Recent massive protests in Potosí, a traditional bastion of support for Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) government, have confronted President Evo Morales with perhaps the most significant challenge of his second term in office. Unlike past regional revolts led by conservative opposition forces in Santa Cruz, Potosí represents a new type of regional economic conflict led by coalitions of popular organizations demanding to be part of Bolivia’s “process of change.” These protests are taking place in the context of a new federalism that is raising expectations as well as demands for political accountability.

Indigenous peoples across Latin America have taken a leading position in defending national sovereignty, democratic rights, and the environment. A renewed cycle of capitalist accumulation in the region centered on mining, hydrocarbon extraction, and agro-industrial monocultures has sparked the new round of indigenous resistance. Drawing on organizational and political legacies of previous decades, indigenous groups in the 1980s and 1990s grew and gained strength from an international arena in which governments were encouraged to recognize and promote cultural and minority rights. In this issue of the NACLA Report, we explore the contributions and creative possibilities of indigenous movements at a moment when indigenous politics has moved beyond this request for state recognition and inclusion.

The “rural city” of Nuevo Juan de Grijalva is part of a government project which claims that it will reduce poverty in the Mexican state of Chiapas by relocating impoverished rural communities into centralized cities built by the state government. However following an orthodox free market economic model promoted by the Mexican state under the Plan Puebla Panama, the Sustainable Rural Cities Project imposes a monoculture, agro-export model that undercuts the subsistence farming practiced by most of its residents. As farmers can no longer cultivate their land, unemployment has risen, and the costs of basic services have quadrupled since its 2008 inception, there has been a significant and building local resistance to the project.