The Antipode Graduate Student Scholarship

2012–2013 Winner

Territories of Life and Death

on a Colombian Frontier
Teo Ballvé
Department of Geography, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;
teo@nacla.org

Since the 1980s, the conflation of political violence and the cocaine boom have
devastated rural Colombia, fueling the displacement of some 4 million campesinos—
mainly by paramilitary groups. Colombia’s northwest region surrounding the
Gulf of Urabá has been an unruly epicenter for this mass of dispossessed
humanity. Established by narcotraffickers and agrarian elites, paramilitary groups
simultaneously act as drug-trafficking private militias and counterinsurgent
battalions, and they use land appropriation and agribusiness as conduits for money
laundering and illicit profit.
When paramilitaries assaulted Urabá in the 1990s, thousands of campesinos fled
their homes and, to this day, await government restitution of their lands. Other
peasants, however, have collectively mobilized and peacefully seized back portions
of their stolen farms from the armed groups. The Afro-Colombian campesinos
of the Curvaradó River, for instance, have established “humanitarian zones” and
“biodiversity zones” as a way of protecting themselves and inching back onto
their occupied farms. Few places in Colombia exhibit all these tendencies—forced
displacement, campesino militancy, and violent forms of accumulation and rule—in
such abundance as Urabá.
Urabá, however, is not simply a tale of political disorder. My research argues
that the region’s combustible mix of narco-driven economies of violence, peasant
struggles, and deeply contested forms of governance have converged into a deadly
form of frontier state formation. “Frontier” is not meant in any originary sense;
I deploy it critically to conjure the spatial production of places like Urabá in
Colombia’s historical geopolitical imaginaries as “stateless” and “savage” zones of
irreconcilable alterity (Serje 2005). While all the region’s social actors are implicated
in producing the norms and forms of everyday governance in this frontier zone—
despite evident imbalances in power relations—the violent incoherencies of this
process stem from the political alignments and misalignments of the multiple,
overlapping territorialities being produced.
Dominant narratives in Colombia claim the root of the problem afflicting places
such as Urabá is the historical and ongoing “absence of the state”. Paramilitary
commanders explicitly couch their activities as the “creation of a state in its absence”,
while local residents regularly lament their “abandonment” by the state. With this in

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mind, my research asks, how is “the state” produced in a region where it supposedly
does not exist? In other words, how does the abstraction of the state gain its everyday
socio-spatial dimensionality—materially and symbolically—through the confluence
of paramilitary networks, economies of violence, and peasant struggles? And how do
campesinos’ territorial assertions challenge Urabá’s ensembles of organized violence,
accumulation, and rule?
Struggles over the state in Colombia are being expressed and conducted
as territorial struggles; the various actors discussed in my research—whether
peasants, narco-paramilitaries, insurgents, landowners, or government agents—
are all in the “business” of producing territory (Brenner and Elden 2009). Indeed,
the interconnected dynamics of frontier governance, narco-fueled economies of
violence, and peasant resistance have made territory itself not only an object
of political contestation, but also a collective springboard for peasants’ reclamation
of stolen lands.
Even by conventional conceptions of the state, Urabá has hardly ever been
“stateless”. In fact, the efficiency with which paramilitaries seized the region in the
late 1990s was in part due to existing structures of government. Municipalities
had recently gained new political, administrative, and fiscal power under the
decentralization reforms of the 1991 Constitution, which was widely seen as a peace
offering of political inclusion to guerrillas. But it was the paramilitaries who harnessed
municipal structures, becoming the local handmaidens of the decentralization
process (Ballvé 2012a). Following practices pioneered by rebel forces, paramilitaries
not only infiltrated Juntas de Acción Comunal (Community Action Boards)—the
country’s most subsidiary form of local governance—they also established Juntas
where these did not exist.
Commanders began implementing agribusiness projects on displaced people’s
lands through a complex circuitry of local institutions, narco-capital, NGOs,
politicians, government grants, international aid, and private firms.1 The favored
form adopted by these paramilitary-backed agribusinesses is a type of corporate-
peasant contract farming dubbed “strategic alliances” that the government
and aid agencies have sometimes negligently helped fund. Under Washington’s
antidrug and counterinsurgency program known as Plan Colombia, USAID supports
“strategic alliances” with its “alternative development” programs in addition to
municipally oriented decentralization projects aimed at “local development” and
“institution building”.
Taking advantage of the strategic alliance structure, paramilitaries engaged in
widespread “land laundering” by divvying up vast swaths of land and parceling
them out to front men and sham “peasant cooperatives” (Ballvé 2012b). Discourses
of local, green, participatory, and multicultural grassroots development with their
attendant institutional forms and practices became utterly instrumental to how
the land grab was executed and laundered in practice. Paramilitaries churned up
the old spatialities of production and governance while consolidating new ones
that proved well aligned with government imperatives of counterinsurgency and
export agribusiness. In short, paramilitary activities are not anathema to projects
of liberal governance, usually associated with tropes of the “rule of law” and


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240 Antipode

“institution-building”; they are deeply tied to initiatives aimed at producing

governable spaces and subjects, expanding trade, and attracting capital.
The ongoing social, spatial, and historical production of the state as a “realized
abstraction” (Lefebvre 1991) in Urabá emerges from these intersecting and
contradictory forces operating at multiple scales—from campesino mobilization
and armed left vanguards, to narco-capitalist agribusiness and global geopolitics.
Through the situated struggles of these intersections, distinct territorialities align
and, fatefully, collide.
After the violent displacements of the late 1990s, the peasants of the Curvaradó
River began trickling back to portions of their lands, establishing small “humanitarian
zones” and “biodiversity zones”. Despite constitutionally protected status as
collectively titled Afro-Colombian property, most of the land remains controlled
by paramilitaries. Nonetheless, the campesinos have slowly expanded the zones,
incrementally encroaching onto their farms and forests. Marked by subsistence and
mixed agro-ecological practices, the motley landscapes of the reclaimed lands stand
in stark contrast to the grid-patterned plantations surrounding them.
Under siege by Urabá’s violent regimes of accumulation and rule, the Curvaradó’s
campesinos have articulated “global” discourses of humanitarianism, environmental
conservation, and ethnic rights with localized political cultures in defense of their
collective property, which they insistently call “territory”. While the discourses help
peasants gain a modicum of protection through transnational advocacy networks,
the state remains a central node of their political demands in so far as it is constantly
hailed as the principle arbiter—and violator—of their rights.
Despite being embedded in state-centric contemporary liberal praxis, the ethical-
political registers of these discourses are being repurposed by peasants in ways
that exceed liberal pretensions. Humanitarianism, environmental conservation, and
ethnic rights have become springboards toward more inventive and affirmative
political horizons that insist on the mutually constitutive integrity of life, land, and
livelihood—in shorthand, a politics of vitalism. Territory, as they conceive and enact
it, is the centerpiece of this political project. By trying to turn the tide against
paramilitary dominion through the production of territory, Curvaradó’s politics of
vitalism is a lived critique of the necropolitical “spaces of death” surrounding them
(Taussig 1984; Mbembe 2003). Indeed, when asked to define what “territory”
means, they simply respond, “Territorio es vida” (“Territory is life”).
This project emerged from 4 years in Colombia as a researcher and investigative
journalist covering similar issues. Before that, I worked for 5 years as an editor and
writer for the NACLA Report on the Americas, an independent left-wing journal on
Latin American affairs based in New York City. It was at NACLA that my interests
in research, writing, and politics first converged professionally; and it was with this
same hope of convergence that I returned to academia in 2009.
I am deeply honored and grateful to have received this generous award. It has
already helped me organize a panel at the 2012 Latin American Studies Association
conference. With perspectives from anthropology, geography, journalism, and
literary criticism, we discussed the theoretical, methodological, and narrative
challenges posed by the recent explosion of Latin America’s drug wars. The award


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Territories of Life and Death on a Colombian Frontier 241

is also helping finance travel for interviews with jailed paramilitary commanders.
Thank you, Antipode.

Acknowledgements
A heartfelt thanks also to my advisors and fellow graduate students at Berkeley for their
camaraderie and their imprint on this project.

Endnote
1
See my investigative reports: “The dark side of Plan Colombia” (Ballvé 2009); “La
telaraña de los ‘paras’ en Urabá” (Ballvé 2011).

References
Ballvé T (2009) The dark side of Plan Colombia. The Nation 15 June
Ballvé T (2011) La telaraña de los “paras” en Urabá. Verdad Abierta 14 June
Ballvé T (2012a) Everyday state formation: territory, decentralization, and the narco land-grab
in Colombia. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30(4):603–622
Ballvé T (2012b) “Grassroots Masquerades: Paramilitary Violence, Development, and Land-
Laundering.” Global Land Grabbing II conference, LDPI and Department of Development
Sociology, Cornell University, 17–19 October
Brenner N and Elden S (2009) Henri Lefebvre on state, space, and territory. International
Political Sociology 3(4):353–377
Lefebvre H (1991) Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1, Introduction. New York: Verso
Mbembe A (2003) Necropolitics. Public Culture 15(1):11–40
Serje M (2005) El revés de la nación: Territorios salvajes, fronteras y tierras de nadie. Bogotá:
Ediciones Universidad de Los Andes
Taussig M (1984) Culture of terror—space of death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and
the explanation of torture. Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(3):467–497


C 2012 The Author. Antipode 
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