatters seized land in the former Lo Errázuriz landfill in Santiago, Chile, pulling the site once again into the public eye as a place of political conflict at the peripheries of the capital city. The site had been a sand and gravel mining pit before its conversion first into a trash dump and then into Chile’s first modern landfill. The landfill operated from 1984 to 1995 amidst poor and working-class neighborhoods (poblaciones) in western Santiago. It underwent sealing from 1997 to 2018. Since 2018 the state has planned to convert it into urban park land. Even before this most recent dispute over its use, the ex-landfill had long been a magnet for conflict. During the 1980s residents of nearby poblaciones mobilized protests against the landfill, citing environmental concerns and challenging the dictatorial state in the process. In 1990, at the dawn of the new democracy, Chileans staged protests in the landfill against a proposed nuclear waste dump near the Argentina-Chile border. From 2018, the state targeted the site for urban park development, citing the importance of green areas for the urban environment. Today, government authorities cite environmental hazards to justify eviction of the squatters from the site. The repeated conflicts over the site over nearly four decades shed light on how people, from the grassroots to the state, have mobilized environmental concerns as a strategic element of broader sociopolitical conflicts at the periphery of the capital city.