Territory by dispossession : decentralization, statehood, and the narco land-grab in Colombia
Ballve, Teo
For decades, the coupled dynamics of the drug trade and political violence have fueled the displacement of more than four million campesinos in Colombia. Agribusiness developments on these violently stolen lands have become favored conduits for drugmoney laundering and profit by narco-paramilitaries, while also affording them military, political, and economic advantages through territorial control (Castillo 1987; Reyes 1997, 2009; Ballvv 2009). Drawing on investigative ethnographic fieldwork into these dynamics in Colombiaas northwest frontier region of Urabb, I examine how the Colombian state and its territory are dialectically produced and how this process was marshaled by the convergence of narco-paramilitary strategies and reforms aimed at state territorial restructuring through decentralization.1 I argue that Urabbás narco-driven economies of violence are not somehow anathema to projects of modern liberal statehooddusually associated with tropes of institution-buildingg and good governanceebut are deeply tied to initiatives aimed at making spaces governable, expanding global trade, and attracting capital.
Event: International Conference on Global Land Grabbing
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