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In this paper I rethink land grabbing in Latin America by decentering the rhetoric of novelty and the tendency to focus on large-scale land transactions. To do this, I attend to the longevity of racial thinking bound up in everyday forms of land control. I look at the ways race is salient in the making of land and territorial arrangements. Drawing on my own research in Honduras and Panama, I situate land grabbing in relation to a range of scholarly insights that disclose how the early postcolonial dichotomy of 'civilization' and 'savagery', and its inherently whitening logics, re-appear in contemporary development projects of biodiversity conservation, land administration, and residential tourism. I argue, therefore, that land grabbing is a longstanding process that is routinely operationalized through the state and naturalized through development practices that are underpinned by ongoing racial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the political challenges faced by Honduras which started when Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was removed from his post. It says that Zelaya's removal was due to his insistence on violating the Honduran Constitution, which is to remove the one-term limit of presidency. It mentions the importance of nations such as Venezuela and the U.S. in the country's crisis. It adds that the Venezuelan domestic challenges demonstrated the demise of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez' influence in Latin America. It also mentions that the U.S. successfully ended the Honduran political crisis after Undersecretary Thomas Shannon carried out the negotiations. It concludes that Latin America emerged from the crisis as a mature political region.

The article presents a discussion in historical perspective on the political crisis and the coup d'etat triggered in Honduras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]