THE FRACKED EARTH

In the early hours of one Monday this February, 50 Mapuche women, men and children of the Fvta Xayem community assembled – some on horseback, others on foot – to blockade the entrances to a fracking site in Vaca Muerta, western Argentina.

Standing in the dust by the barbedwire gates of the Loma Campana fracking installations, they held aloft the red, green and blue flag of the indigenous Mapuche people, and vowed to stop the operations oil and gas company YPF carries out on their land without consultation.

Loma Campana, run jointly by the Argentine state-owned YPF and the US multinational Chevron, is the flagship fracking site in Vaca Muerta (‘Dead Cow’), close to the town of Añelo, which has become the epicentre