Rondas Campesinas and Defense Fronts

Driven by economic growth policies, material and energy extractivism in the Global South offers cheap uprooting of natural resources and labor prices. In the Andes, capital accumulation meets with local resistance of peasants and indigenous peoples. Neoliberal policies of Peru since the 1990s emphasize extractivism as the foundation of all the future governments. In Peru, we have resistance of “Rondas Campesinas” and the Defense Fronts. When peasants and indigenous peoples defend their habitat and way of life, they participate in the preservation of the “buen vivir” (“living well”). The defense of the environment gives them a new sense to their lives, a sense that they draw on a recovered culturally sensitive worldview and material practice known as “buen vivir.”