Mapping violent land orders: armed conflict, moral economies, and the trajectories of land occupation and dispossession in the Colombian Caribbean

ABSTRACT

In Colombia, armed conflict intersected with land politics in complex ways. Throughout conjunctures of guerrilla and paramilitary domination, the moral economies that sustained hierarchical land orders became a terrain of tensions and negotiations. Through an ethnographic approach to participatory mapping in the agrarian region of Montes de María in Colombia's Caribbean, this article analyzes the links between armed conflict, shifting land orders, and the moral economies that informed peasant politics. It exposes the incomplete and complex processes of space-making produced by armed conflict, as well as the ambivalent and shifting character of peasant political strategies in the context of violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral economies
• land occupations
• dispossession
• violence
• participatory mapping
• Colombia

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the community members who participated in my research project and guided its questions. I would also like to thank Gabriela Valdivia and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Eloisa Berman-Arévalo has a PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research interests focus on everyday spatial politics and territorial conflicts among afro-descendant and campesino communities, ethno-racial identity politics, and agrarian relations in the Colombian Caribbean. She explores these topics through and ethnographic lens informed by feminist methodologies and praxis.

Notes

1 All personal names and toponyms for villages, counties and municipalities in this article have been modified.

2 The Spanish idiom campesino is a flexible identity category that denotes a historical relation to land, nature, small-scale farming, and rural life (Forero-Alvarez 2002; Lederach 2017). Campesino identities in the context of agrarian politics in Latin America generally reflect a particular political position vis-á-vis the state and agrarian elites through a language based on class antagonisms (Boyer 2003; Mallon 1995; Veltmeyer and Petras 2008). In this text, I use peasant and campesino interchangeably.

3 Formed in the late 1960s, ANUC’s main purpose was to ‘promote direct peasant participation in the provision of services and to help implement agrarian reform’ (Zamosc 1986, 50). From the perspective of the state, ANUC was both an organizational platform that would allow peasants to advance their class interests and a strategy for state-control over a mobilized peasantry that would minimize the opposition to the ruling coalition. While initially acting in alliance with the state, ANUC’s radical strategy of massive occupations was a response to their perception of state deceit due to right wing opposition.

4 As documented by Elizabeth Wood for El Salvador, campesino occupation of large landholdings during armed conflict, led to a re-peasantization of the land, as land use shifted from cattle grazing fields to small-scale peasant agriculture (2008).

5 In 2005, peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the national paramilitary organization AUC resulted in the demobilization of 31,671 men. In 2007, the head of FARC’s Front 37 alias ‘Martín Caballero’ was assassinated by the Colombian army in the highlands of Montes de María, effectively putting an end to guerrilla operations in the region. Since then, violent confrontations between armed groups has diminished significantly. The recent peace agreement between the Colombian government and left-wing guerrilla FARC, signed in 2016, involved the nationwide disarmament of approximately 7,000 FARC members and marked the official beginning of an era of purported ‘post-conflict’ in the country.

6 The term despojo in Spanish is generally translated as dispossession. In Colombia, the politics of the term are complex. Besides its academic use, despojo is used to describe peasants’ massive loss of land in the context of the country’s armed conflict, particularly during and immediately after paramilitary violence (CNMH 2010). The term is widely used in human rights circles and by social movements and victim’s organizations. It is also central in legal and policy measures for transitional justice and victims’ reparation. Despite this popularity, at the village level, peasants hesitate to characterize the transactions through which they coercively sold their land as despojo, as the term simplifies such transactions and imbues them with a meaning of illegality and accusation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under a Dissertation Completion Fellowship; the Inter-American Foundation/ Institute of International Education under the Grassroots Development PhD Fellowship Program; and the Tinker Foundation and UNC Chapel Hill's Institute for the Study of the Americas under a Pre-Dissertation Field Research Grant.