Social movements in Argentina have blocked a law that would have expanded the sale of farmland to foreigners, amidst a wave of land disputes sweeping the continent — from Argentina to Honduras.

When the banana company arrived, however, the local functionaries were replaced by dictatorial foreigners (…). The old policemen were replaced by hired assassins with machetes (…), mayors without initiative, decorative judges (…) lawyers dressed in black who in different times had followed Colonel Aureliano Buendía everywhere, and that led the people to think that the agronomists, hydrologists, topographers, and surveyors (…) had something to do with the war.

Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times, they changed the pattern of the rams, accelerated the cycle of harvest, and moved the river from where it had always been and put it with its white stones and icy currents on the other side of the town (…) surrounded by a metal fence topped with a band of electrified chicken wire.

“Look at the mess we′ve got ourselves into,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said at that time, “just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas.”.

These are excerpts from the book One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, which has regained public attention following its popular Netflix adaptation. From a small corner of Latin America – Macondo – García Márquez describes experiences known all over the world, particularly inthe Global South. The excerpts above are from one of the best-known chapters of the novel, inspired by the 1928 Banana Massacre in Colombia, when the army, on the orders of the government of Miguel Abadía Méndez – an ally of the interests of the US-based United Fruit Company – violently suppressed a general strike by rural workers, resulting in the murder of thousands of people.

The story takes on an added dimension in the current geopolitical context, characterised by the resurgence of the US’s Monroe Doctrine – now known as the Donroe Doctrine – and renewed attempts to encircle Latin America— as well as by the resistance of its peoples.

“The Homeland is Not for Sale”

On 6 August 2026, thousands of people took to the streets of Buenos Aires under the slogan: ‘The homeland is not for sale’. They were protesting against a draft ‘Law on the Inviolability of Private Property’, proposed by Javier Milei’s far-right government. The bill sought to increase the concentration and foreign ownership of land — and, consequently, the country’s water, wetlands, minerals and forests.

Despite police repression, the protestors forced the Senate to back down and remove sections of the bill that would have eased restrictions on the sale of land to foreigners and would have authorised the sale of lands affected by fires.

The victory, however, is only partial. The approved version of the bill retains provisions that speed up evictions and expropriations of smallholders farming on leased land — a situation that affects between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of farms in Argentina’s main farming region. The text also makes it more difficult to expropriate land for the purposes of agrarian reform, because it requires the State to compensate not only for the market value of the land, but also for the profits the owner would forgo over the following five years.

However, Diego Montón, from the national coordination committee of the peasant movement MNCI Somos Tierra, believes that the government is unlikely to resubmit the bill to the Chamber of Deputies, given the current level of social unrest and the proximity to next year’s elections. Recent polls indicate that 75 per cent of the Argentine public rejects the proposed law.

“The current law on fire management disadvantages national landowners because it prevents the sale of land where fires have occurred in wetland areas for 30 years and in forest areas for 60 years. And also because this group has no interest in defending the ‘nation’, given that, since the late 19th century – when much of the public land had already been appropriated by them – they began their association with international capital,’ says Montón.

The Scale of Foreign Ownership of Land

An estimated 13 million hectares — an area equivalent to England — are already owned by foreign investors, with the High Luck Group (China), the Benetton Group (Italy), the Walbrook Group (United Kingdom) and the Argentine company Cresud S.A. being the firms that own the largest amounts of land. According to the Observatorio de Tierras, 36 municipalities have exceeded the legal limit of 15 per cent of land controlled by foreign interests, and in four of these, foreign ownership exceeds 50 per cent, including significant reserves of fresh water and minerals.

The recent acquisition by the cryptocurrency giant Tether of a majority stake in Adecoagro — one of Latin America’s largest grain producers, which controls more than 360,000 ha in Argentina — is indicative of a broader trend: the pressure exerted by digital finance on physical assets, such as land and commodities.

The Scale of the Resistance

According to Montón, the response to the project “started small, but drew on multi-sectoral organisational structures and methodologies developed during previous protests. The result was hundreds of assemblies in provincial capitals, bringing together grassroots movements from rural areas, trade unions, environmental groups, sectors of the Church and the cultural sector — culminating in the rally on 6 August in Buenos Aires.”

Argentina today embodies García Márquez’s Macondo, a struggle that is present throughout Latin America, like a social technology of the people, of mobilisation and of struggle for the protection of the territories and the commons communities have managed for centuries.

In Honduras too, the Garifuna communities have reignited their centuries-old struggles in defence of their communal lands to stop the implementation of a new ‘Agro-Industrial Law’. The law – passed in June 2026 – declares that land designated for agro-industrial activities is exempt from agrarian reformand authorises the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the National Police to take swift actions to evict people occupying such lands. On 6 June, immediately after the law was passed, more than 200 police officers evicted the Garífuna community of San Juan, in Tela, and, as part of a broader pattern of persecution of social organisations in Latin America, five Garífuna leaders were arrested on charges of criminal organisation for asserting their right to their collective territory – a right already recognised by the State and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

The matriarch Úrsula, who had witnessed several generations of the Buendía family, often said that time in Macondo — a place that represents all places — is not linear but circular, with the present repeating the past, and thus condemning the family to ‘one hundred years of solitude’.

But, just as the history of land grabbing in Latin America repeats itself, so too, does the history of people’s organising and resistance repeat itself– and keep moving forward!

The Garífuna communities, who are currently camped outside the Honduran Supreme Court, are calling for international solidarity to send a message to the President of the Court in defence of their ancestral territories. To sign, click here.

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