Environmental Devastation

Open air mining, fracking, the building of hydroelectric dams and power plants, massive livestock raising with the resultant methane gases, monocropping of genetically engineered crops with the package of pesticides and herbicides: the development of these practices leads to deforestation and environmental pollution. All are forms of extractivism and neo-extractivism distinguished initially by international capital and then, in some countries in Latin America that formed the Pink Tide, by national capital (Ellner, 2021; Farthing and Fabricant, 2018). The former was to the benefit of international finance capital and the latter, in the Pink Tide countries used to fund social welfare programs. No matter who the beneficiaries are, however, these projects create environmental devastation that leads to climate change, which in turn causes tornados and flooding and drought and desertification, which in a kind of feedback loop create more environmental devastation.

Nemer E. Narchi (2015) conceives of environmental devastation and deterioration as environmental violence, whereby powerful groups erode the livelihoods of the less powerful. He makes the point that capital accumulation leads to the transformation of “all living beings and natural goods into property” (Narchi, 2015: 7). In other words, there is a commodification of everything.

Climate change has a great impact in the developing countries of Latin America, and with its effects on such occupations as fishing and agriculture, leads to greater poverty among the already poor (Santelices Spikin and Rojas Hernández, 2016). Climate change also causes massive displacements in the countryside leading to large scale migration to cities where the displaced peasants and indigenous peoples try to eke out a living in the informal economy (Wilson, 2020). There are, however, peasant and indigenous social movements that resist these depredations.

David Barkin (2018), in his voluminous collection of pre-published articles, shows a trajectory from being subjected to the dynamics of international and national capital correlated with the erosion of biodiversity and the marginalization of peasants and indigenous peoples, to the formation of economic and ecological solidarity groups among those affected. The reactions of these marginalized groups to environmental devastation and biodiversity have been diverse and covered to some extent in various issues of Latin American Perspectives.

Tetreault (2015: 57) examines the conflicts in various indigenous communities in Mexico and concludes the “[M]ining companies have resorted to trickery, coercion, and bribery to gain entrance to communities and dispossess them of their resources. There are promises of jobs, economic prosperity, and social development projects but no mention of environmental costs.” He points out that the promise of employment is dubious since mining requires skills that the local population might not possess.

Although Barkin holds hope for solidarity against environmental degradation as a general movement of solidarity in some communities, there are instances addressed in Latin American Perspectives that belie its generality within them. Thus, a study of four Guatemalan communities showed that some residents welcomed mining as leading to economic development and self-determination, others tended to stress the need for environmental protections and the impacts of mining on public health (Dougherty, 2019).

There are differences by gender in indigenous communities as well. In Sapara communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon women organize against extractiviism while challenging the male domination of the oil drilling enterprise (e.g. Vallejo, Cielo, and García, 2019). There are also tensions between those who take part in traditional artisanal mining and those who endorse industrial mining, as Celis (2007) shows in the case of Colombia. Nonetheless there are cross community, nation-wide and international movements to combat environmental violence and degradation that uphold Barkin’s proposed trajectory.

In Colombia, for example, in 2010 the Congrreso de los Pueblos (Peoples’ Congress was established and includes farm and health workers, students, unions, and women and represented the struggles by peasants and indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples in their struggles against land grabbing for extractive industries (Celis, 2017: 256) and is a cross-community and national movement.

There are also national movements to combat climate change and the environmental damage caused by it. Thus various peasant unions and other organizations in Bolivia have united to challenge the devastation of the environment caused by changes in the climate while utilizing indigenous worldviews challenging Eurocentric views of nature (Hicks and Fabricant, 2016).

The agroecological movement, beginning in the 1970s, rests on the peasant ideals of food sovereignty and the replacement of large-scale industrial agriculture in favor of traditional methods of polyculture and pesticide free fields. It has combined local, national and international levels of involvement and its endorsement has spread around the world (Wilson, 2023). Thus, the trajectory proposed by Barkin is being, to a certain extent, realized.