Interrupting Green Capital on the Frontiers of Wind Power in Southern Mexico

• Author: Scott A. Sellwood,Gabriela Valdivia
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X17719040
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 222, Vol. 45 No. 5, September 2018, 204–221

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X17719040

© 2017 Latin American Perspectives

204

Interrupting Green Capital on the Frontiers of Wind

Power in Southern Mexico

by

Scott A. Sellwood and Gabriela Valdivia

Harnessing the power of wind is commonly understood as a “green”—cleaner and

more sustainable—alternative to conventional extractive practices. An examination of the

unfolding of wind energy projects and their contestation in southern Mexico shows that,

despite the seeming immateriality of wind farming, wind energy requires epistemological

and material enclosures to capture its value. The unreflexive push for these energy fron-

tiers ignores this requirement and, in doing so, sidesteps the processes of dispossession that

follow the widening and deepening of capitalist relations, green or otherwise.

La energía eólica normalmente se considera una opción “verde” o “ecológica”: una

alternativa más limpia y sustentable a las usuales prácticas extractivas. Un análisis de un

proyecto de energía eólica y sus contestaciones en el sur de México muestra que, a pesar

de la aparente inmaterialidad del proceso, esta energía requiere de espacios delimitados,

tanto epistemológicos como materiales, para que se pueda sacar provecho de su valor. El

ímpetu por expandir estas fronteras de manera poco reflexiva ignora dicho requisito, haci-

endo a un lado los procesos de desposesión que surgen a partir del incremento y profun-

dización de las relaciones capitalistas, sean ecológicas o no.

Keywords: Extractivism, Green energy, Southern Mexico, Land enclosures, Indigenous

movements

No longer the sole province of environmentalists, the “quiet revolution” of

renewable energy now draws the enthusiastic engagement of states and inter-

national organizations (Acker and Kammen, 1996). In contrast to the extraction

of conventional resources like oil, gas, or minerals, the harnessing of renew-

able, “green” resources—hydro, wind, solar, geothermal—is branded as more

“benign” and advertised as a “win-win-win” solution for private capital, gov-

ernments, and citizen-consumers alike.1 Latin America is a rapidly expanding

wind energy market in this scenario, prompting analysts to refer to the region

as the “new El Dorado” for European investors. In this paper we examine the

Scott A. Sellwood is a program advisor in extractive industries at Oxfam America and a fellow of

the Duke–University of North Carolina Rotary Peace Center. The views expressed here are his

own and not necessarily those of Oxfam America or Oxfam International. Gabriela Valdivia is an

associate professor of geography at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She examines

resource governance in Latin America, and her latest project focuses on how Afro-Ecuadorian and

Native Amazonians live with the oil complex in Ecuador. Sellwood’s research was made possible

by the financial support of the Rotary Foundation’s Rotary World Peace Fellowship and a seed

research grant from the Department of Geography of the University of North Carolina at Chapel

Hill.

719040LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X17719040Latin American PerspectivesSellwood and Valdivia / Interrupting Green Capital In Southern Mexico

research-article2017

Sellwood and Valdivia / INTERRUPTING GREEN CAPITAL IN SOUTHERN MEXICO 205

case of wind power development in Mexico, Latin America’s fastest-growing

wind market outside of Brazil. The challenges of this energy revolution are

particularly evident in the southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, which

the Mexican state has identified as the nation’s most promising wind energy

landscape. Here Binniza and Ikjoots people who have long contested efforts to

dispossess them of their lands and political autonomies (Campbell etal., 1993;

Rubin, 1994) are interrupting the expansion of wind farming and raising ques-

tions about Mexico’s green energy frontier (see also Howe, 2011; 2014;

Oceransky, 2010; Pasqualetti, 2011). Since 2012, social movements in the Isthmus

have stalled the construction of almost all new wind farms—most significantly

the San Dionisio project, which was slated to be the largest wind farm in Latin

America.

By casting their struggles against wind farm infrastructure as the continua-

tion of historical struggles over land rights and territorial autonomy, Binniza

and Ikjoots people interrupt a dominant epistemic closure of green capital: that

if putting wind to work for mass consumption does not involve destroying/

changing the resource or releasing its toxic wastes into surrounding spaces,

then it must be “clean.”2 Harnessing wind energy for capital accumulation,

however, is not clean. Wind’s seemingly incontrovertible cleanliness stems

from its immaterial form. As air in motion, wind has no body to consume or

waste; it is “a world of traceable differences that nonetheless lack determinate

boundaries and definite shape” (Lewis, 2012: 220). But wind is both immaterial

and material. What allows us to sense it as a body (e.g., with a speed to be cal-

culated and categorized) is its diverse relationships with other material forms,

such as land. Thus, smuggled into the clean logic of immateriality is an actual

enclosure of wind’s relation with land that devalues local ways of life.

Cleanliness, then, obscures the practices and processes that produce wind ter-

ritories as new zones of material appropriation (Moore, 2015).

Framing wind power as a land question, Binniza and Ikjoots people make

legible the burdens of green energy that have been so well documented in the

enclosure of more conventional resources. While scholars have interrogated the

forms of statecraft involved in green energy proposals such as large-scale dam

building for electricity generation (Bakker, 1999; Ghosh, 2006; Kaika, 2006;

Mehta, 2011; Mitchell, 2002; Routledge, 2003), similar-scale wind and solar

energy projects analyses are fewer (cf. Howe, 2011; 2014; Oceransky, 2010;

Pasqualetti, 2011). Our paper contributes to these critical analyses of green cap-

ital by tracing the practices through which the southern Isthmus is valued as a

wind territory and the way social movements interrupt the appropriations of

nature, history, and life that underpin these practices. Calling out the disposses-

sions that accompany the concrete enclosures of wind energy infrastructures

(turbines, fences, generators, and electricity lines), Istmeños raise questions

about the value closures of wind energy projects—their logics (how wind comes

to bear capitalist value, how this value is captured, and by whom) and their

logistics (technologies from mapping to carbon credits to the infrastructure that

makes wind power possible). By making visible the contested histories of land,

Istmeños point to the epistemic violence of green power: the reterritorialization

of the Isthmus as a space of green capital flows that disguises the devaluation

and simultaneous erasure of local land uses and peoples.