Violence in development: the logic of forced displacement on Colombia's Pacific coast

Abstract

A progressive piece of legislation in 1993 granted collective land rights to Colombia's black communities living in the rural areas of the Pacific coast region. This measure aimed partly to support sustainable development strategies in the region through territorial empowering of local communities. Yet 14 years later, the escalation of the country's internal conflict into the Pacific region has created unprecedented levels of forced displacement among rural black communities. Once referred to as a ‘peace haven’, the Colombian Pacific coast is now characterised by new spaces of violence and terror, imposed by warring guerrilla and paramilitary groups, as well as the armed forces. This article examines the nature of the externally induced violence in the region and shows how specific economic interests, in particular in the African Palm sector, are colluding with illegal groups that are used to spread fear and terror among local residents, to make them comply with the requirements of these economic actors.

Keywords:

• Gender and Diversity
• Rights
• Conflict and Reconstruction
• Governance and Public Policy
• Latin America and the Caribbean

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was made possible through grants from the ESRC (RES-000-22-0770) and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, as well as from the European Union to finance my research post as Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellow. I am grateful to John Agnew at UCLA and Chris Philo at Glasgow University for being inspiring mentors in this research project. I want to dedicate this article to the many Afro-Colombian community leaders who show strength and courage in the pursuit of their people's collective well-being, often under tremendous threat to their personal security.

Notes

1. For details on this legislation, see Arocha (1998), Wade (1995), and a special issue of Journal of Latin American Anthropology (2002) dedicated to Colombia's black communities.

2. See West (1957) and Whitten (1986) for details of the history of slavery, settlement patterns, and production cycles.

3. This sort of ‘Nobel Prize for the Environment’ is given every year to grassroots ecological activists from six geographical regions. Libia Grueso from Colombia's Process of Black Communities won the prize in April 2004 in the category South/Central America (see www.goldmanprize.org/node/106) (retrieved 30 March 2007).

4. The complicity of the Colombian army with paramilitary forces has been amply documented. See, for instance, an article published on 25 March 2007, citing CIA intelligence that the head of Colombia's army had collaborated with rightwing paramilitary groups: ‘Colombia army chief linked to outlaw militias’, Los Angeles Times, available at http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/fairenough/latimes905.html (retrieved 3 July 2007). The charges were immediately denied.

5. There are no precise data on the number of displaced people. Estimates are taken from the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), which has monitored forced-displacement statistics since 1992 (www.codhes.org).

6. The notion of the banality of things was, of course, introduced by Hannah Arendt (1963) in her discussion of the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she coined the much-quoted phrase, the ‘banality of evil’.

7. See, for instance, CODHES (note 5), the Spanish NGO Human Rights Everywhere (www.hrev.org), the Colombian human rights NGO Justicia y Paz (http://es.geocities.com/justiciaypazcolombia/), and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the leading international body monitoring conflict-induced internal displacement worldwide (www.internal-displacement.org).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ulrich Oslender

Ulrich Oslender is a political geographer and EU-funded Marie Curie OIF research fellow in the Department of Geographical & Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow (2005–2008). Under the EU scheme he was seconded until August 2007 to the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he conducted research into what he terms ‘geographies of terror’. Since 1995 he has worked with the social movement of black communities in Colombia.