In 2019 and 2022, Indigenous leaders mobilized rural comunas in general strikes that forced the national government of Ecuador to negotiate the terms of newly introduced fiscal and policy measures. These mobilizations came despite long-term demographic decline in these same rural comunas. Further, the ministries charged with granting this authority to comunas today exercise little oversight. Why, then, has the comuna persisted as the preferred form of local organization amid widespread shifts to postagrarian ways of life? We have approached this problem through field research in over a dozen rural comunas, a review of comuna registrations, interviews with comuna leadership, and intergenerational dialogues among comuna members. In practical terms, we find comuna leadership consolidating an agenda focused on infrastructure development in the place of activism for land or the pursuit of agricultural investments. At the same time, it is through rituals of registration and management that local authorities not only find legitimacy but also secure a measure of “cultural autonomy” insofar as comuna members associate the disciplined fulfillment of procedures with the historical expansion of social rights. As the younger generation pursues nonagrarian careers, older comuna members underscore the mutuality of comuna life and lay out a moral purpose and a pathway that in effect centers state procedure as essential for indigenous autonomy.

Este artículo teoriza las relaciones entre la ciudadanía y el Estado ecuatoriano durante el primer año y medio de la pandemia COVID-19. Basado en una metodología cualitativa de entrevistas, las perspectivas de los participantes revelan relaciones contradictorias con el gobierno características de los estados de seguridad neoliberales, pero también de patrones (pos)coloniales persistentes de exclusión racista y clasista: por un lado, un sentido de abandono del Estado, particularmente en salud pública y educación; y por otro lado, la fuerza represiva del Estado en su uso de medidas militares y policiales y de estados de excepción. Proponemos el término estado disperso para referirnos a estas tendencias opuestas de simultánea ausencia y presencia estatal. Argumentamos que las respuestas ciudadanas a la ausencia estatal incluyen cierta aceptación del retorno de las funciones educativas y sanitarias a comunidades, hogares e individuos, provocando de todas maneras nuevas formas de adaptación y creatividad cultural. En cuanto a la presencia represiva del Estado, los participantes expresaron apoyo considerable hacia medidas estatales autoritarias, frecuentemente justificadas por discursos esencialistas sobre el carácter de la ciudadanía nacional.

Almost a century ago, long before biodiversity expressed a scientific value for nature, Latin American countries began establishing national parks. Today, they represent over 6 percent of Latin America’s landmass. By considering national park creation across a broad regional span and six crucial decades, this article explains a mode of state formation focused on caring for nature instead of just exploiting it. It examines how national parks expanded in the region by identifying three consequent trajectories: the use of these conservation units for frontier development in Argentina and as part of a broader project seeking social justice in Mexico; the formation of more haphazard park initiatives in various countries, taking Brazil and Chile as main examples; and the development of ecologically coherent park systems through the cases of Peru and Colombia. The article also addresses the role of science (especially forestry) and international cooperation in shaping national parks. In this manner, it uncovers the paths that faded from view after the idea that parks intend to protect biodiversity took hold and illustrates a rarely acknowledged aspect of state expansion.

The article aims to analyse how the business power of actors in the Argentine automotive industry influenced the foreign trade policies relevant to the sector between 2002 and 2015. The research methods employed combine documentary sources, interviews with key informants and descriptive statistics. The overall findings show how automakers achieved considerable power in the first stage of the period, obtaining clear benefits in terms of foreign trade policy. However, macroeconomic and political changes in Argentina after 2008 had a negative impact on their business power, leading to their enjoying a reduced number of trade policy concessions.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a large favela of Belo Horizonte, this study argues that there are three logics at play when it comes to regulating violence in poor Brazilian urban areas: that of crime, that of the state, and that of religion. These three logics act as normative regimes which, connected by the shared notion of ‘respect’, form symbolical relationships among themselves alternating between dissonance and coordination. This everyday interaction produces a normative triangle that determines which lives are more and which are less valuable and, therefore, the likeliest target of violence.

So-called development projects in rural Mexico are heavily contested. Changes in institutional design have had little effect in mediating the exclusivity of the political decision-making processes defining such projects. Why, and how, has the Mexican state been able to maintain a developmentalist agenda, despite growing pressures to incorporate participatory development institutions and consult Indigenous peoples about development projects? This article introduces the geographic concept of scale and the concept of the state’s heterogeneous selectivities into debates on participation to study the politics of development projects. It analyzes the potential and existing obstacles to political participation for Indigenous networks and activists in the corresponding planning processes across institutional scales, examining protest against wind energy development in the state of Oaxaca and the project of “rural cities” in the state of Chiapas. Rather than two separate cases for comparison, both examples represent different planning processes involving the same heterogeneous state and the same promise of progress.

This article examines how neoliberal multicultural governance shapes the political imaginaries and practices of rural indigenous Guatemalans in the town of San Pedro Necta. Decades of counter-insurgency warfare have displaced radical politics into sanctioned forms of ethnic empowerment, memory and development, but most indigenous sampedranos have maintained radical investments. Persistent political violence, stalled reforms and clientelist favouritism undermined multicultural inclusion, development and optimism regarding the 1996 peace accords, and weakened community autonomy. The resulting mix of pessimism, unmet needs and divisionism has discouraged progressive politics and normalised political disengagement and, increasingly, self-interested affiliations with multiple conservative parties, including corrupt authoritarian populists implicated in genocide.

During the mid- to late 1930s, rural activism surged in the coffee-growing region of southern Chiapas and north-western Guatemala. This article examines the causes and impacts of sustained campesino protests at the grassroots level on the Mexican side of the border. The porous border between the two nations hindered the development of centralised power networks that prevailed in other parts of Chiapas. Campesinos and reformist federal government officials such as teachers and agrarian engineers built alliances that challenged the power of the coffee growers. This article explores the process of negotiation that occurred among campesinos, federal bureaucrats, regional authorities and elite coffee planters in order both to implement and to challenge agrarian reform.