Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 2020
A pesar de la centralidad del estudio del campesinado en America Latina, para diferentes discipli... more A pesar de la centralidad del estudio del campesinado en America Latina, para diferentes disciplinas esta categoria sigue estando ligada a imagenes estaticas de un grupo definido desde el Estado y ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South Ame... more Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narco-trafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narco-trafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports, and the authors’ own years of fiel...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South Ame... more Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narco-trafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narco-trafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports, and the authors’ own years of fiel...
Central America exemplifies a dynamic unfolding around the world where transnational illicit econ... more Central America exemplifies a dynamic unfolding around the world where transnational illicit economies are driving land use change. Despite an extensive network of protected areas, Central America has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world in the past 20 years. Some of this forest loss is due to the international cocaine trade, as drug trafficking organizations launder money into extractive economies and seek to control territories along their supply chain. While research documents land change from narcotrafficking in transit nodes, or narco-deforestation (e.g. Sesnie et al., 2017), less research exists examining other environmental impacts near cocaine transit nodes in protected areas and biodiversity hotspots, which we term ‘‘narco-degradation.” We conducted i) interviews and participatory mapping exercises with 65 actors working in protected areas in Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica and ii) 11 workshops with 76 protected areas managers to understand and document spatial concentration of different types of narco-degradation. Coded interviews and maps yield 500 narco-degradation activities occurring between 2000 and 2018. Our analysis reveals that narco-trafficking affects multiple ecosystems, not only forests, and that variations in narco-degradation types and intensities reflect differences in the three nodes’ transportation practices (air, land, maritime), their age and activity levels (emerging nodes, hotspots, and declining nodes), and their physical geography. In all three protected areas, narcotrafficking accelerates the conversion of natural resources into commodities (such as land, lumber, minerals, and fauna), their extraction, and entry into legal and illegal markets. We conclude by arguing that narco-degradation negatively and disproportionately impacts the livelihoods and governance structures of Indigenous and peasant communities living in and around Central America’s protected areas. These insights contribute an integrated socio-ecological analysis of the role of narco-capital and cocaine trafficking’s contribution to illicit global environmental change.
In March 2020, the United States government began a series of measures designed to dramatically r... more In March 2020, the United States government began a series of measures designed to dramatically restrict immigration as part of its response to the global health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This included Title 42, which deported asylum seekers immediately and prevented them from applying for asylum. These measures worsened an already precarious situation at the US–Mexico border for an estimated 60,000 asylum seekers who were prevented, by the Trump administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ (aka MPP) policy enacted in January 2019, from remaining in the United States while they awaited their asylum hearings. In-depth interviews, participant observation, and social media analysis with humanitarian and legal advocates for asylum seekers living in a camp at the border in Matamoros, Mexico reveal that COVID-19’s impacts are not limited to public health concerns. Rather, COVID-19’s impacts center on how the Trump administration weaponized the virus to indefinitely suspend the asylum system. We argue that the Matamoros refugee camp provides a strategic vantage point to understand the repercussions of state policies of exclusion on im/mobility and survival strategies for asylum seekers. Specifically, we use the analytical lenses of the politics of im/mobility, geographies of exclusion, and asylum seeker resilience to identify how COVID-19 has shaped the im/mobility and security of the camp and its residents in unexpected ways. At the same time, our research illustrates that camp residents exercise im/mobility as a form of political visibility to contest and ameliorate their precarity as they find themselves in conditions not of their choosing
Antípoda Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 2020
Despite the centrality in the study of the peasantry in Latin America,
for various disciplines, t... more Despite the centrality in the study of the peasantry in Latin America, for various disciplines, this category is still bound to static images of a group defined according to the State and capital. In this article, we explain the need to study the situated reality — historically, geographically and politically — of the individuals and groups that fit into this category of the peasantry. The issue concerning peasants is a pressing one in view of the current economic, political and socio-environmental crisis affecting large sectors of the Latin American population. This crisis is due, among other dynamics, to the advance of extractivism, the exacerbation of inequality, environmental deterioration, the dispossession of marginalized communities, and criminalization of the social movement. In order to further the critical analysis of this issue, from a historical, spatial, relational, and political perspective, we will delve into recent conceptualizations of the peasant, and into how political subjects and spatialities are mutually constructed.
Illegal activity, such as deforestation for illicit crops for cocaine production, has been inferr... more Illegal activity, such as deforestation for illicit crops for cocaine production, has been inferred as a cause of land change. Nonetheless, illicit activity is often overlooked or difficult to incorporate into causal inference models of land change. Evidence continues to build that narcotrafficking plays an important, yet often unreported, role in forest loss. This study presents a novel strategy to meet the challenge of estimating the causal effect of illicit activity in land change using consolidated news media reports to estimate the relationship between drug trafficking and accelerated forest loss in Central America. Drug trafficking organizations engage in illegal land transactions, money laundering, and territorial control that can manifest as forest conversion to agriculture or pasture land uses. Longitudinal data on 50 sub-national units over a period of 16 years (2001-2016) are used in fixed effects regressions to estimate the role of narcotrafficking in forest loss. Two narcotrafficking activity proxies were developed as explanatory variables of forest loss: i) an "official" proxy from drug seizures data within 14 sub-national units; and, ii) an "unofficial" proxy developed from georeferenced news media accounts of narcotrafficking events. The effect of narcotrafficking was systematically compared to the other well-known causes of forest loss, such as rural population growth and other conventional drivers. Both proxies indicate narcotrafficking is a statistically significant (p<0.01) contributor to forest loss in the region, particularly in Nicaragua (p<0.05, official proxy), Honduras (p<0.05, media proxy), and Guatemala (p<0.05, media proxy). Narcotrafficking variables explain an additional 5% (media proxy) and 9% (official proxy) of variance of forest loss not captured by conventional models. This study showed the ability of news media data to capture the signal of illicit activity in land use changes such as forest loss. The methods employed here could be used to estimate the causal effect of illicit activities in other land and environmental systems. Our results suggest that current drug policy, which concentrates drug trafficking in remote areas of very high cultural and environmental value, has helped to accelerate the loss of Central America's remaining forests.
This research is motivated by the compelling finding that the illicit cocaine trade is responsibl... more This research is motivated by the compelling finding that the illicit cocaine trade is responsible for extensive patterns of deforestation in Central America. This pattern is most pronounced in the region's large protected areas. We wanted to know how cocaine trafficking affects conservation governance in Central America's protected areas, and whether deforestation is a result of impacts on governance. To answer this question, we interviewed conservation stakeholders from key institutions at various levels in three drug-trafficking hotspots: Peten, Guatemala, Northeastern Honduras, and the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. We found that, in order to establish and maintain drug transit operations, drug-trafficking organizations compete with and undermine conservation governance actors and institutions. Drug trafficking impacts conservation governance in three ways: 1) it undermines long standing conservation coalitions; 2) it fuels booms in extractive activities inside protected lands; and 3) it erodes the territorial control that conservation institutions exert, exploiting strict "fortress" conservation governance models. Participatory governance models that provide locals with strong expectations of land tenure and/or institutional support for local decision-making may offer resistance to the impacts on governance institutions that we documented.
Drug trafficking organizations are driving deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. D... more Drug trafficking organizations are driving deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Drug traffickers deforest the protected area in order to illegally ranch cattle, which serves as a mechanism of money laundering, drug smuggling, and territory control. Journalists and ethnographers have analyzed "narco-cattle ranching" activities in the reserve and resulting "narco-deforestation," yet land use change scientists have yet to quantify the contribution of illegal cattle ranching to forest loss. This article uses remote sensing and GIS analysis to distinguish the relative contribution of cattle ranching, farming, and land speculation to reserve deforestation and other forms of land use and land cover change. We also use ethnographic methods to provide evidentiary links between illegal cattle ranching and drug trafficking activities that suggest a large part, but not all, of illegal cattle ranching is narco-capitalized. Our research finds that illegal cattle ranching is responsible for the majority of reserve deforestation, ranging from 59 to 87% of photographs on deforested lands in three sampled areas. We also found illegal cattle ranching activities are the highest in the reserve's western national parks, which should be strictly protected from land use change. Contrary to popular debate, these findings suggest drug traffickers in the context of the US-led War on Drugs are to blame for forest loss, not subsistence farmers illegally living in the reserve.
Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest first used the term “political forest” to denaturalise forests... more Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest first used the term “political forest” to denaturalise forests, refiguring them as political-ecological entities. Across three moments of colonialism, post-colonial independence, and counter-insurgency struggles, they analyse how states in Southeast Asia (re)made forests as a means of territorialising power. More recently, they identify a fourth, contemporary moment characterised by the entry of diverse non-state actors into the making of forests, and a shift in the rationalities and technologies of forest management. We label this fourth moment “green neoliberalism” to identify an era of global environmental governance characterised by market-based solutions to socio-ecological problems, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration priorities, and new moral and scientific claims to forests spanning a variety of sites and scales. The papers in this symposium transport the analytic of the political forest to Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, Madagascar, Singapore, and Thailand to examine how green neoliberalism’s discourses and practices have created new sites and expressions of territorialisation, governance, knowledge production, and subject formation. In doing so, they illuminate the multiplicity of actors (re)making political forests at a moment when forests’ virtues as carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots draw massive flows of capital and justify remaking socio-ecological relations across the globe.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019
Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt
cocaine shipments between South Ame... more Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narcotrafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narcotrafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports, and the authors’ own years of field research in the region. Parameterization and validation used the best available, authoritative data source for illicit cocaine flows. Despite inherently biased, unreliable, and/or incomplete data of a clandestine phenomenon, the model compellingly reproduced the “cat-and-mouse” dynamic between narco-traffickers and interdiction forces others have qualitatively described. The model produced qualitatively accurate and quantitatively realistic spatial and temporal patterns of cocaine trafficking in response to interdiction events. The NarcoLogic model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool for the robust assessment of different drug policy scenarios, and their likely impact on trafficker behavior and the many collateral damages associated with the militarized war on drugs.
In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected... more In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected areas through a process known as narco-ganader ıa, narco-cattle ranching. Drawing on the case study of Laguna del Tigre National Park, this article argues that narco-cattle ranching is a key driver of deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Using ethnographic and remote-sensing methods, we describe narco-cattle ranching's money-laundering practices, its territorial dynamics, and its environmental impacts. We draw on theorisations of "political forests" to explain how drug trafficking organisations transform land use in the reserve, and along the way, remake its ecology, territories and subjects. Our work illustrates that drug policy is inextricably linked to conservation policy in the Americas. More specifically, we argue that community-based resource management improves forest and protected area residents' abilities to resist drug-trafficking related land use change by strengthening local governance and land tenure regimes.
For decades, cocaine trafficking has been a key factor in accelerating the social and ecological ... more For decades, cocaine trafficking has been a key factor in accelerating the social and ecological transformation of rural landscapes across Latin America. In this review article, we explain why and how. Drawing from scholarly, journalistic, and policy sources we identify and theorize the political-economic logics and grounded processes underlying the pervasive nexus of agrarian change, clandestine activities, and illicit capital. We first outline three key elements of the political economic context that create and enable land acquisition by drug traffickers. We then elucidate narcos' multiple motives for acquiring, transforming, and holding rural landed property. Ultimately, we make a case for understanding drug traffickers as a "narco-bourgeoisie" due to their use of cocaine profits to establish and extend private property relations into erstwhile communal and protected lands that were previously unavailable for capital accumulation. We argue that theorizing drug traffickers in this way better captures the relationship between drug control policy and capitalism, and the role of illicit capital in land use change.
This article introduces a special issue that illustrates how violence and dispossession frequentl... more This article introduces a special issue that illustrates how violence and dispossession frequently define everyday practices, livelihoods and representations in tourism. The authors take a relational approach to violence, emphasizing how violence's many forms (physical, symbolic, epistemic, structural, etc.) interweave in practice to produce the built tourism environment, creating unequal power relations between "hosts" and "guests". The special issue's papers provide five historically and geographically specific articulations of tourism, violence and dispossession in Paris, Guatemalan forests, rural Honduras, faux South African shantytowns, and O'ahu, Hawaii. They reveal recurring themes of enclosure and extraction, erasure and commodification, "destructive creation," and (neo)colonialism. This introductory article draws on the special issue's guest editors' ethnographic research in Colombia and Guatemala to elaborate on the key concepts of tourism development, violence, dispossession and spatial fetishism underpinning these themes using a critical and geographical approach. Attending to violence in tourism allows contributors to identify more sustainable forms of tourism development. These include redefining "sustainability" as Indigenous and Native sovereignty, advocating for grassroots and collective forms of tourism, reducing tourism's role in climate change by traveling locally, and contesting the reproduction of colonial itineraries and practices of "Othering".
In 2005, Guatemalan community forest concessionaires achieved a remarkable legislative victory th... more In 2005, Guatemalan community forest concessionaires achieved a remarkable legislative victory that reversed a green land grab in the Maya Biosphere. The fight over this space, the Mirador Basin, provides valuable contributions to analyses of global land grabs, grassroots politics and power relations underpinning environmental governance. First, the fight for the Mirador Basin illustrates how green land grabs create new natures, rather than simply enclosing existing green spaces. Second, it contributes to recent scholarship detailing land-grabbing practices of resistance, acquiescence and incorporation ?from below? by describing how Maya Biosphere community forest concessionaires were able to reverse a green grab. Lastly, I argue this successful reversal largely rests on the articulation and mobilization of a new rights-bearing subject? the forest concessionaire. Struggles for land in the Maya Biosphere illustrate that practices and relations of green governance do not always create disciplined, neo-liberal, green subjects. Rather, community forestry has provided a political platform turning reserve residents into influential actors participating in the re-territorialization of power in contemporary Guatemala.
Across Latin America, non-traditional tourism sectors, like eco-tourism and cultural tourism, hav... more Across Latin America, non-traditional tourism sectors, like eco-tourism and cultural tourism, have grown dramatically in the last 30 years. Neoliberal ideologies, reforms, and infrastructure set the stage for growth, but neoliberalism alone does not explain why the tourism industry is an acute site of struggle over territory, identity and history. From Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve in the heart of Central America's "Mayan World" tourism initiative, this article asks: Why is contemporary tourism such a powerful and pervasive site of contentious socio-spatial politics? It argues that neoliberal reforms have combined with tourism's dual violent practices of spatial colonization and the commodification of place to fuel this growth and politicization. Spatial colonization refers to the commodification of "nature" and practices of land dispossession that define capitalism's expansion into "underdeveloped" and "green" spaces. The industry also commodifies the culture, identity and experience of a place and its people as objects of tourist consumption, which infuses tourism's representational practices with immense, yet subtle power. This article further illustrates how tourism landscapes are carved out of practices of material and intangible dispossession, as well as practices of state territorialization. This violence often engenders diverse forms of resistance by "hosts" living in other people's playgrounds around the world.
Revue en ligne de géographie politique et de géopolitique, 2016
The Guatemalan tourism industry is a contested terrain of post-war politics where state officials... more The Guatemalan tourism industry is a contested terrain of post-war politics where state officials, indigenous Maya, and ex-guerilla brigades compete to define post-war national identity, historical memory, and future possibilities. I use the analytic of territory to show how the state and civil society groups use tourism development to pursue unexpected political ends. First, I track changes in state marketing practices to suggest the Guatemalan government has used tourism to redefine post-war national identity and the place of Maya within the nation. I then turn to the Maya village of San Juan la Laguna to examine how the Maya Tz’utujil reassert their Tz’utujil identity and claims to San Juan as Tz’utujil space through community tourism. Lastly, I explore how ex-guerillas practice solidarity tourism to carve out alternative spaces of life and livelihood through cooperative living. This paper comparatively examines the territorial practices of state tourism, indigenous and ex-guerilla tourism to illustrate the tourism industry’s political stakes and possibilities in Guatemala.
In the village of Ch’umil in northern Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, competing heritage clai... more In the village of Ch’umil in northern Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, competing heritage claims to Maya archaeological sites and artifacts politicize the region’s cultural and ecological landscapes. Using a geographical understanding of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991), I ethnographically unpack Ch’umil residents’ definitions of cultural and ecological heritage that reflect village-level histories of living and laboring in forests and archaeology sites surrounding Ch’umil. Villagers’ definitions of heritage contrast sharply with the spatial claims made by global heritage advocates who campaign to designate the region as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Analyzing the politics of scale underpinning these conservation practices reveals that when global heritage advocates speak on behalf of a universal humanity, they often render local-level heritage claims invisible and illegitimate. This article urges heritage managers and cosmopolitan theorists who debate the ethics of mitigating global and local heritage claims to reconsider this spatial binary altogether.
Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 2020
A pesar de la centralidad del estudio del campesinado en America Latina, para diferentes discipli... more A pesar de la centralidad del estudio del campesinado en America Latina, para diferentes disciplinas esta categoria sigue estando ligada a imagenes estaticas de un grupo definido desde el Estado y ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South Ame... more Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narco-trafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narco-trafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports, and the authors’ own years of fiel...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South Ame... more Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narco-trafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narco-trafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports, and the authors’ own years of fiel...
Central America exemplifies a dynamic unfolding around the world where transnational illicit econ... more Central America exemplifies a dynamic unfolding around the world where transnational illicit economies are driving land use change. Despite an extensive network of protected areas, Central America has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world in the past 20 years. Some of this forest loss is due to the international cocaine trade, as drug trafficking organizations launder money into extractive economies and seek to control territories along their supply chain. While research documents land change from narcotrafficking in transit nodes, or narco-deforestation (e.g. Sesnie et al., 2017), less research exists examining other environmental impacts near cocaine transit nodes in protected areas and biodiversity hotspots, which we term ‘‘narco-degradation.” We conducted i) interviews and participatory mapping exercises with 65 actors working in protected areas in Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica and ii) 11 workshops with 76 protected areas managers to understand and document spatial concentration of different types of narco-degradation. Coded interviews and maps yield 500 narco-degradation activities occurring between 2000 and 2018. Our analysis reveals that narco-trafficking affects multiple ecosystems, not only forests, and that variations in narco-degradation types and intensities reflect differences in the three nodes’ transportation practices (air, land, maritime), their age and activity levels (emerging nodes, hotspots, and declining nodes), and their physical geography. In all three protected areas, narcotrafficking accelerates the conversion of natural resources into commodities (such as land, lumber, minerals, and fauna), their extraction, and entry into legal and illegal markets. We conclude by arguing that narco-degradation negatively and disproportionately impacts the livelihoods and governance structures of Indigenous and peasant communities living in and around Central America’s protected areas. These insights contribute an integrated socio-ecological analysis of the role of narco-capital and cocaine trafficking’s contribution to illicit global environmental change.
In March 2020, the United States government began a series of measures designed to dramatically r... more In March 2020, the United States government began a series of measures designed to dramatically restrict immigration as part of its response to the global health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This included Title 42, which deported asylum seekers immediately and prevented them from applying for asylum. These measures worsened an already precarious situation at the US–Mexico border for an estimated 60,000 asylum seekers who were prevented, by the Trump administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ (aka MPP) policy enacted in January 2019, from remaining in the United States while they awaited their asylum hearings. In-depth interviews, participant observation, and social media analysis with humanitarian and legal advocates for asylum seekers living in a camp at the border in Matamoros, Mexico reveal that COVID-19’s impacts are not limited to public health concerns. Rather, COVID-19’s impacts center on how the Trump administration weaponized the virus to indefinitely suspend the asylum system. We argue that the Matamoros refugee camp provides a strategic vantage point to understand the repercussions of state policies of exclusion on im/mobility and survival strategies for asylum seekers. Specifically, we use the analytical lenses of the politics of im/mobility, geographies of exclusion, and asylum seeker resilience to identify how COVID-19 has shaped the im/mobility and security of the camp and its residents in unexpected ways. At the same time, our research illustrates that camp residents exercise im/mobility as a form of political visibility to contest and ameliorate their precarity as they find themselves in conditions not of their choosing
Antípoda Revista de Antropología y Arqueología, 2020
Despite the centrality in the study of the peasantry in Latin America,
for various disciplines, t... more Despite the centrality in the study of the peasantry in Latin America, for various disciplines, this category is still bound to static images of a group defined according to the State and capital. In this article, we explain the need to study the situated reality — historically, geographically and politically — of the individuals and groups that fit into this category of the peasantry. The issue concerning peasants is a pressing one in view of the current economic, political and socio-environmental crisis affecting large sectors of the Latin American population. This crisis is due, among other dynamics, to the advance of extractivism, the exacerbation of inequality, environmental deterioration, the dispossession of marginalized communities, and criminalization of the social movement. In order to further the critical analysis of this issue, from a historical, spatial, relational, and political perspective, we will delve into recent conceptualizations of the peasant, and into how political subjects and spatialities are mutually constructed.
Illegal activity, such as deforestation for illicit crops for cocaine production, has been inferr... more Illegal activity, such as deforestation for illicit crops for cocaine production, has been inferred as a cause of land change. Nonetheless, illicit activity is often overlooked or difficult to incorporate into causal inference models of land change. Evidence continues to build that narcotrafficking plays an important, yet often unreported, role in forest loss. This study presents a novel strategy to meet the challenge of estimating the causal effect of illicit activity in land change using consolidated news media reports to estimate the relationship between drug trafficking and accelerated forest loss in Central America. Drug trafficking organizations engage in illegal land transactions, money laundering, and territorial control that can manifest as forest conversion to agriculture or pasture land uses. Longitudinal data on 50 sub-national units over a period of 16 years (2001-2016) are used in fixed effects regressions to estimate the role of narcotrafficking in forest loss. Two narcotrafficking activity proxies were developed as explanatory variables of forest loss: i) an "official" proxy from drug seizures data within 14 sub-national units; and, ii) an "unofficial" proxy developed from georeferenced news media accounts of narcotrafficking events. The effect of narcotrafficking was systematically compared to the other well-known causes of forest loss, such as rural population growth and other conventional drivers. Both proxies indicate narcotrafficking is a statistically significant (p<0.01) contributor to forest loss in the region, particularly in Nicaragua (p<0.05, official proxy), Honduras (p<0.05, media proxy), and Guatemala (p<0.05, media proxy). Narcotrafficking variables explain an additional 5% (media proxy) and 9% (official proxy) of variance of forest loss not captured by conventional models. This study showed the ability of news media data to capture the signal of illicit activity in land use changes such as forest loss. The methods employed here could be used to estimate the causal effect of illicit activities in other land and environmental systems. Our results suggest that current drug policy, which concentrates drug trafficking in remote areas of very high cultural and environmental value, has helped to accelerate the loss of Central America's remaining forests.
This research is motivated by the compelling finding that the illicit cocaine trade is responsibl... more This research is motivated by the compelling finding that the illicit cocaine trade is responsible for extensive patterns of deforestation in Central America. This pattern is most pronounced in the region's large protected areas. We wanted to know how cocaine trafficking affects conservation governance in Central America's protected areas, and whether deforestation is a result of impacts on governance. To answer this question, we interviewed conservation stakeholders from key institutions at various levels in three drug-trafficking hotspots: Peten, Guatemala, Northeastern Honduras, and the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. We found that, in order to establish and maintain drug transit operations, drug-trafficking organizations compete with and undermine conservation governance actors and institutions. Drug trafficking impacts conservation governance in three ways: 1) it undermines long standing conservation coalitions; 2) it fuels booms in extractive activities inside protected lands; and 3) it erodes the territorial control that conservation institutions exert, exploiting strict "fortress" conservation governance models. Participatory governance models that provide locals with strong expectations of land tenure and/or institutional support for local decision-making may offer resistance to the impacts on governance institutions that we documented.
Drug trafficking organizations are driving deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. D... more Drug trafficking organizations are driving deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Drug traffickers deforest the protected area in order to illegally ranch cattle, which serves as a mechanism of money laundering, drug smuggling, and territory control. Journalists and ethnographers have analyzed "narco-cattle ranching" activities in the reserve and resulting "narco-deforestation," yet land use change scientists have yet to quantify the contribution of illegal cattle ranching to forest loss. This article uses remote sensing and GIS analysis to distinguish the relative contribution of cattle ranching, farming, and land speculation to reserve deforestation and other forms of land use and land cover change. We also use ethnographic methods to provide evidentiary links between illegal cattle ranching and drug trafficking activities that suggest a large part, but not all, of illegal cattle ranching is narco-capitalized. Our research finds that illegal cattle ranching is responsible for the majority of reserve deforestation, ranging from 59 to 87% of photographs on deforested lands in three sampled areas. We also found illegal cattle ranching activities are the highest in the reserve's western national parks, which should be strictly protected from land use change. Contrary to popular debate, these findings suggest drug traffickers in the context of the US-led War on Drugs are to blame for forest loss, not subsistence farmers illegally living in the reserve.
Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest first used the term “political forest” to denaturalise forests... more Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest first used the term “political forest” to denaturalise forests, refiguring them as political-ecological entities. Across three moments of colonialism, post-colonial independence, and counter-insurgency struggles, they analyse how states in Southeast Asia (re)made forests as a means of territorialising power. More recently, they identify a fourth, contemporary moment characterised by the entry of diverse non-state actors into the making of forests, and a shift in the rationalities and technologies of forest management. We label this fourth moment “green neoliberalism” to identify an era of global environmental governance characterised by market-based solutions to socio-ecological problems, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration priorities, and new moral and scientific claims to forests spanning a variety of sites and scales. The papers in this symposium transport the analytic of the political forest to Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, Madagascar, Singapore, and Thailand to examine how green neoliberalism’s discourses and practices have created new sites and expressions of territorialisation, governance, knowledge production, and subject formation. In doing so, they illuminate the multiplicity of actors (re)making political forests at a moment when forests’ virtues as carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots draw massive flows of capital and justify remaking socio-ecological relations across the globe.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019
Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt
cocaine shipments between South Ame... more Counterdrug interdiction efforts designed to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narcotrafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narcotrafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports, and the authors’ own years of field research in the region. Parameterization and validation used the best available, authoritative data source for illicit cocaine flows. Despite inherently biased, unreliable, and/or incomplete data of a clandestine phenomenon, the model compellingly reproduced the “cat-and-mouse” dynamic between narco-traffickers and interdiction forces others have qualitatively described. The model produced qualitatively accurate and quantitatively realistic spatial and temporal patterns of cocaine trafficking in response to interdiction events. The NarcoLogic model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool for the robust assessment of different drug policy scenarios, and their likely impact on trafficker behavior and the many collateral damages associated with the militarized war on drugs.
In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected... more In Central America, drug traffickers are deforesting the region's remaining forests and protected areas through a process known as narco-ganader ıa, narco-cattle ranching. Drawing on the case study of Laguna del Tigre National Park, this article argues that narco-cattle ranching is a key driver of deforestation in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve. Using ethnographic and remote-sensing methods, we describe narco-cattle ranching's money-laundering practices, its territorial dynamics, and its environmental impacts. We draw on theorisations of "political forests" to explain how drug trafficking organisations transform land use in the reserve, and along the way, remake its ecology, territories and subjects. Our work illustrates that drug policy is inextricably linked to conservation policy in the Americas. More specifically, we argue that community-based resource management improves forest and protected area residents' abilities to resist drug-trafficking related land use change by strengthening local governance and land tenure regimes.
For decades, cocaine trafficking has been a key factor in accelerating the social and ecological ... more For decades, cocaine trafficking has been a key factor in accelerating the social and ecological transformation of rural landscapes across Latin America. In this review article, we explain why and how. Drawing from scholarly, journalistic, and policy sources we identify and theorize the political-economic logics and grounded processes underlying the pervasive nexus of agrarian change, clandestine activities, and illicit capital. We first outline three key elements of the political economic context that create and enable land acquisition by drug traffickers. We then elucidate narcos' multiple motives for acquiring, transforming, and holding rural landed property. Ultimately, we make a case for understanding drug traffickers as a "narco-bourgeoisie" due to their use of cocaine profits to establish and extend private property relations into erstwhile communal and protected lands that were previously unavailable for capital accumulation. We argue that theorizing drug traffickers in this way better captures the relationship between drug control policy and capitalism, and the role of illicit capital in land use change.
This article introduces a special issue that illustrates how violence and dispossession frequentl... more This article introduces a special issue that illustrates how violence and dispossession frequently define everyday practices, livelihoods and representations in tourism. The authors take a relational approach to violence, emphasizing how violence's many forms (physical, symbolic, epistemic, structural, etc.) interweave in practice to produce the built tourism environment, creating unequal power relations between "hosts" and "guests". The special issue's papers provide five historically and geographically specific articulations of tourism, violence and dispossession in Paris, Guatemalan forests, rural Honduras, faux South African shantytowns, and O'ahu, Hawaii. They reveal recurring themes of enclosure and extraction, erasure and commodification, "destructive creation," and (neo)colonialism. This introductory article draws on the special issue's guest editors' ethnographic research in Colombia and Guatemala to elaborate on the key concepts of tourism development, violence, dispossession and spatial fetishism underpinning these themes using a critical and geographical approach. Attending to violence in tourism allows contributors to identify more sustainable forms of tourism development. These include redefining "sustainability" as Indigenous and Native sovereignty, advocating for grassroots and collective forms of tourism, reducing tourism's role in climate change by traveling locally, and contesting the reproduction of colonial itineraries and practices of "Othering".
In 2005, Guatemalan community forest concessionaires achieved a remarkable legislative victory th... more In 2005, Guatemalan community forest concessionaires achieved a remarkable legislative victory that reversed a green land grab in the Maya Biosphere. The fight over this space, the Mirador Basin, provides valuable contributions to analyses of global land grabs, grassroots politics and power relations underpinning environmental governance. First, the fight for the Mirador Basin illustrates how green land grabs create new natures, rather than simply enclosing existing green spaces. Second, it contributes to recent scholarship detailing land-grabbing practices of resistance, acquiescence and incorporation ?from below? by describing how Maya Biosphere community forest concessionaires were able to reverse a green grab. Lastly, I argue this successful reversal largely rests on the articulation and mobilization of a new rights-bearing subject? the forest concessionaire. Struggles for land in the Maya Biosphere illustrate that practices and relations of green governance do not always create disciplined, neo-liberal, green subjects. Rather, community forestry has provided a political platform turning reserve residents into influential actors participating in the re-territorialization of power in contemporary Guatemala.
Across Latin America, non-traditional tourism sectors, like eco-tourism and cultural tourism, hav... more Across Latin America, non-traditional tourism sectors, like eco-tourism and cultural tourism, have grown dramatically in the last 30 years. Neoliberal ideologies, reforms, and infrastructure set the stage for growth, but neoliberalism alone does not explain why the tourism industry is an acute site of struggle over territory, identity and history. From Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve in the heart of Central America's "Mayan World" tourism initiative, this article asks: Why is contemporary tourism such a powerful and pervasive site of contentious socio-spatial politics? It argues that neoliberal reforms have combined with tourism's dual violent practices of spatial colonization and the commodification of place to fuel this growth and politicization. Spatial colonization refers to the commodification of "nature" and practices of land dispossession that define capitalism's expansion into "underdeveloped" and "green" spaces. The industry also commodifies the culture, identity and experience of a place and its people as objects of tourist consumption, which infuses tourism's representational practices with immense, yet subtle power. This article further illustrates how tourism landscapes are carved out of practices of material and intangible dispossession, as well as practices of state territorialization. This violence often engenders diverse forms of resistance by "hosts" living in other people's playgrounds around the world.
Revue en ligne de géographie politique et de géopolitique, 2016
The Guatemalan tourism industry is a contested terrain of post-war politics where state officials... more The Guatemalan tourism industry is a contested terrain of post-war politics where state officials, indigenous Maya, and ex-guerilla brigades compete to define post-war national identity, historical memory, and future possibilities. I use the analytic of territory to show how the state and civil society groups use tourism development to pursue unexpected political ends. First, I track changes in state marketing practices to suggest the Guatemalan government has used tourism to redefine post-war national identity and the place of Maya within the nation. I then turn to the Maya village of San Juan la Laguna to examine how the Maya Tz’utujil reassert their Tz’utujil identity and claims to San Juan as Tz’utujil space through community tourism. Lastly, I explore how ex-guerillas practice solidarity tourism to carve out alternative spaces of life and livelihood through cooperative living. This paper comparatively examines the territorial practices of state tourism, indigenous and ex-guerilla tourism to illustrate the tourism industry’s political stakes and possibilities in Guatemala.
In the village of Ch’umil in northern Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, competing heritage clai... more In the village of Ch’umil in northern Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, competing heritage claims to Maya archaeological sites and artifacts politicize the region’s cultural and ecological landscapes. Using a geographical understanding of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991), I ethnographically unpack Ch’umil residents’ definitions of cultural and ecological heritage that reflect village-level histories of living and laboring in forests and archaeology sites surrounding Ch’umil. Villagers’ definitions of heritage contrast sharply with the spatial claims made by global heritage advocates who campaign to designate the region as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Analyzing the politics of scale underpinning these conservation practices reveals that when global heritage advocates speak on behalf of a universal humanity, they often render local-level heritage claims invisible and illegitimate. This article urges heritage managers and cosmopolitan theorists who debate the ethics of mitigating global and local heritage claims to reconsider this spatial binary altogether.
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Papers by Jennifer Devine
and seek to control territories along their supply chain. While research documents land change from narcotrafficking in transit nodes, or narco-deforestation (e.g. Sesnie et al., 2017), less research exists examining other environmental impacts near cocaine transit nodes in protected areas and biodiversity hotspots, which we term ‘‘narco-degradation.” We conducted i) interviews and participatory mapping exercises with 65 actors working in protected areas in Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica and ii) 11 workshops with 76 protected areas managers to understand and document spatial concentration of different types of narco-degradation. Coded interviews and maps yield 500 narco-degradation activities occurring between 2000 and 2018. Our analysis reveals that narco-trafficking affects multiple ecosystems, not only forests, and that variations in narco-degradation types and intensities reflect differences in the three nodes’ transportation practices (air, land, maritime), their age and activity levels (emerging nodes, hotspots, and declining nodes), and their physical geography. In all three protected areas, narcotrafficking accelerates the conversion of natural resources into commodities (such as land, lumber, minerals, and fauna), their extraction, and entry into legal and illegal markets. We conclude by arguing that narco-degradation negatively and disproportionately impacts the livelihoods and governance structures
of Indigenous and peasant communities living in and around Central America’s protected areas. These insights contribute an integrated socio-ecological analysis of the role of narco-capital and cocaine trafficking’s contribution to illicit global environmental change.
and social media analysis with humanitarian and legal advocates for asylum seekers living in a camp at the border in Matamoros, Mexico reveal that COVID-19’s impacts are not limited to public health concerns. Rather, COVID-19’s impacts center on how the Trump administration weaponized the virus to indefinitely suspend the asylum system. We argue that the Matamoros refugee camp provides a strategic vantage point to understand the repercussions of state policies of exclusion on
im/mobility and survival strategies for asylum seekers. Specifically, we use the analytical lenses of the politics of im/mobility, geographies of exclusion, and asylum seeker resilience to identify how COVID-19 has shaped the im/mobility and security of the camp and its residents in unexpected ways. At the same time, our research illustrates that camp residents exercise im/mobility as a form of political visibility to contest and ameliorate their precarity as they find themselves in conditions not of their choosing
for various disciplines, this category is still bound to static images of a group defined according to the State and capital. In this article, we explain the need to study the situated reality — historically, geographically and politically — of the individuals and groups that fit into this category of the peasantry. The issue concerning peasants is a pressing one in view of the current economic, political and socio-environmental crisis affecting large sectors of the Latin
American population. This crisis is due, among other dynamics, to the advance of extractivism, the exacerbation of inequality, environmental deterioration, the dispossession of marginalized communities, and criminalization of the social movement. In order to further the critical analysis of this issue, from a historical, spatial, relational, and political perspective, we will delve into recent conceptualizations of the peasant, and into how political subjects and spatialities are mutually constructed.
More recently, they identify a fourth, contemporary moment characterised by the entry of diverse non-state actors into the making of forests, and a shift in the rationalities and
technologies of forest management. We label this fourth moment “green neoliberalism” to identify an era of global environmental governance characterised by market-based solutions to socio-ecological problems, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration priorities, and new moral and scientific claims to forests spanning a variety of sites
and scales. The papers in this symposium transport the analytic of the political forest to Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, Madagascar, Singapore, and Thailand to examine how green neoliberalism’s discourses and practices have created new sites and expressions of territorialisation, governance, knowledge production, and subject formation. In doing so, they illuminate the multiplicity of actors (re)making political forests at a moment when forests’ virtues as carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots draw massive flows of capital and justify remaking socio-ecological relations across the globe.
cocaine shipments between South American source zones and
US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led
interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narcotrafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially
explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narcotrafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction
forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness
across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial
proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on
multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports,
and the authors’ own years of field research in the region. Parameterization and validation used the best available, authoritative
data source for illicit cocaine flows. Despite inherently biased, unreliable, and/or incomplete data of a clandestine phenomenon, the
model compellingly reproduced the “cat-and-mouse” dynamic between narco-traffickers and interdiction forces others have qualitatively described. The model produced qualitatively accurate and
quantitatively realistic spatial and temporal patterns of cocaine
trafficking in response to interdiction events. The NarcoLogic
model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool for the robust
assessment of different drug policy scenarios, and their likely impact on trafficker behavior and the many collateral damages associated with the militarized war on drugs.
and seek to control territories along their supply chain. While research documents land change from narcotrafficking in transit nodes, or narco-deforestation (e.g. Sesnie et al., 2017), less research exists examining other environmental impacts near cocaine transit nodes in protected areas and biodiversity hotspots, which we term ‘‘narco-degradation.” We conducted i) interviews and participatory mapping exercises with 65 actors working in protected areas in Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica and ii) 11 workshops with 76 protected areas managers to understand and document spatial concentration of different types of narco-degradation. Coded interviews and maps yield 500 narco-degradation activities occurring between 2000 and 2018. Our analysis reveals that narco-trafficking affects multiple ecosystems, not only forests, and that variations in narco-degradation types and intensities reflect differences in the three nodes’ transportation practices (air, land, maritime), their age and activity levels (emerging nodes, hotspots, and declining nodes), and their physical geography. In all three protected areas, narcotrafficking accelerates the conversion of natural resources into commodities (such as land, lumber, minerals, and fauna), their extraction, and entry into legal and illegal markets. We conclude by arguing that narco-degradation negatively and disproportionately impacts the livelihoods and governance structures
of Indigenous and peasant communities living in and around Central America’s protected areas. These insights contribute an integrated socio-ecological analysis of the role of narco-capital and cocaine trafficking’s contribution to illicit global environmental change.
and social media analysis with humanitarian and legal advocates for asylum seekers living in a camp at the border in Matamoros, Mexico reveal that COVID-19’s impacts are not limited to public health concerns. Rather, COVID-19’s impacts center on how the Trump administration weaponized the virus to indefinitely suspend the asylum system. We argue that the Matamoros refugee camp provides a strategic vantage point to understand the repercussions of state policies of exclusion on
im/mobility and survival strategies for asylum seekers. Specifically, we use the analytical lenses of the politics of im/mobility, geographies of exclusion, and asylum seeker resilience to identify how COVID-19 has shaped the im/mobility and security of the camp and its residents in unexpected ways. At the same time, our research illustrates that camp residents exercise im/mobility as a form of political visibility to contest and ameliorate their precarity as they find themselves in conditions not of their choosing
for various disciplines, this category is still bound to static images of a group defined according to the State and capital. In this article, we explain the need to study the situated reality — historically, geographically and politically — of the individuals and groups that fit into this category of the peasantry. The issue concerning peasants is a pressing one in view of the current economic, political and socio-environmental crisis affecting large sectors of the Latin
American population. This crisis is due, among other dynamics, to the advance of extractivism, the exacerbation of inequality, environmental deterioration, the dispossession of marginalized communities, and criminalization of the social movement. In order to further the critical analysis of this issue, from a historical, spatial, relational, and political perspective, we will delve into recent conceptualizations of the peasant, and into how political subjects and spatialities are mutually constructed.
More recently, they identify a fourth, contemporary moment characterised by the entry of diverse non-state actors into the making of forests, and a shift in the rationalities and
technologies of forest management. We label this fourth moment “green neoliberalism” to identify an era of global environmental governance characterised by market-based solutions to socio-ecological problems, biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration priorities, and new moral and scientific claims to forests spanning a variety of sites
and scales. The papers in this symposium transport the analytic of the political forest to Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, Madagascar, Singapore, and Thailand to examine how green neoliberalism’s discourses and practices have created new sites and expressions of territorialisation, governance, knowledge production, and subject formation. In doing so, they illuminate the multiplicity of actors (re)making political forests at a moment when forests’ virtues as carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots draw massive flows of capital and justify remaking socio-ecological relations across the globe.
cocaine shipments between South American source zones and
US markets remain a core US “supply side” drug policy and national security strategy. However, despite a long history of US-led
interdiction efforts in the Western Hemisphere, cocaine movements to the United States through Central America, or “narcotrafficking,” continue to rise. Here, we developed a spatially
explicit agent-based model (ABM), called “NarcoLogic,” of narcotrafficker operational decision making in response to interdiction
forces to investigate the root causes of interdiction ineffectiveness
across space and time. The central premise tested was that spatial
proliferation and resiliency of narco-trafficking are not a consequence of ineffective interdiction, but rather part and natural consequence of interdiction itself. Model development relied on
multiple theoretical perspectives, empirical studies, media reports,
and the authors’ own years of field research in the region. Parameterization and validation used the best available, authoritative
data source for illicit cocaine flows. Despite inherently biased, unreliable, and/or incomplete data of a clandestine phenomenon, the
model compellingly reproduced the “cat-and-mouse” dynamic between narco-traffickers and interdiction forces others have qualitatively described. The model produced qualitatively accurate and
quantitatively realistic spatial and temporal patterns of cocaine
trafficking in response to interdiction events. The NarcoLogic
model offers a much-needed, evidence-based tool for the robust
assessment of different drug policy scenarios, and their likely impact on trafficker behavior and the many collateral damages associated with the militarized war on drugs.