The Mesoamerican Popular Movement provides an analysis of the historical resistances carried out by the peoples of the region against imperialism and the exploitation of their territories.
The Mesoamerican region is located in the territory currently occupied by Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. The current population in our region is estimated at approximately 185 million people, whose ancestral origin we find in our original peoples, some such as: Olmec, Zapotec, Mayan, Teotihuacan, Mixtec, Aztec, Toltec, Chorotega, Cacaopera, Sutiaba, Nahuatl, Miskitu, Mayangna, Rama, Afrodescendants, Cabécares, Térrabas, Borucas, Huetares, Malekus, Ngäbe, Buglé, Guna, Emberá, Wounaan, Bri Bri, Naso Tjërdi, Bokota, Nahuapipil, Ch’orti, Lenca, Nahuas, Pech, Tawahka, Tolupán, Maya-Chortí, Garífuna, Xinka, Ladino.
Historically, our region has been a territory of permanent contention. We represent more than 12% of the planet’s biodiversity, which has to do with our geographic location, the processes of resistance, the insurgencies that have emerged from several of its territories, and the processes of struggle of indigenous peoples and peasants. In addition, it is important to understand that the region itself is complex in nature, and that the current conditions of profound inequality are based on production models of plunder and dispossession of the territories and their populations.
A clear example is found in the historical records. Since the 19th century, productive activity in the region has been organized around agro-export activity. Here we find key antecedents of the presence of transnational corporate capital, sustained by the overexploitation of land and the exploitation of labor in the region. This activity revolved mainly around bananas, coffee and sugar.
Extractive capitalism as an instrument of oppression
It is fundamental to mention that capital finds an economic-political alliance with the bourgeois class in the region. This class of landowners not only concentrates in its power the land, as a result of labor exploitation, but also the different forms of repression and criminalization of the indigenous and peasant sectors. An example of this can be found in El Salvador, where agrarian restructuring, which was mainly based on the expansion of coffee, implied a modification of the model based on communal land management, which disappeared to benefit the elites and power groups. Based on the agrarian reforms, the land passed from communal property to private property, based on the “need to invest.” This fact was key in the process of insurrection and popular struggle that led to the repression and criminalization of the Salvadoran people.
Another case can be found in banana monoculture. Honduras was the main producer and exporter in the region. One of the consequences is also found in the struggles that peasants and indigenous peoples had to wage to defend their right to life and land. The landowner capital not only finances the activities related to production, but also the armed units of repression against the civilian population.
Transnational corporations have been operating in our region for more than two centuries, following the logic of oppression and accumulation of the assets of our peoples. But this oppression is not limited only to the forms of production and trade, as it has to do with the expansion of imperialism and the creation of social conflicts in the territories. These are cases such as the wars that took place in the 1980s in countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, where the United States played a decisive role, through military advice, as well as in the financing to sustain these wars, which were forged as a strategy of domination of the people, to stop the processes of social demands for access to land, to a dignified life. They were also a strategy to stop the “spread of communism.”
In Nicaragua, it is estimated that more than 150,000 people lost their lives as a result of this war. In the case of El Salvador, it is estimated that, between 1979 and 1992, more than 75,000 people died as a result of the conflict. In the case of Guatemala, more than 200,000 people died and nearly 45,000 people disappeared. It is important to highlight the cruelty of U.S. foreign policy. The magnitude of the actions that the Guatemalan military forces, supported by the United States, executed against the indigenous peoples of Guatemala constitutes genocide.
The region is a zone historically criminalized by local and foreign capitalist forces, supported by repressive apparatuses that have always counted on imperialist advice and financing. In the 1990s, structural adjustment measures were imposed in these disputed territories, giving way to privatization models and the most tangible expressions of neoliberal policies.
One of the faces of neoliberalism
At the end of the 1980s, the so-called Washington Consensus was released, a set of economic policy reforms that Latin American and Caribbean countries should follow to achieve “development.” To this end, ten strategies were set out to be implemented: fiscal discipline, reordering of public spending priorities, tax reform, financial liberalization of interest rates, a competitive exchange rate regime, trade liberalization (the prelude to free trade agreements), liberalization of foreign direct investment, privatization of public enterprises, market deregulation and property rights.
This context marked an era of great challenges for the region. In the 1990s, the foundations were laid for the signing of the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA), which was signed by all Central American countries between 2003 and 2005. This FTA covered five major areas of implementation: institutional and administrative matters, trade in goods, trade in services and investment, government procurement of goods and services, and other issues.
Some of the consequences that this trade agreement brought to the region are: the deepening of the already existing socioeconomic gaps; fiscal reforms in favor of “investors” to the detriment of the rights of the peoples; legislative changes on intellectual property; reforms to labor rights (labor precariousness); repression of the struggles for social rights; exploitation of territories; increase of monopolies; and the fragilization and bankruptcy of the sectors of small national producers.
It was also at the end of the 1990s when another threat, known as Plan Puebla Panama (PPP), became known. In formal terms, it was presented as a proposal of the Mexican government (representing the interests of the United States government) to promote the integration of the Mesoamerican region. It would consist of the construction of an infrastructure network for transportation and communications, with the supposed objective of promoting the economic and social “development” of the region.
However, the PPP was part of the strategies of the imperial framework to ensure the control and exploitation of the strategic natural resources of our region, in addition to the control of the territorial dynamics of the main areas, which, throughout the region, had maintained a popular organizational fabric. Such control would be one of the major objectives hidden in this proposal.
When we put into perspective the common elements, and contrast them with the current reality, stopping to analyze their structural causes, we can understand that the strategies of free trade, expansion and deepening of the extractive model have a logic that does not change direction: to ensure financial gains to the detriment of the lives of the people. Currently, poverty levels exceed 50% of the population. In 2023, more than 1.5 million people had to migrate, 65% of whom were under 35 years of age.
This logic is also based on the criminalization of rights defenders, as a measure that seeks to protect investment and intimidate populations. Data from Global Witness in September 2024 reflect that, in Mexico, more than 70% of the murders in 2023 were of indigenous people. Most of the victims were fighting against mining operations in their territories. In Honduras, 18 people defending their territories were murdered.
The struggles do not stop
Throughout the Mesoamerican region, popular organizations are mobilizing in the different territories, because only through social mobilization is it possible to achieve the necessary transformations to build a present and a dignified future, imbued with justice and equality for the peoples.
In the region there are diverse and broad sectors that have organized from common interests or struggles, whether for the right to land, for food, for the ancestral right to territory, for the right to decent and safe housing, for the right to preserve our languages, for the right to water, to healthy food, for the defense of territories free of mining, of extractive tourism, against hydroelectric dams, for the right to organic forms of production, against all forms of exploitation, against all forms of violence, against imperial capitalism, against patriarchy, against militarization, for the right and autonomy of our bodies, for the right of children, adolescents and youth to live free from any kind of violence, exploitation and exclusion, for the right to cooperativism, for the right to alternative media, for the right to build other forms of politics, for the right to free and inclusive education, for the recovery of memory and the happiness of the peoples.
Surely, there are many other expressions of struggles that are not mentioned in this text. This is part of the diversity, of the accumulation that we have built throughout history. It is also part of the legacy that our grandmothers left us and is part of the memory that runs in our veins, as peoples who fought from the first ray of light until sunset, and even in the midst of darkness we continue to stand.
*The Mesoamerican Popular Movement is a space of diverse popular expressions of the Mesoamerican region that come together to confront the threats of free trade agreements.
Editing and proofreading by Helena Zelic
Original text published by Desinformémonos on January 18, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.