Indigenous communities and mining activities in Central America and Mexico: A systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mining activities pose an increasing threat to Indigenous peoples in Central America and Mexico, as their territories become the focus of expanding extractive interests. This systematic literature review provides a cross-cutting analysis of the relationships between Indigenous communities and mining operations across the region. Drawing on the ROSES (Reporting Standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses) methodology, it analyzes 50 peer-reviewed articles published in English and Spanish between 2000 and 2024. The findings reveal a strong concentration of studies centered on Guatemala and Mexico, with particular attention to the Maya (Mam, Q’eqchi’, Sipakapense) and Zapotec peoples. Canadian mining companies emerge as the dominant actors, especially in gold and silver extraction. The research field is structured around a diverse set of interrelated themes, with significant emphasis on conflicts and resistance, violence and criminalization, colonial legacies and dispossession, Indigenous ontologies, and the socio-environmental impacts of extractivism. The review underscores the need to advance research on post-extractive transitions, corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies, and gender-sensitive approaches. It also advocates for the use of participatory methodologies co-developed with Indigenous communities and highlights the importance of expanding geographical coverage to underexplored contexts such as Panama and Nicaragua.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".