The struggle for territory in Mesoamerica

Abstract

Socio-environmental conflict in Latin America is a problem that has manifested itself significantly over the course of the last 15 years or more. On the one hand, the number and scale of extractive mega-projects are on the rise due to collusion between governments and companies, and on the other hand, a great number of socio-political movements have emerged with claims relating to territory, identity, or human rights. In Mesoamerica, this kind of conflict is significant, because of the levels of dispossession and increasing antagonism affecting communities. In this issue of LACES, we have the chance to take a look at what’s happening in these cases. We will present reviews of three books, all of which examine socioenvironmental conflict to explain the dispossession and struggle of different indigenous peoples from Guatemala and southern Mexico who are resisting a variety of mega-projects. In Dinámicas de despojo y resistencia, Bastos and de León present us with three case studies from Guatemala in which the local population, mostly indigenous Maya, has stood up to a variety of mega-projects. The authors intend to analyze the political aspects of the social conflict by focusing on the interactions between community mobilizations and company and State actions. Above all, Bastos and de León seek to discover the processes and tendencies related to community mobilization. The authors situate their case studies within the broader conditions of Latin America’s position at the beginning of the 21st century, amid a regional shift to opening up to the global economy, by which the demand from emerging economies for raw materials made extractive activities paramount for local governments in the region. At that time, transnational or local capital colluded with different governments to advance mega-projects. In