Rather than an obstacle to the development of the region's countries, territorial inequalities should be considered inherent to it. Historically, Latin American development has been characterized by both the heterogeneity of its economic structure, related to its dependent peripheral integration into the international division of labor, and a socio-territorial stratification that excludes large sectors of the population from the status of rights holders.

Uneven territorial development is associated with subordinate insertion within the context of the global capitalist system, in which "development and underdevelopment constitute differentiated and opposing realities that are structurally articulated" (Enríquez, I., 2010:116). Therefore, these inequalities demonstrate "capitalist relations of production extended in space" (Massey, 2007, p. 2). In terms of the theorists of uneven geographical development (UGD), "socio-spatial inequality is intrinsic to capitalist geography and fundamental for the expanded reproduction of capital" (Martínez Caldentey & Murray, 2019, p. 4).

The territory then acts as a mediator in access to resources (housing, health, education, work, security, infrastructure, etc.), in the exercise and guarantee of rights and in the possibility of having a series of conditions that are key to the well-being of people, groups and communities (ECLAC, 2010).

It is crucial to consider that territorial inequality is a phenomenon that goes beyond disparities between spaces (at their different scales and times) in terms of access to goods and services or the possibilities that individuals have to effectively exercise their rights. Territorial inequality must be understood as a complex process, one that is permeated and shaped by power structures (capitalist, colonial, patriarchal, racial); structures that, as they intersect, produce or reproduce specific and situated forms of exclusion and discrimination.

Inequalities, including territorial inequalities, must be understood as a power relationship (Massey), where domination is established based on a series of axes, such as gender, race or ethnicity, class, and territory, among others. These categories are not mutually exclusive, but rather can overlap to create situations of maximum exclusion.

Territory is thus considered one of the structuring axes of inequality (Abramo, 2020) and is linked to the development model or accumulation pattern. Therefore, this dimension of inequality cannot be addressed without considering the role the State plays in its production or reproduction.

The Latin American region and its productive structure are embedded in the international economic system and market as a supplier of primary products or products with low technological intensity. These generate an economic surplus that the peripheral state regulates or distributes through various economic policies, or it may fail to regulate or even generate processes of regressive wealth distribution. In both cases, state intervention, whether by action or omission, is not neutral and generates consequences with socio-territorial impacts.

The production and maintenance of territorial inequalities are inherent to the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, within which the State plays a fundamental role. Policies, programs, plans, and projects (territorial, developmental, social policy, among others) order and reorganize places and their processes in accordance with market demands.

In this regard, even though the concept of development has broadened to encompass more dimensions than those exclusively related to economic growth, it undoubtedly remains, at least in the first instance, a matter of economic growth for public policy. This is evident in the current phase of neoliberal globalization, where foreign investment is the dominant factor, and nation-states compete for it and implement regulatory or deregulatory actions to encourage its arrival.

In the current model, the State and the old power structures of the national oligarchies, in alliance with transnational capital, as well as illicit capital; have revalued territories under a new logic of capital accumulation, that of "dispossession" as argued by David Harvey, with the extractive projects that are now being installed in the territories (monocultures, hydroelectric plants and open-pit mining, among others).

The concentrated nature of development was evident in the growth fueled by the extractive super-cycle the region experienced, which failed to reduce territorial inequalities. These inequalities became particularly visible during the recent health crisis. In this context, territories with higher poverty rates, informal employment, and inadequate health and education services, among other deficiencies, saw their disadvantaged position reinforced. The economic model, focused almost exclusively on GDP growth, prioritized not the needs of these territories, but rather the conditions that enabled it to achieve that goal.

However, these state strategies, closely linked to those of transnational capital, are met with responses from local actors, not only in the form of defensive stances, but also through alternative models that entail their own conceptualizations of development. Territories, understood not as mere recipients of decisions made by external actors (namely, the state and transnational capital), also exhibit their own internal logic. Within them converge diverse actors, interests, forces, and power relations, and thus they can be conceived as expressions of social struggle for the appropriation of collective resources (Linck, 2006), and also for the achievement of rights by various groups. It then becomes relevant to understand how these intra- and inter-territorial tensions manifest themselves, tensions that reflect positions within the economic and productive structure as well as one's place in the socio-cultural order.

There is agreement, then, that territorial gaps in the countries of the region present a series of common patterns, such as: the preeminence of the lag in growth and development of territories classified as rural, as opposed to the territories of capital cities or large urban centers, where the supply of services for well-being and the exercise of rights is concentrated; the correlation between territorial heterogeneity and the proportion of the population belonging to indigenous or Afro-descendant peoples; and the institutional capacities of the territories, among others. (RIMISP, 2011)

Beyond the diagnosis of unequal development, its causes and shared manifestations, economic-productive, socio-territorial, political context, natural resource availability, etc. particularities are also recognized, which must be considered in the analysis, understanding them as a result of the intersection between the determination of a specific development model and the particularities that it adopts in each country, region or city.

The Working Group's objective is to critically examine the structural conditions linked to dependency, highlighting their current manifestations and their connection to historical forms, while also recognizing the unique characteristics they adopt in each specific context, for different types of actors, and at varying territorial scales. Furthermore, the diversity of disciplinary and methodological approaches will allow for a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the subject matter.

While development has been reconceptualized as a multidimensional phenomenon reported through composite measures (the most well-known example being the HDI), it is still largely defined by the assumptions of modernization. This means that prevailing approaches in development policy continue to rely on the hypothesis of territorial convergence as a result of economic growth, a notion refuted by evidence of increasing heterogeneity.

According to De Mattos, "...this problem is linked to a set of systemic, historical and structural interrelations, specific to the way the region is inserted into the world economy and the productive structures associated with it, in which territorial inequalities are part of the general dynamic of Latin American development, and must therefore be explained within a more global perspective (De Mattos, 1983:98)?" (ECLAC, 2015:18)

The center-periphery perspective also serves as an explanatory framework for the production and reproduction of asymmetries within the subcontinent, between dynamic and depressed areas; or between regions within countries, which exhibit greater or lesser inequalities in terms of economic indicators, population well-being, opportunities, and also result in unequal access to spaces of participation, which affects the quality of democracies.

Inequality is constitutive of the development model of the capitalist periphery, being a problem that refers to the essence of the Latin American mode of development and the role that the State plays in peripheral capitalism (Prebisch, R., 1981), now in the phase of neoliberal globalization.

In the current context, territorial production by global market agents reaches previously unaffected areas, thanks to "changes in relative distances caused by development in transport and communication" (Massey D. and Meegan RA, 1979:2), integrating these into global accumulation dynamics.

This cannot be possible without the actions of the nation-state, no longer as a container of economic and productive processes, much less financial ones, nor as the economic actor of the Fordist phase, but rather as the entity that holds the legitimacy of political control over the territory, and is therefore necessary for transnational capital to operate within it. This does not mean that the weakness of nation-states in the face of the political entity constituted by the transnational capitalist class that Robinson (2007) discusses is not recognized; rather, what is being questioned is the recurring idea that the nation-state is no longer a relevant actor when considering development in the context of neoliberal globalization. Following Robinson, one could say that, just as during the Fordist-Keynesian phase nation-states generated "national circuits of accumulation and production that were externally linked to other similar national circuits through exchanges of goods and capital flows" (Ibid., 26); in the phase of globalization, these states participate in "globalized circuits of accumulation." controlled by the new transnational capitalist class, which has "objective class existence and identity in the global system, above any local territory and politics" (Ibid., 2007: 65).

The role of the state in transnationalization processes is particularly evident when it designs a neoliberal legal framework (Santos, Narbondo, Oyhantçabal, & Gutiérrez, 2013), which enables an extractivist development model that currently includes sectors such as mining, soy, forestry, energy, and urban real estate speculation, among others. This model tends to deepen territorial inequalities, generally to the detriment of the very territories that provide human and/or natural resources. Even so, these strategies enjoy strong consensus, based on the idea that large-scale foreign direct investment is almost the only way to generate development in impoverished territories. As a result of uncritically accepting these arguments, people become subject to the conditions imposed by business groups that commodify and privatize collective goods, despite unlikely positive effects on employment and the population's quality of life.

On the other hand, parallel to the extractive territorialization model, state policies generate development strategies that place the territory and its actors at the center, building around this issue a network of programs and projects to promote local capacities, although disconnected from the structural conditions that explain inequality. Thus, territorial integration policies at the subnational level coexist with the processes of penetration of global capital dynamics into these same spaces.

Likewise, the structural dynamics of the productive development model operate in conjunction with the logic of intersectional inequality, which permeates the production of territoriality. The intersections of class, gender, race, and ethnicity define the conditions of large sectors of the population, subordinating them in neo-extractivist contexts. These areas, which are the object of such economic practices, are transformed into "sacrifice zones" (Lerner, 2010), subject to dynamics of dispossession and plunder of natural resources and territories, and thus intensely affecting the individual and collective rights of their inhabitants (Svampa & Viale, 2014).

Linked to the historical extractivist model and its current expression (neo-extractivism), intersectional inequality is related to neocolonial forms of stratification that define discrimination in access to opportunities and outcomes, whether economic, or access to other types of capital, such as political capital.

The use of this analytical category poses the theoretical challenge of addressing the multiplicity of territorial inequalities, in an overlapping manner, identifying and understanding different types and degrees of inequality, as well as observing the interaction and link between the categories (race-class-gender) as mutually constitutive (Crenshaw 1991, 2012; Lutz, Herrera and Supik 2011).

Inequalities are rooted in relationships defined by these categories, and the purpose of analyzing them is to make visible and question the socioeconomic power structures that produce and reproduce territorial inequalities. This perspective combines the interaction of the macro level, through hierarchical structures of inequality, with the micro level, through subjective experiences of discrimination and identity in the formation of subordinate groups.