The Working Group "Bodies, Territories, Resistances" (GT CUTER) is intimately linked to the moment we are living through as people of Latin America and the Caribbean/Ladino America/Abya Yala, and, above all, as inhabitants of planet Earth. A new planetary consciousness is emerging in the most diverse places on the planet as a result of rethinking and acting in the face of what has been called the "global crisis of capitalism," the "crisis of Western capitalist heteropatriarchal civilization," and the "civilizational collapse." 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, food, migration, war, and political in a triple 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 ethnic crisis in terms of a crisis of values, life projects, and dominant forms of identity and subjectivity. Others place special emphasis on the crisis of dominant structures and forms of knowledge (1).

Is this where this Working Group asks: How are we experiencing these multiple crises in Latin America and the Caribbean/Ladino America/Abya Yala? In this Working Group, we reflect on crises and wars from: a) racialized, plural bodies in resistance/re-existence; b) the defense of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant territories; c) media sovereignty achieved through the creation of their own media; d) autonomies with or without permission. Our starting points are specific Indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant territories that are building alternatives, other worlds, geolocated in the Caribbean (Cuba), North America (the US and Mexico), Central America (Guatemala), and South America (Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile).

Latin America, the most violent and unequal region in the world, is considered by many to be a seedbed of hope, dignity, rebellion, and resistance; an inspiration for the ongoing counter-hegemonic globalization (2). Seedbeds that refer us to "other geographies" and "other calendars," as the Zapatista praises say, to long-term cycles, to the colonial wound and the Indian rebellions, to maroon communities and the palenques of Black slaves, to peasant revolts, as well as to 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." That same year, 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 government. In 1994, the Maya of the EZLN declared war on the Mexican government and army on the very day that NAFTA with the US and Canada went into effect, demanding work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace for all.

Today in 2022 we live in a post-pandemic condition that forces us to recognize the collapsing condition of humanity and although resistances, rebellions, indigenous, citizen and popular revolts do not cease to emerge, right-wing governments, after an era of progressive governments, have become present in Latin American countries such as Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador.

In the face of the advance of systems of death, horror and wars (3); Faced with the growing patriarchal commodification of all spheres of life, women, gender and sexual diversities, and peoples with anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal horizons and practices are opposing it in a thousand ways. These movements are emerging in rural and urban areas, in both the Global North and the Global South, and they are against the privatization of common goods, the irrational exploitation of Mother Earth, environmental pollution, destruction through fracking, open-pit mining, transgenic monocultures, renewable energy production projects via hydroelectric, thermoelectric, and wind megaprojects (4), as well as mega-infrastructure projects for the extraction of common goods (5) from peoples, nations, and tribes, as many indigenous people, peasants, and Black people organized and standing up for fight.

Rebellions, resistances, and re-existences 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 struggle (6), are expressed in a unique intersection of lives that simultaneously challenge and confront capitalism, machismo, cis(hetero)patriarchy, and racism. Struggles whose main potential is their pluriversal character in defense of life.

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 direct confrontation with the many heads of what the Zapatistas call the Capitalist Hydra (7) and feminists call the globalizing offensive of capital as a war against women (8). This is a product of the age-old cognitive damage called patriarchy (9). Of course, women and young people are not the only ones affected: the trafficking of children, the murders of young people, 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: 14 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 brought to justice (10). In 2012, El Salvador and Honduras had the highest rates of femicide, with 14 and 11 women murdered, respectively, per 100,000 women (ibid.). 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 (11).

We know that figures will never be able to fully reflect the suffering, pain, and violence experienced; for that, we require situated, rigorous, and in-depth research like that which our Working Group is committed to. The aim is not only to transform reality—as was said in the last century in abstract, masculinist Marxist terms—but, primarily, to contribute to creating, or continue creating—in feminine, multi, and pluri terms—the other possible worlds here and now, beyond the current systems of death (12).

The theoretical relevance of the GT CUTER is related to what is now called in academic and political grammar "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 and the Caribbean/Ladino America/Abya Yala and the entire 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 the so-called "Other" from coloniality, of its being, knowledge, gender, sexuality, as part of the rational monoculture that characterizes it.

Let me briefly explain what this has to do with our Working Group. For example, to address the theoretical relevance of the concept of "Dispossession," many academics would consider it sufficient to refer to the texts of other social science scholars. Today, this is insufficient from a pluri-versal, decolonizing/depatriarchalizing perspective, in which it is necessary not only to make visible and value the knowledge of subjects in resistance, but also to understand and conceive 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 ongoing cognitive praxis, 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 decentralize 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, forged 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). For them, these are the pillars and processes that have allowed capitalism to assert itself, grow, function and maintain itself.

Here is a fundamental theoretical-epistemic-political problem that structures the work of this GT. The operational concepts that we are going to weave: body, territory and resistance (thus in the singular) were born and are part of a geopolitics of knowledge anchored in colonial/imperial languages ​​(English, Spanish, French, etc.), in "the West", in cis(hetero)patriarchal modernity and abstract masculinist thought (7). That is why it is relevant to continue the path of decolonizing/depatriarchalizing deconstruction and thus, for example, to address not only the broad and controversial 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 deeper into the concepts of peoples in resistance, co-theorizing with the women and young people of those peoples who are already engaged in this process. They have native languages ​​where the word "territory" does not even exist as such. Therefore, what is needed is not only an exercise in linguistic, cultural, or epistemic translation, but also to reach out "shoulder to shoulder" situated perspectives, embodied theories that from the inside out, allow a critical felt-thought dialogue with the social sciences but also with their own cultures/languages; with what Nigerian feminist Oy?wùmí called the sense of one's own world (8).

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 complex web of meaning, a construction mediated by power relations, a historically and socially delineated construct, an object of control and regulation, and a locus of conflict and order. These theories have shown in detail how historically the body, particularly that of women, has been and is the locus of power where relations of domination, subordination and hierarchy are made explicit, exercised by States, nations, institutions (family, Churches), colonialism, capitalism and cis(hetero)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 an "I" 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, Zapatista Indigenous women in resistance, with their de facto autonomous practices, question capitalism and the State, challenge the notion of individual rights while, from their political practice, defending collective rights and transforming traditions that violate not only women but communities as a whole (12). In the same perspective, the Kaqchikel Maya women of Guatemala (13), starting from their language and culture They explain that the body is a whole with its parts interconnected and interdependent not only within itself, but that each part expresses relationships and tensions with the cosmos and with all the beings that surround us (animate and inanimate). They invite us to go beyond what we usually call "epistemic" and "ontological."

In our Working Group, work from the audiovisual territory inhabited by alternative media built from grassroots Indigenous and Afro-Mestizo resistance also occupies a relevant place. One need only look, for example, at the productions of the members of the Latin American Coordinating Body of Film and Communication of Indigenous Peoples-CLACPI (14) or the Network of Masters (15) that we formed to appreciate the counter-hegemonic power that community cinema, Indigenous video, Indigenous communication, and New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have today in the hands of these peoples who struggle and resist.

Indigenous peoples in struggle use film, video, radio, television, and ICTs as weapons to confront the same things, for example, oil extractivism, as to build de facto autonomies beyond the modern state. In different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean/Ladino America/Abya Yala, video self-representation is becoming part of the construction of autonomies by right and the creation of anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist alternatives (16).

Problematizing this from within, hand in hand with the subjects in resistance themselves, is one of the virtues of this GT which is made up of university students, leaders and professionals from indigenous and/or Afro-descendant communities as well as committed researchers who accompany these struggles (17)