Peace through coca? Decolonial peacebuilding ecologies and rural development in the Territory of Conviviality and Peace of Lerma, Colombia

Abstract

While illicit crops like the coca leaf can be vehicles of conflict and income for armed groups across the Global South, this article reveals that coca has alternative uses based on its nutritional and cultural value. Drawing on the experience of the Territory of Conviviality and Peace of Lerma in Colombia, the country’s first community to receive state authorisation to experiment with coca for non-alkaloid purposes, we ponder whether coca can be a catalyst for peace. Lerma has been a large coca producer for decades, which enveloped it in relations of subordination and exploitation tied to illicit economies and armed conflict. Based on qualitative research over a six-year period, we analyse Lerma’s project to overcome capitalist logics driving peasant dispossession through Colombian history and intra-community violence by diverging from production for the drug economy in favour of agroecological coca. In conjunction with other community-based programmes, Lerma’s production of organic coca as part of its food sovereignty project suggests a process of decolonial peace at work, whereby the community breaks from oppressions tied to the rule of armed groups and capitalist markets. This reveals the ecological dimensions of peace, which requires community organising and sustainable relations between humans and land.

Keywords:

• Peace
• ecology
• development
• coca
• illicit crops
• Colombia

Acknowledgements

We express our deep gratitude to the members of the Territory of Conviviality and Peace of Lerma for their time and wisdom. We also wish to thank the Fundación Universitaria de Popayán (FUP) for funding the fieldwork for this research in addition to the Escuela Superior de Administración Pública (Territorial Cauca) for time allocated to co-author Óscar Valencia’s workload for writing this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We prefer the Spanish term ‘campesino’ to its typical English translation as ‘peasant’ to avoid the latter’s pejorative – and misguided – association with backwardness, ignorance and anti-revolutionary reactionism (Marx and Engels 1978; New Oxford American Dictionary 2012). Following Gwen Burnyeat (2013), ‘campesino is a whole cultural category in Colombia and other parts of Latin America that is not accurately conveyed by’ peasant or small-scale farmer (3).

2 The research methodology was approved by the Comité de Ética (Ethics Committee, Colombia’s Institutional Review Board [IRB] equivalent) of the Fundación Universitaria de Popayán in conjunction with the research project ‘La Paz Híbrida’ (approval number CEI018-06-SIDI18) and by the Comité de Ética of the Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, for the research project ‘Geografías políticas y performativas de paz territorial en Colombia’ (approval number DVO005-127-CS94).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Sistema de Innovación, Desarrollo e Investigación (SIDI) of the Fundación Universitaria de Popayán (FUP).

Notes on contributors

Óscar E. Valencia

Óscar E. Valencia obtained an MSc in Political Science from the University of Montreal after completing his undergraduate studies in political science at the Universidad del Cauca. With research focused on local peacebuilding and the internationalisation of Colombia’s armed conflict, he is Assistant Professor at the Escuela Superior de Administración Pública, Colombia, and Director of the Armed Conflict and Civil Initiatives for Peace group (CAPAZ) at the Fundación Universitaria de Popayán.

Christopher Courtheyn

Christopher Courtheyn completed his PhD in Geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds a BA in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley. A scholar of globalisation, development and social movements, he is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Service at Boise State University.