DECLARACIóN DE TERRITORIOS LIBRES

This guide, published by Friends of the Earth International, outlines the concept and practice of declaring 'free territories' to protect lands from extractive industries, financialization of nature, and corporate imposition. It provides a framework for communities and indigenous peoples to exercise autonomy and human rights by formally rejecting projects such as mining, fracking, and GMOs.

• Declaring a territory 'free' is defined as a practice of autonomy and a political tool to exercise collective human rights, including the right to timely information, citizen participation, and self-determination.
• The process of declaring a territory free typically occurs at one of three stages: prevention (before a project is implemented), execution (during implementation), or consolidation (after a project is operational and being expelled).
• Effective strategies for achieving free territory declarations include preventive information sharing, organizing broad networks, implementing media strategies, and conducting political work ranging from door-to-door outreach to legal lobbying.
• In Mesoamerica, the M4 (Mesoamerican Movement against the Mining Extractive Model) has used free territory declarations since 2011 as a preventive strategy, adapting the implementation to national contexts: community consultations in Guatemala, municipal structures in El Salvador, and legal agrarian nuclei or political agreements in Mexico.
• Specific examples of free territory declarations include over 400 communities in Australia declaring themselves 'Gasfield Free' to stop fracking, and 78 out of 81 cantons in Costa Rica declaring themselves free of GMOs.
• The document highlights the challenge of declaring territories free from the 'financialization of nature' (FN) and REDD+ because these are often presented as conservation tools that provide money, making their negative impacts more abstract than those of mining.
• In the European Union, as of early 2006, more than 170 regions and 4,500 local governments across at least 25 countries had declared themselves GMO-Free Zones.

APA

Rojas, I. (2018). DECLARACIóN DE TERRITORIOS LIBRES. Friends of the Earth International. https://www.foei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/La-declaracion-de-territorios-libres_Amigos-de-la-tierra-internacional.pdf

Chicago

Rojas, Isaac. DECLARACIóN DE TERRITORIOS LIBRES. Friends of the Earth International, 2018. https://www.foei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/La-declaracion-de-territorios-libres_Amigos-de-la-tierra-internacional.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Rojas |first1=Isaac |title=DECLARACIóN DE TERRITORIOS LIBRES |publisher=Friends of the Earth International |date=February 2018 |url=https://www.foei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/La-declaracion-de-territorios-libres_Amigos-de-la-tierra-internacional.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rojas2018declaracin, author = {Rojas, Isaac}, title = {{DECLARACIóN DE TERRITORIOS LIBRES}}, institution = {Friends of the Earth International}, year = {2018}, month = feb, url = {https://www.foei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/La-declaracion-de-territorios-libres_Amigos-de-la-tierra-internacional.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }