Overflowing the Channels of the Left

Abstract

In 2012, the “climate hotspot” region of the “Bajo Lempa” in El Salvador was the recipient of a Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) Fund granted by the United States and administered by the leftist FMLN political party to bring “sustainable development” to the region. Local organizations initially pursued funding opportunities through this mega-project though their efforts were unsuccessful, thereby undercutting subsequent campaigns to resist the project for its environmental risks. Remaining pockets of resistance were undermined by gang violence directed at key community leaders, seemingly at the behest of local oligarchs. Thus, an interlocking web of political-economic obstacles blocked communal agency to forge alternative climate futures. By analytically foregrounding the meso-level relationships between community-based environmental movements and leftist-controlled state institutions subordinated to global logics of accumulation, I distill the contradictions inherent to anthropocentric state forms, and the inability of the Latin American left to incorporate environmental concerns into their projects of governance. Ultimately, I argue that despite their inability to halt the MCA, the political and agro-ecological practices of communities in the Bajo Lempa “overflow” channels of the Latin American left and instantiate communal projects of resource governance as horizons of climate change adaptation, and radically democratic forms of governing social life.

Keywords

• Environmental Movements
• World-Systems Analysis
• State-Movement Interactions
• Latin America
• Agro-Ecology and Food Sovereignty