State-capital from China and neoliberal mining in Peru: Authoritarian practices and struggles over copper extraction in the Indigenous territories of Las Bambas -Apurimac

This article examines a mining conflict arising from the symbiotic rather than competing interaction between state-capital from China and neoliberal authoritarianism in Peru. It aims to show how state-capital flows from China interact with and benefit from previously established policing institutions and anti-terror systems designed to defend and safeguard neoliberal growth formulas in Peru. In this context, inter-state assemblages promoting the neoliberalization of trade and investment give way to the multiscalar formation of a transnational space, in which Chinese transnational companies legally purchase ‘cheap’ sources of physical force from the Peruvian state to advance copper extraction by violent means. We refer to the latter as the ‘Sino-Peruvian extractive space’ (SPES) to show the ways China’s increasingly dominant role in global capitalism builds on and reconfigures the coloniality/modernity dynamics of transnational mining, with a particular focus on mining investments in Indigenous territories of Apurimac in the Andean highlands of Peru. The case of Las Bambas, the second biggest copper mine in the world, highlights the ways large investments by the Chinese company MMG/Minmetals benefit from Peru’s highly deregulated and market liberalizing policies adopted by the Peruvian state during periods of authoritarian rule supported by US policies under Fujimorismo.