Since the nineteenth century, in the province of Mendoza (Argentina), state policies favored the centralization and distribution of water to benefit to irrigation oasis and the wine industry. Both of this aspects were controlled by the political elite, and European immigrants. Such distribution of water was legitimized by arguments that postulated an environmental rationality, supposedly scientific and universal. Subsequently, this postulate was associated with water conservation and nature. Since the recent conflict due the installation of mega-mining projects that would be sources of exploitation and water pollution on a large scale, we analyze the state conceptions about socio-environmental relations, their contradictions and their political effects on both of social distribution of resources as well as in the environmental configuration. We conclude that the State of Mendoza interpellates to the nature according to their potential exchange value, under the rhetorical appeal to technical efficiency, development, modernization and consensus at the expense of social and cultural rights.
Water management; State and mining; Nature, culture and politics.