In these times of genocide, extermination, and violence, this Working Group asks: What (civilizational) transitions are underway? What is the New World Order? How is all of this seen, experienced, felt, and thought about from the different territories, bodies, lands, societies, cultures, and subaltern communities of Latin America, Abya Yala, Ladino Africa, and the Caribbean? These are civilizational transitions that we are experiencing as human and non-human beings, and as planet Earth.

We reflect and act amidst the Collapse, the Storm (1), the genocide, and the extermination. Genocide that, in this first quarter of the 21st century, we are witnessing and that the Palestinian people are suffering; but, unfortunately, they are not the only ones. In this context, the notion of "Terricide," coined by the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversities for Good Living and the writer and weychafe Moira Millán (2), makes perfect sense to us, contributing to a deeply felt and thoughtful reflection and creating radical alternatives; those that go to the root of societal problems (3).

Several analysts affirm that, in this 21st century, between 2000 and 2025, the world, and therefore Latin America and the Caribbean, are experiencing times of profound, unprecedented, and uncertain transformation (4). We could further divide this period and distinguish three phases within it: the first from 2000 to 2014, the second from 2015 to 2022, and the third from 2023 to 2025.

The first phase could be characterized by what is known as the pink tide wave; that is, by the rise of moderate or progressive left-wing parties to power through elections. This period is generally considered to begin with the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (1999) and extend until 2014, the year in which ECLAC (5) marks an economic stagnation due, among other factors, to the fall in international prices and the slowdown of the Chinese economy, as well as to social decay caused by corruption and scandals that plagued many progressive governments.

The analysis of this period takes place amidst a controversy that, on the one hand, highlights how these governments sought to confront the neoliberal project through the expansion of public spending, social programs, and a new proposal for regional integration. Several analysts acknowledge that there was greater inclusion and even a reduction in poverty in these countries (6); however, it has also been pointed out that, in practice, many of these governments did not achieve fundamental structural changes; on the contrary, they served the interests of extractive capital, co-opted various movements and organizations, and limited their capacity for autonomy (7), even though in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia the constituent processes and the establishment of Plurinational States were real and also the product of the participation and mobilization of different sectors of civil society (8).

A second phase (2015-2022) could be said to have begun with the tense coexistence, at all levels, of two contradictory and antagonistic processes: the emergence of the feminist movement and the advance of the conservative counteroffensive in Latin America. Regarding the former, we know that it began with the feminist mobilizations known as #NiUnaMenos (Not One Less) in 2015 in Argentina. These mobilizations arose in response to gender violence and femicides, which in Latin America have the highest rates in the world; higher than those in Asia and Europe (9). The movement was characterized by massive marches in the streets, intense actions within collectives, universities, families, and the courts. The demands included the decriminalization of abortion, the demand for comprehensive sex education, access to contraceptives and public policies on sexual and reproductive health, as well as the recognition of care work and the fight against the precariousness of women and gender and sexual minorities (10). From Argentina the movement spread to Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and El Salvador.

Then there was also the advance of conservative ideology, expressed, for example, in the electoral victories of center-right, right-wing, and far-right parties (11). They strengthened and rose to presidential power in countries such as: Guatemala (with Morales in 2015), Argentina (with Macri in 2015), Chile (with Piñera in 2018, second term), Colombia (with Duque in 2018), Brazil (with Bolsonaro in 2019), El Salvador (with Bukele in 2019, first term), Ecuador (with Lasso in 2021), and even Costa Rica in its 2022 elections, where the center-right candidate Rodrigo Cháves won.

I would like to point out two further events that impacted the region during that second period: the rise of Donald Trump in his first term as US president, and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide in 2020. The economy contracted further in 2020 and 2021, although according to ECLAC data, the Gini coefficient had already stagnated by 2016. Since then, the region has shown very low average growth, below 3% annually (12).

In the third phase (2023 to 2025), the world and Latin America have witnessed the rise of autocratic governments, various types of wars, increased militarization, the criminalization of social protest, and the rise of Trump in his second presidential term. This has had repercussions not only for Latin America but also for the world through the launch of tariff wars, the strengthening of a war economy, the criminalization of migrants, the increase in human rights violations due to new US immigration policies, the dismantling of US democratic institutions, and a local strategy with global impact to restore US "greatness," what Trump calls "Make America Great Again," an emerging social movement: MAGA (13).

This third phase of the periodization begins in 2023 with the rise to power in Argentina of Javier Milei, a far-right leader, as well as with the attack carried out in Israel by Hamas on October 7 of that year, which led to the occupation of Gaza by Israeli forces. This marked the beginning of what, two years later, on September 16, 2025, the UN Independent International Commission legally classified as “genocide” perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people (14). This genocide has had different impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean, but in both cases it introduces us to what the American physicist and philosopher Paul Raskin and his team called “barbarization” or the regressive devolution of humanity (15).

This barbarization has taken on horrific forms today in the face of the local, community, and global advance of necrocapitalism, especially at the hands of organized crime corporations and their infiltration of governments and nation-states. It has eroded communal ways of working and living, given the rise of denialism (e.g., Brazil and the US) as well as the escalating violence perpetrated by government armed forces (16). At the same time, we cannot forget the contributions that Caribbean and Latin American peoples make to the world through struggles that propose pluriversal ecosocial transitions centered on "struggles for life" led by women and communities, where autonomy and their own spirituality, as well as matriarchal ontologies, are vital. These struggles articulate social reproduction and the commons, weaving alliances, pedagogies, and autonomies for plural worlds that generate cosmobiocentric alternatives and recover ancestral and communal forms of care (17). Constituent and autonomous struggles that both recover collective memory and dispute meanings of sovereignty, social and environmental justice with the dominant powers (18).

The theoretical relevance of this Working Group is related to what we now call 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, the Caribbean, Ladino America, Abya Yala, and, in fact, throughout the planet Earth (2). 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" (3). The indolent reason characteristic of the abyssal thinking of modern Western science (4) actively reproduces the non-existence, the invisibility of the so-called—from coloniality—"Other." Non-existence of its being, knowledge, gender, sexuality as part of the rational monoculture that characterizes it.

What does this have to do with our Working Group? Let me explain with a concrete example: to address the theoretical relevance of “dispossession,” many academics find it sufficient to refer to the texts of other social science academics. That is the “normal” approach. For us, 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 by right (5). That is to say, they produce not only “ideas,” “testimonies,” “histories,” and “narratives” to be interpreted by the “expert.” not scientistic, but, from their dynamic cognitive praxis, from their other practices of knowledge (6) they create conceptualizations and theorizations that, unlike Cartesian ones, are concrete, corporatized, situated, partial and expressed in their own terms of cosmoscience. All of this challenges and decenters multiple instituting and instituted powers.

Another example: the academic analysis of the British geographer David Harvey is contrasted with Zapatista theory, politics, and practice. 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 what he then called the new imperialism (7). In contrast, the Zapatistas forged their own theoretical, practical, and political perspective amidst what they called the “Fourth World War” and “the four wheels of capitalism.” referring to exploitation, dispossession, contempt and repression (8). For them, these are the pillars that have allowed capitalism to assert itself, grow, function and maintain what they called "The Capitalist Hydra" (9).

Here is my/our underlying theoretical-epistemic-methodological-political-ethical point (10): the operational concepts we weave in this Working Group—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.). Anchored in "the West," in cis(hetero)patriarchal modernity, and in abstract masculinist thought (11). Therefore, it is relevant to continue along the paths of decolonization/depatriarchalization and thus 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 we must also go further and delve deeper into the concepts/notions/terms of peoples in resistance/re-existence/resilience. To this end, we have co-theorized with the women and young people of these communities who are already doing so inside and outside academia (12). They have native languages ​​in which the word "territory" does not even exist. Therefore, it requires not only a simple exercise in linguistic translation but also reaching, shoulder to shoulder, situated perspectives, embodied theories that, from within and without, allow for a critical, felt-thought dialogue with the social sciences but also with the cultures and languages ​​of these communities. A dialogue with what the Nigerian feminist Oyèrónkő Oyőwőmí called: sense of world (13).

Feminist theories provide us with important tools for analyzing the role of the body in historical and current conditions of dispossession, violence, and war. These theories/methodologies/epistemologies remind us that the creation and reproduction of life should not be confused with or reduced to the simple reproduction of capital (14). They 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 a territory that carries rights and has 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 (15). Indigenous women, part of community feminism, and Lorena Cabnal have challenged the Cartesian dualism of mind/body through categories such as "territory-body-earth" (16), which, while taking up the feminist concept of "my body-my territory," expands it to collectivism and weaves it with Mother Earth.

For their part, the Zapatista indigenous women in resistance, with their de facto autonomous practices, question the very authority of the State, challenge the notion of individual rights while defending collective rights, and transform traditions that violate not only women but communities as a whole; but they also challenge feminisms insofar as they work shoulder to shoulder with the men of their own communities and movement (17). From the same perspective, Emma Chirix, a Kaqchikel Maya intellectual from Guatemala (18), drawing on her language and culture, explains that the body is a whole with its interconnected and interdependent parts, not only internally but also in that each part expresses relationships and tensions with the cosmos and with all the animate and inanimate beings that surround us.

All these approaches invite us to go beyond what we usually call "epistemic" and "ontological" in our self-contained academic grammar, and to simultaneously embody decolonization and depatriarchalization (19). To achieve this, we, for example, create cartographies in/from the feminine, from stones, rivers, caves; from care practices and from the intimate-small and communal (20). Problematizing all of this from within, hand in hand with women, youth, and sexual minorities, is one of the strengths of this Working Group, which is composed of university students, leaders, and professionals from Indigenous and/or Afro-descendant communities, as well as activist researchers who are part of and/or accompany these struggles. We make our contributions with and from the struggles and movements that are building hope and radical alternatives to the ongoing systems of death.