Political declaration against the extractive violence faced by the struggles in defense of life and for environmental justice in Abya Yala
Within the framework of the 9th CLACSO International Conference, “The Web of Inequalities in Latin America and the Caribbean – Knowledge, Struggles, and Transformations,” four years after our last meeting in Buenos Aires, we are facing new and complex challenges that, taken together, are critically jeopardizing the reproduction of life. The global COVID-19 pandemic compounded several other crises already underway—social, economic, and environmental. It exacerbated them, adding new components such as health and energy crises, producing a conglomeration of intertwined global crises that manifest themselves differently in each region and country.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, socio-ecological degradation persists at all levels, and the inability of governments to address it has been justified by invoking the pandemic crisis. Hiding behind the idea that extracting natural resources is necessary to confront the economic recession, traditional positions that view environmental measures as obstacles to “development” have been reinforced.
All Latin American governments have opted to maintain conventional economic strategies, especially the massive appropriation of human and non-human resources, granting various advantages to capital. Keeping the economy alive in Latin America and the Caribbean has meant securing and intensifying extractive industries. At the height of the pandemic, tax breaks and subsidies were granted to allow sectors such as mining, oil, and residential and civil engineering construction to continue operating, and megaprojects and agribusiness were promoted, leading to a growing expansion of sacrifice zones and areas of dispossession. All of these measures not only fail to address the climate, water, and food crises but exacerbate them. Furthermore, there has been an unprecedented expansion of organized crime, which allies itself with agribusiness and extractive companies, sowing fear and terror. According to the Global Witness report, Latin America is the region with the highest number of assassinations of environmental leaders. Countries in our region rank among the highest in the world for the number of environmental defenders killed. In 2020 alone (the year of lockdowns), 65 murders were documented in Colombia, 30 in Mexico, 20 in Brazil, 17 in Honduras, 13 in Guatemala, 12 in Nicaragua, six in Peru, and one in Costa Rica, representing an increase in these killings compared to 2019.
However, as we have witnessed today, while processes of social and environmental degradation have intensified, so too have resistance movements and autonomous structures persisted. Countless peoples, communities, organizations, and collectives throughout Abya Yala mobilize and work daily for the ecoterritorial defense of water, rainforests, forests, wetlands, seeds, and all forms of life existing in their ancestral lands and territories. Organizing for this purpose involves strengthening socio-territorial relationships and intergenerational connections where children, youth, women, men, and elders revive the collective sense of mutual care, for it is the defense of life itself. It also involves the creation and expansion of collaborative networks where academia has much to learn and contribute, supporting each other in the proliferation of critical practices and thought aimed at building a dignified and emancipated life for all in rural and urban areas.
For CLACSO Working Groups: Territorialities in Dispute and Resistance, Political Ecology(ies) from the South/Abya-Yala, Anti-capitalisms and Emerging Sociabilities, Indigenous Peoples, Autonomies and Collective Rights, Borders, Regionalization and Globalization, Latin American Critical Geographical Thought and Critical Studies of Rural Developmentarticulated in the Inter GTs Network New Frontiers of critical thought and struggles for emancipation from Latin America, and organizers of the Forum “Territories, struggles and r-existences: Community horizons in the face of the reproduction of inequalities of capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean”It is essential to make these struggles visible and amplify the voices that rise up every day from different community spaces and grassroots organizations in circumstances of harassment, intimidation, threats, criminalization, slander, disqualification, and murders whose impunity is permitted by all governments, regardless of their political affiliation.
We wish to highlight the practices that we believe truly contribute to mitigating serious food, water, health, and climate threats. We had the opportunity to hear from some of their representatives about experiences and practices that are moving in that direction, such as:
United Peoples of the Choluteca Region for Life
Front of the peoples of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala
Tlachinollan de Guerrero Human Rights Center
Yaqui Tribe
A Leap of Life
Union of peoples of the Diaguita nation
Union of indigenous communities of the northern zone of the isthmus
Women's movement in defense of Mother Earth and territories
Coordinator for the defense of the indigenous and peasant territory of Bolivia
Sowers of territories, waters and autonomies
Living Rivers Movement
Via Campesina
Movement of people affected by dams in the Americas
Movement for water and territories
Latin American and Caribbean Platform for Climate Justice
Law firm for indigenous peoples
Struggle of the people of Cherán, Michoacán
Community Living Culture Network
Yuturi Warmi indigenous guard association
We call for an increase in information, support, and collaboration with these and other struggles in our Abya Yala that defend life, not only to confront the multiple post-pandemic planetary crises, but also to decisively combat all forms of exploitation, dispossession, oppression, subordination, and violence that reproduce capitalist inequalities.
The fundamental objective of this political declaration is to amplify the content of what these voices raise from their experiences of resistance and eco-territorial defense, strategies, needs, alternatives that they have built; as well as their dreams and aspirations for life, today usurped by the developmentalist discourse and pretensions of a maldevelopment disguised as well-being.
June 9th, 2022
CLACSO Working Groups articulated in the Inter GTs Network New Frontiers of critical thought and struggles for emancipation from Latin America,
and organizers of the Forum “Territories, struggles and r-existences: Community horizons in the face of the reproduction of inequalities of capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean”
Territorialities in dispute and r-existence
Political ecology(ies) from the South/Abya-Yala
Anti-capitalisms and emerging sociability
Indigenous peoples, autonomies and collective rights
Borders, regionalization and globalization
Latin American critical geographical thought
Critical studies of rural development
Adheres
CLACSO Working Group Reinventions of the Common
This statement expresses the position of the aforementioned Working Group and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
