As social property and resources formerly open to common use, such as beaches and coastal lakes, have been privately appropriated, an environmental discourse has arisen among national and transnational elites that justifies this appropriation in terms of conservation and even shapes environmental policies for their benefit. One example is the creation of natural protected areas in zones of predominantly private property, giving them exclusive rights and increasing real estate values and investments in tourism. As a result, tourist paradises have sprung up in places of high biodiversity, offering exclusivity to their owners and clients while violating agrarian rights, creating social conflict, and destroying ecosystems. Frente a un escenario de apropiación privada de espacios otrora de propiedad social y recursos de uso común como playas y lagunas costeras, ha surgido un discurso ecologista de las élites nacionales y transnacionales que justifica esta apropriación por medio de acciones de conservación e incluso orienta las políticas ambientales para su beneficio. Un ejemplo es la creación de áreas naturales protegidas en zonas donde predomina la propiedad privada, con el fin de dar exclusividad y valorizar las inversiones inmobiliarias y turísticas. Como resultado, han surgido paraísos turísticos en lugares de alta biodiversidad que ofrecen exclusividad a sus propietarios y usuarios pero que afectan derechos agrarios, generan conflictos sociales y destruyen ecosistemas.

Political Ecology, understood as a field of social and political analysis of environmental problems, becomes relevant in the face of changes associated with the capitalist globalization that is expressed in the privatization of strategic natural resources, encumbrance of community property, and devastation of the environment. From that perspective, this article studies the neo-liberalization of nature and water in Latin America as a process based on the dispossession of peasants and indigenous peoples in their territories and the exacerbation of socio-environmental conflicts. Among other results, it was found that the state plays a central role both as a promoter (together with private stakeholders) of such changes in the region, and as a facilitator of processes of privatization, through legal and illegal mechanisms alike. This process has generated a variety of social movements for the defense of the territory and water that demanded access to justice and solutions to their socio-environmental conflicts.

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el conflicto generado por la ampliación del Sistema Cutzamala, así como la reorga-nización y la movilización campesina ante el intento de co-optación y la represión ejercida por el Estado para imponer los intereses urbano-industriales de la Zona Metropolitana de la Ciudad de México (ZMCM), en detrimento de una de las regiones más pobres del estado de México. Este conflicto fue expresión de las tensiones entre el campo y la ciudad, en el marco de una estrategia gubernamental de despojo de agua y fragmentación de los actores sociales que habitan en zonas rurales estratégicas por su disponibilidad hídrica. Pese a ello, los actores sociales superaron su heterogeneidad, se reorgani-zaron en el Comité para la defensa de los derechos humanos y recursos naturales del Cutzamala hasta lograr suspender nuevamente el proyecto Temascaltepec en diciembre de 1999.

The objective of this article is to analyze the social movement that appeared in the late 1990s in the State of Mexico against the construction of the "El Tule" dam, part of the fourth stage of the expansion of the "Cutzamala System". The organization and mobilization of the affected population was, after two years of fighting, one of the key factors which led the Federal Government of Mexico to suspend the project. The text analyzes the various stages of the conflict, the demands and repertoires of the actors, the Government's response, and the result of the mobilization. The procedural analysis of the conflict contributes to understanding rural-urban contradictions and contextualizing the new interest of the State to finalize the interbasin transfer in Mexico City fifteen years after the rise of the social movement