Over the past decade, global society has witnessed the deepening of reforms to the modern state and the rise of ultra-neoliberal governments, both in the core and periphery of the world-system. This process challenges political analysts, journalists, and intellectuals to present compelling and valid explanations. Such formulations are disseminated through extensive advertising campaigns that accuse progressive and/or left-wing governments that have come to power in the last decade of supposed incompetence in resolving the historical problems of their respective national societies. These campaigns also endorse widespread processes of politicizing the judiciary and criminalizing labor leaders for alleged crimes of responsibility, corruption, and so on.

Understanding the shifts in political power within nation-states must be considered in light of the transformations of capitalism, particularly those that took root in the 1970s, with the crisis of Fordism-Taylorism-Keynesianism and the rise of the flexible accumulation pattern (Harvey, 1998). The implementation of this latter pattern required the application of neoliberal reforms (both first and second generation) and productive restructuring.

In the late 1990s, it became clear that neoliberal reforms had failed to create pathways for capital to emerge from its crisis. During the turn into the 21st century, progressive or leftist governments with neo-developmentalist projects were formed in various countries of the region. These projects, however, clearly did not produce the essential breaks with the metabolism of capital, much less generate the construction of alternative structures capable of responding to the needs of all. In Bolivia and Cuba, other countercurrent processes emerged, beginning with the construction of the Plurinational State and the reaffirmation of socialism and permanent revolution, respectively.

On a global scale, the operators of the global casino, associated with information and communication corporations, continued to fragment reality through the discourse of the existence of several crises (environmental, energy, food, political, financial, crisis of confidence, etc.) supposedly disconnected and unrelated to one another (RAMOS FILHO, 2015). In turn, Istvan Mészáros's studies confirm the uncontrollable destructive expansion of capital, arguing that this is a structural crisis, and therefore universal in nature, as it is present in all places, sectors, and branches of work and productivity; it affects all countries of the world indiscriminately; its temporal scale is permanent, and its unfolding is a gradual process. Its evolution is marked by declines in profit rates, erosion of working conditions, and destruction of nature (MÉSZÁROS, 2011; 2013).

The rise of ultra-neoliberal governments in the region expresses the projection of the power that capital exerts over nation-states with the aim of gaining control of the instruments (resources, markets, labor) to guarantee its geographical expansion (HARVEY, 2005a), precisely in the historical period marked by the deepening of the structural crisis of capital.

It does not matter whether the processes of seizing power and the measures of government are democratic or autocratic, whether the social processes are peaceful or belligerent. Governments are required to act to universalize societal consensus for the agenda of neoliberal orthodoxy or to implement it, fostering lucrative investment opportunities for over-accumulated capital, with a view to stabilizing the patterns of capitalist accumulation (Harvey, 2005b).

In scenarios of economic stagnation, to achieve these objectives, state capital promotes: lowering costs and privatizing nature (land-soil-subsoil-water-air-winds-electromagnetic spectrum-biodiversity) and destroying forms of collective property rights; converting new contingents into reserve armies of labor, either by lowering their cost or expropriating portions of the peasantry and family labor; privatization and financial speculation with life, with social rights and with labor rights, such as the commodification of social security, the universalization of public health and public safety, etc.

In response to this process, the global agrarian question is undergoing profound transformations, primarily in the redirection of speculative capital toward productive sectors, expanding into Latin American and African countries where the material conditions for life's reproduction are abundant. Consequently, there is a mobilization of capital for land acquisition, whether for future speculation, by converting this common good into a marketable and profitable commodity, or by transforming it into factors of capitalist production of food, energy, or mineral goods.

Territory assumes a central role in the instrumentalization of the capital accumulation project, being viewed as a physical, material base that can be commodified. The capitalist and territorial logic of accumulation by dispossession of common natural resources (Harvey, 2005a and 2005b) is thus updated, oriented towards the hoarding of assets by over-accumulated capital.

It is therefore necessary for the capitalist production of geographic space to mask the conflicts arising from the processes of capital expansion/invasion of peasant, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and traditional territories. In this sense, transnational corporations and multilateral financial institutions have forced governments to provide aid to speculators and banks, and to reduce social spending and long-term investments that would guarantee the recovery of capital accumulation capacity.

On the other hand, efficient state instruments are being developed to obscure public awareness of the depth and severity of the conflict. Furthermore, public policies are being implemented to control social structures, mitigate poverty, and instrumentalize the appropriation of wealth and the exploitation of labor, whether through the extraction of greater value in rural and urban areas or by creating conditions that subordinate peasant income to capital.

The geographical expansion/invasion of capital is occurring in Latin American and African countries, where the material conditions for the reproduction of life (land, soil, subsoil, and water) are still abundant. Agribusiness, hydro-business corporations, public and private national and international pension funds, transnational mining, energy, and telecommunications companies, international banks and multilateral financial institutions, large corporations, global information and communication corporations, etc., are deepening the capture of the state and triggering the creation of political situations of emergency or exceptional regimes, which attempt to legitimize and conceal the violence and criminality directed against workers.

Indeed, Mantonvani (2018) warns us that, to realize the project of this phase of the primary-export-neocolonial process, such junctures prioritize “new doctrines of national security, where criteria of political efficiency prevail to the detriment of the formal State of enshrined social rights.” Belligerent narratives emerge, supported by State structures and thus above the political-ideological orientation of governments, which rely on alterations to the legal and normative norms supposedly protecting the interests of the nation.

Amid the general trend of ultra-neoliberal advances, which, with their national particularities, ultimately fragmented and weakened more traditional forms of organization, the political action of these groups and their capacity for mobilization have placed them at the center of theoretical and political attention. This same process has also seen a spatial shift that has highlighted the potential of territory as a political strategy for social movements and public policy, creating a territorial trap whose social and political consequences for political actors who address common interests and move beyond militant particularism are still being analyzed. 

Faced with such a problem, the new proposal for the 2019-2022 period is based on three main elements to be analyzed and studied regarding: 

1) the speed and virulence of the process of dismantling rights, public policies and precarious agreements with which the primary export extractivist bet, materialized in the progressive governments of the region, had been sustained; 

2) from the perception of evident continuities in the destructive forms not only of nature, but also of society, which were previously limited to groups that were directly affected by extractive expansion and now advance over the contours of society as a whole; 

and 3) of the processes of r-existence that are already being reconfigured for this new phase marked by denial, repression and the precarization of the reproduction of life. 

We aim to promote comparative action research on the rise of ultra-neoliberalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, democratic transitions and ruptures, and their impacts on the agrarian world. We will also maintain an ongoing dialogue and collaboration with the Latin American Critical Geographical Thought Working Group, based on three thematic axes, namely: 

Thematic axis 1: The transformations of the Latin American and Caribbean agrarian question, the territorial disputes driven by the permanent confrontation between capital and labor, resulting in the formation of a database of the struggles for land and territory in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Thematic axis 2: Discuss the reconstitution that political subjects have made from the construction of processes of autonomy, resistance and common alternatives and interests with the aim of overcoming the Modern State and assuming total control of the territory through work. 

Cross-cutting theme - Gender relations in the countryside and violence against rural women.

The rise of ultra-neoliberalism in Latin America and the Caribbean has deepened the dispossession and commodification of various spheres of life that have been occurring for decades. In this new phase, concentrated capital and its socio-political representatives have advanced the practical and discursive denial of the forms of production, lives, and territories of peasant, Indigenous, and native peoples, rural workers, Afro-descendants, and traditional communities. For these elites, the pressure to expand the extractive frontier to extend a primary export-oriented development model based on the plunder of common resources represents the only way for our countries to integrate into a global order marked by an imperialist offensive and hegemonic struggles among various powers.

The countryside and rural ways of life are threatened not only by the expansion of cities and the change in consumption patterns, but mainly by the multiple expressions of capital: agro-exporting elites successfully promote greater integration with the market through Free Trade Agreements and Strategic Partnership Agreements, such as the one recently signed between Mercosur and the European Union; public and private capital deepens the land grabbing and foreign ownership of lands and territories; growing public debt intensifies dependence on international credit (mostly with China but also with the BNDES, the IDB and the IMF); State and private investments in infrastructure projects link the construction of mega-projects in indigenous and peasant areas with extractive projects, mainly of minerals (precious, industrial and strategic), hydrocarbons (conventional and unconventional), agro-export (oilseeds, sugar cane, oil palm, counter-seasonal fruits for central countries, intensively fattened cattle) and corporate tourism. 

In this scenario, those who inhabit the territories of Latin America face new forms of violence and exploitation. Both territories and the bodies of men, women, and individuals of other identities—sexual, Indigenous, Black, racialized, and marginalized—constitute a kind of army of disposable externalities of the capitalist system that continually reproduces itself.

However, despite the horror of the violence that occurs daily, voices of resistance are rising in these territories, offering new ways of understanding, analyzing, and investigating the social, economic, and political reality they experience. Local actors, men and women, seek to develop alternative ways of understanding the world, generating new research processes—and new ways of engaging with research teams—that prioritize local knowledge, memories, and resistance present in these territories. These processes allow us to envision other ways of life, other forms of relating to territories and bodies, beyond capitalism and its inherent evils. In this context, this Working Group will adopt research and knowledge co-construction perspectives with communities, territories, and socio-political actors, in order to share embodied knowledge and “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1991, p. 326), which allow for an understanding of the advance of capital in their territories, analyzing these scenarios from the perspective of intersectionality theory and community, Black, and Indigenous feminisms, which are challenging the epistemology that sustains the capitalist system.

Following decolonial and indigenous feminists (Crenshaw, 2012; Hill Collins, 2012; Espinosa Miñoso, 2009; Segato, 2012; Cumes, 2011; Álvarez and Painemal, 2016) we postulate that in sociocultural, political and economic contexts such as those of the Latin American region, where the coloniality of power and racism persist as modes of everyday social relations, violence against women - but also against indigenous, black, or other gender identity men, subordinated and emasculated by reason of the original pact with the conquering white man and the modern patriarchal Western logic - takes the form of “violentogenic” processes (Segato, 2012).

Thus, Indigenous, Black, and marginalized men, socialized within the codes of hegemonic masculinity, forcibly imposed by cultural assimilation and economic dominance, reproduce the patriarchal structure inherited from the colonial era and perpetuated by the nation-state, expressing themselves violently in the only place where the colonial gender matrix allows them to exhibit power and “(…) the capacity for control inherent in the position of male subject in the only world now possible” (Segato, 2012). That is, the subject becomes violent where he can do so, “the domestic unit, a space where, through violence against Indigenous [Black] women, the Indigenous male subject restores the virility diminished by the current power structure, which subordinates him to other men, white and mestizo, who possess a greater share of political and economic power in the territory” (Ketterer, 2019).

Considering the preceding elements, the Working Group proposes to mainstream the analysis of gender relations in the Latin American countryside and violence against rural women, emphasizing the relationship between territory and the body, given the emerging feminist territorial organization and struggle. This practice has revealed widespread violence against bodies, which disrupts the life cycle and reproduces patriarchy through policies that generate and perpetuate violence against women's bodies. This violence manifests itself in gender repression, criminalization, control over and of reproduction, denial of and lack of political participation, and other forms of violence. Women have created a new front of territorial struggle, empowering themselves and fighting for their territories through community organizing, armed struggle, protest, demonstrations, and other means, based on their feelings and actions.

In a context of intensifying dispossession and the hegemonic invisibility of alternatives, it is urgent to collect, systematize and share the experiences of defense and struggle for lands and territory in Latin America and the Caribbean as a strategy of resistance to the waste of experience constantly reproduced by the capitalist, modern, colonial, patriarchal and heteronormative system (Grosfoguel 2007).

In short, faced with the return to primary commodity exports and the agrarian counter-reform, popular sectors offer resistance and re-existence born from the heat of constant confrontation with capital. Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, peasants, rural workers, rural women, quilombola communities, artisanal fishers, inhabitants of the rural-urban fringe, and many others, engage in an asymmetrical struggle for territorial control. There, conflict is intertwined with experiences of "local territorial development" as well as with new forms of local political action, reinterpreting traditions of struggle, demanding historical rights over "their territories," and forging new states and societies. 

These movements take on a variety of forms, with perspectives more or less linked to institutional structures. The EZLN in Mexico became an inspiration for struggles for autonomy and for a new generation of activists, as did the Nasa Misak, Mapuche, Kayambi, and Maya peoples. The MST is the most important support for the world's largest peasant organization (Vía Campesina) and for efforts to advance agrarian reform (Fernandes, 2000). The peasants (Bartra, 2011), peasant movements, and indigenous and native peoples of Ecuador (CONAIE), Bolivia (MAS), and Venezuela were or are determining factors in the rise of “progressive” and revolutionary left-wing governments, achieving important constitutional and legal transformations that, nevertheless, have not fully materialized in the reconstruction of society, but hold enormous transformative potential: Plurinational State, 21st Century Socialism, decolonization of the State, Sumak Kawsay or Good Living, the rights of nature, agroecology and food sovereignty, comprehensive and popular agrarian reform, popular markets, water redistribution, interculturality, social and environmental justice, autonomous territories, community economy, participatory democracy, territorial planning, etc. From the perspectives of rural and water communities, the aim is to prioritize all spheres of life understood in their close relationship and without fragmentation, as proposed by the Western binary logic in agrarian, environmental, social, economic, and agri-food issues.

In this regard, in recent cases such as Guatemala, organizations like the Committee for Peasant Development (Codeca) have opted to form their own political party and participate in elections in the pursuit of a Plurinational State. In other cases, in contexts of widespread criminalization and persecution, they deploy significant resistance strategies, as seen in Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay.

The complex processes and conflicts of rural development experienced throughout the continent are addressed in studies ranging from those that announce the loss of autonomy of peasant, indigenous, rural worker, Afro-descendant and traditional communities and movements to those that show their enormous versatility to adapt or reinvent themselves in their struggles, proposals and societal pursuits. 

Furthermore, the current ultraconservatism in Latin America and the Caribbean—even with the breakdown of the democratic pact—understood as a societal project linked to the commodification of all spheres of life, is on the rise and seeks to perpetuate the denial of the forms of production that shape the lives and territories of these peoples. The geopolitical division of the world remains in effect, and Latin America and the Caribbean continue to be territories of evident conflicts and also of other, emerging projects. 

To further analyze these problems, the Working Group proposes the following: First, to continue critical reflection on the domination imposed by capitalism and on socio-territorial liberation movements and disputes over development models, which materialize in the relationship between the State and social movements; second, linked to government strategies, it is necessary to place at the center of the debate the complicity of certain theoretical proposals that support and justify the advance of capitalism in rural areas, almost all of which are driven by public policy. Third, it is relevant to deepen the territorial debate, both as a material and symbolic structure that gives meaning to social struggles, and as a space in dispute with capital and the nation-state, or as a unidirectional discourse that ignores the complex reality of Latin America.

Furthermore, it is worth highlighting that in the current context, a political and theoretical framework is being constructed amidst what we might call a decolonial debate. These are theoretical proposals developed by peasant, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and traditional organizations across the continent, and they are a concern for academic activists and intellectuals at universities, forming part of what could become a new critical paradigm alternative to capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Today, advancing the critique of the colonial burden inherent in “development” and the “rural”—which ultimately oversimplifies a complex reality—is crucial. For them, it is important to differentiate between the colonial as a historical process and coloniality as a power structure inherited from this process (Aníbal Quijano, 2005). Coloniality, with its geopolitics of knowledge, incorporates dualisms that restrict the possibility of problematizing dichotomies (countryside-city, rural-urban, indigenous-mestizo, among others) in light of the knowledge derived from socio-territorial struggles. The notion of territory as “[...] a space appropriated by a specific social relationship that produces and maintains it based on a form of power” (Mançano Fernandes, 2005: 27).

The richness of this complex and multifaceted political action demands a more engaged academy that can accompany these transformations with humility and without dogmatism. The theoretical relevance of this research is inextricably linked to a political practice that fosters political connections with other experiences, the circulation of knowledge, information, and debates in such a way that the positions and proposals of rural popular sectors can be consolidated, disseminated, and united.

In this sense, it is the task of the GT to broaden and disseminate the debate, multiply its links with social movements, with committed academia and some government bodies with the perspective of improving the socio-economic and political position of indigenous, native, peasant, rural worker, traditional peoples and black subjects of Latin America - Abya/Yala.