Territorial restructuring and the grounding of agrarian reform: Indigenous communities, gold mining and the World Bank

While indigenous and agrarian movements do discursive battle with the World Bank’s market-led land reform programmes, Bank-driven projects favouring foreign mining interests have unleashed a much more thorough destruction of indigenous lands. In this study of the World Bank ́s role in Guatemala, Eric Holt-Giménez shows how its programme for market-led land reform there complements its strategy for opening the Western Highlands to extractive industries.

Holt-Giménez shows how these polices interconnect through a logic of “territorial restructuring.” He argues that both livelihood struggles and redistributive agrarian reform movements should therefore be grounded within strategies for territorial resistance, with direct actions and proposals advanced for redistributive territorial reform.