By Peter Ho and Cécile Famerée

The article illustrates how the political dynamics around access, assignation, and control of natural resources allows understanding divisions in land?based social relations. A powerful Peruvian private firm has acquired land for palm plantation on each side of the frontier between the departments of San Martin and Loreto. Both investments involved land use changes, deforestation of virgin forest, and peasants’ displacements. However, we show in one case, how a process of resistance took place while in the other case, increased land?based social divisions allowed the development of the monoculture agroindustry.