The Working Group “Bodies, Territories, Resistances” (GT CUTER) is intimately linked to the moment we are living through, not only as inhabitants of Latin America and the Caribbean, but as inhabitants of planet Earth, as emphasized by members of various anti- and alter movements. This new planetary consciousness emerging in the most diverse places is not accidental; it is the fruit of what has been called in various ways: “the global crisis of capitalism,” “the crisis of Western capitalist heteropatriarchal civilization,” and “the crisis of the hegemonic civilizational pattern.” All these conceptualizations emphasize different aspects of the phenomenon, but they all agree that the current crisis is global, systemic, and goes beyond being merely an economic or financial crisis. It is rather a multifaceted crisis that is simultaneously environmental, energy-related, food-related, migratory, war-related, and political in a threefold dimension: a crisis of the hegemony of imperialism, of the legitimacy of the modern state and of representative liberal democracy, as well as a cultural and ethical crisis in terms of values, life projects, and dominant forms of identity and subjectivity. Others place special emphasis on the crisis of structures and dominant forms of knowledge (1). It is here that this Working Group asks: How are we experiencing these multiple crises in Latin America and the Caribbean? In particular, in this Working Group we reflect on crises and wars felt and thought from: a) the resistance of racialized and plural bodies; b) from the defense of Indigenous and Black territories; and c) from media resistance through the creation of independent and/or autonomous media. In this 2nd... During the period in which we are requesting the renewal of the GT, we will reflect from/on 4 Central American countries (Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica), one Caribbean island (Cuba), 8 South American countries (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) and 1 from “North America” (Mexico).

Latin America, the most violent and unequal region in the world, is considered by many to be a breeding ground for hope, dignity, rebellion, and resistance, an inspiration for the ongoing “counter-hegemonic globalization” (2). These breeding grounds remind us of “other geographies” and “other calendars”—as the Zapatistas say—of long-term cycles, of the colonial wound and Indigenous rebellions, of maroon communities and the palenques of enslaved Black people, of peasant revolts, as well as the Haitian, Mexican, and Cuban revolutions. But let us focus on the last decades of the 20th century, when the struggles of resistance against neoliberal structural reforms were intertwined with both the questioning of monocultural nation-states and the decolonizing movement of the counter-celebration of the so-called “Fifth Centenary of the Discovery of America.” Thus, in October 1989 in Bogotá, 30 organizations from 17 Latin American countries met in a gathering that would lead to the launch of the “Continental Campaign: 500 Years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance.” That same year, popular protests erupted in Guarenas and Caracas, rejecting, among other things, the IMF measures implemented by the Venezuelan government in power. A year later, in 1990, CONAIE organized blockades in Ecuador to publicize its “Mandate for the Defense of Life and the Rights of Indigenous Nationalities.” Also in 1990, the peoples of the Bolivian lowlands marched to the capital to defend their territories, demand greater control over their resources and the environment, and seek recognition of their internal forms of governance. In 1994, the Maya of the EZLN declared war on the Mexican government and army on the same day that NAFTA with the US and Canada came into effect, and demanded for all work, land, shelter, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.

Today (2019) we are witnessing the reopening of new cycles of resistance. Resistances that continue to emerge and, on the contrary, intensify in the face of the growing patriarchal commodification of all spheres of life. This resistance is opposed by women, diverse groups, and communities with anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal perspectives and practices, which arise in rural and urban areas, in the Global North and South, and which oppose the privatization of common goods, the irrational exploitation of Mother Earth, environmental pollution, and destruction through... fracking, open-pit mining, transgenic monocultures, renewable energy production projects via hydroelectric, thermoelectric, wind megaprojects as well as mega-infrastructure projects for the extraction of common goods (3) of peoples, nations and tribes, as many indigenous, peasant and black people organized and in struggle call themselves.

In the first three years of the Working Group, we placed great emphasis on the study and analysis of the rebellions and resistances of women and other racialized peoples and of peoples in resistance against the backdrop of violence, wars, and deaths (4). Rebellions and resistances that rise up on their own terms in every corner of the known world, in diverse ways but with horizons that today, for many of the women who fight (5) is expressed in a unique intersection of lives that simultaneously challenge and confront capitalism, sexism, patriarchy, and racism. Struggles whose main potential, and at the same time challenge, is the diversity, the pluriversity that characterizes them.

As we know, in Latin America, Indigenous, Black, and peasant women, as well as urban dwellers—mostly poor and racialized—are literally putting their bodies on the line, and even dying, in a direct confrontation with the many heads of what the Zapatistas call the Capitalist Hydra (6) and some feminists refer to as the globalizing offensive of capital as a war against women (7), the product of a millennia-old cognitive damage: patriarchy (8). Of course, women and young people are not the only ones affected: child trafficking, youth murders, and the assassinations of Indigenous and Black leaders, journalists, and community communicators have surpassed all imaginable limits. The figures can be terrifying. Let's take a look.

Colombia. The assassinations of social leaders and human rights defenders have increased dramatically since the start of the peace process in December 2016. The Ombudsman's Office itself—a state institution—published figures that confirm the horror of a country still engulfed in violence and bleeding. The Ombudsman's website opens with the tally of 462 social leaders and human rights defenders murdered between January 1, 2016, and February 28, 2019 (9). By July 29, 2019, the figure had risen to 743 (10).

Mexico. To date (August 2019) there is an average of 10 women murdered per day, 252,538 violent deaths since 2006, 40,000 missing persons, 26,000 unidentified bodies in forensic services, hundreds of clandestine graves discovered by the relatives of the victims, dismembered bodies hanging from bridges.

Central America. Fourteen of the 25 countries in the world with the highest rates of femicide are located in Latin America and the Caribbean, and in only 2 out of every 100 cases are the perpetrators prosecuted (ECLAC, cited in García, 2018: n.p.). In 2012, El Salvador and Honduras had the highest rates of femicide, with 14 and 11 women murdered, respectively, per 100,000 women (11). And in 2016, the year in which hitmen murdered the Lenca leader Berta Cáceres in her home, Honduras had the highest per capita rate of murders of land and environmental defenders in the world (12).

We know that figures will never be able to fully reflect the suffering, pain, and violence experienced; they certainly bring us closer, but we require rigorous and in-depth work—like that which the GT is committed to doing—in order not only to contribute knowledge to transform the current situation but, mainly, to help create possible alternatives beyond the current systems of death.

The theoretical relevance of this Working Group lies in what is now called in academic and political discourse “the defense of the pluriverse” (1), which has been activated epistemically, ontologically, spiritually, and theoretically from different sites of enunciation and subjects in motion in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the planet Earth. In it, “what is at stake is not [only] different cultural perspectives about the world but the very presupposition that this world of one nature and several cultures […] is the ultimate reality” (2). The indolent reason characteristic of the abyssal thinking of modern Western science (3) actively reproduces the non-existence, the invisibility of what, from a colonial perspective, is called “the other,” of their being, knowledge, gender, and sexuality, as part of the rational monoculture that characterizes it.

I will briefly explain what this has to do with the topic and the axes of our Working Group. For example, to address the theoretical relevance of dispossession, many academics might consider it sufficient to refer to the texts of other social scientists. This is insufficient from a decolonizing pluriversal perspective, which requires not only making visible and valuing the knowledge of subjects in resistance, but also understanding and conceiving of them as generators of knowledge in their own right. That is to say, they produce not only “ideas,” “testimonies,” “histories,” and “narratives,” but also, from their evolving cognitive praxis, they create conceptualizations and theorizations that, unlike Cartesian ones, are concrete, corporatized, situated, partial, experimental (4), and expressed in their own terms. Terms that, in many cases, challenge and decenter multiple instituting and instituted powers.

From this starting point, the academic analysis of the British geographer David Harvey is contrasted, for example, with Zapatista political theory. Harvey spoke of “accumulation by dispossession,” referring to other means of accumulation and devaluation based on predation, fraud, and violence. In 2003, he stated that in the absence of a strong revitalization of sustained accumulation through expanded reproduction—that is, growth—accumulation by dispossession has become the hallmark of the new imperialism (5). For their part, the Zapatistas, in 2006, coined their own theoretical-political perspective, amidst what they called the “Fourth World War” and “the four wheels of capitalism,” referring to exploitation, dispossession, contempt, and repression (6). Those who conceived as pillars and processes that have allowed capitalism to "assert itself, grow, function and maintain itself, despite its most essential absurd and irrational nature, which sacrifices man to things-commodities" (7).

We have a fundamental theoretical, epistemic, and political problem that structures the work of this Working Group. The operational concepts we will weave together—body, territory, and resistance (in the singular)—were born from and are part of a geopolitics of knowledge anchored in colonial/imperial languages ​​(English, Spanish, French, etc.) and in “the West” and (hetero)patriarchal modernity. Therefore, it is relevant to continue the path of decolonizing and depatriarchalizing deconstruction, and thus, for example, to address not only the broad and controversial existing academic debate on the concept of territory, understood as “space,” as “place,” as a condition of possibility or utopia, but also to go further and delve into the concepts of peoples in resistance, co-theorizing with the women and youth of these communities who are already engaged in this work. They have mother tongues in which the word “territory” as such does not even exist. That is why it requires not only an exercise in linguistic, cultural, or epistemic translation, but also achieving—shoulder to shoulder—situated perspectives, embodied theories that, from within and without, allow for a critical dialogue with the social sciences but also with their own cultures, with what Nigerian feminist Oyěwùmí called the sense of world (8) Collective and community processes such as those mentioned have been underway in the Americas since the 80s among the Guambiano, Arhuaco, Aymara, Nasa, North American lesbian feminist women of color, and racialized Latin American women. And more recently among the Mapuche, Guatemalan and Mexican Maya, decolonial feminists, and racialized lesbian trans*feminists.

Feminist theories provide us with tools to analyze the role of the body in historical and current conditions of dispossession, conquest, and war. They remind us that the creation and reproduction of life should not be confused with or reduced to the simple reproduction of capital (9). These theories conceive of the “body” as a battlefield, a space of tension, a web of complex meaning, a construction mediated by power relations, a historically and socially delineated construct, and an object of control and regulation. loci of conflict and order. These theories have shown in detail how historically the body, particularly women's bodies, has been and is the loci of power where the relations of domination, subordination and hierarchy are made explicit, exercised by States, nations, institutions (family, Churches), colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy.

Feminist and LGBTQ+ movements have called on us to understand the body as territory, that is, as a bearer of rights with the capacity for decision-making, inviting us to overcome the modern vice of thinking of a “self” separate from the body, a reason separate from subjectivity and emotion (10). But Indigenous women have gone further, challenging the Cartesian mind/body dualism through categories such as territory-body land (11). For their part, the Zapatista indigenous women in resistance with their autonomous practices They question the very authority of the State, challenge the notion of individual rights, and, through their political practice, defend collective rights and transform traditions that violate not only women but the community as a whole. From the same deconstructive perspective, the Kaqchikel Maya intellectuals of Guatemala (12)—drawing on their language and culture—explain that the body is a whole with interconnected and interdependent parts, not only within itself, but that each part expresses relationships and tensions with the cosmos and with all beings that surround us (animate and inanimate). They invite us to go beyond what we call “epistemic” and “ontological.”

The final theoretical thread we explored in this Working Group concerns alternative media built from grassroots Indigenous and Afro-Mestizo resistance movements. One need only look at the productions of the members of the Latin American Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples' Film and Communication (CLACPI) to appreciate the counter-hegemonic power that community communication and film, Indigenous video, Indigenous communication, and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) hold today in the hands of these peoples who struggle and resist. Consider what is happening in the Ecuadorian Amazon (13) or the Lacandon Jungle (14), to take just two examples, where Indigenous people use video and ICTs not only as means of communication but primarily as weapons of struggle to confront oil extraction in one case, and to build de facto autonomies beyond the State in the other. This brings us back to the controversial debate about the use of technology as a means of progress and liberation in modern societies. But to go further, we need to look at how, in different parts of Latin America, video self-representation and the control of ICTs are becoming part of the construction of autonomy by right and of anti-capitalist and anti-systemic alternatives. Analyzing this from within, hand in hand with the subjects of resistance themselves, is one of the strengths of this Working Group, because a third of its members are university students, professionals, or organic intellectuals from Indigenous and Afro-Mestizo communities in resistance.