Latin American critical geographical thought is a field of knowledge and practice that intertwines multiple perspectives of critical thinking with a strong interest in advocating for the transformation of socio-territorial realities across diverse latitudes. It represents a commitment to change and emancipation, aiming to disrupt and end the social and spatial inequalities and injustices in which we find ourselves immersed. As Herrera (2019) argues, critical geography cannot be conceived without the practice and political and ethical commitment to social movements whose purpose is the defense of territories and the pursuit of social justice.

The origins of geography in Latin America, as a modern discipline, were linked to the independence processes of our countries. The need to create a detailed inventory and registry of natural resources, towns, and populations led to its development at the beginning of the internal colonialism processes in the nascent republics. Within this context, geographical societies began to emerge in Latin American countries, mirroring the geographical societies of the 19th-century European empires.

The process of institutionalizing the discipline in academia was linked to this process and also to the teaching of geography in schools and universities. Official atlases and maps emerged in response to the needs of nation-states, and the military in particular; they were key devices and instruments for creating the geographical imaginaries of the new nations based on the physical and cultural geography of each country (Delgado, 2019), with a strategy of knowledge colonization imposed on local knowledge and wisdom.

Alongside this process, representations of geographic spaces were created and imposed from a Eurocentric, colonial, modern, and patriarchal perspective. This approach has not only been deployed through official maps but has also been disseminated at various points in history from different centers of education and knowledge production, even today. This has occurred at both the school and university levels, thus rendering invisible the diverse knowledge and wisdom of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as those of various Global Souths, silencing and concealing other forms of knowledge and diverse ways of life. 

According to Fals Borda (2009), we can say that, for those in power, traditional forms of spatial representation are a strategic tool and knowledge for maintaining the political, cultural, and economic status quo of the modern-colonial-patriarchal capitalist system. They require the adherence to certain rules, norms, methods, and techniques that conform to a single type of rationality.

Critical geography can be understood as a stance, a field of knowledge, and a situated praxis that challenges conservative and imperialist positions and recognizes diverse forms of oppression (Herrera, 2019). It necessarily involves a critical review of analytical and methodological categories, through which we engage with diverse forms of knowledge when addressing socio-spatial conflicts and manifestations. This critical perspective on geography is open to social theories, linking and articulating spatial knowledge to the social production of spaces.

Critical geography is not separate from the social processes we are experiencing in most of our countries. The rise of political groups and parties in government belonging to the most reactionary and oppressive right-wing ideologies has deepened neoliberal and extractive strategies and policies, undermining the social gains achieved in recent decades.

Given the current global and local context of crisis in the political, economic, cultural, environmental, social, and scientific spheres (marked by severe cuts in public education budgets and funding for science and technology), practices that constantly violate human rights and intensify strategies of plunder and dispossession against communities, coupled with the expansion of practices of socioeconomic exclusion and marginalization affecting broad sectors of society, it is essential to strengthen critical research and action groups and networks whose aim is to challenge these social realities. In this way, the spatial logic of neoliberal capitalism and its underlying patriarchal and colonial patterns will be understood, enabling a collective and collaborative production of knowledge in conjunction with diverse social groups and movements, while also influencing the political sphere.

It is therefore important to advocate for the strengthening of critical geographical thinking in various fields, from which the dialogue of knowledge and the listening to other voices can be made possible, those that emerge from the re-existence and becoming of the processes of resistance, struggle and social movements in defense of territories and life.

Our proposal also refers to the articulation with Southern movements from various latitudes from which we can create bonds of collaboration and solidarity.

Based on the journey and collective work we have carried out as a Working Group in the 2016-2019 call, and a critical review of our practices, recovering the work themes of those who are part of it and the links that we have with various groups and social movements in different places, we propose for the next three years the following lines of work that will be guided in order to achieve concrete action and organize ourselves as a group with a large number of participants:

* Latin American and Caribbean Geopolitics: Migrations and Infrastructures of Dispossession [Alberto Gutiérrez Arguedas, Emiliano Díaz Carnero, Juan Manuel Delgado, and Marcela Torrez Gallardo]

* Agrarian conflicts, struggles and social movements linked to rural and peasant-indigenous spaces [Claudio Ubiratan Gonçalves, Francys Cárdenas Ferrucho, Ginno Pérez Salas and José Antonio Mora Calderón]

* Climate change scenarios, socio-environmental problems and approaches to risk [María de Estrada, José Becerra-Ruiz, Ismael Díaz] 

* Urban problems and urban social movements [Felipe Ignacio Ochsenius Recabarren and Igor Catalão]

* Gender(s) and feminisms from and in geography [Tania Herrera and Carla Pedrazzani]

* Historical and cultural perspectives in geographical thought [Santiago Llorens and Valeria de Pina Ravest]

* Disciplinary training, other methodologies and social cartography [David Jiménez Ramos, Ignacio Rojas Rubio and Miguel Espinosa Rico]

* Geographic bases, GIS and participatory geotechnologies [Adrian Flores, Inés Rosso and Martín Ortiz]

Critical geographical thought in Latin America and the Caribbean presents various challenges, one of which is the production of knowledge. This field interweaves multiple perspectives with a strong interest in advocating for the transformation of socio-territorial realities in diverse latitudes and interconnected contexts.

It is relevant to the socio-territorial transformation processes that societies/groups experience. The struggle for property, housing, the production of differentiated spaces, or the displacement of populations to different regions of the world, among other things, are processes rooted in disputes over power and territories. Neoliberal policies are intensifying in most Latin American countries, affecting different groups/communities, which are repressed, displaced, and marginalized from their territories of origin and belonging.

Indigenous and peasant communities face dispossession as a result of extractive projects, infrastructure development, and the expansion of monocultures. They stand against the commodification of land, and states deny them the value of their land and territory. 

The reproduction of capital increases its accumulation circuits, disrupting the expanded reproduction of life, where economic and life forms are linked to nature. 

In Latin American urban spaces, spatial inequalities are increasing due to various processes of accumulation by dispossession. This generates multiple forms of violence and tension. New peri-urban spaces emerge that contrast with the ways of life of the communities, and urban elites occupy these spaces as second homes or for new forms of environmental development.

Popular education movements, which emerged and consolidated in Latin America, seek to discuss practices and experiences that are rendered invisible and denied in formal education. The history and geography content in formal education tends to transmit a positivist view of space as a static container, unchanging in time and with little connection to human beings. Lacoste (1976) argues that the true value of geographic space remains hidden, except among elites who have constructed a "smokescreen" that obscures the importance of spatial knowledge, thus keeping it in the hands of a few and creating a monopoly on it.

Critical geographies posit space as a social construct, enabling the recognition of difference. While they have contributed to the understanding of differentiated social space, the position of male power is not entirely challenged. Dialogue with feminist geography from other regions has broadened the horizons of geographical debates, contributing from situated knowledge. Microsocial and qualitative perspectives are articulated in the analysis of space, highlighting intersectionality and the subaltern voices of women, lesbians, gays, transgender people, queer people, and others traditionally excluded from spatial analysis (Zubia & López, 2015).

It is essential to emancipate pluriculturalism and biodiversity in Latin America as factors for the protection, respect, and safeguarding of its peoples, aiming for authentic and local education rooted in local knowledge and geographies that contribute to Latin American reality, reclaiming traditional knowledge and territories. We need to rethink the relationship between humanity and the environment, using multidimensional and multi-scalar approaches.

Geographers linked to different areas of knowledge contribute from their practical experience. They question, demand, and propose diverse ways of understanding territorial contexts and their actors, a plurality of voices that combine to confront and transform socio-territorial contexts. 

Accordingly, the GT is interested in the training and practice of critical Latin American geographical thought, accompanying socio-spatial processes and transformations that have occurred and are occurring in Latin America and the contributions that can be made from Geography, highlighting new forms of spatial representation and questioning the hegemonic forms of official representation. 

The Geopolitical Emergence of Domination

Eurocentrism imported slavery, feudalism, and colonialism, but also emancipatory ideas that combat this domination; these ideas were inspired by modern European humanism, which fermented in the independence movements and decolonial processes known up to that point in Latin America. The evils of Imperial Colonial Europe also created antidotes to its barbarism (Morin, 2007), which must be brought into dialogue.

In the 21st century, Latin America and the Caribbean have undergone significant transformations in the structures and orientations of their political landscapes. This period has been characterized by the establishment of governments with a relatively distinct left-leaning tendency; however, right-wing governments with authoritarian practices persist within these states.

Supranational blocs have been formed with a new geopolitical projection that goes beyond the economic and commercial dimension, and encompasses a growing negotiation of areas of political power between the center and the periphery of the world-system, in the face of the still persistent expressions of geoeconomic and social fragmentation (Preciado and Uc, 2010).

Latin American Critical Geographical Thought has sparked interest among Latin American geographers connected to geographical problems from a critical perspective. This highlights the need for spaces for reflection and collective construction of geographical practice in relation to this line of thought. 

Considering the Global South as a source of knowledge that allows for an epistemological disruption, “a revolution in theory” (Santos, 2016), with a strong critique—both internal and external—of the epistemological, ontological, and methodological model of Western modernity, we appeal to cognitive justice and to promoting, within the disciplinary field, other ways of knowing and producing knowledge in a profound dialogue with other academic and extra-academic fields of knowledge, as well as with territorial knowledge.

As part of our practical work, we propose a process of articulation and cooperative and collaborative work with the CLACSO Working Groups. We also aim to strengthen research, training, and exchange networks with the Latin American Network of Geographers of Roots (GeoRaizAL), the GeoComunes Collective, the Institute of Geographies for Peace AC, the Puerto Rican Geography Collective, the April 24 Critical Geography Collective (Costa Rica), the Cambalache Geographical Cooperative project, and other networks, collectives, and groups active in Latin American geographic work.

Our commitment to social change through the design of public policies at global and regional levels involves initiating, maintaining, and strengthening relationships with academic, political, and geoeconomic organizations, such as the UN regional system in Latin America (ECLAC, UNU, UNEP, UNDP, UNESCO, and others). This includes the 2018 merger of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the International Social Science Council (ISSC), which created the International Council for Science (ISC). We must also mention our relationship with FLACSO (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences) and the OAS (Organization of American States), specifically with its research arm in geography, history, anthropology, and cartography, the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH).

Finally, we will coordinate with international organizations that bring together various professional interest groups such as the International Sociological Association - ISA, the International Geographical Union - IGU and the International Political Science Association - IPSA, among others.

In the words of Yves Lacoste (1976), geography is a weapon for war; therefore, it is necessary to rethink in each project and action how it is used and with whom and how territorial knowledge is built.