Paper short abstract:

The establishment of biodiversity corridors in the Yucatan in 2000 was a state strategy to conduct conservation in a broad not "developed" areas. After twenty years, this policy fed the reappropriation of landscape for current disputes over territory to confront extractivism frontiers.

Paper long abstract:

Since the late 1990's, state conservation policies began to be framed for all Mexican landscapes. This policy affected rural communities in many ways, but in the Yucatan peninsula this policy was instrumented by a territorial framework known as biodiversity corridors. Biodiversity corridors as epistemological hypothesis were oriented to attend natural protected areas and their nearby areas known as "Influence zones" where subsidies were disperse for more than 20 years. This paper examines the many facets of the territorial policies instrumented in the Yucatan which for many years were held as an example of state instrumented neoliberal conservation, but recently as being appropriated as policies an as interests are held as means of social identities in the regions. Conservation became the locus of contested action against tourism development and agribusiness, the main extractivist industries operating in the area.