Land Struggles, State Absence and Territorial Justice. Agribusiness Expansion vs. Peasant Re-emergency in Mendoza, West Argentina

FACUNDO MARTÍN

Lima

Conferencia; LASA 2017; 2017

Latinoamerican Studies Asociation

As many other countries in Latin America, Argentina experimented an expansion of capital investment in agriculture during the 2000s. This led to a process of transnationalization of natural resources and agro-industrial chains control. This process involved a pressure on territories inhabited by peasant groups. At the same time, and partly as a consequence of this pressure a process of political organization of peasants and landless rural workers emerged, seeking to maintain and / or reclaim their ancestral territory. This contentious process resulted in an unprecedented public unrest where the state had an erratic, disoriented and absent role.This paper seeks to explore current conflicts over natural resources with special attention to political structures, their spatial dynamics and constitutive materiality. In this regard we reflect on the strategies and forms of struggle for access to natural resources (land and water) by the peasantry and agribusiness in a specific space-temporality. From the empirical study of the conflictive trajectory over territory between 2000 and 2015 in the northern province of Mendoza (West Argentina) we show a real dance, or a process of territorialization, de-territorialization and re-territorialization, between these two groups in relation to the territory and its resources. The ultimate goal of this exercise is to strengthen the critical dialogue within recent empirical literature which -many times- simplifies the advance of agribusiness as well as to the spatial practices of resistance.