ABSTRACT

Latin America has a long history of social-environmental movements that defend life and territory, but it is now considered the world’s deadliest region for such actions. This chapter maps the emergence and current dynamics of social-environmentalism in Latin America along three axes to show that contemporary violence cannot be dissociated from the legacies of extractivism that shape the region. First, I trace social-environmentalism as a response to the political economies of extractivism by following trends from colonization through authoritarianism to “post”-neoliberal politics. Next, I chart current efforts to counter-map social-environmental injustice to assess key challenges. Third, I discuss increasing violence against social-environmental movement actors and provide an outline for future research. These axes show that grassroots Latin American territorial movements must be understood as social-environmental, striving for the protection of all life rather than the bifurcation of the “social” from the “environmental” through which extractive logics and colonial capitalism operate.