Latin American challenges in the struggle for the commons
Stories to share
Coordinator : Elena Lazos Chavero
Authors : Elena Lazos Chavero, Cecilia Gárgano, Edith Carolina Pineda Pinzón, Luz Palestina Llamas Guzmán, Claudia Dary, Claudia Rivera Rosales, Gabriela Lichtenstein, Cloe Mirenda.
CLACSO Working Group on Common Goods and Open Access
Throughout history, particularly in recent decades, peasant and Indigenous communities have been dispossessed of their territories through various means, including their tangible and intangible biocultural heritage. From the lowlands to the highlands, forests, biodiversity, jungles, springs, rivers, agrobiodiversity, seeds, knowledge, and agroecotechnologies that transform, conserve, utilize, and regenerate have been the foundation of life, identity, and the history of Indigenous peoples. The accelerated appropriation and destruction of natural commons by transnational corporations have generated processes of dispossession central to opening new spaces for investment, creating spatiotemporal solutions to the crises of over-accumulation. Furthermore, Latin American states compete to receive portions of global capital in their territories to have investment "opportunities," at the cost of the devastation of the commons through the instrumental appropriation of nature and the peoples who give them life at the expense of labor exploitation and the precarization of their social rights.
Working Groups Collection
ISBN 978-987-722-611-9
CLACSO.
Buenos Aires.
July 2020
