Resistencia para que? Territory, autonomy and neoliberal entanglements in the ‘empty spaces’ of Central America

This paper explores black and indigenous land rights struggles in Central America, focusing especially on the contradictions produced and deepened by strategies of neoliberal governance. Paradoxically, among the most daunting obstacles is not repression or denial of rights, but, rather, partial recognition and the bureaucratic-political entanglements that follow. Another major challenge is the declining viability of agrarian development in the globalized Central American political economy. The second part of the paper reflects critically on recent attempts to understand these problems, through the practice of politically engaged anthropological scholarship. Activist research, I argue, draws the anthropologist into some of the same contradictions and predicaments that the actors themselves confront. While this makes for difficulties at various levels, it can also be a privileged source of insight and analytical enrichment.