Support my first book on C.America

During the summer of 2014 I moved to Guatemala in order to pursue a career in journalism. My philosophy was to find stories from the communities of the country, and to raise their voices to large mediums across the world. In the last two years I've written hundreds of articles sharing the reality in Guatemala, but I don't feel that the articles paint a clear enough picture of what is occurring in Guatemala, and Central America. Therefore I've set out to write a book that puts the various social movements and social conflicts into the context of neoliberal development projects such as Plan Mesoamerica. In the book I look to analyze how these development projects bring back the forms of repression of the past in order to guarantee the accumulation of capital by transnational companies. Furthermore, I look to show how these projects continue the colonization of the region known as Mesoamerica (southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador), and how they are a direct assault on the indigenous communities that continue to resist the cycles of colonization that have occurred in the last 500 years. This new cycle of colonization is capitalisms latest war in the region. But organized resistance that is the continuation of this history of resistance meets this neoliberal project, and the resistance looks to defend not only territory, but also the indigenous identity.

The book will be broken into 7 chapters:
1) The introduction will lay out the situation on the militarization of development, and how it continues the years of war by another means
2) The gulf between the narrative of indigenous rights, and the neoliberal project, and the history of the attack on indigenous identity in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador
3) Conflicts over Energy Generation
4) Conflicts over Agri-business
5) Conflicts over mining
6) Tourism as an extractive industry
7) Conclusions and the quest for Indigenous Autonomy in Mesoamerica

If you'd like to know more about my idea for the book, please read this article I wrote for New Politics Magazine in June of this year as it lays out part of the thesis for the book: http://www.newpol.org/node/1633

Please consider supporting this project in order to make it a reality.

Thank you,

-Jeff