Land Violence, Security, and Development in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico
About the Project
The humanitarian crisis of Central American migrants at the U.S. border that has surfaced in recent years is one of the most visible symptoms of a much longer-lasting, widespread, and structurally-driven problem. In Latin America, rural areas have become sources of forced out-migration when small-scale agricultural producers, peasant cooperatives, and indigenous communities with collective territorial rights, are dispossessed of their land as a result of a market-led agrarian reform aimed at promoting the rise of agribusiness, mining, tourism and other large-scale industries. Millions of hectares of land have come under the control of large-scale enterprises or state-led megaprojects -- a shift that has led to the destruction of livelihoods and environmental degradation. There is an extensive literature on the social and environmental impacts of these reforms, but much less on their reliance upon violence for implementation. Presently, Latin America is the world's deadliest region for land-rights and environmental defenders, with Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico displaying the highest rates over the past five years. The scholarship on the economic consequences of neoliberal restructuring overlooks the role of violence in neoliberal regimes of land-use and control. Meanwhile, the literature on collective violence fails to capture a type of violence instrumental to large-scale development projects and favoured by states and dominant groups.
This project will examine how the use of violence by state and non-state armed actors for the purpose of land appropriation and repression intersects with economic and security legislation in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. The research employs critical globalization theory, world systems approach, the political process approach, and literature on elite violence. It incorporates participatory methodology and will include: inventory of economic and security legislation and data on land conflicts; interviews / focus-groups entailing participatory mapping and photography in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico; N-vivo coding of data; an international video-encounter of social movements representatives, and creation of a database on violent land conflicts and relevant legislation. The project will consist of a Canadian team (graduate student research assistants and an academic collaborator) and a fieldwork team (collaborators in site countries and local knowledge facilitators).
The research will advance my theory of pro-capitalist violence, the foundation for which was laid by my project "Violence and Land Dispossession" (funded by SSHRC IDG 2018-2020). It will reveal the relationship between institutionally-supported economic objectives and the activities of armed actors, and will be of interest to scholars working on land-grabbing, rural proletarianization, political violence, and parastatal groups. The contributions will be also relevant to World Bank and government policy-makers and the private sector. The research will support rural communities by identifying strategies for securing access to land and reducing violence and providing them with empirical data to support their demands. Project outcomes will be: database, briefing papers, participatory photography gallery on a publicly accessible website as well as journal articles, conference papers, and a monograph. Overall, the research seeks to promote peacemaking and democratization by guiding institutional efforts towards addressing specific structural conditions that generate violence. The project will create opportunities for skill development in research methods and subject matter expertise for Canadian student research assistants. The latter will benefit from co-authoring journal articles, conference presentations and briefing papers.