¿Post conservación de territorios indígenas y campesinos en América Latina?

Abstract

I argue that the conservation industry and its corresponding establishment and administration of Natural Protected Areas, despite multiple attempts at flexibility and renovation in recent decades, has not been able and will have difficulty in truly reconciling with the worldviews and livelihoods of a large majority of Latin American indigenous peoples and peasant communities. In response to the colonial policies of the conservation industry, growing and collective mobilizations by the peoples and communities themselves, in synergy with civil organizations and academic activism, have begun to articulate processes of reterritorialization, discursive formation, and counter-governmentality I translate these as 'post-conservation' territoriality in scholarly terms. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic experience with peoples and communities immersed in conservation dynamics, academic scrutiny, and secondary analysis of cases in Latin America, I first identify four central pillars in the post-conservation of indigenous and peasant territories: (i) biocultural legacies, (ii) relational ontologies, (iii) legal defenses, and (iv) quests for relative autonomy. I then conceptually elaborate and empirically illustrate these constitutive pillars, based on cases from Mexico and Guatemala. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on how mobilized indigenous peoples and peasant communities of Latin America are a challenge from the Global South to quantitative attempts to expand the system of Natural Protected Areas to a third of the planet's land surfaces and oceans by the colonialist conservation industry.