Women’s Struggles Against Extractivism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Since Cynthia Enloe asked, 'Where are the women?' in 1989, studies about the place of women in International Relations have increased. However, most of the analyses since then have focused on the participation of women in international organisations, events and institutional spaces, making invisible other practices and places occupied by black or indigenous women from the South. This article aims to highlight the role of women at the international level, analysing their performance in disputes over the meanings of development in Latin America and the Caribbean, based on struggles against extractivism. In addition to denouncing the impacts of this development model, these struggles seek to construct alternatives that, although they could be essentially local, have been multiplied and articulated throughout the Latin American and the Caribbean territory, as part of a broader resistance to the dominant extractivism in the region. These struggles will be mapped using a database of 259 conflicts around mining activities, developed by the Research Group on International Relations and Global South (GRISUL).

Not victims, but fighters: A global overview on women's leadership in anti-mining struggles

“…Although there has not been a global systematization such as the one we propose here for mining conflicts, there has been some research on women using the EJ Atlas: The Latin-American Network of Women Defending Social and Environmental Rights, CENSAT and ACKnowl-EJ led a joint effort to map 22 cases of Latin American women resisting extractive activities. 6 Echart & Villareal (Echart & Villarreal, 2019) described women's activism in some projects in Latin America through a cartographic project based on the EJ Atlas. Tran et al (2020) presented 35 cases of murdered Women Environmental Defenders, raising the issue of violence against female leaders involved in socio-environmental conflicts.…”

The violence of disavowing Indigenous governance: exposing the colonial politics of "development" and FPIC in the Caribbean

“…These incursions typically coincide with refusals by states and corporations to fulfil their duty to consult and seek consent through culturally safe processes of community engagement (Anaya & Puig, 2017). The deleterious ecological and social upshots of such development schemes, which are often minimized as "externalities" (Acosta, 2013), include but are not limited to: landlessness (Kapoor & Jordan, 2019); forced displacement (Berman-Arévalo & Ojeda, 2020); abject poverty (Raftopoulos, 2017); the decimation of biodiversity and ecosystems Ødegaard & Rivera Andía, 2019); illhealth due to contamination (Cielo & Coba, 2018); increases in gender-based violence and sexual exploitation (Muñoz and Villarreal, 2019); the destruction and desecration of heritage sites (Apaydin, 2020); loss of cultural identity and native languages (McCarty & Coronel-Molina, 2016); targeted smear campaigns; and assassinations (Méndez, 2018). In the face of a sobering reality that the region remains one of the deadliest in the world for environmental defenders (Menton & Le Billon, 2021), Indigenous and Afrodescendant autonomous movements and grassroots activists across Latin America and the Caribbean continue to demonstrate their political agency by organizing collective resistance; protecting land, water, and ecosystems; and defending their homes, communities, relations, and ways of being.…”

More than just headlines: A global statistical analysis of murdered women environmental defenders

“…While literature is bringing more attention to violence against environmental defenders [5][6][7] , extractive violence also has gendered aspects 8,9. Corporations and states typically concentrate power among men during project negotiations. Such imbalance reinforces gender hegemonies rendering WEDs vulnerable to institutional misogyny, limiting their autonomy and normalizing their oppression [10][11][12][13][14] . Political organizing threatens dominant political and gender structures, which leads to violence against WEDs.…”