Biography
María del Rocío Juárez Nogueira is a historical anthropologist with master´s degree in latin american studies from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in the Postgraduate Program in Latin American Studies where she is currently a doctoral student. Since then, she has worked on socio-environmental issues from a historical and structural perspective that accounts for the multidimensional relations of exploitation, subordination and dominance between various actors involved in territorial projects and disposition of commons. She is conducting a doctoral research on the expansion and dominance strategies of agro-industrial capitals interested in the cultivation of oil palm and cocoa in the Peruvian Amazon.
Abstract
Expansion of oil palm and cocoa cultivation in the Peruvian Amazon. Productive subordination and territorialization of the dominance
The proposal will address the phenomenon of land grabbing as a historical process that involves not only the displacement and concentration of millions of hectares, but of intricated mechanisms of land control, with multiple mediations, which require a multidimensional and multiscale analysis that integrates social relations of subordination, exploitation, and dominance. In this sense, the strategies for the expansion and dominance of agro- industrial capital result in a multifaceted compendium that enables the operation of accumulation interests by opening financ ial innovations at various scales such as the creation of offshores that prevent us from following the trail of the main players in speculation about the territories of the Global South, as well as the naturalization of credit and debt as survival strategies in an increasingly unequal world. These mechanisms are in addition to the invasion, titling, and trafficking of land, as well as the association with small producers showing how they feed on institutional failures that in practice hierarchical business interests; as well as narratives that reproduce the naturalization of dispossession. In this sense, the gear between legal and illegal activities is vital for the processes of devaluation of the conditions and livelihoods that come with the logic of accumulation and reproduction of capital. In this way the proposal will be developed through the operations of Grupo Romero in the cultivation of oil palm and cocoa.
Affiliation: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México