From the Agrarian Question to the Territorial Question: Green Grabbing and the Corridors of Extractivist Dispossession in Latin America

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the contemporary forms of territorial dispossession that stem from the energy transition, especially those related to free trade corridors and green grabbing in the context of Latin America. To do this, we describe the reconfigurations of contemporary capitalism for territorializing capital in the geopolitical context of Latin America. At the same time, we argue how the territories of Latin America became strategically relevant for the expanded reproduction of capital in contemporary times. We also shed light on the centrality of free trade agreements and the corridors of extractivist dispossession as a turning point in the expansion—relating to the spectrum of hegemonic and imperialist domination of capital—of legal state frameworks for regulating and justifying full access to the neo-extractivist exploitation of Global South territories. Finally, we show that the “energy transition” supports green grabbing—that is, a new model not just of land grabbing, but rather of comprehensive territorial grabbing, since it means the expropriation of subterranean, maritime, wind, solar, and land territory.

1. Introduction

The historical development of capitalism at a global scale has had a profound effect on the nature of social and production relations in different regions of the world. From primitive accumulation of capital [1] to its expanded reproduction [2], we arrive at the end of the 20th century with a reconfiguration of the pattern of accumulation through dispossession, marked by an intensification of the violent expropriation of territories. One element of this process is how the dispute for territorial conceptions has intensified: on the one hand, transnational and financial capital defends a conception of development linked to territorial exploitation for extracting commodities; on the other is a conception of territory for life and good living, as conceived by the different rural peoples, be they indigenous, peasants, traditional or riverside populations, Afro-descendants, fishing communities, or nomads, among others.

Today, research linked to the field of agrarian studies shows—from the perspective of dialectical and historical materialism—that class struggle is exacerbated in rural areas [3], as these regions are strategically interested in this new pattern of accumulation of capital. The evolution of a large-scale corporate agricultural development model [4], linked to a neo-extractivist economic policy based on producing merchandise, reveals capital’s interest in expanding, especially in the territories of the Global South—that is, in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

In the 21st century, unchecked exploitation of territories led to the climate emergency and the energy crisis, causing governments and business sectors to change their rhetoric in favor of a development model based on generating “clean energies” or “renewable energies”. Thus, “renewable energy” this century has become the backbone of the concept of development under the aegis of capital. This has worsened the fight over territories for exploiting water, wind, minerals, solar energy, and biodiversity, aggravating the conflicts in rural areas and the process of forced deterritorialization in different countries in these regions. In this context, we observe that, under the discourse of the energy transition, there is a reconfiguration of the agrarian question to the territorial question, in which the terrestrial and subterranean territories, and marine and aerial territories become of interest to capital. This leads to green grabbing, a contemporary form of land grabbing disguised by a rhetoric of green energy and sustainability, the new face of contemporary capitalism.

In this text, we analyze the contemporary forms of territorial dispossession that stem from the energy transition, especially those related to free trade corridors and green grabbing in the context of Latin America. To that end, we describe the reconfigurations of contemporary capitalism for territorializing capital in the geopolitical context of Latin America. At the same time, we argue how the territories of Latin America became strategically relevant for the expanded reproduction of capital in contemporary times.

We also shed light on the centrality of free trade agreements and the corridors of extractivist dispossession as a turning point in the expansion—relating to the spectrum of hegemonic and imperialist domination of capital—of legal state frameworks for regulating and justifying full access to the neo-extractivist exploitation of Global South territories. In this article, we put forward the following thesis: that so-called “green grabbing” is an increasingly common modality of integral appropriation of territory in regions of strategic interest of capital. More specifically, the “energy transition” constitutes a strategic turn in the pattern of capital accumulation in which the logic of the expanded reproduction of capital is passed from a focus on land to a focus on territory—that is, an evolution from the agrarian question to the territorial question. In this sense, we consider it relevant that in the field of contemporary critical agrarian studies, the understanding of what we call integral territorial grabbing enables a greater analytical breadth, since it refers to an appropriation not only of the land itself, but also of associated underground, maritime, wind, and solar territories, i.e., an appropriation of ecosystems.

This integral territorial grabbing responds to the race for hegemony among the current economic, technological, and military leaders of the world, a process that is carried out through what has been called a “full spectrum war” [5]. This is an imperialist action, in a Marxist sense of the word, in which economic powers seek political, economic, and military domination over other territories, to create and develop the market relations necessary for accumulation. In a contemporary approach to imperialism, these mechanisms reproduce a dialectic form of dependence in countries with peripheral economies, where domination is exercised in countries or regions undergoing democratic crisis that have significant wealth in biodiversity, minerals, water, wind, and sun.

On the other hand, the concept of green grabbing rests on a historical problem that accompanies the genesis and development of capitalism, related to ontological conflicts regarding conceptions and uses of territory, through what we have called “ontocide” [6,7]. Green grabbing dismantles the agreements that support the common use of territories, water, and soils under the argument of green protection, energy transition, and climate change. It deepens the extractive logics of the commodification and financialization of nature, from the intensification of the exploitation of natural assets destined for export as an way to address the economic crisis [8].

For the development of our thesis, we have organized this essay in three sections to (1) briefly describe the contemporary face of capitalism and the territorialization of capital, (2) present free trade corridors as a contemporary modality of capitalism by spoliation and neo-extractivist dispossession, and (3) deepen our analysis of green grabbing as a modality of integral territorial grabbing of regions of strategic interest of capital and recolonization of territories.

2. Method of Analysis

Our method of analysis is historical–dialectical materialism. Our theoretical–analytical framework for approaching green grabbing incorporates (a) Marxist and neo-Marxist theory of original accumulation and the expanded reproduction of capital as analyzed by Rosa Luxemburgo. In the light of Luxemburgo, we situate Imperialism as a political form in the process of capital accumulation, especially in the dispute of political–economic and territorial hegemony. (b) Latin American and Caribbean critical social theory for the analysis of the historical character of domination and power in processes of territorial expropriation carried out in Latin American countries, from colonization to the establishment of capitalism. To this end, we take up an analytical approach of the “Sociology of Exploitation” [9] and “Critical Theory of Dependency” [10] for the analysis of contemporary processes of the integration of Latin American countries into world capitalism, in which a pattern of colonial domination and the dependent and subordinate character of peripheral economies is maintained.

In addition, to establish the relationships between imperialism and the current dispute over territories in the race for economic, political, warlike, and technological hegemony, (c) critical agrarian studies are presented for the analysis of the concept of green grabbing and for the central thesis that we put forth in this essay, as are (d) the ontologies and epistemologies of indigenous peoples and of the Latin American peasantry to demarcate the ontological conflict with capital found in the ways of naming the relationships established with nature, conceptualizing them as “territories for life”.

This essay is a product of a process of socially committed research and our ongoing accompaniment of indigenous and peasant organizations, whose territories have been directly impacted by land grabbing and green grabbing. In this sense, we recognize that indigenous and peasant movements in Latin America are a central historical–political subject in denouncing historical territorial expropriation, while theorizing and analyzing, with methodological rigor, the nature of neo-extractivism, strategies of land grabbing and green grabbing, and the socio-environmental impacts caused by them. La Via Campesina International and the Latin American indigenous movements as a whole place at the center of this discussion another ontological approach to land and territory.

With this theoretical approach, and based on our positionality as researchers from the Global South, we have conducted a systematic analysis of documents, publications, news reports, and documentary research on the administrative processes of granting environmental licenses for projects, as well as of specific legislation adopted in Brazil to make these projects viable. Quantitative data were collected and systematized from the Latin America and Caribbean Energy Portal, the Mining Conflict Observatory, and the Global Wind Energy Council, in addition to primary sources, such as memorandums for mineral exploitation, for the installation of wind and photovoltaic power plants, and for green hydrogen.

Taken together, these platforms provide quantitative data from the vast majority of Latin American countries impacted by neo-extractivist capitalism. Therefore, rather than focusing on a specific country, we present the data and qualitative analysis to support green grabbing as a form of comprehensive land grabbing in the Global South.

3. The Contemporary Face of Capitalism: Territorialization of Capital

In its historical process, capitalism’s expansion has always been territorial. In the 20th century, there was a new element: capitalism became a regular phenomenon of geo-economic, political, and cultural dynamics that guarantee the continuous and expanded reproduction of capital. Whereas in other modes of production prior to capitalism the determining element of social functioning was the fulfillment of social needs, in the capitalist system the fundamental reason for reproduction is producing surplus value, a process that combines the exploitation of labor and technology for the commodification of nature.

According to Rosa Luxemburgo’s analysis [2], an unavoidable requirement for the expanded reproduction of capitalism is the homogenization of non-capitalist societies. From the perspective of René Zavaleta Mercado [11], this homogenization is totalizing, insofar as it roots capitalist rationality in societies marked by the prior establishment of a colonial order, but where it was not possible to destroy other forms of non-capitalist organization of social and political life. That said, the reproduction of capital adds a historical–cultural element, which we consider to be its ontological nature and which is not restricted to the reproduction of productive relations. Rather, it is an ontological conception of development, a societal paradigm that entails a certain level of domination over nature and the subjectivation of society to the values underpinning the rationality of capital.

Non-capitalist societies, according to Rosa Luxemburgo [2], are those that existed before the rise of capitalism or in which capitalism has not fully penetrated, in the sense of embedding its rationality in social and productive relations. In the light of Rosa Luxemburgo’s analysis [2], the capitalist production process is formed by a unity of two distinct but closely intertwined elements: social conditions and technical conditions, with the latter linked to the relationship between human beings and nature.

An essential premise of Marxian political economy is the realization that capital, from its inception, has developed in a non-capitalist social environment. Its reproduction, as a regular phenomenon, requires both the process of appropriating productive forces for the purpose of exploitation and the systematic thrust of all the planet’s productive resources [2]. This is why private ownership of land is essential for the formation of capitalism, as it is the legal device that secures a monopoly for exploiting these resources.

When we analyze the colonial economy, we see that territorial expansion had a direct relationship with this genesis, since primitive accumulation was the opening for the circulation of European capital. For this reason, private ownership of land is fundamental to the genesis of capitalism, since it is the legal device that guarantees a monopoly of the exploitation of resources. Marx and Engels [12], as well as Rosa Luxemburgo, accurately analyzed this historical process, starting with the English and French cases in India and Algeria, respectively [2,12]. If we focus on colonial history in a broader sense, this process of territorial appropriation was extremely violent and happened in multiple ways, either through genocide or by the establishment of the slave order itself, a method used to subjugate and dehumanize the civilizations of Africa, America, and the Caribbean [13,14,15].

However, when we entered the expanded reproduction phase of capital, there was a shift in the expansion strategy, because dispossession of land was no longer enough. Non-capitalist societies kept their ancestral forms of family and communal organization, including communal land ownership, which underpinned other life production logics based on ontological frameworks different from capitalist rationality. Even in contexts of slavery there was active community resistance that, when faced with colonial order, activated these ancestral ways, as in the case of quilombos in Brazil or revolutionary processes like the Haitian Revolution.

Given this, perfecting expropriation methods was sine qua non for capital, focusing on the inevitable destruction of communal living, the core of these non-capitalist societies’ social organization. This method was applied by the colonizing countries, especially England and France in India and Algeria [2,12]. In both cases, the main method was to expropriate the land, establishing private ownership of it and then offering it or leasing it to oligarchic social sectors within the same colonized society. The goal was to cause internal splits and divisions to destroy communal forms of organization in the shared territories. Walter Rodney [16] emphasizes how colonialism was a foundational system of underdevelopment in Africa, affecting all social, communal, and political relationships—a process that intensified with the development of capitalism in Europe.

According to Rosa Luxemburgo [2], in the case of the Arabs, for example, communal life was rooted in common land. In her analysis [2], Luxemburgo argues that the French strategy was to annihilate the organization of communal life based on common land in order to destroy the power of families as social communities, weakening their resistance. This way, they could maximize the exploitation of communal lands expropriated from Arab families who had lived in communities for thousands of years. Although it was a successful method in various colonial contexts, it failed to completely annihilate these communal forms of organization. This is why capitalist and non-capitalist societies have existed simultaneously throughout history.

We consider that the ontological foundations of capitalism as a historical condition of existence are rooted in this historical trajectory and marked by the permanent fight against all non-capitalist social and economic structures, with the aim of ensuring capitalism’s territorial reproduction, which allows it to appropriate the productive sources in their totality. In contemporary times, this condition—essential for the existence of capital—has shifted from the appropriation of land to the appropriation of territory and everything above or below it: water, land, air, solar energy, minerals, biodiversity, and human beings themselves—in this case, those who have been historically subordinated to continue fulfilling their role as cheap or enslaved labor.

The ontology of capital and its contemporary territorialization is advancing at an increasing pace, disguised under the discourse of energy transition as an alternative path to the emergency and climate crisis and a conception of sustainable development as an alternative path to economic growth. The problem is that this discourse of promoting sustainable development hides two fundamental contradictions: (a) to sustain the technology of wind power plants and solar panels, for example, more and more exploitation of rare minerals such as lithium is required, in addition to the intensive use of water, causing an increase in socio-environmental impacts, such as water shortages and the destruction of mountains and hills, due to mineral exploitation by large mining corporations, in addition to the surging incidence of cancers and other diseases [17,18], and (b) installing these sustainable energy sources hides green grabbing, the contemporary form of land grabbing in the name of green capitalism that expropriates territories and maretorios. We use the term maretorio used by riverside populations, fishers, and Afro-descendant communities who understand the sea as a territory. Therefore, they call it maretorio (marine territories).

Recent studies have shown how green grabbing is taking place with leasing contracts imposed on family farmers [19]. Artisanal fishers cannot access the sea due to the construction of onshore wind farms, and their lives suffer serious impacts when these wind farms are installed offshore. In the case of northeastern Brazil, the installation of solar parks in the caatinga biome—characteristic of the Brazilian semiarid region—has exacerbated deforestation, increasing the biome’s dryness and the loss of water reserves. This situation is forcing indigenous peoples, family farmers, artisanal fishers, Afro-descendant communities, and other traditional communities to change their way of life due to the profound alterations to their territories.

A key issue to highlight in the process of the historical development of capitalism is the fact that, in the Global South, its reproduction is expressed in a colonial, patriarchal, and racist socio-historical context, in which the nature of capitalist oppression and exploitation combines internal and global colonialism [9] and the colonialities of power, knowledge, and being [20,21], equally involved in the imperialist relations established between central and peripheral economies. In her analysis of imperialism, Rosa Luxemburgo [2] argues that the exercising of it incorporates coercion and force to dominate and submit the economies that are not yet capitalist in the interests of mercantile expansion and the reproduction of the processes of accumulation. For Luxemburgo [2], imperialism is analyzed as a political expression of the process of accumulation of capital based on four processes: (1) taking possession of large reserves of raw materials in the dominated economies, either through direct ownership or by cheapening the price of their goods; (2) destruction of traditional methods of production, in order to create wage laborers who would have to sell their labor and goods; (3) transformation of the dominated economies into market economies; and (4) the separation of industry from commerce and agriculture, which were previously well integrated in non-capitalist economies.

Likewise, Luxemburgo stresses that the use of coercive power, including military action, was the basic mechanism used by imperialist countries to create and develop the market relations necessary for accumulation. Also, militarism functioned as a generator of sources of demand, stimulating the accumulation. In her theory, militarism is of paramount importance as an outlet for large economic conglomerates given the transformations resulting from capitalist development and competition. As a result, some traditional societies and cultures were treated as neo-colonial economic territories, while others were transformed into market economies dependent on advanced economies, although politically independent. In this sense, as capitalism consolidates its imperialist face, exploitation increases in the world periphery and colonialism expands in its commercial, fiscal, productive, financial, monetary, cultural, and political aspects [22].

In 21st-century capitalism, with its neo-extractivist character, these many layers of mediation are clear in global exploitation. In this century, periphery countries are still trapped in global colonialism and in a dependent and subordinate form of integration [10] as regions that supply raw materials and cheap, enslaved labor. They are also susceptible to being sacrificed in the name of development based on territorial dispossession, violent and predatory plundering, and deterritorialization and migratory flows, which lead to an increase in violence, poverty, and social exclusion, and a profound crisis of democracy and hegemony.

In contemporary times, imperialist countries continue to implement strategies for the achievement of economic and technological hegemony through the expansion of the frontiers of domination. In the analysis of the “New Pentagon Map” [23], Ana Esther Ceceña [24] highlights the use of land and sea armies by the US to keep areas that are considered “priority attention of the Pentagon” under their control, which correspond precisely to the richest and most abundant strategic natural assets, such as areas intensive in biodiversity, water, oil, gas, and metals for essential uses, among others.

The territorial dispute is between economic conglomerates linked to transnational and financial capital, internal political forces, and indigenous, peasant, Afro-descendant, riverside, and traditional and fisher communities, among others, who defend their territories. In this historical conflict, the ontology of capital engages in a permanent process of attempts to homogenize societies to consolidate its societal and development paradigm [6,7].

To do so, it uses ontocide as a method of territorial expropriation [6,7], a historical process that begins during colonization—a period of territorial expansion by European colonialist countries to consolidate new routes for producing and transporting goods, including enslaved people (who were themselves counted as goods)—and culminates in the consolidation of capitalism. Ontocide is an engine that shifts social subjectivity. Its goal is to superimpose the ontology of capital on other ontologies inherent to non-capitalist societies. As a method, ontocide requires a multidimensional analysis of this process that does not end with the production of surplus value, since it is closely linked to social subjectivation at the moment when the civilizational paradigm—in this case, the capitalist paradigm—is defined.

This is the foundational act of ontocide: denying that this “discovered” territory is already inhabited, with a millenary history and culture, with the vital existence of a diversity of beings. Naming the conquered lands to give them the character of property and calling their inhabitants “Indians”, savage peoples, aborigines, and primitives started the construction of a social and political subjectivity based on burying and rendering invisible and inferior other pre-existing ontologies and epistemologies—that is, ways of understanding being, existence, and the organization of socio-cultural, spiritual, economic, and political life.

We define ontocide as the systematic extermination of other existences, carried out via multiple forms of violence and devices [7]: the invention of superior and inferior races, and the definition of a “civilized being” and its opposite, the “non-being”, defined as barbaric, primitive, and uncivilized, with the former endowed with culture and the latter susceptible to enduring being civilized. There is even ontocide by decree: this is when the State drafts an official document to declare the non-existence of a people [25]. Another method is what Luciana Nóbrega [26] defines as policies of concealment and invisibilization, applied in contexts of territorial dispute for neo-extractivist development purposes and with the goal of leading to the non-existence of individuals, groups, and collectives, especially native peoples, Afro-descendants, traditional populations, and other rural peoples. As the author says, it is a kind of “assepsia de existências que, no final das contas, comprometerá toda a complexa rede cooperativa e relacional que sustenta o que conhecemos de vida no planeta” (“asepsis of existences that will ultimately compromise the entire complex cooperative and relational network that sustains what we know of life on the planet”) [26].

The ontocide of our colonial past is still in full force today as a method of territorial dispossession and decree of non-existence. In spite of the political pressure exerted by different peoples to be recognized in their territorial existence, the State continues to deny them by repeatedly applying ontocide by decree, a mechanism that serves the interests of capital. Despite political pressure by the different peoples to be recognized in their territorial existence, the State continues to deny them, repeatedly applying “ontocide by decree”, a mechanism that serves the interests of capital, especially corporations or conglomerates of a neo-extractivist nature. These people assert their ontological existence. This step is crucial for the equal recognition of their consultation and consent protocols on the social, legal, and political management of their territories as a community, or even the demand for the recognition of their ancestral territory and existence.

The destruction of the foundations of life and the relationships [27] that territories support for traditional peoples and communities has become the main theme of the new process of territorialization of capital—especially in Latin America—under the guise of the energy transition.

As is typical in the history of capitalism, in order to ensure its territorial expansion, capital promotes a series of strategies that guarantee its reproduction, following a pattern, as analyzed by Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburgo [1,2]. This pattern includes territorial control—especially in a spectrum of hegemonic and imperialist domination [24]—state and legal regulation, and mechanisms to control its expansion in national contexts in areas that will be the sacrificed for the full advancement of capitalist development. Along these lines, the most vehement discourse of the energy transition that we see emerging today is the result of strategies implemented three decades earlier (or even four decades if we consider the precedents necessary to make it a reality), like the creation of free trade agreements and their consequences for the territorialization of capital in the 21st century. For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on the case of Latin America.

4. Free Trade Agreements and the Corridors of Extractivist Dispossession

The turning point in the territorialization of the ontology of capital in Latin America was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed in 1992 between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, which established international rules for investment and trade between the three countries. In practice, however, NAFTA gave a neo-extractivist character to capitalist accumulation and inaugurated a new stage in territorial expropriation. After NAFTA, the geopolitics of capitalism were reconfigured, not only in the context of the Americas, but also on a global scale. It represented a shift in the strategic interest of capital due to a change in the pattern of capitalist accumulation through neo-extractivism. Land continued to play its historical role in the context of the agrarian question. Meanwhile, territory was acquiring strategic value in capitalism by dispossession. Therefore, free trade agreements became the imperialist method to guarantee the total conditions necessary for the expanded reproduction of capital in the Global South.

In the specific case of NAFTA, Mexico was a strategic country for three reasons: (a) it is rich in water, oil, minerals, wind energy, solar energy, and biodiversity, making it an essential bastion for capitalism to exploit commodities; (b) Mexico has a transcontinental connection to Central America, which justifies the investment of the neo-extractivist model while facilitating trade flows; and (c) by participating in a trilateral treaty, conditions were created for imposing a regulatory framework for territories of interest on capital that the Mexican government had to comply with, starting with the settlement of Canadian and U.S. mining companies in Mexican territories.

Prior to NAFTA, in 1991, Mexico promoted the Tuxtla. Tuxtla Gutiérrez is the capital of the state of Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico. The Mechanism for Dialogue and Coordination (Tuxtla Mechanism or Tuxtla Summit) is an initiative for political dialogue between the heads of state of Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Its goal was to promote Mesoamerican and Central American regional integration and cooperation. In 1996, the Joint Declaration of Heads of State and Government of Central America and Mexico was signed to [28]: […] establish a mechanism for dialogue and coordination among the eight countries in the region to periodically and systematically analyze the many regional, hemispheric, and global issues of common interest; to coordinate joint positions before the various multilateral forums; to move towards establishing a free trade zone; and to promote joint economic projects and agree on regional cooperation actions in all areas in support of the sustainable development of the region.

In 2001, under Mexican President Vicente Fox (2000–2006), the Puebla-Panama Plan was created during the Extraordinary Summit on the Tuxtla Dialog and Agreement Mechanism, a new integration strategy for free trade. The goal was to strengthen regional development by carrying out and managing projects focused on natural resource extraction in the Mesoamerican region, as well as by implementing inter-oceanic connection routes between the Pacific, Caribbean, and Atlantic oceans, in order to create export and commercialization routes for extracted products. In addition to the countries participating in the Tuxtla Mechanism, Belize, Panama, and Colombia joined the Puebla-Panama Plan, making it an ambitious regional integration initiative. The objective was to promote a series of mega-projects of road, rail, and port infrastructure; dams; and wind energy complexes, with public and private investment, to become a hub for foreign direct investment and therefore a region of trade flows of interest to North America and Europe, due to its strategic location as an inter-oceanic connection zone between North and South America, the Isthmus region, Europe, and Asia. It is also a region with abundant hydrological and energy resources.

It is important to point out that the creation of NAFTA was an early strategy of the United States to neutralize the political and economic strengthening of the Tuxtla Mechanism, aiming to preserve its historical political–economic and military dominance over the region, at a time when the countries of the Middle East held a hegemonic geopolitical position due to their oil deposits. Sensing the fine line between losing or expanding its imperialist power due to the potential threat posed by the regional integration promoted by Mexico, the United States joined the Puebla-Panama Plan to ensure geopolitical control over the region. This move resulted in a shift in the Tuxtla Mechanism towards alignment with NAFTA’s geopolitical and economic interests.

In 2008, during the Tenth Meeting of the Tuxtla Mechanism, the Puebla-Panama Plan was renamed the Mesoamerica Integration and Development Project, or Mesoamerica Project [29]. There are currently more than 100 projects approved with funds from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), and the Andean Development Corporation (CAF). The consolidation of these trilateral and multilateral regional integration agreements for free trade are, in reality, strategies for exploiting water, forestry, and mineral resources. On the other hand, they lead to a high level of external indebtedness in the periphery countries that make up the Mesoamerica Project, as well as to an increase in social exclusion, violence, and migration in the Central American and Mesoamerican region [30,31,32,33].

The administration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024), prioritized promoting the Transisthmian Corridor, also known as the Interoceanic Corridor, which aims to connect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans through ports and railroads, returning to the original intention of the Puebla-Panama Plan—that is, to become a free trade region with the United States, Canada, Asia, and Europe. Another infrastructure project for tourism is the so-called Tren Maya, a 1554 km railway with a strong environmental impact, since it crosses a wide expanse of biomes.

We identified other models of economic corridors with high investment, such as the case of Brazil, where there are several logistics corridors being created and implemented, such as the Transnordestina Railroad, started in 2006. Planned for a length of 1753 km and connecting 81 municipalities in the states of Ceará, Piauí, and Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, its aim is transporting agricultural, mineral, and fuel production to the ports of Pecém, in Ceará, and Suape, in Pernambuco, two of the largest ports in the country’s northeast. The work was halted for 14 years due to reports of irregularities in the railroad’s construction and exploration contracts. Initially, the work was supposed to cost BRL 4 billion and was expected to resume in 2024. Now the value has quadrupled, estimated at BRL 15.7 billion and with a forecasted completion of 1026 km by 2029 [34].

All this investment in infrastructure points to the horizons of the geography of capital in the territories of the Global South, whose first stone was laid with NAFTA and which is being expanded with BRICS, which positions China and Russia as countries that dispute political–economic hegemony with the United States through economic corridors. It also obeys the same logic of the extended reproduction phase of capital, in the terms analyzed by Marx and Luxemburgo [1,2], but in a more refined way, both through the financialization of capital and the transnational expropriation of territory and, consequently, the financialization of nature.

On the other hand, since the second decade of the 21st century, China has taken the initiative of funding infrastructure projects in the Global South, such as the Belt and Road Initiative. The Belt is a direct reference to the overland routes connecting China to Europe via Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. The Road, on the other hand, refers to the maritime network that connects China with the world’s major ports in Europe and Africa via Asia. Started in 2013, it is one of the main transcontinental connection, integration, and cooperation strategies, and China has now invested USD 40 billion in over 70 countries [35]. In 2018, China invited Latin American and Caribbean countries to join the Belt and Road Initiative, and since then has invested over USD 60 billion in countries in the region to develop energy and transportation infrastructure projects (railways, roads, and ports), hydroelectric and nuclear plants, and mining projects, among others [36]. China currently participates in six economic development corridors: (1) CMREC: China–Mongolia–Russia; (2) NELBEC: Eurasian Land Bridge; (3) CCWAEC: China–Central Asia–East Asia; (4) CPEC: China–Pakistan; (5) BCIMEC: Myanmar (Bangladesh–China–India); and (6) CICPEC: China Peninsula [35]. The construction of the Bioceanic Corridor, under negotiation between China and Brazil, with the aim of creating a maritime connection linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, is a strategic project for South American economic integration into Asian markets, reducing distances and logistics costs.

With the expansion of Chinese capital into Latin America and the Caribbean, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, the Pacific, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, China is consolidating its strategic position by strengthening bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral relations for expanding Chinese companies and their capital in other countries, reinforcing its economic hegemony. This strategic push in global geoeconomics is already believed to have surpassed the Marshall Plan, which is responsible for consolidating the political and economic hegemony of the United States. When we observe the geopolitical landscape of the territorial expansion of capital through free trade corridors, we can see how the strategy of bilateral, trilateral, and multilateral agreements are new mechanisms of territorial expropriation, with a new characteristic in our present historical time: In the 21st century, there is no longer a single imperialist country, like the United States. The imperialist dispute is contested by three countries: the United States, Russia, and China, and the appropriation of territories becomes the purpose of capital accumulation and its reproduction [37].

5. Green Grabbing and the Corridors of Extractivist Dispossession: Territories for Capital

Up to this point, we have tried to argue how capitalism becomes territorialized and the strategies it uses to maintain its expanded reproduction in the territories of the Global South. Historically, in these regions of the world, private land ownership is the basis of original accumulation. In the contemporary global context, the continuous search for land is associated with the growing demand for the so-called “4 Fs”: food, fiber, forest, and fuel [38], which leads to three other phenomena: land grabbing [39], green grabbing [40], and water grabbing [41].

According to White et al. [42], although the question of land grabbing is part of Karl Marx’s analysis in the first volume of Capital, today this has been expanded in terms of “[…] the ways in which ‘grabbing’ creates specific kinds of property dynamics, namely dispossession of land, water, forests and other common property resources; their concentration, privatization and transaction as corporate (owned or leased) property; and in turn the transformation of agrarian labor regimes” [42]. At the same time, the dynamics of contemporary accumulation generate contradictions that provoke changes in the original form of appropriation and accumulation. In the analysis of Mehta, Veldwish, and Franco [41], changes in the pattern of land appropriation respond to the confluence of several crises: the food crisis, the energy and fuel crisis, the climate crisis, and the financial crisis. They also argue that the emergence of new centers of global capital, such as BRICS, condition the search for resources and create complications for financial capital as it seeks places for investment with more stable profitability.

A fundamental aspect to analyze in land appropriation is the commodification and financialization of nature, especially when it comes to the transfer of ownership, forms of control, and rights of use for the appropriation of natural “resources” [43]. The technological revolution at the dawn of the 21st century imposed a new tone and pace in the reconfiguration of accumulation by dispossession. Energy vulnerability defines guiding lines of foreign policies of countries such as the United States, in the sense of guaranteeing territorial control for full access to oil fields and other strategic energy resources that are geographically fixed [5]. This implies various mechanisms of accumulation, extraction, and alienation in the race for territorial control.

With the worsening of the climate and environmental crisis, a governmental and corporate discourse has emerged regarding the need for innovation and transition in development models, in which an “environmentally responsible” posture is taken on. This is triggering a new stage and new modes of land appropriation, such as the creation of more environmentally sustainable mechanisms, such as forest reserves and forest cover commitments for carbon credits [44]; “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation” (REDD+) agreements; and investments to produce so-called clean energy [45], among others. From this emerges the notion of green grabbing [44].

At present, the discourse of energy transition under the concept of clean energy or green energy upholds a development paradigm that intensifies the advance of territorial expropriation with green grabbing, while transforming the territories located in the Global South into sacrifice zones. Researchers from the Global South have coined this modality of (neo)extractivism [46,47] and territorial coloniality [48], characterizing it as an acommodities pact [8], based on a violent offensive towards territories, and a violation of human rights and the rights of nature [46,49], led by large corporations and their chain of interests, in a framework in which the capacity of appropriation and territorial control is operated by a two-headed subject (States and corporations) [50].

In the specific case of green grabbing, we start from some questions that seek to problematize, from the Global South, the discussion on the energy transition: What is the objective of these proposals to “green” the energy matrix, who will benefit from the installation of these projects, who will suffer from their impacts, and what is behind this choice? For what we are interested in analyzing in this article, we argue that there are three aspects to be analyzed in the advancement of green grabbing.

There are three aspects to analyze in the progress of green grabbing: (a) green grabbing is the result of a historical process of ontocide as a method capital dispossession, which attempts to overpower other non-capitalist ontologies, even disguising itself in arguments that blame communities for environmental impacts; (b) it relates to the political–economic and cultural role of free trade agreements, which maintain the dependent, subordinate nature of the relationship with countries in the Global South, whose territories are sacrificed to sustain a development model based on socio-environmental destruction; and (c) it treats the territories of peoples and communities as social voids and the communities as poor or lacking in “development”. There is a discourse by governments and corporations that these ventures associated with the energy transition will generate jobs and income. Even under this argument, the relationships established between peoples and their territories are based on the commons [51]. According Gutiérrez and Ganoa in Ref. [51], the commons should not be understood merely as a thing or a good shared among a few people, but rather as a type of situated social practice that rearranges the relationships between people, and between people and the material wealth they produce by establishing various practices of exchange, interdependence, and interaction with their environment that are understood as something minor, lacking any value of interest for capitalism. Nevertheless, it is precisely these territories that have the ideal conditions for the new extractivisms of the sea, the wind, and the sun. Likewise, free trade corridors materialize this new form of dispossession, characteristic of green grabbing—becoming corridors of extractivist dispossession—which advances as an extractivist paradigm [52].

There is an ontological conflict that is transversal in the territorial dispute under the logic of land grabbing and green grabbing, in which the dimension of community life in the territories and the socio-environmental function of the land and the sea are not respected [7,53,54,55]. From the perspective of the affected peoples, there is an ontological conception of territory directly related to the sustainability of life. To give an example of this ontological conception, we would like to highlight the Final Declaration of La Via Campesina during the Forum “Land, Territory and Dignity”, held in 2006, in Brazil:

The new agrarian reform must recognize the socio-environmental role of land, sea, and natural resources in the context of food sovereignty. We understand that food sovereignty implies policies of redistribution of, access to, and fair and equitable control of natural and productive resources. […] Food sovereignty is based on the human right to food and to self-determination, on indigenous rights to territory, and on the rights of peoples to produce food for their subsistence and for local and national markets. Food sovereignty defends agriculture with peasants, fishing with artisanal fishing families, forests with forest communities, and steppes with nomadic pastoralist families. […] The sophisticated knowledge that indigenous peoples, peasants, and fisherfolk have acquired through centuries of interacting with nature provides solutions to the current ecological and social crisis. That is why we are convinced that indigenous food systems should have a high priority in land reform and that indigenous principles and knowledge should be applied for the benefit of communities [56].

La Via Campesina International (LVC) is a concrete example of this process of defending territory and confronting capital on a transnational and global scale. The LVC constitutes a transnational rural social movement [57,58] that brings together a set of organizations that participate in national, regional, continental, and global political processes, while seeking to deepen, from a theoretical, onto-epistemic, and political perspective, their own conception around territory, territorial issues, and the struggle of the logics belonging to the capital–nature conflict on a planetary scale, which directly affects the socio-cultural and environmental dynamics. In the process of defending their territories, an ontological argument predominates—that is to say, what territory represents to the fabric of life. For La Via Campesina:

[…] Territory is not only a geographical area but much more than that: it expresses a collective relationship of a people with an area where soil, subsoil, water, air, animals and forests, and seeds and diverse plants are included. But also, the territory is part of the identity of the people: we are part of the territory where our ancestors lived, and the territory is part of us. It implies historical memory; the right to decide on the resources contained therein; the existence of organizational forms, mechanisms, and spaces to make decisions; and the possibility of articulating different expressions with decision-making capacity—that is, spaces for a different way of understanding and exercising power [59].

It is precisely this sense of community that articulates the defense of the commons, which constitutes a type of social relationship in itself [60]. This social relationship is anchored in an ontological and epistemic foundation that gives meaning to the relationships established with the territory and conflicts with the ontology of capital, which conceives of nature as a source of commodities and surplus value.

This is the case of indigenous peoples, for example, whose social formation is based on a millennia-old history and is governed by a different societal paradigm of a communal nature, which makes them an obstacle to the full development of capitalism. However, there is an additional factor to this analysis: the fact that territory mediates this relationship, which, in the case of indigenous societies, is conceived from the perspective of the production of life. In this case, the “human beings–nature” unity is compounded by the subjective dimension of what many Latin American indigenous peoples define as “sentipensamiento” (something like “thinking–feeling”), an ontological principle that defines the feeling of belonging to the territory and the epistemic meanings attributed to it and in coexistence with it. Therefore, from sentipensamiento, there is an apprehension of the territory as a place where a social, communal, and life ethos is constructed [61].

Therefore, each attempt or installation of neo-extractivist ventures creates socio-territorial conflicts between the corporations and the peoples who occupy the territories of economic interest. These conflicts are eminently based on antagonistic ways of life, i.e., antagonistic ontologies in terms of the conceptions and uses attributed to the territories [7,62,63,64]. Above all, these are conflicts over the territorial dimension, “sobretudo quando o que está em jogo são povos, grupos e comunidades ameaçados ou afetados por frentes ou projetos de desenvolvimento” (“especially when what is at stake are peoples, groups, and communities threatened or affected by development fronts or projects”) [65]. In contrast to the notion of land, these territories as particular ways of life and in relation to the commons go beyond a mere claim to property rights. When allied with the dimension of identity and autonomy, these “expressões espaciais de um modo de vida” (“spatial expressions of a way of life”) [65] refer to the power to define themselves and what they consider to be their present and future projects.

As we have analyzed previously [26,66], it is at the moment when claims for land tenure regulation or agrarian registration become more acute that this ontological conflict in the conception and forms of land use becomes more evident. In the countries of the Global South, the State as a political entity and governments as public agents assume the role of inducing business and corporate activities through fiscal policies, but also through a set of legislation and environmental licenses that allow access to territories to promote development projects. There is an official discourse that institutes an idea of a “demographic vacuum” (“empty land”) and local economic backwardness—therefore, an area available to a development project [66]. There is a subversion of the rule of law and corporate capture as a phenomenon derived from the use of legal instruments in favor of corporations [67]. Corporate capture is the mechanism used by economic elites to distort the formulation of laws and in function of some economic groups [67,68,69].

The ontological conflict in the conception of territory is what marks the difference between green grabbing and other ways of thinking and relating to the territory of indigenous peoples, peasants, and water and forest peoples, as the diversity of peoples of the Global South call themselves. In this case, territory is articulated to a conception of nature as a socio-environmental being [70], revealing the pluriversal character of our existence among and with other forms of non-human existence. Among the different indigenous peoples, we find concepts of their mother tongues that provide an ontological and epistemic sense of the set of relationships established among them, as communities and in their coexistence with nature.

An example is the Teko Araguyje—sacred way of being—of the Guaranies and Kaiowá indigenous people [71]. An other example is in the Tojolabal Mayan language (spoken in the Mesoamerican region), there is the concept of Sak’an—the earth—which is also used to indicate something that lives, or even a prolonged life [72]. From the Tojolabal perspective, Mother Earth is a living being, since she fulfills the primordial task of generating life and producing food [72]. On the other hand, we have the Tojolabal concept of altzil, understood as the principle of life [73]. In this conceptual pair, we identify an ontological and epistemic rupture with the Western approach to nature, defining it as “living nature and dead nature”. In other words, in the Mayan cosmovision, everything has life; everything lives. Thus, the dimension of life incorporates human beings, but also fauna, flora, waters, mountains, caves, stars, etc. [74]. We can find similar concepts in the linguistic plurality of Latin America, which fulfill similar and interrelated subjective functions.

In this framework, nature is conceived as a subject with rights. Other concepts are activated on this ontological basis, among them Sumaq Kawsai, Sumaq Qamaña [75,76], Lekil kuch’lejal [77], and wët wët fxi’zenxi [78], that is, the different ways of naming the concept living well, or even the Abya Yala [79] and Wallmapu [80], in which the vindication of the recognition of an ancestral territory is observed, while at the same time a radical critique is made of the paradigm that sustains a development logic that, in reality, deepens the logics of territorial plundering and the capital–nature conflict [70]. Another theoretical–political process to highlight is that of the articulation of indigenous women of the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador and their economic–political–cosmological proposal of Kawsak Sacha, or living forest, to stop the advance of the oil frontier in their territories [78].

From the perspective of these peoples, in the territories there is sacredness in the rivers, the mountains, the seas, the sun, the moon, the air; there are sensations, of smell, of taste; there is sonority, of the earth, of the waters, of the winds; there is circularity of life and its times and beings. The diversity of people living on the banks of rivers and seas have developed an amphibious culture [81]—that is, ways of coexisting with water and land. But as the indigenous Krenak people in Brazil also say, the rivers have been mutilated by mining, and capitalism tries to silence existence in the territory [82]. We can extend this denunciation by echoing the resistance processes of the peoples of the sea, such as the Movement of People Affected by Renewable Energies (MAR) and the Articulation of Peoples in Struggle (ARPOLU), in the northeast of Brazil, when they defend the maretório (a play on words, in which territory is combined with the word for the sea) from the construction of offshore wind power plants.

There is a fundamental issue here that demarcates the differences in the conception of territory between green grabbing and the diversity of peoples that cohabit the territories impacted by neo-extractivist ventures, and that has to do with the notions of value in Marxist theory analyzed by Bolívar Echeverría [83]: use value and exchange value. In use value, a relationship of interdependence prevails between human beings and nature, in which everything that is produced is necessary for the reproduction of life. Contrarily, exchange value presupposes a monetary and economic value in the process of the domination of nature, transforming it into a commodity to generate surplus value, i.e., profit. For Echeverría [83], the notions of use value and exchange value reflect antagonistic civilizational processes, since the exchange value of commodities is given at the cost of sacrificing the use value established with nature. Therefore, the social and natural process of reproduction of human life is subject to the monetary logic of capitalist modernity, in which an abstract market value is attributed to everything that can be transformed into merchandise, the basis of capital accumulation. Thus, social forms of use value are considered “unproductive labor”. This analysis is also used in the field of feminist social theory, especially ecofeminism, focusing on the urgency of placing life at the center concerning the sustainability of life, i.e., building social processes aimed at the sustainability of life [62,84,85].

In the energy transition model, there is a direct impact on these forms of organization of life in the territories, causing socio-environmental injustices that are considered mere externalities of the projects, despite a “green” discourse of environmental responsibility with the planet and with the mitigation of the climate crisis. The disregard for the people living in the territories coveted by these projects is an important indication that we are talking much more about a deepening of the extractivist model based on the values of change than necessarily about a green transition in the capitalist way of life.

In the case of mineral exploitation, for example, an argument is made in favor of sustainable mining or green mining, promoted, for example, by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as a resilient alternative, because exploiting certain minerals is considered essential for manufacturing electric vehicles, batteries for solar panels, and motors for wind turbines. Green mining includes certain minerals, among which are so-called rare minerals, also known as rare earths, such as neodymium, lithium, cobalt, tantalum, and graphite, among others.

As we argued at the beginning, there is a contradiction in this discourse, since the exploitation of these minerals has a direct effect on the aggravation of socio-environmental impacts. We could even speak of a new pattern, an economy of dependence on these rare metals, considered essential to the energy transition for maintaining the most strategic sectors of the central economies, such as robotics, artificial intelligence, medical biotechnologies, nanotechnology or nanoelectronics, driverless vehicles, mobile phones, computers, etc. This all acts as a driving force for the imperialist expansion of the United States, China, and Russia, contributing to a capitalist hegemony that intensifies the integration of peripheral economies under conditions of dependency and subordination.

The economic corridors conceal the imperialist war for the domination of these territories that, among other commercial interests, are rich in rare minerals. They therefore shape a rare metals war, as analyzed by Pitrón [86], who argues that the contradiction in this energy and digital transition is the fact that the extraction of rare metals is anything but clean. China has control of both the reserves and the production of the major rare minerals and therefore controls their refinement and consumption [87]. The three countries with the largest reserves of rare metals are China, Russia, and Vietnam, accounting for about 70% of the total. China has more than half, which puts it in a strategic position in the global value chains. Throughout the 21st century, the United States has disputed access, and the priority given to the value chain of rare metals can be seen in the administration of current President Donald Trump, in negotiating the end of the Russia–Ukraine war, based on a U.S. –Ukraine economic agreement for access to rare earth minerals [88].

We posit that, while arguing in favor of energy transition through wind energy and solar panels, mineral extraction diversifies and becomes the epicenter of the contradiction of energy transition, due to its socio-environmental impact and impact on water. From a geopolitical point of view, access to and control of minerals defines, to a certain extent, the risks to national sovereignties and democracies through the dispute of hegemony between countries seeking political–economic and military leadership. So-called “full-spectrum wars”, as analyzed by Ceceña [5,24], are part of the strategies used in the process of land grabbing and biocidal destruction.

The report No Reprieve: For Life and Territory: COVID-19 and Resistance to the Mining Pandemic [89], by the Coalition Against the Mining Pandemic, shows the progress of mining in nine Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, and Peru. Lithium, also known as “white gold”, “green metal”, or “the metal of the future”, is leading the search as a raw material for the energy transition. Countries with lithium will become of great interest to mineral extraction corporations, such as in Brazil and Chile. In the case of Brazil, according to the National Mining Agency, between 2022 and 2023, orders for lithium extraction quadrupled.

According to the Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America [90], there are currently 284 identified conflicts. This is the number of conflicts identified as of December 2024, when this chapter was written, with 301 mining projects involving the following countries: Mexico (58), Peru (46), Chile (49), Argentina (28), Brazil (26), Colombia (19), Bolivia (10), Guatemala (10), Ecuador (09), Nicaragua (07), Panama (07), Honduras (06), El Salvador (03), Dominican Republic (03), Costa Rica (02), Venezuela (02), French Guiana (01), Paraguay (01), Trinidad and Tobago (01), and Uruguay (01). Among them, there are five cross-border conflicts [91]: at the Chile–Peru border in the Lluta Valley and Uchusuma Canal (Tacna Department; General Lagos, Arica and Parinacota region), at the Guatemala–El Salvador border (Asunción Mita and Metapán departments), at the Costa Rica–Nicaragua border, and two conflicts along the Argentina–Chile border (Pascua Lama and San Juan). Furthermore, the Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America identifies 162 water conflicts in the following countries: Chile (38), Mexico (28), Peru (24), Brazil (19), Argentina (18), Colombia (09), Ecuador (05), Honduras (05), Nicaragua (05), Guatemala (04), Bolivia (02), Panama (02), Venezuela (02), Costa Rica (01), El Salvador (01), Paraguay (01), and Uruguay (01).

According to the Global Wind Energy Council, Brazil is among the world’s top five markets for installing wind farms, along with China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. Decree No. 10,946, issued on 25 January 2022 during Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2018–2022), establishes mechanisms for the concession of union-owned inland waters, maritime territory, and the exploitation of natural resources in the exclusive economic zone and on the continental shelf for offshore power generation. The decree is a legal device to ensure legal certainty for domestic and international investors. Also, during the Bolsonaro administration, the Ministry of Mines and Energy launched the Ten-Year Energy Expansion Plan (PDE) 2031, a document that outlines the growth prospects of the Brazilian energy sector for the 2021–2031 decade. There is a specific chapter on green hydrogen. We will address green hydrogen in the next section.

According to the Energy Portal for Latin America and the Caribbean, there is currently a total of 1411 renewable energy parks in operation, in addition to 481 under construction and another 209 announced, distributed by energy source, as shown in Table 1.

The expansion of mineral extraction has led to increased water conflicts resulting from corporate capital’s role in the privatization of water for building large infrastructure, the impacts of extractive and industrial activities, and development models that promote water grabbing [93]. We have also identified a series of infra-constitutional proceedings for altering norms in order to reduce the legal protections in environments and territories, especially in indigenous areas. In many cases, this translates into a subversion of the meanings of environmental regulations. There is a sort of “desregulação isenta do debate público, a ser conduzida por meio de reformas infralegais—portarias, instruções normativas e atos administrativos-, que não dependem de aprovação do Congresso” (“deregulation exempt from public debate, to be conducted through sub-legal reforms—ordinances, normative instructions, and administrative acts—that do not depend on approval by Congress”) [94].

We agree with the argument of Ceceña and Ornelas [50] and of Guamán [67] in calling this process of territorial onslaught a corporate capture for the control of wealth and essential goods, expanding territorial control to everything else, such as water, forests, and the deepest corners of the redoubts of life, with increasingly sophisticated penetration capabilities. The authors give the example of LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology, which makes it possible to identify not only the surface, but also what has been underground for millennia: deposits of potentially profitable goods.

More recently, we have observed that the energy transition discourse prominently places green hydrogen as an alternative to decarbonization and defossilization. Nevertheless, there are questions as to what this entails in terms of potential socio-environmental risks and the enhancement of green grabbing.

6. Green Hydrogen and Recolonization for the European Energy Transition

According to the Paris Agreement, in force since November 2016, global greenhouse gas emissions are expected to reach zero, that is, a balance between emissions and removals, in the second half of the 21st century. This is the case if the different countries of the world want to fulfill their commitment to keeping the global average temperature increase below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and continue their efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels [95].

In the global energy transition agendas, large transnational corporations, national business sectors, and governments have reached agreements to advance in decarbonization and defossilization. To this end, green hydrogen is given a prominent place among the energy transition alternatives. In 2024, the European Commission, through the European Hydrogen Bank, granted almost EUR 720 million to seven green hydrogen projects in Europe [96]. The Green Hydrogen Roadmap is another initiative implemented by some European and Latin American countries, as well as in China, India, and Australia. Meanwhile, Germany plans to build the Inga 3 hydroelectric power plant on the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the goal of producing electricity for green hydrogen to be exported to the European country. Inga 3 is already attracting the interest of major turbine manufacturers, such as Germany’s Voith Hydro and Austria’s Andritz AG, as well as China and the United States [97].

Some countries are positioned to become pioneers in green hydrogen implementation, as is the case of Brazil. Due to the Paris Agreement and in the context of the National Policy on Climate Change, established in Law No. 12,187/2009, Brazil proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 37% below 2005 levels by 2025, with subsequent reductions until climate neutrality is achieved in 2050. In the case of the Brazilian energy matrix, based on data from the Ministry of Mines and Energy, renewable sources account for around 49% of the country’s energy matrix [98], which is quite different from European countries like Germany.

It is precisely this scenario of renewable source abundance that makes Brazil, and especially the country’s northeast, globalized capitalism’s new frontier of exploitation and appropriation. Brazil is interested in feeding the large European consumer market, whose supply of energy sources has been shaken by the war between Russia and Ukraine. The country is emerging as a place where new sacrifices can be demanded through the expansion of wind and solar farms, including offshore. A report titled “Hidrogênio verde promete turbinar parceria Brasil-Alemanha” ref. [99] (“Green hydrogen promises to turbocharge Brazil–Germany partnership”), ref. [99] says:

De acordo com a Agência Internacional de Energia (IEA, na sigla em inglês), o custo de produção por quilo do H2V a partir da eletrólise da água no mercado internacional, com utilização de fontes renováveis, é de entre 3 e 8 dólares. Já no Brasil, se considerado o emprego da energia gerada em usinas eólicas ou solares no processo de eletrólise, o custo estaria entre 2,2 e 5,2 dólares. O baixo custo de produção do H2V no Brasil se justifica, sobretudo, pela abundância de fontes renováveis. (“According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the production cost per kilo of H2V from water electrolysis on the international market, using renewable sources, is between USD 3 and 8. In Brazil, if we consider the use of energy generated by wind or solar power plants in the electrolysis process, the cost would be between USD 2.2 and 5.2. The low production cost of H2V in Brazil is explained, above all, by the abundance of renewable sources.”)

The abundance of sun and wind, especially in northeastern Brazil, is a real curse, as Gudynas [100] points out. The social groups that, through their traditional practices and ontologies, have managed to maintain conserved spaces on the planet, ensuring wide and rich biodiversity, are precisely those that face the fury of capital in its current phase. They are dispossessed, persecuted, and expelled from the territories they helped sustain [101,102,103,104,105].

In the state of Ceará, in northeastern Brazil, where the Pecém Industrial and Port Complex (CIPP) is located, a true green hydrogen pole is planned. There are currently more than 37 memorandums of understanding signed with various multinational companies, such as AES Brasil, a branch of AES Corporation, one of the largest energy companies in the United States. In 2023, state governor Elmano de Freitas, from the Workers’ Party, enthusiastically announced the production of green hydrogen on the coast of Ceará. The H2V Pilot Project, which will be developed at the Pecém Thermoelectric Complex, in São Gonçalo do Amarante, a municipality in the state of Ceará, will receive an investment of around USD 5 billion from Australian multinational Fortescue Metal Group [106].

We should note that, as this is an emerging technology, there was no specific regulation for the environmental licensing of these projects. This is why the State Environmental Council of Ceará, linked to the State Secretariat of the Environment, began discussing a proposed resolution specifically addressing green hydrogen production projects for energy generation within the state. To this end, on 10 February 2022, the Council’s collegiate body approved Resolution 03/2022, which establishes the procedures, criteria, and parameters applicable to the environmental licensing and authorization process, under the jurisdiction of the state environmental agency, for green hydrogen projects. This resolution is the first of its kind in the country, which still lacks a general regulatory framework on the matter.

Instead of having the environmental licensing for green hydrogen production projects follow existing general national regulations on environmental licensing, such as Resolution 237 of the National Environmental Council, Ordinance 60/2015, regarding the role of bodies involved in licensing, the state of Ceará, through its environmental policy bodies, chose to establish specific, ad hoc legislation for individual, concrete cases [107]. This specific, ad hoc behavior of the state with regard to legislation designed to serve CIPP investors was noticed by Aquino when he referred to the tax exemptions granted: “As mudanças freqüentes na regulamentação da lei de incentivos fiscais indicam um comportamento ad hoc, em que as normas parecem mais se seguir a negociações caso a caso de atração” (“The frequent changes in the regulation of the tax incentives law indicate an ad hoc behavior, in which the rules seem to follow more of a case-by-case negotiation”) [107]. In other words, it established an exception within environmental legislation specifically for green hydrogen production.

By February 2022, the state of Ceará had already signed around 14 memorandums of understanding with various multinational companies to establish green hydrogen production projects in the CIPP region. This suggests that, rather than ensuring the constitutionally established right to an ecologically balanced environment or protecting the rights of populations affected by these projects, the main objective of the resolution approved by the state environmental agency is to guarantee legal certainty for investors. First, memorandums of understanding are signed with investors, and then the approval of a resolution is expedited to legally secure these investments, avoiding future questions. Along these lines [108], in a report titled “Aprovada a 1^a Resolução do País que trata do licenciamento ambiental para usinas de hidrogênio verde”, (“The country’s first resolution dealing with environmental licensing for green hydrogen plants was approved”), published on 11 February 2022, in the newspaper Diário do Nordeste, presents the statements of the current representative of Semace, Carlos Alberto Mendes Júnior [108]:

“Além de ser um marco sobre o aspecto de mostrar a intenção do Ceará em se transformar em um ‘hub’ de Hidrogênio Verde, a resolução traz, ainda, uma segurança jurídica para os empreendimentos”. “São mais de 16 memorandos de entendimento assinados pelo governador [Camilo Santana] com as empresas. Hoje, essas companhias terão segurança jurídica de saber qual a tramitação, qual tipo de estudo será solicitado e como será o rito do processo” (“In addition to being a milestone in terms of demonstrating Ceará’s intention to become a green hydrogen hub, the resolution also provides legal certainty for the projects. There are more than 16 memorandums of understanding signed by the governor [Camilo Santana] with the companies. Today, these companies will have legal certainty in knowing what the process will be, what type of study will be requested, and how the process will be carried out”).

The report also lists a number of companies that have already signed memorandums of understanding with the state of Ceará, indicating their interest in exploiting this new green hydrogen market in the CIPP. Among them, it highlights Enegix Energy, White Martins, Qair, Fortescue, Eneva, Diferencial, Hytron, H2helium, Neoenergia, Engie, Transhydrogen Alliance, Linde, Total Eren, and AES Brasil.

Green hydrogen is not a fuel or raw material that is naturally occurring in its pure state, but rather a vector for storing energy produced by the wind and the sun. One factor that is not mentioned in the discussion of these new technologies based on the “energy transition” debate is the heavy use of water. In the case of hydrogen, the molecule is obtained from water electrolysis: for every ton of green hydrogen produced by electrolysis, an average of 9 tons of fresh water are needed. The implementation of green hydrogen in Ceará, Brazil, is of particular concern, considering that more than 90% of the state’s territory is in the semi-arid region, where rainfall is scarce.

Likewise, researchers warn about the risks and disadvantages of green hydrogen: (a) since it is a vector and not a raw material present in nature, the process of its elaboration, implementation, and transportation requires large investments, making it burdensome; (b) it has a high cost of generation and affects 60% of the final value of energy; (c) its production requires a significant amount of water, which compromises access to fresh water and increases conflicts over water and water insecurity; (d) it impacts environmental biodiversity and territorial dynamics; and (e) it deepens colonial relations between the Global North and the Global South [109,110,111]. On the other hand, we believe that green hydrogen is a form of green grabbing of land and water, compromising access to fresh water and affecting the dynamics of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and agricultural and livestock production in the communities located in the vicinity of water-rich areas.

Implementing green hydrogen for export to European countries or other central economies highlights the contemporary forms of recolonization of the territories of the Global South and a kind of energy imperialism typical of the economic exploitation pattern of capitalism, deepening the dependent and subordinate character of periphery countries of these regions to globalized capitalism. In national contexts, while peasant family farmers, indigenous peoples, and traditional communities face water injustice, companies, by signing memorandums of understanding with the State, guarantee that there will be no shortage of “safe business environments”, including land, water, infrastructure, and rules favorable to the territorialization of capital. This is a corporate capture of territory.

Based on what we argue in this essay, the energy transition based on renewable energy constitutes a contemporary form of territorial dispossession—green grabbing—since, in order to implement the transition, territorial appropriation and the financialization of nature are deepened. This is one of the reasons why most indigenous, peasant, and traditional community movements and organizations, among others, describe this kind of energy transition as a false solution to the climate crisis [112]. There is a fundamental contradiction in the energy transition: for it to be realized, territorial expropriation and mineral and water extraction are increasing, deepening socio-territorial conflicts, advancing deterritorialization processes, and deepening the water crisis. Access to land, water, and minerals are the guarantees agreed upon in trilateral and multilateral treaties for the full development of the expanded reproduction of capital, a process sustained by neocolonial logic in which the territories of the Global South continue to be the suppliers of raw materials (commodities) and territories or zones of sacrifice. As Merino [113] and Moctezuma Barragán [114] point out, speculative dynamics are worsening due to growing scarcity from climate change and the contamination of surface water bodies and underground aquifers, exacerbated by mining.

Therefore, we assert that green grabbing constitutes a contemporary form of integral land and territory grabbing. The innovation we propose in this essay consists of articulating green grabbing in terms of contemporary forms of expanded capital reproduction through logics of control and domination inherent to the imperialist and hegemonic dispute, in the terms posed in this article and in the terms laid out first by Rosa Luxemburgo [2] and, more recently, by Ana Esther Ceceña [5,24]. But not only that: there is an element of sociopolitical subjectivation behind green grabbing that sustains the ontology of capital, as it seeks to promote a narrative of environmental responsibility and corporate commitment to the climate emergency, based on the promotion of clean and renewable energy.

This obscures the ontological conflict regarding the conception of territory, constructed over millennia by a diversity of people who resist the attacks and impacts caused by mining, wind and solar power plants, and agribusiness. For these peoples and movements, the places where they live and interweave their subjectivities constitute territories for life, whose relationships with nature are not limited to commercial logic and overexploitation. On the contrary, nature is understood as a socio-environmental being with rights. Green grabbing disarticulates community agreements for the common use of territory by imposing another ontology of a commercial nature, rooted in capitalist rationality, since it neither questions nor seeks to transform the logic of development as such, but rather is a transition of the energy matrix linked to the continued exploitation of nature, leading to the depletion, in this case, of water and the land itself.

In the 21st century, the question of energy has a central role in the agrarian question. Territories become the epicenter of conflicts, hegemonic disputes, and discourses on conceptions of development. In the ontology of capital, the defense of the energy transition is a primordial strategy to guarantee its own reproduction, despite the systemic and socio-environmental crisis that this entails. All these mechanisms of privatization of land, wind, and water for building renewable energy infrastructures are green grabbing, and mask (or not so much) the territorialization of the ontology of capital, based on an intensified commodification of nature in contemporary capitalism. Similarly, we argue that a critical analysis of economic corridors is essential, going beyond the cooperation and economic integration agreements between nations and regions. Economic corridors are part of the transportation infrastructure that connects a set of commodified and financialized natural resources to central economies. In other words, they are the transfer corridors for the plundering of common goods to supply value chains and sustain the economic, military, and technological hegemony of central economies.

Understanding this “green” discourse, which in the name of climate and energy transition imposes new forms of appropriation of territories and ways of life, instituting ontocide as a method, is urgent, as is resisting this scenario if we still want to contain the falling of the sky, as indigenous thinker Davi Kopenawa inspires us to do [115], or postpone the end of the world, as indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak calls us to do [116].

7. Final Thoughts

Free trade corridors mark a new phase in the accumulation pattern of capitalism in the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, a process that places the territories of the Global South at the center of capital’s strategic interest. Despite the pressure exerted by the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP), 21st-century capitalism increases the scale of neo-extractivism with technological investment for perfecting the commodification of nature, supported by rhetoric from governments about a supposed search for development alternatives through renewable energies.

Transnational agrarian social movements, such as La Via Campesina International, have for years denounced that this development model is heading towards an inevitable catastrophe for the planet [112], while condemning as false solutions all measures that, in the end, do not radically break with the biocidal development model. The call for environmental and climate justice is central to La Via Campesina International, specially building real, grassroots solutions to address the social and environmental problems resulting from this development model [112].

The energy transition is a false solution to climate change. There is, in fact, no transition from one energy model to another—that is, the replacement of fossil energy exploitation by more sustainable ones. On the contrary, capital developed renewable energy technology to expand forms of environmental exploitation in favor of economic growth based on expanded and permanent reproduction. Moreover, it accentuates mineral exploitation to gain access to rare minerals, while causing unprecedented land and water grabbing. This leads us to assert that, in reality, we are witnessing green grabbing disguised as a concern for the climate emergency.

Therefore, behind the discourse of “energy transition” via wind farms, solar energy, and green hydrogen, there is a reconfiguration of the territorial question, marked by contradictions in the strategies of an economy clad in green, but which, in order to reproduce itself, requires a biocidal model of exploitation. Its socio-environmental impacts threaten the sustainability of life.

In this essay, we seek to highlight all these contradictions with the aim of broadening our analysis from a critical perspective. We believe that a set of issues motivates us to continue investigating the comprehensive nature of land grabbing based on the ontology of capital, a territorial sociology, and studies of the historical accumulation of capitalism in its productive and subjective dimensions. We also consider it essential to deepen our studies of the water crisis and the socio-environmental impacts resulting from water extraction in the Global South. This is associated with a theoretical and analytical deepening of environmental justice and environmental racism, categories increasingly present in studies related to the neo-extractivist pattern and the climate crisis.

Equally relevant are studies of national contexts, especially those that deepen their analysis of the legal frameworks established by governments to regulate the different uses of land by corporate conglomerates, following the trail of financing processes linked to green grabbing. Similarly, studies on the forms of territorial resistance undertaken by movements and organizations, their scope, and challenges toward the consolidation of climate and environmental justice are relevant.

We conclude this paper by stating that we are not against energy transition. However, for it to truly be a transition, there must be a real break from any energy system based on fossil fuel exploitation and the overuse of water resources and common goods. At the same time, this transition should be conceived based on a popular perspective—that is, designed for implementation on a smaller scale and based on a dialogue with social organizations. It should not be an energy transition to sustain the greed of capital in opposition to the territories.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, L.P.B. and L.N.N.; methodology, L.P.B. and L.N.N.; investigation, L.P.B. and L.N.N.; writing—original draft, L.P.B. and L.N.N.; writing—review and editing, L.P.B. and L.N.N. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Data Availability Statement

The data is contained within the article.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Footnotes

Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

Table

Table 1

Distribution of renewable energy parks in Latin America [92]. Made by the authors.

Renewable Energy Parks	In Operation	Under Construction	Pre-Construction/Permitted	Announced
Onshore wind farm	1.441	90	696	123
Solar farm	626	163	3.041	191
Offshore wind farm	____	___	57	55
Total	2.067	253	3.794	369

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