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The COLONIZATION OF Latin America never ended, it merely changed forms. Today this conquest continues, with transnational companies driving neo-colonization grounded in the continued exploitation of natural resources. This is nowhere more true than in Central America. The force of neo-colonization is strengthened by free-trade agreements and development plans that guarantee a company's right to investment above the rights of the citizenry. Meanwhile, the indigenous populations face renewed dispossession and eviction to make way for global capital's conquest.
"Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European-or later United States-capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power," Eduardo Galeano wrote in his seminal book, Open Veins of Latin America (Monthly Review Press, 1971). Capital takes "everything: the soil, its fruits, and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources." Forty years later, "The veins are still open," as an anonymous hand wrote on a wall in Guatemala City's historic center following Galeano's death in 2015.
Global capital's demand for primary resources, such as minerals, water, and soil, has driven modern colonization. The neoliberal project has reignited a period of capitalist development that Karl Marx once referred to as "primitive accumulation." Natural resources are exploited and original peoples are transformed into the ranks of the proletariat. This process of proletarianization strips rural autonomous populations of their means of production and forces them to sell their labor power as wage labor. "Each new colonial expansion is accompanied by a relentless battle of capital against social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of the means of production and labor power,''wrote Rosa Luxemburg in her masterwork, The Accumulation of Capital, adding, a page later, that "force is the only solution opened to capital."
The modern colonization has been driven by financial capital, which seeks to find new investments to continue its accumulation. It is this quest that drives the neo-colonization of indigenous territories. According to Raúl Zibechi, a Uruguayan journalist and social movement analyst, this process of neo-colonization is something that is occurring across the globe and manifests differently in different places. "Today we live in a world dominated...