The power of the imaginary: Hidden violence in Costa Rica

Keywords: climate justice, hydropower, Indigenous rights, hydrosocial territories
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 19

Abstract

In September 2021, Global Witness published their latest report on the killings of land and environmental defenders; 227 people were murdered in 2020. The list includes Jerhy Rivera, a Brörán leader living in Térraba territory in southwestern Costa Rica who actively resisted hydropower development. Jerhy was murdered by non-Indigenous peoples as he recuperated ancestral lands from them. Jerhy and the Rivera family were my primary interlocutors during my dissertation field work, which focused on studying the local impacts of proposed hydropower projects. To begin to comprehend Jerhy’s death, and those of the others murdered, we must assess the root causes of the ongoing threats faced by land and environmental defenders. In Costa Rica, the state-electricity company’s decades-long push to build dams on the Térraba river exacerbates land and resource use conflicts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, which have been ongoing since colonization. I explore the fast and slow violence materializing within the Indigenous-hydropower nexus through the framework of a hydrosocial territory. By interrogating the interconnected factors responsible for Jerhy’s murder, I address the ways in which the manufactured imaginary of Costa Rica as a social and ecological oasis produces a space through which violence continues with impunity.