Implications within the concept of development more than 10 yearsafter the popular uprising for autonomy in the municipality of CheránK’eri, Michoacán

Abstract

This essay discusses some of the implications of the concept of “development” considering the
characteristics of the political and economic autonomous process experienced by the municipality
of Cherán K’eri, in the state of Michoacán, after its popular uprising in 2011. The exacerbated
violence caused by drug trafficking configured a system that degraded the social fabric, forcing
the population to create means of defense that articulated local interests for the conservation of
the environment and public safety, thus modifying the logic of linkage with the State. In this
sense, with the conquest of the recognition of their uses and customs in the legal frameworks, the
governments (local-national) generated strategies to redirect Cherán towards the developmentalism
promoted by the State. From this perspective, Cherán’s collective action forged an alternative
proposal that reconfigures the contents and values of statist development, promoting a dynamic
model of self-management and defense of the territory at the margin of the institutionalist treatment
of the contemporary Mexican political system.