Coal crisis and its extractive economic transitions through local press (1994–2008): labor-productive reconversion, inequity and brutalism in coastal Chile

Extractivism produces material and social fractures that deepen when industries enter into crisis. This article examines the collapse of the coal industry in Lebu (coastal Chile) and the productive transitions that followed, showing how they reconfigured, without overcoming, the region’s longstanding socioeconomic marginalization. Drawing on a critical analysis of the local press (1994–2008), treated as a cultural text that reveals community narratives of risk, abandonment, and resistance, the study reconstructs the situated experience of the crisis and its subsequent mutation toward new forms of extractivism. Combining Mbembe’s framework of brutalism with political ecology offers a novel reading of how dynamics of fracture and fissure are reterritorialized in post-coal economies, while communities develop practices of suturing and repair in the face of structural precarity. The findings show that the shift from coal to fishing, tourism, and – above all – the forestry industry did not constitute a just diversification, but rather the continuation of extractive metabolism under new forms of dispossession. The Lebu case illustrates how local discourses illuminate the materialities of slow violence and persistent inequalities in Global South territories, contributing a situated perspective for critically analyzing energy transitions and their socio-ecological impacts.