Abstract

CANO CASTELLANOS, Ingreet Juliet. Border, neoliberalization and marginalization in the southeast of the Lacandon Forest. Trace (Méx. DF) [online]. 2021, n.80, pp.21-48.  Epub Oct 11, 2021. ISSN 2007-2392.  https://doi.org/10.22134/trace.80.2021.785.

Marqués de Comillas, in the south-east of the Lacandona Forest, is a border region configured by the superposition of different economic and political processes, with social and environmental consequences that persist to this day. The article examines the gaps and misalignments between the extractive, agrarian, petroleum, ecological and national borders that have characterized the region from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Through this historical review and on the basis of ethnographic fieldwork, the current confluence of conservation actions and oil palm plantations in the region is analyzed. In addition to proposing to understand them as two different forms of neoliberalization of biophysical environments, we show that conservation and plantations are deployed as economic-political processes that ignore each other. In this context, environmental degradation and social marginalization, far from stopping, recur.

Keywords : oil palm; conservation; neoliberalization; extractivism; border.