Latin American Perspectives: blog: March 2019 issue

Showing posts with label March 2019 issue. Show all posts

April 18, 2019

Book Review, Canadian Capital and Extractive Imperialism-"Blood of Extraction"

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Canadian Capital and Extractive Imperialism
Blood of Extraction

by Arturo Ezquerro-Cañete

Blood of Extraction is a book about the seamy side of Canadian foreign policy. Its aim is to shed light on the ways in which the Canadian state exercises its (secondary) imperial power to facilitate the expansion of Canadian capital in Latin America. These mechanisms include pushing for neoliberal reforms, underregulating the Toronto Stock Exchange, providing tax benefits, direct subsidies, and diplomatic support to Canadian mining companies operating abroad, and refusing to regulate them outside of the country (Tetreault, 2013). One of the major contributions of this book is its ability to discredit a number of old claims and myths centering around Canada’s commitment to democracy and human rights overseas.

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April 16, 2019

Abstract, Black Women’s Struggles against Extractivism, Land Dispossession, and Marginalization in Colombia

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Black Women’s Struggles against Extractivism, Land Dispossession, and Marginalization in Colombia

by Castriela Esther Hernández Reyes

The neocolonial turn toward extractivism intensifies the use of violence while fostering land dispossession, racism, and militarization of social life. Afro-Colombian women resist this process by using their subjectivities politically, strategically, discursively, and textually. An examination through the lens of black/decolonial feminism of the first national Mobilization for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories, led by 40 black women from the Department of Cauca in 2014, shows that black women’s emotions and collective affections were driving forces that exhibited both their exclusions and their resistance. These feelings may be seen as catalysts through which their lived experiences are expressed and performed in the material world. Examination of this event suggests that a more radical analysis of black women’s historicity, subjectivities, and struggles is needed to better capture and understand experience-based epistemologies that challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production.

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April 11, 2019

Abstract, The Gendered Dimensions of Resource Extractivism in Argentina’s Soy Boom

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The Gendered Dimensions of Resource Extractivism in Argentina’s Soy Boom

by Amalia Leguizamón

Analyzing resource extractivism as a gendered structure is important for understanding the complex social processes that create and perpetuate environmental injustice—both social inequality and environmental degradation—and for visualizing gendered resistances and opportunities for transformation. Applying Risman’s approach to Argentina’s soy model, six causal mechanisms at the institutional, individual, and interactional levels can be identified that serve either to maintain or to challenge the status quo: (1) resource distribution, (2) ideology, (3) identity work, (4) cognitive bias, (5) status expectations, and (6) state paternalism.

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April 9, 2019

Abstract, Ethnicity, Gender, and Oil: Comparative Dynamics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

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Ethnicity, Gender, and Oil: Comparative Dynamics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

by Ivette Vallejo, Cristina Cielo, and Fernando García

During the past decade, Ecuador’s Alianza PAÍS socialist government, primarily under the leadership of Rafael Correa, was committed to moving toward a post-neoliberal economy and implementing a “New Amazon” free of poverty, with expanded infrastructure and services, as part of the redistribution of oil revenues. However, in sites of state development projects, gender hierarchies and territorial dispossession in fact became more acute. Analysis of two place-based indigenous political ecologies—one in the central Amazon, where the state licensed new oil blocks in Sapara territory to a Chinese company in 2016, and the other in the Kichwa community of Playas de Cuyabeno in the northern Amazon, where the state company PetroAmazonas has operated since the 1970s—shows how women have reconfigured their ethnic and gender identities in relation to oil companies and the state in the context of rising and falling oil prices and in doing so reinforced or challenged male leaders’ positions in the internal structures of their communities and organizations.

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April 4, 2019

Abstract, How Does Development Mean? Attitudes toward Mining and the Social Meaning of Development in Guatemala

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How Does Development Mean? Attitudes toward Mining and the Social Meaning of Development in Guatemala

by Michael L. Dougherty

The ways that the concept of development comes to mean refract individual value sets and map onto Guatemalan host-community residents’ attitudes toward mining. Economically oriented residents tend to support mining while those who prioritize public health and environmental advocacy tend to oppose it. Individuals who trust institutions of the state tend to support mining, while individuals who perceive these issues through the lens of their religious faith tend to oppose it. Concerns around public health are especially salient. Focusing on individual-level decision making rather than community-level action distinguishes between rationale and decision, thus highlighting the variegated social meanings underlying superficially similar attitudes. Mining attitudes and their rationales are heterogeneous and vary in intensity.

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April 2, 2019

Abstract, Extraction, Revolution, Plurinationalism: Rethinking Extractivism from Bolivia

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Extraction, Revolution, Plurinationalism: Rethinking Extractivism from Bolivia

by Andrea Marston and Amy Kennemore

With the ratification of its new constitution in 2009, Bolivia was transformed into a “plurinational state” associated with ecologically oriented values, yet resource extraction has expanded ever since. Fieldwork conducted in communities in highland Bolivia shows how resource extraction sustains and is sustained by “revolutionary narratives” in which the state—led by President Evo Morales—is configured as the protagonist of the plurinational era. Examination of the challenges presented by Bolivia’s indigenous communities and mining cooperatives to this revolutionary narrative during the 2014 adoption of new mining legislation suggests that shifting critical focus away from revolutionary change toward what David Scott calls the “politics of the present” might be a more fruitful way to think about the relationship between resource extraction and Bolivia’s plurinationalism.

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