Social environmental conflicts have multiplied throughout Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America during the first decade and a half of the new millennium. These conflicts revolve around mega-mining projects, dam building, oil and gas extraction , and the construction of infrastructure for the transportation of energy, water , goods, and people. Conflicts have also been sparked by tourist developments , wind farms , urban sprawl, garbage dumps, genetically modified seeds , and diverse forms of industrial contamination . Typically, large national and transnational companies, backed by government agencies , are pitted against local opposition groups, who build alliances with progressive and radical elements of civil society and deploy collective action through nested scales of social networks . In many cases, it is the state itself that spearheads controversial large-scale development projects, especially for dams , highways, and oil exploitation, with private sector participation. These projects are promoted by capital and the state through appeals to the notions of progress, economic growth, and modernization, while the discourse of resistance speaks to the defense of livelihoods of small-scale rural producers, human rights , the commons, healthy living environments, territories, and alternative cosmologies .
Social environmental conflicts are not new (MartĂnez Alier 2011). In Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America , there is a long history of conflict around the dispossession of land and territory since the Conquest. The colonization of indigenous groups âincluding in the cultural realm of the imaginary (Gruzinski 2007)âwent hand in hand with the colonization of the natural environment; this process has continued until the present, as the biophysical characteristics and territorial configurations of local spaces in Latin America âappear before global hegemonic thinking and before dominant elites in the region as a subaltern space, which can be exploited, ravaged and reconfigured according to the needs of the current accumulation regimesâ (Alimonda 2011: 22). Accordingly, from a long-term perspective, resistance to dispossession and ecological destruction can be seen as a continuation to the historical struggle for land and, in the case of indigenous groups , as part of ongoing struggles for local autonomy , self-government, and cultural recognition (Porto Gonçalves 2001; Escobar 2006; Alimonda 2011; Composto and Navarro 2014).
It was not until the 1970s and 1980s, however, after the post-WWII push for state-led industrialization and Green Revolution agriculture , that the ecological content of these struggles became salient in the discourses of affected populations and social activists (Bray 1997; Carruthers 2008a; Hochstetler and Keck 2007). In the context of the debt crisis and as part of the transition from single-party authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships, environmental concerns were incorporated into broader struggles for democracy and social justice across the region. These struggles formed part of a new wave of social movements , waged by peasants , indigenous groups , urban associations, womenâs groups, independent labor unions , ecclesiastical practitioners of liberation theology, university groups, and non-governmental organizations (Carruthers 2008a). Mexico was no exception. Social environmental conflicts emerged in different parts of the country around problems of oil contamination , commercial logging, industrial pollution , displacement due to dams , and plans to build nuclear power facilities (Barabas and BartolomĂ© 1973; Bray 1997; GonzĂĄlez 1992; DĂez 2006; Madrigal 2010; VelĂĄzquez GarcĂa 2010).
Since then, social environmental conflicts have multiplied in the context of neoliberal structural adjustments aimed at creating favorable conditions for private and foreign investment in extractive activities, assembly plants, and development infrastructure. In Mexico, Paz (2012) detected 95 cases of social environmental conflict , by participating in assemblies that bring environmentally affected people together and through a systematic revision of newspaper articles from May 2009 to May 2011. Of these, 39% have to do with water , 25% with agricultural land and territories, and 15% with protected areas. In another inventory, Toledo and his collaborators (2015) detected 298 such conflicts between September 2009 and March 2014, revolving around mining (79), hydraulic infrastructure (65), energy (52), urban development (26), forestry (19), biotechnology (18), tourism (17), hazardous wastes (14), and agriculture (8). By February of 2016, this count had reached 420 (Toledo cited by Enciso 2016).
What are the political economic conditions that have given rise to increasing numbers of social environmental conflicts in Mexico? Why do these conflicts arise in some local and regional contexts and not in others? How are social environmental movements constructed and sustained? And, what are the alternatives? These are the questions that this book seeks to address. Our objective is not to try to provide definitive answers, but rather to contribute to ongoing debates by bringing together diverse approaches to empirical and theoretical inquiry; approaches that draw from critical development studies, political ecology, ecological Marxism, and cultural anthropology. The scopes of analysis range from local- and regional-level case studies to sectoral and structural analysis with a focus on the national level. The idea is to analyze social environmental conflicts in Mexico from different methodological, epistemological, and theoretical perspectives. The common thread is critical analysis.
This introductory chapter has five sections. The first sketches out key contours of the national context in an effort to demonstrate that, in some ways, for the study of social environmental conflicts , Mexico represents an âextremeâ case (in the methodological sense of Yin 2009) and also an anomaly in the Latin American context. The second section presents a theoretical model to explain the multiplication of social environmental conflicts in the neoliberal era, taking as a point of departure Marxâs model of âoriginal accumulationâ. It also points toward the policies and agencies that promote projects that imply the commodification and privatization of natural resources in Mexico. In this way, an argument is made that, in the context of a regulatory framework subordinated to the imperative of creating favorable conditions to attract and retain private and foreign investment, the imposition of mega-development projects , maquiladora industrialization , and the extraction of natural resources have generated objective conditions of environmental crisis and injustice in multiple and diverse local settings throughout Mexico, even though not all give rise to open social conflict. The next two sections provide a panoramic description of social environmental conflicts in Mexico and the alternatives that are being constructed from below in rural areas. The last section presents an overview of the chapters that are included in this book.
1.1 Mexico in the Latin American Context
The multiplication of social environmental conflicts can be observed throughout Latin America and elsewhere around the world, as attested by the growing number of cases registered by the global Environmental Justice Atlas.1 In this database, 70 social environmental conflicts have been registered in Mexico, putting the country in fourth place in Latin America, after Colombia (125), Brazil (92), and Peru (79), and well ahead of Chile (47), Bolivia (40), and Venezuela (33). The extraction of mineral ores and building materials is a leading immediate cause of conflict in all of these countries, especially in Peru and Colombia where it corresponds to 58 and 41% of the total number of conflicts, respectively. Other leading immediate causes are biomass extraction and land disputes, especially in Brazil (36% of total); water management, especially in Mexico (20%) and Chile (19%); and fossil fuel and climate justice, representing 30 and 15% of the total number of conflicts in Venezuela and Colombia, respectively.2
As Delgado Ramos (2012) and others have pointed out, the growing number of environmental conflicts in Latin America correlates with an increase in the social metabolism of the global economy and the reinsertion of the region as a provider of primary products. Indeed, the rate of extracting materials from the region (biomass, metals, minerals, construction materials, and hydrocarbons) quadrupled between 1970 and 2008, with...