‘The South resists’: the coloniality of Mexico’s National Development Plan

From 25 April to 4 May 2023, the Caravan El Sur Resiste marched across seven states in southern Mexico, chanting ‘El sur resiste, existe porque resiste’, meaning ‘the south resists, it exists because it resists’. The Caravan was organised to protest megaprojects, such as the Mayan Train and Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, implemented under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)’s National Development Plan (NDP). According to AMLO, the NDP would mark the end of Mexico’s neoliberal era, demonstrate that modernity could be forged from the bottom, and implement development projects that are not opposed to social justice. This article analyses how the state managed to navigate contradictions within the NDP which framed its agenda as a departure from neoliberal violence, while also promoting extractive megaprojects in Mexico. The article argues that the state obscured these contradictions by appropriating some ‘revolutionary’ histories and erasing others in order to frame itself and its NDP as progressive and transformational. In doing so, the state attempts to conceal the coloniality reproduced by the NDP, including the hierarchies of knowledge and power that render some peoples and their ways of being in the world as inferior and disposable.