Abstract
Latinx/Palestinian solidarities have been subject to increased conversation throughout the United States as activists began constructing joint mock border walls to represent the US-Mexico and Israel-Palestine Walls across cities and universities. Highlighting US-Israeli collaborative border construction and policing tactics led to increased international scrutiny on the longer legacy of coordinated racial war-making between Israel and Latin America throughout the Cold War. While recent scholarship and organizing has focused on border walls and international solidarities, less attention has been paid to how agriculture and militarization link Latin America and Palestine. This emphasis on border militarization has led to Latinx/Palestinian solidarities to de-emphasize the current struggle of farmworkers throughout the United States.
I trace the racialized genealogies of US-Israeli-Central American militarization, agriculture, and surveillance coordination in the 1980s. The first half of the paper situates the construction of model villages throughout Guatemala in a longer history of settler imperialism and racial capitalism. By beginning our narrative of Palestine from the Americas, I aim to shift the temporal and spatial terrain of Palestinian decolonization. Employing the rhetoric of the Green Revolution, Israeli “agricultural experts” coordinated with Guatemalan coffee growers and US agricultural companies to develop rural counterinsurgent strategies for Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt’s “scorched earth” policy. Employing pesticides and fertilizers, these security and agricultural “experts” sought to reshape and reimagine the counterinsurgent environment. These transnational networks of security expertise were both destructive and sinisterly productive, fashioning what I call “racial security laboratories”, where tactics of militarizing the environment became key sites of racial projects and counterrevolutionary imaginaries. Drawing from USAID papers, Israeli memos, and Guatemalan Police archives, The second half of the paper reveals how Israeli/Guatemalan rural counterinsurgent tactics shaped racial security regimes and militarized environmentalism across the United States, Israel, and Central America. The paper concludes by discussing how we practically cross our own mental barricades that has historically estranged Latin America and Palestine from one another. What possibilities are opened up when we stand from our grounded solidarities and commit to refuse exceptionalist narratives and single-issue organizing, particularly in our shared commitments to more effectively combat the ongoing practices of war-making and imperial violence?
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