ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how the devastation of Mexico's rich natural resources is facilitated by ongoing ties between transnational corporations and government institutions that deny critical environmental protections while marginalizing Indigenous communities and other at-risk populations. The central concepts of ecocide, ethnic rights and extractivism provide a guide for understanding how the intensive exploitation of natural resources for profit does violence to the environment, and to ethnic groups who have long been subordinated in Mexican society. Environmental justice movements are an important form of community action to redress past damage, reclaim rights and territory, protect the future of the planet and assert Indigenous people's rights to exist in peace. The chapter explores recent environmental justice struggles in four regions of Mexico: (1) an Indigenous group based in west-central Mexico attempting to reclaim and protect sacred desert lands known as Wirikuta, (2) a rural and community-based insurrection that returned self-rule and autonomous forest management to the highland town of Cherán, (3) a labor strike by agricultural workers in the Valley of San Quintín export zone near the U.S. California border, (4) infrastructure projects in Southern Mexico that have coincided with environmental activist land defenders being harassed, kidnapped and assassinated.
