Land Violence, Security, and Development in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico
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This five-year project (2021-2026), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), is aimed at building an understanding of the conditions under which violence can function as an enabler of land dispossession. By gathering accounts of the lived experiences of rural communities in countries that have displayed the highest rates of violence against land-rights defenders and environmentalists, the project seeks to expose the ways in which violence operates in tandem with neoliberal policies and legislation towards securing favourable conditions for land acquisition, as well as the extraction and appropriation of natural resources by foreign and local corporations in the Global South. For more on project objectives and methodology, click here.
What is land dispossession, how is it related to economic globalization, and why is it important?
Land dispossession is a process through which people are separated involuntarily from the land they work and live on. It is a global phenomenon that has accelerated during the past 25 years as a direct consequence of the expansion of global capital over resource-rich territories. Global capital manifests itself as the simultaneous penetration of local economies by foreign investment on one hand, and the integration of domestic capital into global production chains on the other. Both have entailed an acceleration in land acquisition by foreign and local corporations operating across different economic sectors such mining, agribusiness, hydroelectricity, and tourism. As a consequence, small-scale farmers, peasant cooperatives as well as indigenous and Afro-descendant communities have become landless. Loss of land not only means loss of home and livelihood for millions of rural residents, but also loss of culture and knowledge rooted in traditional agricultural practices.
Why Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico?
According to the 2025 Global Witness report, 82 percent of the murders of land and environmental defenders in the world takes place in Latin America even though the region represents eight percent of the world’s population. Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico exemplify an acute expression of the pervasive violence and repression against rural movements. In 2021 Mexico ranked as the deadliest for land and environmental defenders based on absolute number of murders. (1) Honduras has had the highest rate of murder of land defenders per capita in the world for thirteen consecutive years between 2012 and 2023 (2) and thus, has consistently been ranked as the deadliest for those involved in struggles for land. (3) Guatemala experienced a fivefold increase in the murder of land-rights activists between 2023 and 2024, making it the most dangerous for land defenders based on the rate of murder per capita. (4)
A Few Highlights of Key Findings
Who is carrying out the violence?
Pro-capitalist violence, or the violence that enables land acquisition by large-scale capital, is carried out by a variety of armed actors, both state and non-state.
Why are movements targeted?
The findings from this project point to the paramount importance of peasant movements as a force at the forefront of contemporary struggles for social and environmental justice. Peasant movements offer an alternative to managing land use and agricultural production, in a way that is characterized by equitable access and distribution of harvest, income, and benefits, among those who work and reside on the land as well as food sovereignty. This model of land use and agricultural practices is contrary to the requirements of mining, agribusiness, and other extractive large-scale privately owned industries. Given that in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico on average 3-4% of landowners own approximately 70% of all arable land, the mobilization of peasants as an agent of change is perceived as a considerable threat to be neutralized if the status quo is to be maintained. This is where the instrumentalization of violence comes in.
----------------------------------------(1) Global Witness 2022(2) Global Witness 2025(3) Global Witness 2024(4) https://dialogue.earth/en/justice/guatemala-becomes-the-deadliest-country-for-environmental-defenders/
How is the violence justified and organized?
Violence as a mechanism that facilitates corporate land acquisition intersects with other legal and discursive mechanisms, as part of a counterinsurgency approach to security. The political landscape in present day Honduras, Mexico and Guatemala is characterized by a continuity in the use of counterinsurgency strategies including a blend of tactics such as surveillance, infiltration, cooptation, torture, selective assassinations, and generalized terror, with legal frameworks focused on anti-terrorism and the weaponization of states of exception that have led to the criminalization of land struggles (and other subaltern social movements). Hence, frequently, the violence against land activists is justified and normalized by portraying the latter as criminals or terrorists. At other times, violent incidents are catalogued as a product of organized crime, thus totally depoliticized and disconnected from the powerful economic actors who benefit from it.
Excerpts from Testimonials
On the Peasantry as the ‘Enemy of Development’
“They see us [the peasants] as something to be gotten rid of. Our lives have no value. We are an obstacle for the caciques, the corporations, the government. You can clearly see this in how we are left to barely survive. If we want to use our land to be self-sufficient, to have control over our lives, to produce in a collective manner and distribute the wealth equitably so that we can all have dignified lives, we are considered an enemy. But if we agree to be miserable, each of us carrying our own burdens, then the government would give us some handouts in the form of assistance programs” (FNLS, Mexico, 2023).
“They began campaigns against the peasants saying that peasant farms are unproductive, that we want to spend all our lives lying in a hammock, that we don’t have the business mind. They would bring big machinery and show us videos, telling us that peasants needed these expensive machines to prosper but did not have and never would have the capacity to acquire them” (Plataforma Agraria, Honduras, 2018).
On the inaccessibility of the Justice System
“In our country, it is nearly impossible to find a lawyer who is willing to take on a case of land dispute between peasants and those large landowners like Facusse. In 1997 we put the first case against Rene Morales. But the lawyers always got bribed and abandoned the case. Already by 2006 we had the seventh lawyer. He was also bribed. The last one who did not sell himself to the landowners and won the case on behalf of the campesinos was killed in 2012” (Plataforma Agraria, Honduras, 2018).
On Violent Evictions
“One day, it was in 2015, at 4am there was a military operation of 30 members of the armed forces, 20 of the National Police, 20 of the Batallion Marcal and 9 armed civilians. They were asking us where the drugs were, they shot my son three times … they made us bring the children to interrogate them” (MILPA, Honduras, 2018).
“Approximately 350 members of the police and military arrive, in addition to private security guards. The guards also wear police uniform, but we know they are the private security because their pants and shoes are civilian. They come aggressive, their intention is to scare us, unwilling to dialogue, they say ‘Get out, it’s an order’ and if one says no, if we demand that they respect our rights, they begin to throw teargas, burn our tents, they drag us out…” (Plataforma Agraria, Honduras, 2018).
On the Brutality of Violence
“Today we buried a child. We are being hunted, as if we were animals.” (Plataforma Agraria, Honduras, 2017)
On the Continuity of Counterinsurgency
“Between 2006 and 2018 …there was a concerted effort to decapitate the popular movement. We have documented that more than half of all the social activists executed were leaders of their organizations … Those who were not killed … would be accused of organized crime, drug-trafficking, terrorism, or subversion and sent to maximum security prison where their human rights were violated” (Comite Cerezo Mexico, 2025).
“I would say that the tactics that they used in those years [the Civil War] continue today. One hundred percent they continue, there is no change, no difference. … Why I say that? Because personally, as a woman defender, I live it everyday. A while ago when we were on the streets protesting, they declared a state of siege. The helicopters were spraying us with teargas and the police and military evicted us violently. These have been the same tactics always by the state and by the corporation (El Estor, Guatemala, 2024).
The corporate media … advances one narrative. In the past they used to call us subversives or guerrilla. Today, … it is no longer guerrilla but terrorists. They don’t just call you a terrorist, but an invader. … They call us invaders in our own territories. It is the same narrative from the past (Independent journalist, Guatemala, 2024).
On the Links between Politicians, the Military, and Paramilitary Groups
“The ones who do the most land-appropriation in this region are members of the Chiapas state congress, governors, senators, municipal officials. If a landlord with political connections, wants to increase his sugar cane production, he has back up from the federal and state government and can do it violently. He can request the Mexican army. If he wants to, he can send [the paramilitaries] to kill (OCEZ, Mexico).
Project Outputs
Books
Hristov, J., Sprague, J. and Tauss, A. (2022). (Eds). Paramilitary Groups and the State under Globalization: Political Violence, Elites, and Security. London: Routledge.
Book Manuscript in Progress
Land, Violence, and Capital: Peasant Struggles Against Dispossession in Honduras. [Under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing]
Journal Articles
Hristov, J. (2026). Land, Blood, and Resistance: State Violence against the National Front of Struggle for Socialism (FNLS) in Mexico. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 1 (48) [in press].
Hristov, J. and Arias, J.C. (2023). Beyond the Politics of Love: The Challenges of Paramilitary Violence and the Land Question for Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro. Studies in Political Economy, 104(1), 55-68.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07078552.2023.2186022
Hristov, J. and Spring, K. (2021). Violencia paramilitar en sectores económicos clave en Honduras: el brazo violento del «desarrollo». Estudios Criticos del Desarrollo 11(21): 199-245. https://estudiosdeldesarrollo.mx/estudioscriticosdeldesarrollo/numero-21/
Articles Under Review
Hristov, J. and Tatham, R. Where Capital Meets Counterinsurgency: The Criminalization of Land and Environmental Struggles in Honduras and Guatemala. Globalizations
Journal Articles in Progress
Abreu, K. C. and Hristov, J. Pro-Capitalist Violence and Criminalization in the Experiences of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), Brazil. [manuscript in preparation for the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies].
Hristov, J. Clandestine Cemeteries, Massacres and Terror on the Oil Palm Plantations of Honduras: Land Conflicts and Unholy Alliances. [manuscript in preparation for Third World Quarterly].
Book Chapters
Hristov, J. (2026). “‘We Are Being Hunted’: Counterinsurgency as Necropolitics in Honduras and Mexico” in Chulio, N., Peate, A. & Gomez, C.T. (Eds.). Necropolitics and Mass Violence: Power, Death, and Resistance in Global Perspective. Leeds: Emerald Publishing [forthcoming December 2026].
Hristov, J. and Bushra, L. (2022). Theorizing Non-State Armed Actors in the Era of Economic Globalization: Beyond the Criminal and the Terrorist. In Hristov, J., Sprague, J., and Tauss, A. (Eds.). Paramilitary Groups and the State under Globalization: Political Violence, Elites, and Security. London: Routledge.
Hristov, J. and Spring, K. (2022). Paramilitarism in Progress: the War against Social Movements from Below in Honduras. In Hristov, J., Sprague, J., and Tauss, A. (Eds.). Paramilitary Groups and the State under Globalization: Political Violence, Elites, and Security. London: Routledge.
Golinger, E., Hristov, J. and Tauss, A. (2022). Transnational Connections: Right-wing Violence in Venezuela as a Strategy to Restore Political Hegemony. In Hristov, J., Sprague, J., and Tauss, A. (Eds.). Paramilitary Groups and the State under Globalization: Political Violence, Elites, and Security. London: Routledge.
Book Chapters under Contract
Hristov, J. Land Dispossession, Violence, and Peasant Movements under Global Capitalism: Lessons from Mexico and Honduras. In Gutiérrez Núñez, N. L. (Ed.). Environmental Change and Human Experience: Land. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [under contract with delivery date January 2027].
Solidarity through Visual Sociology and Cross-disciplinary Collaboration
In line with the commitment to participatory action-oriented research that supports rural populations in asserting their right to a clean environment and land as a source of livelihood, in 2025 Dr. Jasmin Hristov invited artist Mateo Gutierrez to join the Land Violence Project as part of an effort to diversify knowledge mobilization strategies and project outputs in order to reach a wider audience. The goal of this unique collaborative relationship between an artist and a sociologist is to communicate through art experiences of political violence endured by members of peasant movements in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala. The first movement to participate in this process is the Frente Nacional de Lucha por el Socialismo (National Front of Struggle for Socialism), Mexico. The series "YCIFKU" is in-progress and is viewable here on the artist's website.
"YCIFKU" will be exhibited in New York City in the Fall of 2026, as part of group final exhibition of artists in residence at the Textile Arts Center, opening reception September 10, 2026 6-8pm with an artist talk to follow. In addition, the series is currently under review for consideration for the February 2027 ZONAMACO International Art Fair in Mexico City.
"YCIFKU is a monument to collective grief. Using archival images of disappeared and murdered Indigenous FNLS members, provided through my colleague Jasmin and approved for use by the FNLS, I digitally transformed their silent portraits into agonizing screams before translating them into painstaking hand-embroidery on ubiquitous Latin American plastic tarps. By weaving in discarded lottery tickets, candy wrappers, and other New York City street trash, the lost appear to rise from the capitalist waste of the Global North to scream directly at the viewer. The series is an intentional invocation of horror and shame, forcing audiences to finally confront their complicity in a brutalization the world has long ignored. "
- Mateo Gutierrez, 2026
Conference Presentations
Hristov, J. 2026 (June 9-12.) Palm Oil and Land Conflict: A Case Study of the Lower Aguan Valley in Honduras. Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Studies in International Development (CASID). York University.
Hristov, J. and Tatham, R. 2025 (May 15-17). Criminalization as a Form of Political Persecution: Experiences of Peasants and Environmental Defenders from Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS). York University.
Hristov, J. 2025 (March 27). Violent Land Dispossession under Globalization: Lessons from the Experiences of Honduras’ Peasant Movement. Global South Group Virtual Seminar. Sociology of Development Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA).
Hristov, J. 2024 (June 17-21). Rural Struggles against Dispossession: A Comparative Analysis of Rural Movements from Honduras and Mexico. Canadian Sociological Association (CSA). Annual Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities. Montreal.
Hristov, J. and Abreu, K.C. 2024 (June 17-21). Understanding Struggles for Land by the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil: An Anti-capitalist Alternative Targeted by Pro-Capitalist Violence. Canadian Sociological Association (CSA). Annual Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities. Montreal.
Hristov, J. and Tatham, R. 2024 (June 12-15). Clandestine Cemeteries, Terror, and Murder: Experiences of Struggle and Resistance by the Peasant Movement of the Lower Aguan Valley in Honduras. Annual Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Bogota, Colombia.
Hristov, J. 2023 (May 31). The Bloody Origins of Oil Palm Plantations: The Role of Laws and Violence in the Experiences of the Agrarian Platform Peasant Movement in Honduras. Canadian Sociological Association (CSA). Annual Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Toronto.
Hristov, J. 2023 (May 30). Peasants or Environmentalists? How Progressive Discourses from the North ‘Disappeared’ the Peasantry in the South and the Consequences of This for Peasant Movements Facing Escalating Violence. Canadian Sociological Association (CSA). Annual Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Toronto.
Hristov, J. and Tatham, R. 2023 (Mar 19). Criminalization of land and environmental defenders in Honduras and Guatemala: Legal, Violent, and Ideological Dimensions. Latin American Studies Association Annual Congress, Vancouver, Canada.
Hristov, J. 2023 (Feb 14). Pro-Capitalist Non-State Violent Actors and Women: Experiences of Violence and Resistance from Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. Montreal: International Studies Association Annual Conference.
Hristov, J. and Tatham, R. 2022 (Aug 23-26). Elite Laws, Criminalization, and Murder: the Modus Operandi of Large-Scale Mining in Honduras and Guatemala. Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS). University of Toronto.
Hristov, J. 2022 (May 29-June 2). Land-right Activists and Environmental Defenders in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico: Between Criminalization and Violence. Canadian Sociological Association (CSA). Annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Virtual.
Hristov, J. and Jimenez, P. 2022 (May 5-10). Guapinol Resiste: Lethal Discourses, Toxic Environments, and Pro-Capitalist Violence against Land and Environmental Defenders in Honduras. Annual Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Virtual
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