Networked, rooted and territorial: green grabbing and resistance in Chiapas

Abstract

Land grabbing has been characterized by large-scale commercial land deals or green grabs of large conservation tracts. In Chiapas, Mexico, green grabs employ a networked strategy across state, corporate and civil society lines to evict peasant and indigenous communities, and facilitate entry of extractive industries, plantations and industrial ‘ecotourism’. The resistance is rooted in place(s) and in a coalition of civil society organizations and autonomous communities. Network illustrations and field reports show that several environmental organizations occupy pivotal positions in grabbing and/or resistance networks, with large powerful groups linked to state and corporate interests. The experience in Agua Azul, a key node in a planned tourism megaproject, illustrates the deployment of networked and dispersed power to unmake and remake territories across scales. Small purchased plots form nodes in far-flung circuits of ecotourism and archeological sites. The substantial resistance is likewise rhizomatic in character, reaching across archipelagos of forest and farming communities and distant allies, to reconstitute autonomous territories. Ongoing land struggles play out in networked spaces, with entire territories, and many lives, at stake. Emerging coalitions of human rights, indigenous, religious and environmental groups promise an expanding resistance to evictions and territorial green grabs in Chiapas and elsewhere.

Keywords:

• land grab
• green grab
• political ecology
• territory
• networks
• Chiapas
• Mexico
• dispossession
• resistance

Acknowledgements

I owe special thanks to Jun Borras and two anonymous reviewers for their patience, guidance and comments, and to Rosaluz Perez Espinosa, Katherine Foo, Fernando Hernandez Espino, Padini Nirmal, Martha Pskowski, Michelle Andrews, Miguel Pickard and Miguel Angel García Aguirre for insightful contributions. This paper also benefited from the seminars, conferences, workshops and publications of Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología (CIESAS); Centro Indígena de Capacitación Integral (CIDECI); Centro de Estudios Superiores de México y Centro América (CESMECA); El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR); Universidad Autonoma de Chiapas (UNACH); Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM); Centro de Investigaciones Económicas y Políticas de Acción Comunitaria (CIEPAC); Otros Mundos, Maderos del Pueblo and the Escuelita Zapatista.

Notes

¹Organizations noted in Figure 1: International Monetary Fund (IMF); World Trade Organization (WTO); World Bank (WB); United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). United Nations Secretariat (UNHQ), UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO).

²Key to abbreviations for organizations and groups: ENGOS, Environmental non-governmental organizations, local and national; IENGOS, International Environmental Non-governmental organizations; Ministry of tourism, Secretariat for tourism (SECTUR) and tourism development agency (FONATUR); Ministry of Environment, Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources.

³For an articulation of this at the international level, see Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2014 on similar framings by La Via Campesina.

⁴Scott (2009) has discussed the history of similar quests for autonomy, as opposed to taking of state power, among people in the mountain communities of Southeast Asia.

⁵The Indigenous Law passed by the congress lacked provisions for territorial rights and autonomous self-government that were key elements of the original accords.

⁶PROCEDE, the Certification of Ejido Rights Program, followed from the reform of Article 27 and the new Agrarian law.

⁷In fact, Monsanto is on Conservation International's ‘Business and Sustainability Council' (Conservation International 2013).

⁸The inaugural projects of the PPP, particularly large dams, encountered stiff resistance throughout the country and especially in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero. Renamed the MesoAmerica Project in 2008, it linked regional development plans to US and regional military, policing, Drug War and border control strategies (Zunino and Pickard 2008, 2009; Maderas del Pueblo del Sureste 2008; Wilson 2008).

⁹Carlos Slim Helú, telecommunications magnate, and the world's second wealthiest billionaire, is also a major investor in mining (Berman 2013; Forbes 2013).

¹⁰See also D. Hall, P. Hirsch and T. Li (2011) on indigenous status and land conflicts in southeast Asia.

¹¹See Ramachandra and Shruthi (2007) for a detailed description of a similar process of remote exploration and technical identification of renewable energy sites in Karnataka state in India.

¹²A message from a Chase-Manhattan Bank security consultant to the office of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo in 1995 (Silverstein and Cockburn 1995) noted that it was the perception of investors that was at stake and not any real safety threat. This posture has remained more or less the same for the last 20 years.

¹³REDD+ refers to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, a UN carbon trade program to mitigate climate change through payments by carbon emitters in industrial countries, ostensibly to protect forests in the global south.

¹⁴The Other Campaign formed in 2006 as a national alternative to party affiliation and electoral participation, and an organizational alliance in solidarity with the Zapatistas. Adherents of the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona (EZLN 2005) constitute a national and international solidarity network supporting its principles.

¹⁵Translations: Parks and Protected Area Commission and Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources.

¹⁶The last two prisoners were released in December 2013 after an intensive national and international solidarity campaign (Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas 2012; Bellinghausen 2013b, 2013c).

¹⁷Additional detailed reports from communities in the Chilón Municipality and human rights organizations from 2011 through 2013 can be found at the Enlace Zapatista, the civil society communication hub of the EZLN at www.enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx.

¹⁸I have revised this account twice to report the assassination of yet another leader opposed to the CIPP near Agua Azul. Several others have died at other sites over the last seven years, from Mitziton to Chinkultic (Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas 2012).

¹⁹Davies (2010) states: ‘The sources of the report quoted are FONATUR, March 2008 and the Secretary of Tourism and International Relations of the Chiapas government. They have been made available in Spanish by Frayba. http://www.slideshare.net/pliegoelbuenas/100217-informe-bolom-ajaw-anexo-1-1-1-3218096’

²⁰Note that even apparently simple grabs of large single parcels are rooted in complex histories and geographies of power, as in the long history of land grabs in Africa (Verma 2014).

²¹A set of corollary questions directed to state and NGO environmental and sustainable development organizations might include: Are they willing to reassess and reframe their perceptions, policies and practices as well as their alliances? Will they consider withdrawing their substantial support (direct or indirect) from the networked, violent campaign to take and remake roughly one third of the land of Chiapas into a multi-purpose territory, based on indigenous and peasant cleansing, shrouded in the fog of greening? The communities will not wait for answers to these questions and will continue to resist (Davies 2013; Bellinghausen 2014a). Yet the question remains, do these organizations plan to continue paying for new reserves and/or tourism development with the blood, sweat and tears of campesino and indigenous communities evicted (or worse) to serve an exclusionary ‘land sparing' approach (Fischer et al. 2011) to conservation in Chiapas and elsewhere? And will they continue to look the other way as much of the land ‘freed up' by conservation takings is chopped into concessions for commercial tourism development, mining, oil and gas drilling, and oil palm and timber plantations? And finally, would they consider reframing conservation and sustainable production within the context of matrix ecology (Vandermeer and Perfecto 2007; Perfecto, Vandermeer, and Wright 2009) with recognition of the legitimacy of forest communities as currently proposed in Chiapas by the Mazules Coalition of environmental and human rights groups and internationally by Via Campesina, Friends of the Earth International and many others?

Additional information

Dianne E. Rocheleau is a professor of geography and global environmental studies at Clark University. She is co-author of Agroforestry in dryland Africa (ICRAF, 1988), and Gender, environment and development in Kenya (Reinner, 1995), co-editor of Feminist political ecology (Routledge, 1996) and Power, process and participation (ITG, 1995) and author of over 70 published articles and book chapters. She has worked with and written about people in agrarian and forest landscapes, political ecologies and social movements in the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Mexico, the US and elsewhere. Prior affiliations include: senior scientist, International Council for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) Nairobi; program officer, Ford Foundation Nairobi; Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Board of Trustees; and Council of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC-Commons).