Jan. 2021
Issue Editors: Steve Ellner
This issue examines how contemporary capital accumulation in Latin America is driven by legal and illegal actors. That violence both derives from and kindles direct, structural, and cultural violence. Those forms of violence in turn spark various forms of resistance. Articles deal with a wide range of topics, including the dispossession of ranchers and Mapuches in Argentina caused by natural gas and oil extraction; the expansion of criminal organizations dedicated to extortion rackets and other criminal activities in Medellín; popular uprisings against criminal organizations dedicated to kidnappings, extortions, and illegal logging in the states of Guerrero and Michoacán; the overlap between legal and illegal energy markets in northeastern Mexico and their functioning under violent hybrid governance schemes; the existence of a form of “mafia capitalism” in the tri-border area of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil; the differences between disappearances during the Cold War era and the neoliberal era in Mexico; the creation of the Fuerza Civil, a semi-private, highly militarized police force operating in the state of Nuevo León; the disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college and the social movement it sparked; the links between violence, capitalism, and the US opioids crisis; the creation of the Las Abejas de Acteal indigenous social movement in Chiapas in response to paramilitary violence; and violence in northeastern Guatemala linked to US banana companies, large landowners, and regional elites.
