Bocarejo Diana. Multi Cult, Colombia

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Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKLAPOLaw & Policy0265-82401467-9930 2009 The Author Journal compilation 2009 Baldy Center for Law and Social PolicyXXXOriginal ArticleBocarejo DECEPTIVE UTOPIASXX

Deceptive Utopias: Violence, Environmentalism,and the Regulation of Multiculturalism

in Colombia

DIANA BOCAREJO

Multiculturalism, constructed as a liberal utopia intended to recognize marginalpopulations, commonly draws upon deceptive mechanisms that reify the old tropeof anthropological savage slots (a term borrowed from Trouillot 2003). Suchslots configure the relationship between politics and places: the fixation ofethnicity in a territory and the creation of strong frontiersboth physical andsymbolicbetween grantees and nongrantees of differential citizenships. In thecase analyzed in this article, those frontiers reify the distinction between peasants and indigenous peoples; two group categories widely mobilized in thecontext of indigenous land expansion in the northern region of Colombia (SouthAmerica). This article explores how an environmental utopic space used bystate institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), has turned into

a fetish that hides a segment of Colombias most dramatic reality: the violentcontext wherein paramilitary threats force small peasant landholders to sell andleave their land.

I. INTRODUCTION

The idea that places

are socially and politically constructed is a recurring

statement within the social sciences. However, one question always remains

unanswered: what agents and processes actually build political landscapes

in the contemporary liberal world? The question is how to address the

relationship between politics and places, and assemble the image of a

landscape of so many different authorities in a shared space. One of the

main scenarios for analyzing such a broad issue is understanding the legal

field as a political arena that has been co-opted by legality through a

process called the legalization of politics (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006).

In fact, this process has advanced paradoxically, or even inherently, in the

midst of violence. Hence, the legal possibilities of producing an effect on

space coexist with strongly spatialized de facto sovereignties like those


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resulting from the violent rule exerted by guerrillas and paramilitaries

scattered all over the world. In addition, lived and imagined places are also

the result of a wide multiplicity of agents, like NGOs, corporations, and

private actors. This enlargement of the political arena has been addressed

as one of the key features of neoliberalism engendered through processesof state retrieval or within a structural state absence. The latter political

configuration is not new for postcolonial states or for those so-called

failed states (see Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Coronil 1997, 2001;

Das and Poole 2004).

This article is part of a broad research that seeks to analyze the variety

of actors that configure political landscapes within the practice of legal

multiculturalism in Colombia (South America), exploring the intricacies of

the coexistence between legality and violence. I focus on the reconfiguration

of indigenous and peasant land tenure in the Sierra Nevada de SantaMarta, in the Caribbean coast of northern Colombia, and the political

arrangements that have allowed and conditioned such a territorial reform

during the period following the 1991 Constitutional Reform. I propose two

different levels of analysis and themes in this article.

The first level intends to illuminate the different agents, processes, and

projects, as well as state and nonstate institutions, that play a central role in

regularizing and determining the scope of multicultural legal arrangements

in Colombiaa characteristic of the contemporary realm of the political

in liberal democracies. Such a diversity of agents, processes, and institu-tional actors complicates the instruments, consequences, and expectations

of the political regulation of differential rights. For instance, it is

important to denaturalize the association of multiculturalism as a political

utopia for social emancipation that contests and creates new social

possibilities within a highly unstable political context due to the ongoing

violence between state, guerrilla, and paramilitary forces (see Cepeda 2001;

Garca Villegas 2001). In fact, the conjunction of different authorities,

including state institutions, corporations, religious groups, NGOs,

indigenous organizations, and what in Colombia are called agents at themargin of the law (agentes al margen de la ley), builds very different

multicultural landscapes that coexist. Thus, all of those landscapes need to

be analyzed in order to address the political potentiality of multiculturalism;

instead of assuming its a priori

emancipatory political potential.

This article also seeks to contribute to a second set of debates in the

social sciences: the relevance of spatial analyses for understanding politics.

Indeed, multiculturalism creates and reifies political frontiersboth

spatially and discursivelybetween grantees and nongrantees of differential

citizenship. Frontiers, as Barth (1969) stated long ago, are physical as wellas symbolic constructions. In this article I focus on the analysis of a


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309

order to analyze authority and power relations, we have to study the

different places constructed by social interactionsat the level of the lived,

conceived, and imagined places, following Lefebvres famous triad (1991).

There have been many debates regarding the conceptualization between

politics and space within the social sciences. Here, I follow Casey (1998)and a number of other authors (Smith 2003; Escobar 2001) who address

space as a concept that refers to a location and characteristics of its

physical dimensions and prefer the usage of place as a far more tailored

concept . . . of considerably greater utility within social science research

as it refers to specific locations invested with meanings . . . places within

specific histories (Smith 2003: 32). As Gupta and Ferguson affirm, an

important topic to analyze is the process whereby a space achieves a

distinctive identity as a place by foregrounding the spatial distribution

of hierarchical power relations (1992: 8). A socially historicized notionof place is associated with the conceptualization of the notion of territory,

widely used in the Colombian context. Territory, as it is mobilized within

multicultural arrangements, incorporates the sense of a spatial extension,

a cultural claim to ancestral territory, and a legal jurisdiction negotiated

within the Colombian nation-state. Those three levels and meanings of

spatiality are essential for understanding the configuration of frontiers

between indigenous peoples and peasants within the current multicultural

moment.

The peasant/indigenous binary I analyze, is not used in other Colombiancontexts (mainly in the Andean area) or in other Latin American nations

in which these categories are used interchangeably and even as synonyms.

Authors like Marisol de la Cadena (2000), Xavier Alb (2002), David Gow

and Joanne Rappaport (2002) who examine the cases of Peru, Bolivia, and

Colombia, respectively, recognize the close connection of the categories of

race and class and of Indian and mestizo. In contrast, in the Sierra Nevada,

peasants are understood and addressed through a class and economic

category, while the indigenous communities are understood and addressed

as a cultural and state-recognized ethnic concept. The information andanalysis regarding the conceptualization and mobilization of those catego-

ries to effect land tenure is the result of one year of fieldwork carried out

during 2006 with some short visits in 2008 in seven different towns where

indigenous peoples are buying peasant land in the Sierra Nevada (Cuesta

Plata, La Mesa, la Honda, Pueblo Bello, Costa Rica, Santana, Jimain) and

the analysis in state institutions, NGOs, and indigenous organizations in

Santa Marta and Valledupar.

To understand the current frontiers between peasants and indigenous

peoples, I address three determinant locations and mechanisms that dictatethe possibilities of these groups to access land tenure. These legal and


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hegemony of an environmental rhetoric linking indigenous groups to

ecological conservation, and the violent context that forces peasants to

displace. Territory, as a legal concept, will be addressed in the first section

through the analysis of the spatial imagination and consolidation of the

legal connection created between an

ethnic group to a

territory. Thisconnection was legally regularized by the Constitution drafted in 1991 and

by the jurisprudence of the National Constitutional Court. I trace the

means used by indigenous organizations to expand their territories, mainly

through the creation of state-recognized reservations (

resguardos

) and

through private land purchases. In the second part of this article, I analyze

the interplay between opposing representations of what constitutes an

indigenous landscape and a peasant one. These are strong imaginations

of cultural places or territories, to borrow Raffles (2002) notion, which

drastically and violently encapsulate communities in a utopic and fixedrepresentational place. Currently, the correspondence between indigenous

peoples and the environment is leading the process of ethnic land expansion.

Such a discourse is not only mobilized by indigenous groups but also by

NGOs, international cooperation agencies, and economic groups who see

indigenous peoples as natural conservationists.

In the final section I seek to explore the economic and political conditions

of peasant displacement within the context of violence and paramilitary

rule in the area. The meaning of a free realty market in which both

indigenous peoples and peasants interact to buy and sell their land has tobe reexamined under the violent context of the Sierra Nevada de Santa

Marta area. In fact, environmental discourse represents an indigenous

representation of place that becomes a fetish, masking the actual political

and economic procedures through which an agrarian reform is actually

taking place. Thus, there is a pervasive irony shared in various contexts of

continuous violence where the consolidation and imagination of places as

utopias is built upon places of deception, the ironic and painful pendulum

between violence and hope. The irony is based on different and, in most

cases, competing rationales of political and spatial economies such asenvironmental conservation and agrarian development.

II. ETHNICITY

IN

AND AS

A TERRITORY

The strong and necessary association between ethnicity and territory is

an old trope in legal anthropological studies and a recurrent topic of

discussion (see Nader 1969, 1990; Greenhouse 1996; Darian-Smith 1999;

Merry 2000, 2001; Coutin 2003). The deployment of this connection ispresent in academic circles as well as in social movements. However, legal


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common to these various positions, nevertheless, is the importance that

demands on territory have had worldwide for indigenous peoples. The

different discourses mobilized for advancing such negotiations include

claims of ancestral territory, precolonial inhabitance, colonial contracts,

and cultural spatial connections.The multicultural legal framework in Colombia granted to ethnic groups,

and especially to indigenous peoples, has been inextricably linked to space.

This has led to a spatial exceptionalism of rights

in which indigenous

peoples acquired a number of rights that were circumscribed by a legally

and physically bounded territory, a resguardo. Resguardos are the collectiveand legally inalienable property of the ethnic group. These territorial

arrangements have become a progressive icon of Colombian multiculturalism,

despite the fact that ethnic groups only account for 3.4 percent of the

Colombian population, and in spite of the history of resguardos

as a colonialconfiguration. In turn, multiculturalism has been used as a democratic

symbol for the Colombian state since its institutional inclusion and

recognition in the 1991 Constitutional Assembly. It was at this time that

ethnic rights as well as many other progressive democratic arrangements

were made possible through an interesting political process that included

members of ex-guerilla movements, ethnic groups, religious minorities, and

marginal political parties (see Jackson 2007; Padilla 1996; Rappaport 1996;

Van Cott 2000).

The interrelation between space and ethnicity has been intensely regulatedby the Colombian Constitutional Court, the main state agent favoring the

consolidation of multiculturalism (see Cepeda 2001; Pineda 2001). Moreover,

ethnic minority rights have been addressed as a means to achieve the

emancipatory role of the Court, a characteristic that is now widely

recognized in the legal and activist arena, especially due to the violent and

conflictive political field in which legality is practiced in Colombia (see

Cepeda 2004; Garca Villegas et al. 2006; Sousa Santos and Rodrguez

2005). The Court jurisprudence regarding multicultural ethnic rights does

not follow a clear path as it hinges on two very contextual and complex judgments regarding the meaning of alterity and ethnic territory. On the

one hand, as one of the magistrates writes: the greater the degree of

conservation, the greater the degree of autonomy (Cepeda 2001: 235). On

the other hand, it is constantly stated in Court rulings that there are two

aspects used to regulate multiculturalism: the subjective or personal

character and the geographical character. The intricacies of the

Colombian Courts jurisprudence come from the complex endeavor of

defining the meaning of greater degree of conservation and defining the

limits of indigenous territorial jurisdiction. The Court uses notions ofacculturation without any clear approach or statement about the meaning


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territorial space (

mbito territorial

) (for a legal-anthropological analysis,

see Bocarejo 2008; Vera 2006).

The Court follows human ecology and essentialist models of culture that

in turn are the basis for: (1) considering the right to territory for indigenous

peoples as a fundamental right, (2) mobilizing the closeness between Indiansand nature and representing these communities as protectors of the

environment, (3) addressing ethnic acculturation as a category given to

members of ethnic communities who do not live within an indigenous

territory, and (4) creating opposed community representations between

Indians and peasants in which the latter do not have any cultural connec-

tions with the territory.

These legal approaches, also deployed in a variety of state and nonstate

institutions, explain how even in a world context of deterritorialization,

due to the dynamics of informational flows that build ethnoscapes,ideospaces, and mediaspaces (Appadurai 1996), the connection between

ethnicity and space is reified in the political context of multiculturalism. Thus,

in contrast to what Gupta and Ferguson affirm (1992: 7) multiculturalism

did not become a feeble acknowledgement of the fact that cultures have

lost their moorings in definite places. In contexts like the Colombian one,

multiculturalism acquires a very definite form through space and has as

raison dtre

the close interconnection between an

ethnicity and a

place.

Hence, legal multiculturalism binds a geography of imagination to a

geography of governance, that is, the construction of an other to theconsolidation of an apparatus to govern and regulate difference. In fact, the

new Constitution presented itself as a conceptual grid

for state governance

and practice by creating and assembling socio-political spaces that included

indigenous resguardos.

Despite this legal acknowledgement and recognition of indigenous

spaces, resguardos

remain somehow illegible to the state because of the

recognition of customary law and the legitimate power exerted by indigenous

authorities within their jurisdictions. In addition, the hyperlocality of

ethnicity is contested by indigenous peoples through two main processes: byrelocating themselves in cities and actively asking for recognition within

urban spaces and by expanding their land through private land purchases

outside of the state channels of resguardo

delimitation. In the following

section, I analyze the processes of resguardo

consolidation and the

land-buying practices that became the principal means of indigenous land

expansion in the Sierra Nevada.

III. INDIGENOUS TERRITORY: RESGUARDOS

AND PRIVATE-COLLECTIVE LAND


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private donations, and state-allocated money transfers. Since colonial times,

resguardos

have been used effectively by the state to spatially bind ethnicity

and to ensure ethnic legibility (Agudelo 1980; Friede 1944, 1999; Herrera

1999). Legibility meant the production of both a language and a knowledge

for governance and of theoretical and empirical tools that classify andregulate collectivities (Trouillot 2001: 125, see also Scott 1998). The political

meaning behind these territorial and political arrangements has changed

historically. In colonial times these territories were judged as sites for

economic exploitation, whereas today that are viewed as crucial conditions

for guaranteeing ethnic autonomy. Even before the 1991 institutionaliza-

tion of multicultural rights in the National Constitution, indigenous social

movements were able to negotiate the delimitation of resguardos in someareas of Colombia. In the case of the indigenous groups of the Sierra

Nevada de Santa Marta, two resguardos

were legally constituted in 1981:the Arhuaco, comprising 196,000 hectares, and the Kogui-Malayo, with

384,000 hectares. In 2003, indigenous Kankuamos were granted a resguardo

of 26.995 hectares. The number of indigenous peoples living in the area is

21,357 (not counting the kankuamo community that was not included in

the 1993 census).

The jurisdictional articulation of resguardos

in the Sierra Nevada de

Santa Marta is far from simple since the resguardos

are divided in two

different state departments (Magdalena and Cesar), and some areas of these

territories overlap with one national park (Parque Natural Sierra Nevada),one archaeological park (Parque Arqueolgico Ciudad Perdida), and a

Unesco Biosphere Reserve. The jurisdictional complexity of resguardos

is

amplified by the manner in which they were consolidated by giving legal

title to land considered wasteland (

balda

)even if in some cases they were

occupied by peasantsand by directly purchasing peasant land. This

resguardo delimitation process has also been accompanied by the legalrecognition in 1973 of the indigenous conceived place through a legal

resolution from the Colombian Ministry of Government. The resolution

states that there is a

lnea negra

or black line that symbolicallydemarcates the culture of the Arhuaco, Kogi and Malayo groups settled in

the Sierra Nevada of Cesar. The black line is shaped by sites that are

considered mystic symbols by these cultures and constituting fundamental

elements in their concept of universal equilibrium. The delimitation of this

cultural boundary was primarily institutionalized in order to grant these

communities the right to access those sacred sites and spaces for making

offerings (Ministerio de Gobierno 1973: 12).

More importantly, the resolution argues that not having access to these

spatial symbols affects the psychological state of indigenous peoples of theSierra Nevada and is a factor that hinders their normal development and


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response: all the traditional families of the city of Valledupar who have

controlled the local politics for decades and additionally own large

extensions of land. Nevertheless, there has been a state recognition of an

indigenous conceived space that includes all the mountain region of the

Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the lower slopes, and even the capitalcity of Cesar (Valledupar), territories that seem far way from the initial

resguardo

area. The lnea negra

is constantly represented in maps actively

mobilized by the indigenous organization and by the NGOs working with

them.

An additional mechanism for expanding the indigenous territory

contests the rationalities of private and collective land ownership. This

modality is somehow illegible to the state because it is not completely

followed or accounted for by any state institution. How then is this new

form of land tenure shaped and created by indigenous organizations? Landtitling processes and taxation are the key factors that must be considered

for answering this question. Land is purchased following the regular legal

procedures, just like in any private contract. Nevertheless, the actual land

title is held by the indigenous community, or the land is held in

coownership between the mayors office and the indigenous community,

or, even entitled to the Cabildo Gobernador

, the indigenous legal representa-

tive. These variations have strong implications in terms of cadastral records

and, thus, land taxes. In fact, indigenous reservations do not pay municipal

land taxes, since these are paid directly by the Colombian Treasury(

Ministerio de Hacienda

). Currently, new parcels are acquired by purchasing

peasant farms. Nonetheless, these parcels of land do not become reservation

territory immediately based on the sole fact that ownership is now held by

an indigenous organization.

However, in the tax office of the municipality of Valledupar, most of the

new farms bought are automatically included in the list of land holdings as

reservations so that the Colombian Treasury also pays for those taxes.

Why? Basically because the tax office does not differentiate between parcels,

whose ownership is collectively held by the community and are part of staterecognized reservation, from the new parcels bought in the name of the

community that are, oxymoronic, as it may seem, private-communal

land. These individual land parcels are assumed to be collectively owned

yet appear in tax and cadastral records as corporate property, that is, under

the ownership of indigenous organizations.

The money for acquiring private land comes from fundraising activities

that include the support of various NGOs (Fundacin ProSierra Nevada de

Santa Marta, Nature Conservancy, Tayrona Heritage Trust, Tchendukua

Ici et Ailleurs), international cooperation funds, and private donations byforeign citizens (mostly from the United States, France, Wales, and Spain).


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used mainly for buying purposes (even though state transferencias

are

semiautonomously managed).

The procedure for indigenous leaders to receive these funds has involved,

until now, two crucial and unavoidable steps: drafting a yearly investment

budget and submitting it either to the governor or mayors office. This hasmeant that indigenous communities can only receive these funds indirectly.

The negotiations with the mayors office have been positive regarding land

expansion; in 2004, the money accounted for land purchases (

ampliacin ysaneamiento

) of the Arhuaco indigenous territory in the amount of 764,

679, 963.78 pesos (around 56 percent and about $382,340). In 2003, the per-

centage spent in land was around 60 percent, and in 2002, the amount spent

was around 59.4 percent. However, for other areas in Colombia, the idea of

an autonomous usage of state transferencias

has been more complicated

and a topic arduously debated (Chaves and Hoyos 2008).

IV. THE REAL POWER OF IMAGINED PLACES: PEASANT VS. INDIGENOUS

LANDSCAPES

Identity and difference are mobilized through contested and sometimes

openly reified processes of representation. Alcida Ramos (1994: 161), follow-

ing Baudrillards words, shows how activism creates a

simulacrum

through

which the real Indian is transformed into a hyperreal representation: thesubstitution of signs of the real for the real itself. The ideal Indian became

an NGO ethical hologram (ibid.) or as Hale (2004) calls it, an image of the

indio permitido

(allowed Indian), which is based on strong utopian ideals

and broad economic models of environmental conservation and activism.

Indeed, the utopia of an environmental haven is associated strictly and

uniquely with indigenous peoples. This process is driving an indigenous

agrarian reform as well as the construction of new frontiersspatial,

discursive, and symbolicbetween indigenous peoples and their peasant

neighbors. This responds to what a number of authors in the Latin Americancontext and other parts of the world have called environmentality

: the tech-

nologies of environmental government and their relationship with changes

in human subjectivities (Agrawal 2005, see also Kosek 2006; Ulloa 2005).

In fact, the main discourses mobilized by environmental NGOs,

indigenous organizations, and some activists in favor of indigenous territorial

expansion result from rigid presuppositions regarding their lived and

imagined place; these places are the direct opposite stereotypes of what

peasantry and the places occupied by peasants represent. As such, an

indigenous landscape is immediately associated with environmental con-servation while a peasant one is linked to agricultural development. The


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Currently, the representation of an indigenous environmental landscape

favors indigenous land expansion in the Sierra Nevada. This is primarily

done by buying the farms owned by peasants all over the mountain,

including territories that are not even close to the boundaries of the state

consolidated resguardos. Legal, state, and nonstate institutions attributingsuch green characteristics to indigenous land tenure have become key

mechanisms through which indigenous land claims have been fostered.

Within these different locations of negotiation, indigenous conceptions of

territory become overly and overtly simplified under the rubric of environ-

mentally friendly inhabitants. This is a commonly known association in

Latin America, but we can recognize two different trends that roughly

divide highland indigenous populations of the Andes to lowland indigenous

peoples. The first indigenous groups are connected to sustainable agricultural

practices and eco-farming, and, in contrast, the latter are addressed as theguardians or savers of an untouched ecological environment (see Conklin

1997; Graham 2002; Ulloa 2005).

In turn, the idea of a peasant landscape is also presented in a rather

simplistic manner and homogenized as the assemblage of agricultural

practices that do not have any particular meaning and/or cultural concep-

tion of place. The indigenous connection to territory is contrasted in the

public imaginary with peasants who live through cultural land detachment.

Thus, it was not by mere chance that in a meeting on territorial reorganiza-

tion in the Sierra Nevada, one NGO representative addressed indigenouspeoples as descendants of the pre-Hispanic Tairona group and peasants,

actually called colonos

or colonizers, as descendants of the Spanish

Conquistadors. Moreover, indigenous institutions, as well as government

and NGO officials, commonly and rather unthinkingly call the process of

buying peasant land as saneamiento

, which means literally cleansing, and

underscores the connections of peasants to their land and their historicity in

those places.

Identity making is constructed via strong and fixed imaginations of

space, which in turn are mobilized to delimit access to land. Such a transla-tion process is, in theory, targeted to reshape a lived space that includes,

in Lefebvre and Harveys account (1989: 218), the material spatial practices,

the physical and material flows, and the transfers and interactions that

occur in and across space. However, the mobilization of fixed indigenous

and peasant landscapes has created strong imagined places, using

Raffles (2002) concept, which become socially alienating and withering. In

fact, the indigenous community is constructed through fixed images of

environmental conservation that serve the purpose of creating a utopian

spatial arrangement that actively silence the lived and conceived indigenousspace.


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multiculturalism. It highlights the complex context in which ethnic rights

are mobilized and the potentiality for negotiation under what Hale (2002)

calls neoliberal multiculturalism. In addition, it reflects the manner in

which the representation of an indigenous landscape is not particularly

informed by any detailed account of an indigenous lived space. In short,what counts is the imagination of a utopian environmentally conserved place

rather than the actual people and their real places. Finally, the indigenous

territorial expansion process, although backed by the members of the

indigenous group, is also openly criticized amongst them. Discontent rises

from the unconformity of the land distribution process within the community,

the lack of leaders presence, and the general feeling of abandonment and

isolation felt by the indigenous inhabitants of the newly bought areas.

How can the unfulfilled expectations of well-being expressed by peasants

be incorporated under the conceptualization of such a strong environmental-indigenous imagination? How do we deal with the fact that electricity,

water treatment plants, schools, and generally all the unsatisfied basic needs

clash with the imagination of an ecological haven? This utopian (or rather

dystopian) clash, as well as the despair felt by peasant communities, is

constantly evidenced in the environmental conservation projects in which

they are allowed to participate, mostly as peripheral actors.

One example of this clash is an environmental recovery project located

in the Clavos River basin in the southern side of the Sierra Nevada. The

project was organized by the Arhuaco Indigenous Organization (CIT) andthe National Parks Office during 2003, and because of the specific location

where the project was to be developed, these institutions asked for the

intervention of the Colombian Coffee Federation, which, in most cases, is

the only institution working with and on behalf of peasants and indigenous

communities. In one of the preliminary meetings in the village of La

Honda, the project managers asked peasants of the area to draw three

maps: one of the past, one of the present, and one of the future. The map

of the future raised a number of issues, becoming an object of much

discussion and conflict. The map poignantly materialized in paper a utopianand imagined future that included schools, water treatment plants, roads,

power lines, and sports centers (see Figure 1).

The exercise was made all the more touching because a majority of the

peasants who drew and worked on the map were born in the area or had

arrived after fleeing from other parts of the country during the Colombian

period of violence in the 1950s (known as La Violencia

). In one of the

participants words, we drew a map of the future, we added electricity, a

high school, and we designed all the farms and houses so that they would

have electricity and created a beautiful future. However, in contrast to theopinions expressed by the peasant community, the indigenous representa-


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Honda did not correlate with the proposal expectations where maps of thefuture were supposed to have a lot more green in them.

Under such a strictly imagined relationship between indigenous peoples

and the protection of the environment, what is left for peasants if they want

to work on environmental projects? There are three main preoccupations

constantly addressed by peasants who have been able to participate, even if

only tangentially, in environmental projects. The first one is that they nor-

mally only participate in workshops and receive environment education

(through handbooks) related to waste disposal and watershed protection.

As a peasant affirmed, projects managed by indigenous leaders or theNational Parks Unit usually never take us into account for any real plan

Figure 1. Map of the Future or the Useless Map. Source: Colombian CoffeeFederation Office Valledupar.


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manage the waste of cultivation areas or around the houses, a problem that

you see in indigenous and peasant farms. Thus, there are no real joint

environmental projects between peasants and indigenous peoples in the

area. Moreover, the environmental efforts rest mainly on buying land to

indigenous peoples.The second most reiterated comment of the peasant population regarding

environmental conservation projects is that the programs that are directed

to the indigenous community could also be of great use to them. In fact,

NGOs and state agencies have been asked to design environmental projects

to accommodate the interests of indigenous communities, reshaping

them in order to fit their cultural difference, as one environmental NGO

representative affirmed. However, most of the projects actually taken to the

field do not involve a differential approach based on culture. For example,

there is funding directed to create small rural aqueducts and building watertanks for the indigenous community. Thus, as one peasant affirms, we all

need water, and any improvement in the service and maintenance of the

water is useful for everyone, that is a real project of environmental pro-

tection directed to preserve watersheds.

The third problem related to the participation of peasants in environmental

protection projects is the open refusal of many of the indigenous authorities

to include peasants in environmental projects financed by NGOs and

international cooperation organizations. This is one of the most poignant

issues because it has been assumed that the best way to protect and restorethe environment in Colombia can be met by granting more land to the

indigenous population. In practice, this means that peasants will have no

further opportunity or possibility of living or working in these territories

no future, no land.

In sum, we are evidencing an environmental fetishism that constructs

and directs the meaning of indigenous subjectivities and their relationship

to space. As a fetish, it stands for indigenous peoples masking the actual

political economy behind the process of territorial expansion. As I will

show in the final section of this article, it is important to reexamine thenotion of a free realty market as a transparent medium and scenario

through which territorial configuration is being carried out in countries

such as Colombia.

V. PEASANT LAND SALES: A FREE REALTY MARKET?

The often-quoted statement that places never stay still and are always in a

process of formation (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Harvey 1989; Lefebvre1991), acquires a dramatic meaning in the context of violence and political


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sales. The two most frequent explanations offered to me as to why peasants

were selling their land were, it is a process of indigenous land recuperation

and peasants are not forced to sell. Both arguments are quite overt in the

sense that they do not explain why peasants sell but rather denote the fact

that indigenous land purchases are: (1) perceived to be an accomplishmentand (2) a process ruled by the real estate markets invisible hand, since

peasants want to sell and Indians want to buy, each one maximizing

their own self-interests.

The first statement emphasizes the process of indigenous land expansion

addressed as a recovery of their ancestral territory, which is exceptional

in and of itself if we take into account the incredibly difficult conditions

they face. Nevertheless, the other side of the process, the real reason of how

and why land is offered, is completely silenced. Many people, including

those called indigenistas (pro-indigenous intellectuals, activists, etc.), mainlyliving in cities, see the process as a land reform over elites and owners of

large extensions of land (latifundistas or terratenientes). However, the mainportions of land that are bought come from smallholders who have

themselves lived at the margins of the state and have intricate stories of

displacement and violence. Moreover, if any portion of the population is

actually winning anything, it would actually be the local elites whose

lands remain untouched.

The second statement regarding peasant land sale is probably the more

complicated one because it follows the rational logic of a free market inwhich a person sells or buys driven by his/her own initiative. From this

point of view, the process is clear, unproblematic, and an expression of free

will. However, a closer analysis of the social and political context in which

the vendors are located reveals two intertwined circumstances that explain

the decision: claims of state abandonment and the constantly shifting

authority and violence, mainly between guerrilla and paramilitary forces.

Under such circumstances, what freedom and choice mean in real life

must be reconsidered.

The many cases of displacement and land sales illuminate repetitivehistories that hold more than a family resemblance, being the result of

broad active struggles inserted within the Colombian nation-state building

process. The disillusion expressed by peasants regarding state absence

results in an initial and painful claim: the unfulfillment of the basic

fundamental right of the Constitution, the right to life. As Don Pedro, a

local peasant from the region affirmed, we have been waiting for electricity,

a well maintained road, and at least one policeman but we have never

received anything. One of the most serious symptoms perceived by young

peasants who are slowly taking charge of their family farms is that it isinconceivable that our 70 and 80 year old fathers and grandfathers are


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322 LAW & POLICY July 2009

holdings to indigenous peoples. In Cuesta Plata, a village in the Sierra, due

to a violent intrusion of paramilitary forces, many peasants sold their land,

and many openly thanked indigenous leaders for having bought it. The his-

tories of horror, murders, and relentless persecution in the area are evidenced

in the desolate landscape from which most peasants left. Only a few arecoming back to reorganize the house, with their wounded families and

missing the beloved ones they lost because of the ongoing violence.

The regret expressed by peasants relates to their personal, affective, and

meaningful links to a place and to a sense of community shared with their

neighbors (vecinos) with whom they have worked and struggled together inany number of projects aimed at constructing, shaping, and giving

meaning to their village. During the 1990s, Cuesta Plata was seen as an

example of economic as well as peasant social organization. Together with the

Colombian Coffee Federation, peasants were able to make investment plansin order to produce quality coffee, build ecological processing stations,

improve their homes, build wood-burning stoves that consume less wood

with lower levels of smoke, and have sanitary systems (basically toilets) in

each house. Peasant regret also emerges from the negotiation procedures

used by indigenous leaders. The discontent rises from the low prices paid

for the land, due to the highly violent context of the area, and the extra

charge of a commission paid to the indigenous representative in control of

the land negotiation.

State institutions have not created any following plan or analysisregarding peasant displacement. This also has been the case of the human

rights institutions working in the area. On a general basis, these institutions

and programs have tried to make the political instability or hyperstability

of power under paramilitary rule in the Sierra visible. However, many

peasants who sold their land because of direct threats made by guerrilla or

paramilitary forces feel resentment for not having been helped or backed by

any state institution or any of the human rights agencies operating in the

area. The causes of such silencing are complex and multiple, and most of

them surpass the power and actual operational capacity of human rightsagencies.

The first problem emerges from the fact that most human rights agencies

only move into action once they receive a case declaring violations. This

procedure works when there are actual political organizations making

active denunciations, which is precisely the case of indigenous peoples. For

peasants, the situation involves great risks because there are no strong

political organizations acting on their behalf, and violations must then be

denounced individually. Another key issue is that given the prevalent

organizational structure of most human rights agencies, they conduct verylittle fieldwork, and victims do not have a direct relationship with the


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Colombian Defensora del Pueblo1 (Peoples Defense Office) has a fieldofficer who follows cases of human rights violations in the affected areas,

but the job description is limited to indigenous communities. The staff of

the Organization of American States also moves around several areas, but

they have very strict diplomatic protocols that limit the sorts of cases theycan handle.

Finally, most of the funding available for human rights programs in the

area is directed to indigenous populations. Paradoxically, apart from the

Kankuamo indigenous group that suffered some of the worst political

violence in the area, most of the victims in the Sierra Nevada are peasants.

Thus, there are a number of short- or medium-term projects designed by

the Colombian state and other local NGOs funded by U.S. and European

NGOs working on human rights, but the target populations are indigenous

communities. A representative ofPrograma por la Paz (Program for Peace),a human rights project working with indigenous peoples recognized two

main obstacles for working actively with peasants: the fact that most funding is

directed to indigenous communities and the reticence of indigenous leaders

to include peasant communities in human rights projects and agendas. In

fact, negotiating the inclusion of peasants in these projects might shut

down the door of working with indigenous communities.

In sum, peasant displacement is silenced, and the easy rhetoric of a free

realty market prevails in the area. There are some indigenous factions that

acknowledge the difficult peasant position and, as one indigenous leaderaffirmed people might think that the indigenous sector does not care about

peasant communities, and in a sense that has been the case because we buy

their land and do not care about their future, however we have noticed

that because of the governments situation peasants are really in a terrible

position. This harsh statement made by one indigenous leader is rarely

echoed, and neither the state nor any other civil society organization has

made clear or satisfactory attempts to work toward a territorial planning

that includes both indigenous peoples and peasants.

VI. CONCLUSIONS

Multiculturalism, as any other legal and political configuration, is regulated

through different means and actors that determine its scope of action. Legal

codes must be therefore analyzed jointly with legal regulations and practices

that respond to broad political interactions. Legality is addressed as a

political configuration and not as an independent field. Hence, neither state

institutions nor the legal field has complete control over the conditions ofmulticultural ethnic recognition. In the Colombian case analyzed in this


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multicultural political landscape. The alliances, disputes, and also the

silences of such a wide variety of actors configure the extent of indigenous

claims over territorythe translation of a legal state recognition into a real

and physical territory.

A simplistic approach to the process of indigenous land expansion wouldassert the success of multicultural rights and policies in reconfiguring the

political location of communities historically subjected to state marginality.

In contrast, I privilege a more nuanced and detailed account through an

ethnographic approach that seeks to include the perceptions of both

grantees and nongrantees of differential citizenship, the observation and

analysis of the discursive and physical spatial frontiers created between

peasants and indigenous peoples, and the study of the different authorities

that coalesce to shape the access and use of land in the area. Such an

analysis gives us wider and stronger analytical tools to understand the realmulticultural scope of indigenous territorial reorganization and its social

and political potentiality.

In this article, I highlighted four key issues necessary to understand

indigenous land expansion within the context of multicultural recognition:

(1) the means both discursive and material through which land expansion is

being carried out (the consolidation of resguardos by the state, indigenousorganization maneuvers to spend most of the state transfer money to buy

land, and indigenous alliances with NGOs and environmental projects); (2)

the violent context of paramilitary rule that illuminates the strength ofindigenous mobilization within such an adverse milieu but also the

vulnerability of small peasant landholders who are forced to leave; (3) the

reification of political subjectivities, in this case peasant and indigenous,

that evidences a change in the balance of power given the political visibility

of indigenous organizations in the area; and (4) the wide variety of actors

that directly or indirectly participate in the process of indigenous land

expansion.

These different problematiques, in turn, help explain the manner in which

territory has become an idiom of dispute and also of group characterizationand differentiation between peasants and indigenous peoples. The political

mobilization of an indigenous versus a peasant territory linked a geography

of imagination (through which the symbolic and discursive boundaries of

communities were shaped) to a geography of management and legibility

(through which communities were spatially located and rendered legible).

Those two geographies are mapped by a strong connection or isomorphism

between territory and ethnicity that openly redefined the boundaries

between peasants and indigenous peoples. These frontiers are represented

through fixed images of the landscape each group is supposed to embodyand represent. However, the problem is not whether developmental and


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The incommensurability hinges on the fact that locality becomes

inscribed in people (Raffles 2002), a statement that goes beyond affirming

that a society produces a space (Lefebvre 1991). Thus, indigenous conceptionsof place, and their mobilization within the political and economic arenas of

environmentalism, multiculturalism, and humanitarianism, became necessaryconditions to directly and indirectly effect a land reform and, broadly, the

territorial access of indigenous and peasant communities.

The coming into being of a utopian indigenous landscape in spite ofandbecause of peasant deception cannot be addressed as a mere unintendedconsequence. On the contrary, it is the result of denying and making invisible

particular histories and historicities associated with place. Indeed, marking

and pointing out people also means excluding others, and the consequences

are far reaching in a volatile socio-political context such as the one found in

Colombia. The alienation, implicit and complicit with the construction ofcommunity fixed representations, contrasts with the lived histories of

displacement and violence informing peasant land sale. As such, what

we encounter is an environmental fetish that becomes the acceptable face

of indigenous peoples and of their territorial expansion while masking the

intricate conditions of possibility allowing the land reform process and the

actual indigenous lived space.

Environmental fetishism, just like as any other fetishism (commodity

fetishism or state fetishism; see Abrams 1988; Spyer 1998; Taussig 1997), masks

a distinct political economy conditioned by a variety of actors using nationaland international resources of environmental protection while also hiding the

constant struggle between paramilitary, guerrilla, and state forces. In the

final instance what is fetishized is the active silence of the state, NGOs,

indigenous organizations, economic groups, and human rights activists.

This attitude echoes the pervasive silence about the indigenous territorial loss

during past decades and also nowadays in other Colombian contexts.

Hence, what we are experiencing is a local transformation in power

relations but not the contestation of the continuous social and political

invisibilities of the Colombian nation. The multicultural turn implied theindigenous recognition but also the twirl of a peasant silence in the area

under study. Nevertheless, histories are irreducible (Trouillot 2003), and

that is why we must analyze the different actors, processes, and imaginations

that not only illuminate the fetish but also historicize it.

diana bocarejo is Professor at the Escuela de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad delRosario in Bogot, Colombia. She finished her PhD in Anthropology at the University

of Chicago, and her research interests include legal and political anthropology andcultural spatial studies. Her research analyzes legal multiculturalism focusing on the

l ti hi b t liti l t d (th l l j i d di


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NOTE

1. This government office is in charge of defending citizens fundamental rightsagainst violations.

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