Interrupting Green Capital on the Frontiers of Wind Power in Southern Mexico

Wind as a Green Resource

Land enclosures work through public-private or state-capital alliances in which law and state institutions legitimate the privatization of land—a key condition of local production—in order to make it available to more powerful interests (Levien, 2011: 457) at the expense of relations already in place but not functional to the dominant capitalist project (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones, 2012; Heynen et al., 2007; Peluso and Watts, 2001). In the short run, such enclosures of land negate the claims of affected peoples to dignified ways of living. In the long run, they threaten those peoples’ survival by erasing land’s entanglements in local circuits of value that supplement the incomes of the poor and marginalized (Baletti, 2014; Borras and Franco, 2010; Lyons, Richards, and Westoby, 2014).

“Green grabbing” (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones, 2012), the appropriation of land in the name of nature conservation, is an example of land enclosure that builds on long and well-known histories of colonial and neocolonial resource alienation. As political ecologists point out, land enclosures rely on epistemologies of value that legitimate existing power relations and naturalize inequality of access for some in the name of the common good (e.g., Neumann, 1998; Peluso, 1992). In other words, land enclosures necessitate some form of epistemic closure. Legal frameworks and institutions reproduce these epistemic closures, limiting not only what kinds of knowledge about a phenomenon are produced (e.g., degradation, pollution, extinction) but also who produces this knowledge and where. Alternative framings are often rendered less desirable or even nonexistent when there is no adequate language for representing them as valuable (Forsyth, 2003). Local epistemologies that raise questions about dominant forces are often dismissed as misinformed or “too local,” though they represent insights into biophysical and social realities of place and alternatives to the status quo of environmental governance (Forsyth and Walker, 2008).

Knowledge about and responses to global energy crises share these epistemic closures. Green energy, one of the perceived solutions to crises of anthropogenic climate change (Moore, 2011), operates through legal, technical, and infrastructural solutions to global problems that do not necessarily transform the underlying structures of energy production, provision, and consumption but address socially defined risks that are relevant to specific capitalist contexts (Beck, 2010). Wind energy, in this global scenario, is rendered as a technical solution, an unlimited resource with a smaller extractive footprint that has the potential to mitigate the risks of both climate change and energy insecurity. Not surprisingly, renewable energy technologies make up 60 percent of the world’s clean development mechanism (CDM) projects worldwide, accounting for 43 percent of the expected annual emission reductions and 71 percent of total investment (Kirkman, Seres, and Haites, 2013).

Green solutions also respond to the neoliberal imperative of economic growth through competition and the “economization” of all aspects of life (Brown, 2015). The trajectory toward clean energy regimes is propelled by the potential to profit from investment in capital-intensive clean energy projects aligned with a market logic to meet increasing global demand for electricity and energy security (Vorrath, 2013) and the promise of more sustainable forms of harnessing energy, which responds to worldwide efforts to reduce emissions in climate-commons scenarios (Griggs et al., 2013). Thus, resource financialization (making nature tradable) underpins the operation and expansion of green markets (Arsel and Büscher, 2012). According to Greenpeace (2012), 430,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity were installed during the twenty-first century, with global total investment reaching a record US$257 billion in 2011. Wind energy projects as green solutions respond to two basic “best practices” questions: how to best capture/enclose wind and how to best mobilize it in the electricity system to facilitate capital circulation and accumulation.

Green Power

As the narrowest stretch of land connecting the Gulf of Mexico in Veracruz with the Pacific Ocean in Oaxaca, the Isthmus has been a geopolitically significant resource frontier since the Conquest (López, 2012). In the early twentieth century it was valued as a strategic communication and transport node associated with the transoceanic railway and the Pan-American Highway. In the period after the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 and the formal end of the Mexican Revolution, the Isthmus was revalorized as an important site for export-oriented agricultural trade. This wave of extractivism focused first on forestry and then, with the consolidation of the Mexican “developmental” state in the 1950s, on agricultural intensification oriented around large-scale irrigation projects. At that time the Benito Juárez dam and irrigation project (planned in the late 1950s and operational by 1962) opened up semiarid lands in the southern Isthmus to year-round cultivation, conferring “new” value on land previously considered low-productivity (Binford, 1985).

Today, extractivism in the Isthmus is centered on the need of the Mexican state, private companies, and foreign investors for non-fossil-fuel energy sources. Mexico’s potential as an investment site for the production of electricity for distant industrial consumers has increased significantly, alongside growing contestation over wind farming in the United States that is driving up the costs of producing green power domestically (Johnson, 2014). ³ And the Isthmus’s contemporary competitive advantage as a site for capital investment in wind infrastructure articulates with hegemonic conceptualizations of rural spaces as less valuable and freely available for transformation. In the Isthmus, lands and peoples are regularly devalued, legitimizing state-sanctioned control that undermines local autonomy, removes protections of collective resources, and reinforces existing power relations through clientelist relations built on pro-poor-politics regimes (Albertus et al., 2012).

Within this logic of green power investment, the winds that flow across the Isthmus—products of an air-pressure differential between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific—are reimagined as potentially valuable commodities (through processes of measurement and evaluation that began in the 1980s) and the Isthmus is represented, cartographically and discursively, as a strategic wind energy corridor (see Elliot et al., 2003) on which to build wind farms (Figure 1). The largest of these farms was to be placed on the Barra de Santa Teresa, where developers of the San Dionisio project first proposed to construct 102 turbines and the associated transmission infrastructure. ⁴ If it had been built, it would have been the largest, in terms of net electricity generation, of the 18 wind farms built in the Isthmus since 2006 and the largest wind farm in Latin America. The green electricity generated was to supply Coca-Cola FEMSA’s operations in Mexico, while the carbon permits it generated by virtue of its registration as a CDM project would have been secured by foreign investors to offset more than 500,000 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions annually (CDM, 2012; IADB, 2011).

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Figure 1.

Wind resources of the Isthmus.

Wind farming in Mexico also occupies a key position in a broader political and regulatory strategy for accelerating the development of domestic renewable energy production systems for the purposes of “climate-friendly” economic growth (Gobierno Federal de México, 2013). Climate-friendly energy sources will, it is promised, mitigate environmental degradation and the risks of climate change, ensure energy security, and sustain economic growth. This promise is explicit in the National Strategy on Climate Change, which anticipates that within 10 years more than 35 percent of Mexico’s domestic electricity needs will be met by renewable energies (Gobierno Federal de México, 2013). While wind energy in Mexico represents a small fraction (1,500 megawatts or 8.9 percent) of total renewable energy production today (SENER, 2012), it is estimated that the country has 40,000–77,000 megawatts of economically viable wind energy resources, roughly half of them located in the Isthmus (Elliot et al., 2003).

The calculation of the Isthmus as “gifted with one of the world’s best wind resources” (Oceransky, 2010: 505) can be traced to the publication, in 2003, of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Wind Resources Atlas of Oaxaca (Elliot et al., 2003). The atlas had been in development since the mid-1990s as part of the Mexico Wind Resource Assessment Project, funded by USAID and the Mexican federal and state governments (Wood, Medecigo, and Romero-Hernandez, 2012). From the results of a decade of collection, measurement, and evaluation of Oaxaca’s wind energy potential, it estimated that Oaxaca had the potential to produce 33,000 megawatts of installed energy capacity, most of it in the Isthmus. López (2012) remarks that this potential capacity would be sufficient to meet all the energy needs of the state of Oaxaca. Ignored in this benign construction of green power is the way wind energy, when put to work for the benefit of surplus value creation, reproduces the deep structural violence of conventional resource extraction.

Enclosing Wind Territory

The first devices to measure the velocity, intensity, and variability of the north-south winds flowing across the Isthmus were installed in 1986 by the Federal Electricity Commission (Cadenas and Saldívar, 2007), and the first wind farm, La Venta I, a pilot farm of seven turbines with the combined capacity to generate 2 megawatts of electricity, commenced operation in 1994. Although these measuring devices and the pilot farm provided the scientific data used in the wind resources atlas to render wind legible, law and neoliberal environmental policy reforms were necessary to facilitate and incentivize private investment in order to put it to work for the benefit of surplus value creation.

Significantly, in 1992—two years before the entry into force of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change—the Salinas government introduced two key legal reforms that were necessary for this process. Both of these reforms were tied to the “structural adjustment” that followed the oil crisis of the late 1970s and paved the way for the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. First, Article 27 of the constitution was amended to eliminate the protection of ejidal lands (social property redistributed after the revolution) from being sold or confiscated (Reyes and Kaufman, 2011). The registration of social property as individual property produced a complex terrain of uncertain land tenures that wind developers were able to exploit to their advantage, for example, negotiating one-sided land access contracts with individual small-scale land holders, who were often unable to read the contracts. ⁵ Second, the 1992 Public Service Electric Energy Law made possible private participation in Mexico’s electricity system. Prior to this reform, the generation, transmission, and provision of electricity for public use were, according to the constitution, the sole responsibility of the state. Private companies could now invest in electricity production for their own needs and connect their energy-generating projects to the national electricity system via the new modalities of self-supply, cogeneration, independent production, and small-scale production. Wood, Medecigo, and Romero-Hernandez (2012) describe this reform as the most important extraeconomic exercise of state power to facilitate private investment in Mexico’s renewable energy sector. The self-supply modality, the most widely used in relation to private wind energy production today, allows private consumers—who must also be investors in the projects—to purchase green electricity directly from wind farm operators (Hamister, 2012).

Even with this law and the subsequent financial and public outreach of the federal Energy Department’s Electrical Research Institute, the principal technical barrier identified by wind company advocates was the limited availability of electricity transmission infrastructure to connect private wind farms to the electricity grid (Wood, Medecigo, and Romero-Hernandez, 2012). The Isthmus was poorly served in terms of substations and transmission lines. Temporadas abiertas (open seasons) became a policy tool for estimating future demand for new transmission lines and electricity transfer substations and were described as an effective way of coordinating private interests and public resources to overcome the barriers that private companies face in obtaining access to the grid (Wood, Medecigo, and Romero-Hernandez, 2012). Consistent with broader processes of neoliberalization, the provision of green electricity infrastructure was reprioritized to meet the demands of the market rather than the needs of the Mexican public (interview, January 18, 2014).

These domestic legal and fiscal reforms did not, however, generate the political-economic conditions necessary to incentivize capital investment in wind farming in Mexico. Lokey (2009) explains that, as it has in other eligible countries, the Kyoto Protocol’s CDM program provided many of the missing financial incentives. Registered projects generate tradable carbon credits that Northern countries can use to offset their domestic emissions or sell in carbon markets. Fifteen of the 18 large-scale wind farms that have been constructed across the southern Isthmus since 2006 are registered as CDM projects. The politics of this situation, in which private companies use this registration to attract investors and foreign capital, involve complex articulations between foreign and nonstate control over land and territory in the Isthmus (see also Finley-Brook and Thomas, 2011). Capitalist wind farming would not be possible without the financial incentives produced in this way and the European carbon markets.

It was not until 2006 that the Federal Electricity Commission began operating the first large-scale wind farm, La Venta II. La Venta III soon followed, and 4 private projects supply electricity to the commission through the independent-production modality (Oaxaca I, II, III, and IV). The remaining 12 farms generate electricity wholly for private consumers such as the retailer Walmart Mexico, the baking company Grupo Bimbo, the beverage manufacturer Coca-Cola FEMSA, the cement producer and building supplier CEMEX, and the world’s largest producer of silver and Latin America’s largest producer of gold, lead, and zinc, Met-Mex Peñoles. Combined they can generate roughly 1,500 megawatts of energy, and permits have been issued for the construction of an additional 1,000 megawatts (CFE, 2012). This represents more than a 600 percent increase in installed capacity since 2006 (Wood, Medecigo, and Romero-Hernandez, 2012).

The configuration of this predominantly private wind farming calls into question the stated goal of the wind resources atlas to provide social and economic benefits for local communities. As a project of market-based environmentalism, today’s wind energy production in the Isthmus captures wind and puts it to work for the benefit of predominantly private companies. By valorizing and then harnessing wind’s “effort” and transporting it through complex assemblages of turbines, towers, cables, transmission lines, and substations, value is produced and embodied in commodities that can be exchanged in local and global markets. The green commodities appear initially as megawatts, then as carbon credits, and later as capital inputs through the retail and industrial activities of the private firms that are almost the sole beneficiaries of the clean electricity and carbon offsets generated (Henderson, 1998). Residential electricity tariffs, meanwhile, continue to increase (interview, January 24, 2014).

Despite the materiality of this infrastructure and the clear demarcation of who benefits from this wind energy, these projects are perceived as inherently different from the destructive excavation of conventional resources and seen as necessary to avoid the worst extremes of dangerous anthropogenic climate change. In Mexico, this is a questionable claim. Recent energy reforms, for example, facilitate the expansion of the production of crude oil by relaxing the state monopoly on production and opening up unconventional fuel sources such as shale oil gas (SENER, 2012). This intensification of hydrocarbon exploitation is likely to increase Mexico’s total greenhouse gas emissions massively, erasing any purported benefits gained from investment in its domestic clean energy projects (Enciso, 2014). As Borras and Franco (2010) stress, casting climate change action as an investment problem rather than a problem of capital overaccumulation diverts attention “away from what is wrong with the economic development model” and the centrality of land to making this model work in practice (Borras and Franco, 2010: 12).

The discursive practices framing wind energy as a “gift” obscure the actual enclosures of land required to farm wind. Hidden behind the neutrality of the wind resources atlas were encounters among the state, private companies, international institutions, engineers and scientists, and local elites that recognized this need. Through a series of ostensibly public colloquiums organized from the early 2000s on, international development experts, government officials, industry representatives, and wind energy experts met with the Mexican and Oaxacan governments to identify the financial and technical barriers to private investment in wind (de Buen, 2010). Oceransky (2010) reports that colloquium participants produced a map that divides up the Isthmus’s wind resources as a way of avoiding competition between companies. The map fails to acknowledge the existing territories of various indigenous peoples whose lands are required to capture wind and implicitly treats the southern Isthmus as empty space (Krygier and Wood, 2009). The proposition of “emptiness” is claimed and revalorized through the anticipated productive work of the relevant, predominantly Spanish wind companies that are given something akin to exclusive exploration rights. By erasing indigenous peoples this map reproduces the historic and relational patterns of epistemic violence that have, since the mythical search for El Dorado, sought to expropriate their lands and livelihoods (Bonfil Batalla, 2005).

The Mexican Association for the Development of Wind Energy consistently describes agriculture in the Isthmus as unproductive and frames opposition to wind farming in the Isthmus as minor, isolated, and driven by “external agitators” whose motives are “unacceptably” political (Oceransky, 2010). This implies that the association’s work, the “benevolent” promotion of renewable energy, is nonintrusive, based on scientific and objective evidence, apolitical, and therefore incontestable. At the same time, it suggests that the demands and claims of local peoples are irrational and local agricultural systems are wasteful. According to the environment and social management strategy submitted to the Inter-American Development Bank in support of the San Dionisio project, it is not only land that is represented as wasted and degraded but also the labor of farmers: “Both wind farm sites have been exposed to intense human activities in the past decades which have led to a deterioration of the ‘naturalness’ character of the area” (IADB, 2011: 10). The implication is that wind farming, not agriculture, protects and enhances the “natural” values of the Isthmus.

Producing wind as a green commodity operates politically to insulate these projects from critical scrutiny in two important ways. First, it disguises the materiality of green energy production—the fact that harnessing and farming electricity from it requires networks of towers, turbines, transmission lines, and substations. As López (2012) explains, the wind farms and related infrastructure currently enclose 10,000–15,000 hectares but could extend to 40,000–50,000 hectares if the full wind energy potential of the region is developed. Second, it disguises the fact that state and corporate efforts to harness the value in wind require representing the land and the people and things previously there as “wasted” (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011). This frames place-based struggles against green power as the cause of conflict, a problem to be managed and therefore a legitimate object of state-sanctioned control. While the current push for renewable energy resources is largely framed as benign and an improvement over conventional resource extraction practices, it works through epistemic closures similar to those for more conventional forms of resource extraction.

Sedimented Histories of Resistance

Resistance to wind farming intersects with and builds upon ongoing struggles in defense of land and territory in the context of historical injustices against indigenous peoples across southern Mexico (Barabas and Bartolomé, 1986; Binford, 1985; Campbell, 2001; Campbell et al., 1993; López, 2012; Rubin, 1994; 1997). Struggles over land access ground the epistemologies of resistance to wind energy projects and infuse the strategies against green capital. For example, in 1999 ejidatarios from La Venta publicly protested against the low prices they were being paid for access to their lands (50–100 pesos per hectare per year) and the failure of the Federal Electricity Commission to deliver the promised public infrastructure (Jiménez-Maya, 2011). According to a Zapotec lawyer (interview, January 22, 2014), they were approached by representatives of Mexican prestanombres (shell companies) asking them to sign contracts and suggesting that the land would be used to start agricultural projects that would benefit everyone. Later they found out that the contracts were, in effect, a way of turning land into wind value: the Mexican companies sold the contracts to third parties, which then used them to secure loans from multilateral banks to bankroll green energy projects on these “unused” lands. When they sought to renegotiate or rescind these contracts or demand fulfillment of the promises outlined in them, the government of Oaxaca responded by arresting protesters.

Since the commencement of the first large-scale wind farm, opposition movements have emerged in Unión Hidalgo, Juchitán, Álvaro Obregón, La Ventosa, San Mateo del Mar, San Francisco del Mar, and Santa Maria Xadaní. Tensions increased as the wind power frontier moved into regions where land tenures were increasingly uncertain. For example, land tenures along the coast, particularly around the Barra and the communities of San Dionisio del Mar, San Mateo del Mar, and Santa Maria del Mar, remain unsettled, with claims that do not align with the formal demarcation of the two ejidos. According to a local human rights lawyer, when San Mateo del Mar refused to accept the legal demarcations of land, “the companies said, ‘It may be your territory, but we are going to lease ejidal land from the comisariado [ejido leadership] of Santa Maria del Mar. We will contract with them and build our project.” As the lawyer reflected, “If you don’t know whose land it is, it’s easier for someone to expropriate it from you” (interview, January 22, 2014). In response, the community of San Mateo blocked access to what it claimed was its territory, and this led to a violent confrontation between San Mateo del Mar and Santa Maria del Mar in which 11 campesinos were seriously injured.

Unsettled land tenures alone do not capture the complexities of resistance to wind farming today. During most of the twentieth century, corporatism, a system in which the state privileges the interests of some groups in exchange for their loyalty, was widely understood as explaining state–civil-society relations (specifically, the hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional) from the 1930s to the late 1960s (Rubin, 1994). Caciquismo—rule by authoritarian local elites—fits with this understanding of centralized power and politics. Rubin, however, argues that “corporatist structuring of interests was not the predominant form of politics in Juchitán, and caciquismo there was distinct from corporatism” (116). For him the grassroots social mobilizations in the Isthmus in the late 1960s arose from economic pressure and the breakdown of centralized political control (113). His research reveals that the postrevolutionary caciquismo of General Heliodoro Charis (from the 1930s to the early 1960s) “was challenged almost immediately by local and state-level reformers, with his tenure as regional boss marked not only by intrigue, murder, and a mixture of protection and exploitation of peasants, but by stormy, public political battles—often centered on elections—between two opposing elite camps with conflicting visions of present and future political and economic life” (118).

Charis’s caciquismo persists in the Zapotec community of Álvaro Obregón, where indigenous social movements have adopted Charis as a symbol of their political resistance. Álvaro Obregón is one of seven communities protesting the San Dionisio project (ICIM-IADB, 2013) and the dramatic expansion of wind farming in the region. In 2003 the Spanish wind energy expert Preneal began negotiating land access contracts (Rojas, 2013), envisioning the construction of 30 wind turbines in Santa Maria del Mar and 102 along the Barra with a combined capacity to generate 396 megawatts of wind energy each year (CDM, 2012; IADB, 2011). Three years later it announced that it had secured access rights to 2,000 hectares of land in Santa Maria del Mar and exclusive access rights to the Barra. Additional land would be necessary to construct three new electricity substations and 52 kilometers of new transmission lines to connect them to a proposed new substation at Ixtepec that would connect the farm to the national electricity system (IADB, 2011). The Barra would also require six dock facilities during construction and operation (IADB, 2011). In 2011 Preneal sold its development rights to Mareña Renovables, a consortium of domestic and foreign investors (Rojas, 2013). In 2012 the community of San Dionisio del Mar petitioned the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to intervene in the government’s approval of the Mareña Renovables project. Local activists alleged that the approval violated their rights to free prior and informed consent, property, cultural identity, and environmental protection, rights recognized by international law (ICIM-IADB, 2013).

Despite these allegations, construction of the project commenced in November 2012. Álvaro Obregón responded with a blockade of the only land entrance to the Barra and the formation of a voluntary community police force to protect local leaders. These decisions were made by the General Assembly—a community-level forum in which all community members participated in decision making—on the basis that it had never been properly consulted by the initial developer or by the consortium that had subsequently secured the development rights. The land access agreements were, from its perspective, fraudulent, negotiated by “corrupt” local government officials without the consent of all the affected communities. Moreover, it argued, the construction of the project would bar the community from access to the fishing and farming resources central to its agrarian livelihood.

The blockade in Álvaro Obregón catalyzed a communitywide effort to reassert agency over traditional decision-making processes and activate rights to self-determination. Residents refused to participate in formal local government elections in July 2013, preventing Mexico’s electoral commission from setting up voting booths. They claimed that these elections were simply a mechanism abused by political elites to further their own personal interests. On December 13, 2013, they elected their own representatives to a community council. In January 2014, more than a year after these farmers stalled construction activities, foreign investors announced they would not proceed with the project in that location (Rojas, 2014). ⁶ Although state police and hired thugs made numerous attempts to dismantle the blockade, using direct violence, threats against community leaders and their families, and attempts to arrest community leaders, the blockade endured. Despite the decision to relocate the project, in March 2014 there were new allegations of violence against the community of Álvaro Obregón after the municipal government of Juchitán refused to recognize the community council.

Tellingly, community members routinely invoked the memory of General Charis and the unfulfilled promises of the revolution in their struggle against large-scale wind projects. Charis’s face was painted on the wall of his old hacienda, where residents sat in conversation with human rights advocates from Mexico City. The hacienda became an epistemic space in which distrust of the Mexican state articulated with agrarian attachments and suffering for land. In 2013, women, men, and children from Álvaro Obregón spoke about the use of space and their struggles over the reproduction of livelihoods in this new wind territory. They mentioned fears that placed the wind projects in direct relation to other forms of valuing land resources. They shared stories about future harvests and the possibility that if the wind farm were built the surrounding lands would be fenced off and they would not be able to fish from the Barra or harvest their crops. They worried that the constant whir of the turbines—as constant as the winds that blow year-round—would drive the fish away and they would have to move to the city, where for most, they say, there is hunger. And they explained how their daily practices were shaped by the wind. From the Barra, when the strong north winds blow they can set their nets from the beach. When the wind shifts and mellows they can launch their boats. Across the southern Isthmus they cultivate the zapalote chico (xhuuba huinii), a variety of corn that remains a staple today and that can withstand the winds of over 100 kilometers per hour that are common in the Isthmus. Struggles over wind, among Istmeños, are struggles over land. Although in life Charis was a problematic figure, he guaranteed (at least temporarily) “the sort of economic and political autonomy for which they [Istmeños] had repeatedly rebelled” (Rubin, 1994: 117–118). His reappearance as a political symbol around which resistance to large-scale wind farming was mobilized can be understood in terms of the continuities of historical indigenous struggles across southern Mexico for political and territorial autonomy (Smith, 2012).

Caciquismo is, however, deeply troubled in Álvaro Obregón. It initially appeared to work to the advantage of wind farm developers, with local leaders ensuring that the comisariados formally approved land access contracts or, where lands had been individually titled, assuaged land holders’ concerns and promoted the projects’ seemingly fictitious benefits, but trust in official representatives has been replaced with suspicion. Álvaro Obregón has decided to reject the authority of local government leaders and political parties. Residents say that their capacity to determine how their territory is used (and conserved) is based on the “consensus” decision making of the General Assembly. However, caciquismo continues to present obstacles for political organizing, with some communities looking for recognition to reactivate traditional decision making (interviews, January 24, 2014).

Local resistance has adopted different tactics and strategies, including legal and nonjudicial proceedings, direct action and civil disobedience, consciousness-raising activities, local organizing, and efforts to separate community assemblies from the influence of local political elites. Diverse place-based struggles relate to the environmental impacts of the projects, the irregularities in the land access contracts, and the failure to secure the free prior and informed consent of indigenous communities (López, 2012). Yet as state-sanctioned coercion has increased, signaling the limits of legalistic resistance strategies, place-based struggles have focused on strengthening internal collective cohesion. For example, early on some Istmeños proposed alternative development visions grounded in existing biocultural agrarian systems such as the cultivation of the zapalote chico (e.g., Boege, 2008). As Isthmus residents suggest, shared histories of land use and resource dependency can ground politics of resistance that push against the epistemic closures of green capital.

Conclusions

Mexico is not alone in imagining and exploiting new frontiers of green extraction. The scaling up of large renewable energy projects is central to current international policy debates surrounding the post-2015 development agenda. Emblematically, the UN secretary general’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative, which builds upon the Rio + 20 sustainable development negotiations, includes as an objective the doubling by 2030 of the proportion of renewable energy in the global energy mix. ⁷ It identifies the institutions and mechanisms through which this goal is to be pursued while playing down the fact that the expansion of large-scale renewable energy projects within the logics of market-based environmentalism risks exacerbating existing inequalities.

Consistent with discourses related to resource populism and the new extractivism (see Baletti, 2014), the promise of capital-intensive clean energy projects presents the risks for rural peoples’ lifeworlds as a side-effect of an otherwise beneficial cure for systemic poverty and inequality (Borras and Franco, 2010). Within this framing, local conflicts (e.g., protests, blockades, occupations) result from local groups’ perception that they are not getting a fair share of the benefits or are unfairly burdened with the environmental and social costs of the green commodification of nature. Conflict, then, arises about distinct moments when locals interrupt the flow of capital or firms are forced to stop operating. This understanding of how and why conflict emerges structures the possibilities for “resolving” it. Governments and, increasingly, civil society organizations and their international partners respond to these frictions of green capital by arguing that conflict downstream must be pacified to make green markets work. Subsequently, they seek to mediate the costs and benefits of commodification within the singularity of exchange value in an effort to ensure the fair distribution of value. As matters of distribution alone, the argument goes that “win-win-win” solutions are possible so long as we get the institutional structures and market signals correct.

At the same time, critically engaging with the production of green value draws our attention upstream, to the sociopolitical contestation over different production regimes and the creation and circulation of value (Moore, 2011), raising the question how things like wind come to have exchange value (Dikec, 2012; Henderson, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2011). In this paper we have offered insights into the epistemic closures of green capital, revealing the way knowledge about and markets created for wind energy projects in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec promote “benign” power while obscuring the dispossessions that enable it. Understanding of the way the creation and circulation of value are contested points to the structural violence of capitalist relations of production “that gives priority to labor productivity, and mobilizes extra-human nature without regard for the socio-ecological conditions of its (uncapitalized) reproduction” (Moore, 2011: 20). Trying to manage communities in resistance through direct repression or consent leaves intact the spatial and temporal forms of violence their struggles make visible. Local resistance in the Isthmus points not only to opposition to the materiality of wind projects but also to the limits of the discourses of green capital in the context of historical inequality and dispossession. The problem is not the clean energy technology per se or failure to appreciate the gravity of human-induced climate change. Rather, Binniza and Ikjoots people are calling attention to the fact that efforts by the state and firms to “produce and organize space in the operation of power” ignore the voices of local people and the values they place on their agrarian livelihoods (Gidwani and Reddy, 2011: 1636). The articulation of green power, wind territory, and indigenous struggle examined here highlights the need for attention to epistemic closures in the context of green energy if we are to develop a deeper understanding of the development models that seek to address the problem of anthropogenic climate change. Efforts to transition to clean energy must focus on transforming the structures of energy production, provision, and consumption and not simply on flattening the complex politics of these energy frontiers.