Transnational corporations and peoples’ rights in Latin America and the Caribbean: Violations of peoples’ sovereignty

Mapping the presence and impacts of transnational corporations in Latin America and the Caribbean, by Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (ATALC).

We cannot understand the configuration of the capitalist system in recent years without considering the role of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) in the process of capital accumulation. TNCs are key actors leading the process of capital expansion, both in the territory and in all spheres of life. Trade and investment liberalisation policies – including new norms in the services sector, public procurement, intellectual property, as well as dispute settlement mechanisms within free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties – were designed to promote and protect the interests of TNCs. In order to understand how TNCs impose the primacy of their interests – for example through political and trade agendas, we must examine the functioning of the architecture of impunity, which benefits TNCs and enables them to be unaccountable for their violations of human, environmental, and peoples’ rights.

Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (ATALC for its acronym in Spanish) mapped a diversity of cases throughout the region where TNCs attempted to, or succeeded in, imposing their interests by creating and/or exacerbating systemic crises, violating or infringing upon the rights of peoples, destroying territories and livelihoods.