Affective capitalism, humanitarianism and extractivism in Colombia: old and new borders for future times

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Colombian conjuncture encompasses two dynamics. These incorporate social, economic, political and cultural aspects, whose related rationalities are yet to be mapped out and understood in their complex and multi-layered dimensions and registers. On the one hand, as I will explain throughout the text, we have been witness to on-going peace talks between the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia guerrilla group, a whole set of practices of forgiveness, inaugurations of memory museums, the passing of the victims and land restitution law, as well as the recognition of victims and the effervescence of their movements and organizations. These factors have spiralled victims’ demonstrations and fuelled marches all over the country. On the other hand, there are increased rates of foreign investment in those regions that, until as little as a decade ago, were subject to appalling rates of internal displacement, massacres and disappearances, and which now constitute new borders where global capitalism has been able to reconfigure and increase its rates of capital accumulation. In this article, I analyse the processes referred to above and their complex relationships from the vantage point of a cultural studies interrogation of the affective and the popular, focusing on two Colombian regions: Montes de María and Mapiripán. My goal is to understand how different groups and actors are experiencing these processes in their everyday lives. Here, I include victims and their organizations but also government officials and entrepreneurs related to agro-industry initiatives – mentioned below – today refashioned within the new mantra of corporate responsibility. I want to understand the issue of where people are located and what they are doing, facing, consuming, or resisting in terms of these new challenges. Finally, I wish to offer an analytical study that can capture the everyday textures of these processes in a complex and concrete fashion.

KEYWORDS:

• Colombia
• neoliberal humanitarian governmentality
• reterritorialization and deterritorialization
• postconflict
• capital and labour

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, for funding my three research assistants for my project ‘Peasant struggles and rural development in the Montes de María’. Alejandro Ponce de León and Laura Calderón were crucial for gathering information for this article, and Leonarda de la Ossa, an extraordinary researcher and human right activist, also my research assistant in the same project, introduced me to some of the campesinos in the Montes de María I will mention here, and shared her impressions on the future of the region. Joseph Martinez was also a crucial research assistant for the second project mentioned here on development and indigenous communities in Mapiripán. I also want to thank the Research Vice-Dean of the same Faculty for funding the translation of this manuscript, which Tiziana Laudato performed brilliantly. Finally, I want to thank the different groups of campesinos with whom I had long conversations on the history of peasant organizations in relation to the legal and illegal land reforms. I am still indebted to them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Juan Ricardo Aparicio is an Associate Professor at the Department of Language and Culture, Director of the Center of Cultural Studies and the Master’s Program in Cultural Studies at the Universidad de los Andes. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States and he received a graduate degree in Cultural Studies from the first graduate programme in Cultural Studies in Colombia at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. He also received a B.A. in Anthropology from the Universidad de los Andes.

ORCID

Juan Ricardo Aparicio http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2957-0387

Notes

1. See also ‘La difícil reconciliación de Argos con Montes de María’, in La Silla Vacía, November 22, 2015 http://lasillavacia.com/historia/la-dificil-reconciliacion-de-argos-con-montes-de-maria-52428, last accessed, April 16th, 2016.

2. Peasant farmers.

3. With this precise term – Peace Laboratory – the ARGOS Company refers to its project for launching a whole development programme for the region which will lead to the peasant economy subsisting hand-in-hand with agroindustry. With great publicity and attention from the national media, this Peace Laboratory has already started operations in the region. A critical analysis of its outcomes is yet to written. Also, with this same term but with a larger scope for fostering a new paradigm for the rural development in the country, the European Union had already launched different Peace Laboratories since 2002 in different regions in the country.

4. Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces.

5. It is noteworthy today that many companies of the extractivist industry in Colombia (Oil, African Palm, etc.) have created parallel Foundations that interact directly with target communities affected by their activities. Oriented by the principles of corporate responsibility, they also gain tax deductions from this legal figure.

6. Zones of Interest for Rural, Economic and Social Development.

7. In particular, in this same section, I attempt to contextualize and problematize the contours and trajectories of the ‘neoliberal revolution’ (Hall 2011) in Colombia, and its particular articulation with the government of the victims and the promises for the postconlfict. I wish to be cautious in speaking about this ‘neoliberal revolution’ for the Colombian case, and this implies having to distance myself from any simple and formal representations. Instead, my goal is to understand how this neoliberal revolution has been contextualized and updated in the present.

8. Free translation.

9. Translation taken from: https://ces260jh.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/derrida-rogues-two-essays-on-reason.pdf.

10. With the legal term the ‘Unconstitutional order of things’, the Colombian Constitutional Court is claiming that the humanitarian assistance delivered by the Government agencies for the internally displaced population collides with all constitutional standards.

11. ‘El Estado no quiere que pase absolutamente nada’ free translation.

12. The Montes de María Observatory of Politics, Culture, Peace, Coexistence and Development of the University of Cartagena.