The rural world of Latin America and the Caribbean today faces a convergence of crises that deepen historical tensions and shape new analytical and political challenges. The multifaceted crisis of capitalism—economic, food, climate, energy, health, and military—is expressed in our territories in specific forms: the expansion of extractivism, the financialization of agriculture and land, and the deployment of new logics of dispossession linked to "green extractivism" and carbon markets.

Added to this is the growing interference of economic powers, organized crime, and drug trafficking in rural areas. The advance of criminal organizations and armed factions in Amazonian and border regions increases territorial violence, illegal networks, and the capture of resources, creating a warlike dimension in the countryside that complicates the analysis of contemporary rural life.

In parallel, the realignment of political forces reveals the rise of new authoritarian and reactionary right-wing movements, with belligerent, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric that erodes democracy and reinforces projects aimed at concentrating common goods and wealth. These regional dynamics are embedded within a global geopolitical struggle: the restructuring of multilateral organizations, tensions between the United States, China, and Europe, the Belt and Road Initiative, and new trade agreements such as the one between the European Union and Mercosur. All of this directly impacts rural areas, redefining patterns of dependency and subordination.

The Latin American countryside is also a stage for resistance and counter-hegemonic identities. Peasant organizations, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, rural women, and youth are deploying strategies of territorial defense, agroecology, and counter-hegemonic life projects. Feminist struggles, in particular, have positioned the body-territory relationship as an analytical and political axis.

Rural conflict in Latin America and the Caribbean cannot be understood solely as an economic or agrarian problem, separate from the structural processes of accumulation and dispossession. It is a nexus where global crises, geopolitical disputes, dynamics of violence, and experiences of resistance converge, shaping how life, work, and territory are organized in the region. Critically examining these processes is essential to unraveling contemporary forms of accumulation and dispossession, but also to highlighting the alternatives emerging from these territories in defense of life and the commons.

The Latin American countryside is not, as the hegemonic discourse often presents it, a residual space of urban-industrial development, but rather a site of strategic struggle between community-based life projects, peasantry, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, and the interests of transnational capital in its many forms, such as agribusiness, mega-mining, drug trafficking, and extractive tourism, among others.

At the same time, in the current global context, the struggle for the commons that still exist in rural Latin American territories is intensifying. The logics of dispossession are being renewed in “green” or “digital” forms that incorporate discourses of sustainability or innovation, while reproducing and updating, in various ways, the colonial, racial, and class hierarchies that have historically structured regional rurality. Far from being displaced by modernization or neoliberalism, rural communities are now central actors in the resistance against extractivism and in the search for alternative futures, proposing ways of being, inhabiting, and producing based on appropriated local, community, cultural, and environmental knowledge.

Latin America and the Caribbean, as a region historically subordinated in the international division of labor, plays a strategic role as a supplier of natural resources and precarious labor. The agro-export model has been reconfigured in recent decades through the expansion of transgenic agribusiness, the financialization of land, and the emergence of an agro-industrial complex based on digital platforms, "green startups," and Agriculture 4.0. This model deepens the concentration of land and economic power, affects the food sovereignty of communities, and accelerates the environmental destruction of rural ecosystems.

In parallel, the advance of extractivism in its multiple forms—open-pit mining, monoculture forestry, and lithium extraction—is turning rural territories into sacrifice zones. Public policies implemented in the name of sustainable development or the energy transition often perpetuate the model of dispossession, rendering invisible the ways of life of peasants, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and rural workers.

Rural areas are also marked by new forms of structural violence: militarization, forced displacement, the criminalization of land defenders, assassinations, and state involvement in collusion with elites linked to transnational economic power. These forms of violence are most brutally inflicted upon the feminized, racialized, impoverished, and non-normative bodies that sustain life in the countryside. Therefore, a gendered and decolonial perspective is essential for understanding the current rural situation.

Beyond this, it is important to understand that the rural world is not only a space of conflict, but also of creation. Organized rural communities and individuals construct ways of life and knowledge on a daily basis that shape real alternatives to hegemonic development. Practices such as agroecology, community economies, international networks and alliances, bonds of struggle and cooperation with urban movements, forms of territorial self-governance, popular pedagogies, peasant feminisms, and ancestral epistemologies constitute possible horizons that resist the logic of capitalist accumulation and propose projects of well-being, autonomy, and territorial justice.

Globally, the trends toward greater financialization, concentration, and technologization of agri-food production place Latin America in an ambivalent position. On the one hand, its role as a supply zone for global markets is reinforced, but on the other, the socio-environmental tensions generated by this role also open up spaces for radical criticism of the international agri-food system, which is increasingly questioned for its impacts on health, the environment, and democratic forms of government.

In this context, the role of the Working Group on Critical Studies of Rural Development is to contribute, from a critical, collaborative, and situated perspective, to the production of collective knowledge that allows us to understand the dynamics that shape rural life in Latin America and the Caribbean, making visible both the structures of domination and the forms of resistance and re-existence that emerge from these territories. The Working Group positions itself as a space that articulates academic, popular, and territorial knowledge, promoting committed, participatory, and activist research, political education, and the production of and collaboration on alternatives from below.

Placing a critical approach to rural development within this framework implies rejecting technocratic and Eurocentric versions of development and insisting that the ruralities of the Global South are not empty spaces to be "integrated" into progress, but living, conflictive and creative territories where one of the main disputes for the present and future of the region is being waged.

We propose the theoretical relevance based on some fundamental issues: a) the neocolonial extractive export model; b) the decolonial perspective; c) community and decolonial feminisms; d) the dialogues of knowledge and understanding of the political struggle; e) The new populist and reactionary right.

Neocolonial export-oriented extractive model

The imposition of ultra-neoliberalism in Latin America and the Caribbean has led to a deepening of exploitation, dispossession, and the commodification of various spheres of life. In this new phase, concentrated capital and its socio-political representatives have furthered the denial of the forms of production that shape the lives and territories of the various dispossessed groups.

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; public and private capital deepens the grabbing and foreign ownership of land; 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 rural areas with extractive projects, mainly for minerals, hydrocarbons, agro-exports and corporate tourism.

Faced with the re-primarization of the economy and the agrarian counter-reform, the popular sectors offer resistance and re-existence born in the heat of the permanent confrontation with capital.

These organizations take on a variety of forms, with perspectives more or less linked to established institutions, and with autonomous proposals that demonstrate their enormous versatility in adapting or reinventing themselves in their societal struggles and pursuits. They create strategies such as the demand for plurinational states, 21st-century socialism, the decolonization of the state, Buen Vivir (Good Living), the rights of nature, agroecology and food sovereignty, comprehensive and popular agrarian reform, people's markets, water redistribution, interculturalism, social and environmental justice, autonomous territories, community economies, participatory democracy, grassroots territorial planning, trade unionism, and other forms of organization. They seek to prioritize the spheres of life understood in their close interrelation and without the fragmentation proposed by Western binary logic. To further this analysis, we propose: 1) Continuing critical reflection on the domination imposed by capitalism and on socio-territorial liberation movements and disputes over development models, which materializes in the relationship between the State and these movements; 2) Linked to the strategies of governments, it is necessary to place at the center of the debate the complicity of some theoretical proposals that support and justify the advance of capitalism in the countryside, in almost all cases driven by public policies; 3) Deepening the territorial debate in its diversity.

Decolonial perspective

Various proposals are being practiced and theorized from this perspective among rural communities and militant academic activists, forming a new critical paradigm alternative to capitalism. The anti-colonial perspective, with its geopolitics of knowledge, problematizes binary thinking (countryside-city, rural-urban, Indigenous-mestizo, among others), recognizing the knowledge and practices inherent in socio-territorial struggles. In this way, we are interested in delving into the counter-hegemonic territorialization processes of rural social movements in diverse dimensions of social life.

Community and decolonial feminisms

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

Following decolonial and indigenous feminists, we posit that in sociocultural, political, and economic contexts such as those of the Latin American and Caribbean region, where coloniality and racism persist as everyday social relations, violence against women and

Other subjects considered subordinate take the form of "violentogenic" processes.

Considering the preceding elements, we propose to mainstream the analysis of gender relations in the Latin American and Caribbean countryside and violence against rural women, emphasizing the body-territory relationship, given the emerging feminist territorial organization and struggle against gender repression, criminalization, control of and over reproduction, denial and

Lack of political participation, lack of recognition of their work. More women have become stronger and fought for their territories from within community networks and structures, weaving them together with memory, affection, mutual support, and intimacy in the collective and united struggle.

Dialogue of knowledge and understanding of the political struggle

This context demands a commitment among the diverse actors who inhabit and operate from different spaces. This means that academia must be engaged. The theoretical relevance of this research is inextricably linked to a political practice that fosters political connections with other experiences, the exchange of knowledge, information, and debates in such a way that the positions and proposals of popular sectors in Latin America and the Caribbean can be consolidated, disseminated, and united.

Even in the face of daily conflicts in these territories, voices of resistance and re-existence rise up, contributing new ways of understanding and analyzing the social, economic, and political reality they experience. They seek other ways of understanding the world, generating other research processes—and relationships with research teams—that prioritize local knowledge.

The memories and resistance present in these territories allow us to visualize other ways of life, other forms of relating to territories and bodies, beyond the multiple oppressions. Within this framework, we adopt perspectives of co-constructing knowledge with communities and territories, in order to share knowledge and situated knowledge, enabling an understanding of the advance of capital in their territories. In this sense, we propose to broaden and disseminate the debate, and to increase our ties with organizations, movements, and academic institutions that have a social commitment.

The new populist and reactionary right:

The rise of the new populist right in Latin America and the Caribbean poses a direct threat to rural communities, territorial feminisms, and ways of life not subordinated to capital. These right-wing movements articulate authoritarian, religious, racist, and anti-environmental discourses that criminalize protest, delegitimize the rights of Indigenous peoples, and dismantle redistributive policies. As Ackerman and colleagues point out, “The new right not only appeals to traditional values ​​but also launches an offensive against emancipatory agendas and democratic institutions.” This conservative shift fuels the remilitarization of rural areas and reactivates colonial imaginaries in defense of a patriarchal, racist, and extractivist order. All of this must be part of our line of inquiry.