Forced Displacement and Reconstruction in Contemporary Colombia
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Claiming Lands from the City: Forced Displacement and Reconstruction in Contemporary Colombia DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In Anthropology By Andrés Salcedo Fidalgo Dissertation Committee: Professor Teresa Caldeira, Chair Professor William Maurer Professor Susan Coutin Professor Karen Leonard 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vi CURRICULUM VITAE ix ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION xi Introduction: Contemporary Colombian Social Disarticulations 1 Bogotá: Disconnected Cities 11 Fieldwork 16 Blocking the Pain of Violence 25 The Battle of the Oaks 32 Scheme of the Dissertation 36 Chapter 1 Geopolitics of War in Historical Light 38 Is it a War? 41 Techniques of Fear 42 A History of Violence Revisited 50 Competing Sovereignties and the Rule of Violence 59 Plan Colombia, FTA and Peace Process with Paramilitaries 66 Geo-warfare 71 Conclusion 83 Chapter 2 Mobility, Victimhood and Place 85 Forced Displacement and Migration 86 Humanitarian Discourses 94 Colombian State’s Assistance 100 Countering Victimization 105 Place and Stigma 114 Conclusion 125 iii Chapter 3 Remembering the Land of “Before” 127 Place-memories 128 Motherland 132 A Land of Plenty 136 Former Work and Social Standing 141 Forgetting War 145 Mementoes in Practices of Resettlement 147 Conclusion 152 Chapter 4 From Struggles over Land to the Politics of Ethnicity 156 Ethnicity and the 1991 Constitution in Colombia 163 History of Colombian Agrarian Movements 156 Indigenous Resistance against De-territorialization 176 Looking Back to the Law of Origin: the Kankuamo Case 187 Visions of the Gold stolen: Mobility and Recovery Of Lands among the Pijao indigenous group 193 New Slavery, Old family: Afro-Colombian Talk of Displacement 197 Neo-colonialism in the Lower Atrato River 206 The Tumaco Delta under Fire 209 Conclusion 212 Chapter 5 Reconstruction and the City 214 Informal Economy and Rebusque 218 Displaced Women’s Organizations 223 Takeover of the International Red-Cross Headquarters 231 Spiritual and Ecological Movements in Bogotá 232 Neo-shamans in the City 238 The Creation of the Cabildo Ambiká in Bogotá 241 Afro-style in Bogotá 244 Conclusion 252 Conclusion Conjuring the Usurpation of Land’s Wealth 254 REFERENCES 261 GLOSSARY 276 ACRONYMS 279 iv v Introduction: Contemporary Colombian Social Disarticulations Since 1996, thousands of people have died and hundreds of thousands more per year have been forced to flee their places of residence in an unprecedented wave of violent disputes that involve civil and military groups in contemporary Colombia. I propose to call this dispute a war over land-based resources. I argue that forced displacement is not only a violent eviction. It is part of a recent geo-politics of war and also a whole array of cultural and social practices involved in people’s process of mourning and reconstruction. These desplazados are the forcibly displaced people who now occupy the peripheries of Colombia’s small and large cities such as Bogotá. This approach conceives of forced displacement as a fertile ground for research not only on political violence, war and pain, but also on the politics of reconstruction. By looking at how people interpret and talk about their evictions and the ways war has affected their life trajectories, I propose to address forced displacement not only as an imposed and disrupting mobility among individuals but also as a process that has articulated municipal, urban and global anti-war movements. Forced displacement in Colombia is situated at the confluence of national and global processes and exposes some features that seem to characterize the movement and resettlement of populations worldwide at the beginning of the twentieth-first century. From a national perspective, I argue that the violent conflicts that are claiming lives and provoking massive movements of population in the last years are associated with disjointed representations of the Colombian territory and conceptions of nationhood. Official 1 notions of the nation-state contrast with transnational privatization of resources, the exploitation of mini-territories by armed groups, the use of land-corridors for illegal drug and arm-trafficking, and the defense of collective and inalienable lands undertaken by ethnic groups. Moreover, I assert that Colombian war is a situation of competing sovereignties in which different forms of administration, use and control of territories, and discrepant interpretations of history, inclusion and social justice converge. The priority of the last administration of President Alvaro Uribe (2002-2006) has been to recover security and the Colombian state’s monopoly of violence through strong and well-motivated armed forces. Paramilitary groups have presented themselves as redemptory warriors protecting decent Colombians against insurgency and promoting a remodeling of land-tenure and the introduction of intensive agro-business activities. In contrast, old guerrilla groups have presented themselves as the armies of the pueblo and established their own fiefdoms for militaristic purposes and economic sources of income. And finally, squatters, indigenous and Afro-Colombian civilians have engaged in the defense of their territories, especially those from which they have been evicted, arguing that they entail cultural rights and ancestral land- management practices. From a global perspective, these conflicts over lands are associated with three sorts of processes. First, the war against drugs that, after September 11th, became part of the US war against terrorism with the implementation of Plan Colombia, an assistance package signed on July 23, 2000 to eradicate narcotics production. Second, the free-trade economic treaty signed in 2005 between the Colombian and the US government that marks the official incorporation of Colombian economy into the global economy. People I interviewed 2 associate this new era of neo-liberalism with the emptying of strategic areas in the Colombian countryside to enable the extraction of timber, oil and multinational agro- industrial activities. Third, the global networks of humanitarian aid and human rights that are defining the international standards of assistance and imposing a new “civilizing” model of development on poor and “war-torn countries.” A central argument of this dissertation is that forced displacement cannot be analyzed only in terms of processes of expulsion. In fact, the main focus of the analysis is the way in which displaced populations resettle in the city of Bogotá. As they cope with pain, loss and grief, displaced people also reinvent their lives and identities and create for themselves new forms of subjectivity and agency. These new forms clearly reveal the neo-liberal conditions under which poor people find ways of inserting themselves in contemporary urban environments, and these are markedly different from the Fordist and developmentalist contexts in which previous generations of migrants have found their place in large cities throughout Latin America from the mid-twentieth century on. Entrepreneurial informal activities, ethnic economic enclaves and a vibrant network of human rights organizations and NGOs are some of the social and political spaces that internally displaced populations have opened and consolidated in their process of reconstruction. This dissertation focuses on a very recent wave of forced migration in Colombia –not the first one in the country’s history marked by successive episodes of political violence and forced migrations. During the period known as La Violencia (1950s and 1960s), 40,000 plots of land were deserted and 2 million Colombians abandoned their land and reshaped Colombian demography. Government and media saw displaced and expelled populations as 3 economic migrants coming from the countryside and forming part of spontaneous processes of urbanization of the middle-sized and big Colombian cities. After 1995, when war spread out and intensified, forced migrants fell under the category of “evacuees” as if they were affected by a natural disaster called “violence.” These populations were finally recognized as “internally displaced populations” in 1995 and in 1997 they were entitled to Law 387, 1997. Despite this law, only humanitarian assistance has been provided and the Constitutional Court has issued various sentences to enforce it, as I will explain in chapter 2. There are three sources of statistics of internal displacement that never coincide and none of them produce reliable figures. Statistics have become an instrument of power. The state with the RSS, based on his unified registration system SUR1, has its own statistics and reports every six months and claims that the accumulated number of displaced people is 1,732,551 (SUR 2006); CODHES has its own system call SISDES2 and also has an accumulated number of nearly 3 million displaced people since 1985; the Church using a more rigorous statistic methods releases every six months a bulletin from their own mobility center of research and does not keep a record of accumulated number of displaced people like the former sources of information do. 1 Sistema Único de Registro, Unified Registration System of Social Solidarity Network. 2 Sistema de Información sobre Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento Forzado. Information System on Human Rights and Displacement in Colombia. 4 Number of displaced people per year in Colombia (1999-2004) Years CODHES RSS 1999 288.000 25.216