Territories of peace: alter-territorialities in Colombia’s San José de Apartadó Peace Community

ABSTRACT

Scholars are increasingly re-theorizing territory beyond the nation-state given Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups’ demands for ‘territory’ as they confront land grabbing in Latin America. Yet alternative territorialities are not limited to such ethnic groups. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research between 2011 and 2016, I explore the relational territoriality produced by a peasant ‘peace community’ in San José de Apartadó, Colombia. By tracing the collective political subject produced by the Peace Community’s active production of peace through a set of spatial practices, places and values, which include massacre commemorations, food sovereignty initiatives and Indigenous–peasant solidarity networks, this contribution presents a conceptual framework for analyzing diverse territorial formations.

KEYWORDS:

• Territory
• peace
• land grabbing
• social movements
• peasants
• Colombia

Acknowledgements

I cannot emphasize enough the extent to which this paper is the product of collective critical thinking: to the members of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, other social movement collaborators and protective accompaniers in Colombia, and my former colleagues at the University of North Carolina, this research would not be possible without your feedback, wisdom and solidarity. A special thanks to Alvaro Reyes, whose countless discussions with me about the theory of territory profoundly shaped this contribution; to Ahsan Kamal, Adam Bledsoe, Ben Rubin, Stevie Larson and Altha Cravey, who provided critical feedback on draft versions; to Diana Gómez, Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Pavithra Vasudevan and Eloisa Berman-Alévalo, whose many conversations with me have greatly shaped the ideas expressed in this text; to Renee Alexander Craft and the members of the Critical Performance Ethnography Working Group for indispensible methodological guidance; and to Philip McDaniel and Matthew Burns for assistance creating Figures 1 and 2. Of course, any error is my responsibility alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I prefer the Spanish term ‘campesino’ to its typical English translation as ‘peasant’ to avoid the latter’s pejorative baggage – however misguided – linked with Marx and Engels’s (1978) belittling portrayal of peasants as ‘not revolutionary, but … reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history’ (482). I agree with Burnyeat (2013), who notes that ‘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). Further, in conversation with Zamosc (1986), Fanon (2004) and Guha (1983), I employ campesino to allude to the racial, social and political aspects of this subject position.

2 San José’s farmers identify as ‘campesinos’, which in this case correlates with the ethnic category of (mixed-race) mestizo. However, critical theories of racialization as ‘subject position’ rather than mere ‘identity’ (Fanon 2008; Goldberg 2009; Wilderson 2010), the history of internal colonialism through state-Catholic missions and education in Antioquia (Steiner 2000), and a Peace Community leader’s acknowledgement that ‘we are of Indigenous blood, which we carry within us’ (field notes, 2012), lead me to argue that the identifier campesino mestizo in fact hides the process through which they have been historically ‘de-indigenized’ – a realization I owe to Alvaro Reyes (personal communication, 23 July 2015) and De la Cadena (2000). Yet these farmers remain racialized – marked with a subject position of ‘less than human’ – by their phenotype and autonomous politics as the ‘Indigenous savage’ to be exterminated by the modern-colonial project (Rojas 2002; Wilderson 2010), as exhibited by the mass violence levied against them by the Colombian state both prior to and in the wake of asserting their self-determination from both the state-paramilitaries and guerrillas. Indeed, rural Colombian mestizos, Indigenous and Blacks assert in the Campesino University that ‘we all face the same violence’ (field notes, 2013). Therefore, while groups have different cultural practices and identities, the violence against Indigenous and African-descendant campesinos suggests an analogous racial subject position. I thus find it imperative to signal that the Peace Community is mostly comprised of Indigenous-descendant (rather than ‘White’) campesinos.

3 Military–paramilitary death threats against San José’s farmers have persisted into 2017 (Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó 2017), including the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC) paramilitary group spraying graffiti of their acronym onto buildings inside the village of San Josecito in 2016 (Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó 2016).

4 While the Colombian ‘peace process’ is the context for this study, my ethnographic focus on territory precludes me from fully developing here my own re-theorization of the concept of peace and of the Peace Community’s praxis as a ‘radical trans-relational peace’ of ecological dignity through solidarity networks of autonomous politics (forthcoming).

5 Notwithstanding, local resistance – although the case here – is not inevitable or necessarily the most common reaction to land grabbing (Mamonova 2015).

6 This paper’s focus on the Peace Community precludes me from a comprehensive analysis of the diverse peace imaginaries amidst the Colombian ‘peace process’ conjuncture or the state–FARC accords themselves, themes I explore elsewhere (forthcoming). Nonetheless, my argument about the territoriality implicit in President Santos and the military’s approach to peace calls for a selection of indicative quotes. For instance, Santos’s nationalistic discourse is evident in his assertion that ‘Absolute peace is eradicating misery and Colombians having dignified shelter and employment …  . We will progress when we are together, united, in order to overcome resentments’ (quoted in El País 2014). Yet the militaristic nature of such peace is reflected by his argument that, ultimately, ‘We will achieve peace with the stick or the carrot’ (quoted in La Nación 2014). Similarly, former Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón argued, ‘Peace requires an Armed Forces that are strong, equipped, and present in the entire national territory …  . Colombia is going to have peace either through reason or through force’ (quoted in El Tiempo 2014). Additionally, an army officer described peace as ‘The soldier that provides security, with the teacher, the businessman who provides work, and the person that farms the land. But the land belongs to the state. It decides what to do with it. And, the land is to be exploited!’, as he made a digging motion with his hands (personal interview, 2014). He thus the linked ‘peace process’ with Santos’s extractivist economic model, in which land is something ‘to be exploited’. These imaginaries parallel the ‘modern’ or ‘liberal’ approach to peace widely critiqued by scholars as state-centric, militaristic and patriarchal (Dietrich 2012; Daley 2014). Furthermore, it reflects a particular relationship with space and politics: a territoriality of domination over nature and population, in which the state has ultimate authority.

7 The Colectivo Agrario Abya Yala is an interdisciplinary participatory action research collective in Colombia that works in tandem with peasant, Indigenous and Black groups in support of their rights to territory. It organizes seminars, conducts research, and produces publications on land, territory, and social movements: http://www.colectivoagrarioabyayala.org/

8 The Colectivo de Sentipensamiento Afrodiaspórico is comprised of various Afro-Colombian, raizal and palenquero organizations. It was founded in 2013 in the city of Quibdó to work against capitalism, modernity, as well as state institutionalization and cooptation of the Afro-Colombian movement (Colectivo de Sentipensamiento Afrodiaspórico 2015).

9 It is worth noting that while scholars have used de- and re-territorialization to describe primitive accumulation and neoliberal globalization (see Elden 2006), Deleuze and Guattari articulated these concepts with an even wider range of processes, including ‘psychic deterritorialization’ (1983).

10 Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN) is a network of Afro-Colombian organizations that emerged in the 1990s to defend black communities’ rights to territory and culture. See Escobar (2008).

11 Since territories themselves are always processes that are continually re-made, I argue that distinguishing ‘territory’ and ‘territorialization’ is a question of emphasis, rather than signaling fundamentally different dynamics.

12 Community work days are often called a minga by Indigenous communities in Colombia, such as the Nasa.

13 Horses are the community’s primary form of transporting supplies.

14 For a comprehensive exploration of the role of memory in San José’s peace project, see Courtheyn (2016).

15 Campesino University gatherings beyond San José de Apartadó have taken place in San Vicente de Caguán and the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Inter-American Foundation under the Grassroots Development PhD Fellowship Program; the Tinker Foundation and UNC Chapel Hill’s Institute for the Study of the Americas under two Pre-Dissertation Field Research Grants; and the Mellon Foundation and Institute for the Study of the Americas’ Mellon Dissertation Fellowship for Latin American and Caribbean Research.

Notes on contributors

Christopher Courtheyn

Christopher Courtheyn is a professor of Peace and Citizenship Studies at the Universidad Minuto de Dios, Bogotá. He completed his PhD in geography at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and holds a BA in Latin American studies from the University of California, Berkeley.