Extractive Policing in Peru: Racialized Displacement and the Territorial Dynamics of Modernity

• In Event: Political and institutional reforms in Post-Authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Chile and other Latin American countries

Abstract

Violence against environmental defenders (people organizing to contest the unsustainable exploitation of land, water, and nature) is reportedly on the rise across the world, and with particular intensity in Latin America. Emergent explanations for these circumstances vary between their focus on proximate, contextual causes, and on structural conditions, although these tend to be treated separately. This paper bridge these frameworks to understand these dynamics in depth, and to develop the means to confront these forms of violence. Therefore, it illustrates and theorizes the discursive and material links between: (1) historical, structural, and institutionalized forms of oppression, (2) modernization ideologies and the development industry, and (3) contemporary violence, state and corporate, against environmental defenders. Using comparative and ethnographic evidence from Peru, this research sheds light on how policing in extractive conflicts is discursively argued, for example via corporate media, and how its material effects consist of the violent displacement of people—especially low-income and rural populations, women, people of color, and indigenous people—from their territories.

Author

• Michael Wilson Becerril, Colgate University