Mashue: A System of Their Own
How one rural community built a grassroots water system, and challenged the country’s neoliberal model in the process.
February 2nd, 2025
How one rural community built a grassroots water system, and challenged the country’s neoliberal model in the process.
Simone Endress
Article
Before we can talk, José Luis Buitano must prepare “un matecito”.
Throughout our conversation, José Luis—who is bald with thick grey eyebrows—fills the matero with water and passes it around the table. With us are two of his colleagues. Raul Caman runs the native plant nursery in the backyard, and Fernando Muñoz is the current president of the water committee that José Luis once led. The house we’re in was converted to an assembly room for community meetings concerning water management, so it’s undecorated aside from some maps and licenses on the walls.
He fills a plastic kettle with water in the kitchen, squeezing the faucet with a calloused hand. While the water boils, he opens a wrinkled package of Taragu yerba and upends it so that some of the dried leaves collect into his leather matero, gathering around the metal straw. He carries this matero out to the meeting room along with a thermos of hot water from the kettle. Although sharing mate is a Mapuche tradition, and around 67% of Mashue’s population is Mapuche, this ceremony wouldn’t have been possible here in 2005, when the community was in a water crisis.
The road from La Unión to Mashue, which winds up a hill, is at first idyllic. As you begin to ascend, emerald-green pastures sprawl out on both sides of the road. Winding upwards from here, gravel dust hugs car windows. Muddy banks connote unrooted trees. Even further up, coligüe trunk carcasses are slumped out across fields in a gruesome scene. At the top, eucalyptus trees crowd together to block the horizon from view. Just around the corner from these monoculture plantations is the house where Mashue meets to manage its water.
When he’s not drinking mate, José Luis plays with a measuring tape, pulling the tape out and watching it snap back in. He starts from the beginning: in the summer of 1998, the well assigned to the municipality dried up. Neighbors met at the local school and assembled in a parade. Men shoved plastic carboys into their trucks and saddled their horses. Others joined in walking. The procession gathered at the river, where neighbors crowded the banks and filled jugs with water for domestic use. “ That was the first action to get the attention of the authorities, but obviously, the authorities didn’t do anything. So [the neighbors] decided to organize,” Luis Buitano tells me. They formed an assembly to discuss and pursue solutions for the water crisis.
coligüe trunk carcasses are slumped out across fields in a gruesome scene.
The assembly struggled for years, finding only temporary solutions in deals with nearby communities. It wasn’t until 2005, when José Luis, who had been working in agriculture further south, returned to his hometown of Mashue, that things changed. José Luis, who holds a degree in philosophy, proposed that the group approach the problem holistically and take advantage of a system that could ultimately save Mashue. He was voted the first president of Mashue’s APR (Rural Water Management Committee).
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