Este artículo repasa de manera sucinta los debates en los que converge la geografía crítica en las tradiciones latinoamericanas y anglosajonas, así como las principales líneas de discusión en ecología política; geografía feminista; geografía poscolonial y decolonial; y geografía de la movilidad y las migraciones, con el afán de contribuir a delinear una geografía crítica latinoamericana. Además, se indaga en torno a por qué ciertas líneas investigativas han tenido mayor o menor acogida en la región, con énfasis en la importancia de abrir un diálogo transnacional que, con base en investigaciones críticas locales, retroalimente, cuestione, proponga nuevas vías en la producción de conocimiento geográfico desde, en y sobre la región y, en línea con la teoría crítica, se comprometa con las luchas políticas y territoriales en América Latina.
Shingre . . . These are just a few names out of the long list of environmental and land defenders that have been killed across Latin America over the last few years. Unfortunately, this list continues to grow, with new names added to it almost every week.The violence against land and environmental defenders, activists, and communities that oppose extractive activities is a soaring problem. 1 Worldwide, an average of four defenders died every week in the period 2014(Butt et al. 2019. These cases generally remain unresolved, as impunity prevails ( Maestro 2020 ). Global Witness (2020 ) reported that Latin America is the region where most murders are reported: of the 212 murders that occurred globally in 2019, 147 were in Latin America. This figure reflects widespread opposition to the large number of extractive projects in the region ( Le Billon & Lujala 2020 ;Temper et al. 2015 ), but also strong forms of activism and solidarity in Latin America that allow for better monitoring ( Global Witness 2019 ).The blatant murders of Latin American environmental defenders are, however, only a fraction of the violence they experience. Generally, these murders are embedded in multiple practices of "passive" violence against activists and leaders, most of which do not make it to the headlines (see Menton et al., this volume). This violence may consist of daily hostilities by public forces or private security guards, bullying, impediment of free mobilization, and destruction of crops, which may escalate to unruly arrests, militarization of communities, criminalization of dissent, sexual assaults, or threats of violence against family members.Our research focuses on the violence -widely understood -against environmental defenders in Ecuador, particularly its Amazon region. Here, the longstanding oil exploitation and the more recent expansion of large-scale mining have faced fierce resistance ( Sawyer 2004 ;van Teijlingen & Hogenboom 2016 ). Since the 1980s, Amazonian grassroots organizations and Indigenous and peasant communities have denounced the destructive effects of these activities on the environment, their territories, and their livelihoods. Although the violence
como uno de los abordajes principales dentro del debate sobre los extractivismos en Ecuador. Desde nuestra contribución activa a este debate, nuestro objetivo con este artículo es reflexionar sobre los aportes y limitaciones que ha supuesto la ecología política latinoamericana para el análisis del extractivismo, y en particular las posiciones de los sujetos comunitarios e indígenas. Analizaremos el enfoque analítico que se da a escenarios de conflicto, y cómo este tiende a asignar a dichos sujetos un lugar fijo tanto geográfico como de enunciación. Esto pueda representar un limitante, particularmente en casos donde la construcción del espacio, la naturaleza, y las posiciones de los sujetos se atraviesa por historias y prácticas de movilidad. Con base en tres estudios de casos de despojo extractivo-capitalista en la Amazonía Ecuatoriana, mostramos que al establecer un diálogo entre la ecología política y la geografía crítica de las movilidades se puede enriquecer el enfoque analítico sobre el extractivismo y las posiciones de los sujetos.Palabras clave: (in)movilidades, urbanización indígena, geografía crítica.
Over the past two decades, the terms "environmental defenders", "land defenders" and "environmental human rights defenders" have gained currency among NGOs, media and UN agencies. This has coincided with the development of an international infrastructure encompassing prizes, resolutions and resources to support and acknowledge defenders and their causes. However, the uptake of the term "environmental defenders" and related notions has been uneven across geographical areas, languages and those considered defenders. Listening to the voices of this last group themselves, this chapter considers two questions. First, it explores the connotations of the term "environmental defenders" and examines to what extent it corresponds to the ways those labelled in this way see and identify themselves and their work. Second, it looks at the ways in which the term empowers or, by contrast, disempowers, and the various advantages and drawbacks related to its use. We conclude by considering a number of ways in which those supporting or reporting on defenders can mitigate the inadvertent negative effects of the term, to which so far no alternative has emerged that is less contentious or better captures the heterogeneous groups that it designates.
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