NACLA Update 9/02/10 - New NACLA Report: Indigenous Peoples Confront Capitalism




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September/October - NACLA Report on the Americas

After Recognition: Indigenous Peoples Confront Capitalism
Indigenous peoples across Latin America have taken a leading position in defending national sovereignty, democratic rights, and the environment. A renewed cycle of capitalist accumulation in the region centered on mining, hydrocarbon extraction, and agro-industrial monocultures has sparked the new round of indigenous resistance. Drawing on organizational and political legacies of previous decades, indigenous groups in the 1980s and 1990s grew and gained strength from an international arena in which governments were encouraged to recognize and promote cultural and minority rights. In this issue of the NACLA Report, we explore the contributions and creative possibilities of indigenous movements at a moment when indigenous politics has moved beyond this request for state recognition and inclusion.

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New on nacla.org

The Sustainable City Project Ruse in Chiapas
by Paola Reyes
The "rural city" of Nuevo Juan de Grijalva is part of a government project which claims that it will reduce poverty in the Mexican state of Chiapas by relocating impoverished rural communities into centralized cities built by the state government. However following an orthodox free market economic model promoted by the Mexican state under the Plan Puebla Panama, the Sustainable Rural Cities Project imposes a monoculture, agro-export model that undercuts the subsistence farming practiced by most of its residents. As farmers can no longer cultivate their land, unemployment has risen, and the costs of basic services have quadrupled since its 2008 inception, there has been a significant and building local resistance to the project.
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Guatemala's New Civil Conflict: The Case of Ramiro Choc
by Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens
Ramiro Choc, a Q´eqchi´ community leader, has been fighting for indigenous people's land rights in Guatemala's volatile departments of Alta Verapaz and Izabal since the 1990s. These are the so-called "crimes" that led to his six year prison sentence starting in 2008. His story illustrates both the tension and boisterous mobilization of the people around land and natural resource issues in this area of Guatemala. To this mobilization, the Guatemalan government is responding by criminalizing peasant leaders, militarizing regions slated for development projects, and using environmental "protected areas" to exclude indigenous people. This combination of ingredients has become the core of Guatemala's new civil conflict.
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