Paper short abstract:

This piece details how Indigenous land defenders are protecting the environment and their ways of being from development aggression, state-sponsored land grabs, and neoextractivism. It is informed by critical theories of race and decolonisation and three decades of combined engaged movement praxis.

Paper long abstract:

The repudiation of Indigenous people’s land rights, governance systems, and worldviews––not to mention contributions to knowledge production and ways of living sustainably amidst the crisis of dangerous climate change and overconsumption––remain some of the world’s most pressing issues of exclusion and injustice to this day. Accordingly, this article offers an anti-colonial analysis of the Maya land struggle in Toledo District, Belize. We contend that state-sponsored violations of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, which continue to occur under a pretence of “development” and “green recovery,” reveal the persistent coloniality and deep-seated racial animus of the Westminster-modelled postcolonial state. Drawing from movement-engaged evidence and revolutionary theories of race, violence, and decolonisation, we explain how the liberal-capitalist state and third-party corporate extractors it authorises are aiding and abetting dispossession, environmental degradation, heritage-site destruction, disavowals of self-determination, and the criminalisation of land defenders. We do so through an overview of (neo)extractivism and a historical-structural summary of how the driving forces of capital accumulation affect Maya communities. The piece ultimately shows how state-sanctioned FPIC violations, premeditated abdications of the duty to consult, and bad faith negotiations with Indigenous people constitute contemporary manifestations of colonial power, racial-capitalist exploitation, and slow violence. Conceptually, the article demonstrates how land-grabbing, processes of negative racialisation, and coloniality are inextricably linked. Geopolitically, we are detailing how historically-repressed communities who were the targets of imperialism are exercising political agency; co-constructing autonomy; and building resurgent, sustainable alternatives in an agrarian Majority World context that is situated in both Central America and the Caribbean.