Description
Since 2019, Mexico’s national development plans have claimed that the Mexican government would catalyze a historic ‘transformation’ that prioritizes the well-being of the most vulnerable in Mexican society, including poor and Indigenous populations. Key to this transformation are development projects such as the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT) and Mayan Train which have been resisted by the very people the state claims will benefit from their construction. This paper uses racial capitalism, extractivism, and carcerality to explore to what extent these development projects are mechanisms to consolidate the power of the state and diminish autonomy of particularly Indigenous peoples in southern Mexico. The paper begins by examining to what extent the development projects function through racial capitalism, invoking old colonial logics of Indigenous peoples as ‘docile’ and ‘cheap’ labor. Drawing on grey literature and policy documents, the paper then interrogates the extractivist desires underpinning state narratives that portray the south as an “abundant” and “untouched” frontier of national progress. Finally, it considers how the securitization of these projects—through their classification as “national security” infrastructure—enables the deployment of carceral tactics to suppress resistance. In doing so, the paper argues that Mexico’s current development agenda extends rather than ruptures the racialized and extractive power relations between the ‘colonial’ state and the (still) resistant south.
