Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlac20

‘Disenchanted with the state’: confronting the

limits of neoliberal multiculturalism in Colombia

Anthony Dest

To cite this article: Anthony Dest (2020) ‘Disenchanted with the state’: confronting the limits
of neoliberal multiculturalism in Colombia, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 15:4,
368-390, DOI: 10.1080/17442222.2020.1777728

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2020.1777728

Published online: 12 Jun 2020.

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LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES
2020, VOL. 15, NO. 4, 368–390
https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2020.1777728

‘Disenchanted with the state’: confronting the limits of

neoliberal multiculturalism in Colombia
Anthony Dest
Department of Anthropology, Lehman College, Bronx, NY

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The Colombian government’s embrace of multicultural policies in Anthropology of the state;
the 1990 s had far-reaching implications for black and indigenous autonomy; blackness;
struggles for self-determination and autonomy. In the context of Colombia; indigeneity; land
rights; multiculturalism;
widespread violence, multicultural policies seemed to offer
neoliberalism; self-
a semblance of protection. However, after nearly three decades of determination; social
multicultural reforms, black and indigenous communities continue movements; racism; violence
to face disproportionate violence and dispossession at the hands of
the state, multinational corporations, drug traffickers, and other
armed groups. This article explores the autonomy/inclusion dialec­
tic in order to understand why some black and indigenous social
movements are turning away from the state’s recognition policies.

Introduction
During meetings organized by social movements in southwestern Colombia, empty chairs
often line the front of packed assembly halls (See Figure 1). The chairs bear handwritten
signs indicating the name or position of the government officials invited to address the
concerns that prompted the mobilization. These chairs are rarely filled.

Figure 1. Empty chairs in Corinto, Cauca. Photo by Author (March 2017).

CONTACT Anthony Dest Email dest.anthony@gmail.com Department of Anthropology, Lehman College, Bronx,
NY 10468
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 369

In April 2019, Colombian President Ivan Duque left an empty seat in Caldono, Cauca
after massive protests blocked the Pan-American Highway for nearly a month. The Minga
in Defense of Life, Territory, Democracy, Justice, and Peace brought together more than
fifteen thousand people from black, indigenous, and peasant movements to denounce
the government’s empty promises. As an integral aspect of the culture and politics of
protest in Colombia, mingas are a form of collective action that draw from indigenous
approaches to communal labour in the Andes based in reciprocal solidarity. Even after
reaching a multi-million-dollar agreement that allocated funds and created policies
addressing the concerns of the protests, the organizers of the Minga insisted on speaking
with Duque. The President eventually made it to Caldono via helicopter but refused to
meet with the assembly due to supposed security concerns. His reluctance to face the
crowd opened up the possibility of a renewed effort to block the highway, but the
protestors returned home instead. The ordeal was suggestive of some of the deepest
challenges facing rural communities in regard to recognition, rule of law, and access to
resources. It also demonstrated the potentially neutralizing power of a promise from
a government official or institution.
Over the course of approximately three decades, the Colombian political establish­
ment, in dialogue with other transnational actors, asserted hegemonic influence on
defining the terms of inclusion of black and indigenous communities within the nation-
state through multicultural policies. During that period, many black and indigenous social
movements – as well as non-black/non-indigenous movements – became institutiona­
lized. Instead of challenging the premises of state power, their struggles increasingly
sought to shift the nature of their inclusion in the nation-state either through participa­
tion in electoral politics or advocating for legal rights through government institutions
(Asher 2009; Cárdenas 2018; Hale 2006; Paschel 2016). This transformation in large part
overshadowed efforts to build alternatives outside of the dominant multicultural
framework.
In 2014, two distinct social movements – one called the Afro-Descendant Women’s
Mobilization for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories, and the other, the Liberation of
Mother Earth Process – emerged in the region of northern Cauca in response to the failure
of multicultural rights to guarantee the conditions for their autonomy and self-
determination.1 Distinct from the tendency of many organizations and individuals that
turned to electoral politics and other institutionalized forms of activism, they engage in
varying forms of direct action that demonstrate the state’s inability to address their
grievances. In pointing to the legacies of racist dispossession and the state’s commitment
to capitalist development, these movements signal the deficiencies of multicultural
statecraft.
In this article, I first explore why black and indigenous social movements advocated for
multicultural recognition from the state in the context of the armed conflict. I then
provide an ethnographic analysis of how the Afro-Descendant Women’s Mobilization
for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories reassessed the potential of multicultural
rights in relation to their 2014 march to Bogotá. In the third section, I examine how the
Liberation of Mother Earth Process is struggling to enact forms of self-determination at
great risk. I argue that both cases represent a significant shift in the ways in which some
black and indigenous movements relate to neoliberal multicultural statecraft and struggle
to move beyond it.
370 A. DEST

The autonomy/inclusion dialectic

Colombia’s 1991 Constitution represented the country’s official embrace of multicultur­
alism by recognizing ‘the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Colombian Nation’ and
creating several measures explicitly aimed at addressing the needs of black, indigenous,
and Roma communities. These policies included the creation of new procedures for
acquiring collective land titles, designated Congressional seats, and other affirmative
action policies. Throughout the 1990 s and 2000 s, black and indigenous communities
led unprecedented campaigns to assert their newly recognized rights by negotiating the
legal avenues made available through the multicultural turn. According to Paschel, ‘the
recognition of collective territory for indigenous peoples and black communities meant
the biggest agrarian reform in [Colombia]’s history’ (Paschel 2016, 82).
Lobbying and lawsuits, of course, were not the only forms of struggle, and the
Colombian government did not endorse multiculturalism by happenstance.2 After all, to
quote Frederick Douglass, ‘power concedes nothing without a demand,’ and the historic
black and indigenous struggles for recognition were no exception.3 The demands of black
and indigenous organizations were not, however, uniform in their calls for self-
determination and autonomy, and some sectors of the movements explicitly sought
integration into the nation-state.
The oppressive conditions of Colombia’s armed conflict weighed heavily on the
strategies deployed by black and indigenous organizations throughout the country and
particularly in northern Cauca. A resource-rich region spanning thirteen municipalities
where the Cauca River spills out of the Andes Mountains and into the valley near Cali,
northern Cauca became an important battleground in the war. Armed actors from outside
the communities fought for pre-eminence: the Colombian military and police on behalf of
the nation-state; guerrilla movements founded in the revolutionary fervour of the sixties;
and paramilitary death squads sponsored by political and economic elites. By the 1990 s,
the costs of war expanded exponentially with the arrival of drug trafficking, and collusion
between the state forces, paramilitaries, and elites became more evident. Despite the
diversity of motivations among the actors, they shared a common desire for control over
the territory.
In addition to its reputation for violence associated with the armed conflict, northern
Cauca is also famously home to some of the strongest black and indigenous organizations
in Colombia.4 In 1971, the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (Consejo Regional
Indígena de Cauca, CRIC) split off from Colombia’s largest peasant union to lead the
struggle to reclaim land for indigenous peoples in Cauca (Campo Palacios Forthcoming;
Troyan 2015). The CRIC and later the Association of Indigenous Cabildos of Northern
Cauca (Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca, ACIN) built on centuries of
indigenous resistance to colonialism by wrestling control of the land away from large-
scale landowners through a combination of land occupations and legal recourse.5 In 1984,
the Quintín Lame Armed Movement (Movimiento Armado Quintín Lame, MAQL) – an
indigenous guerrilla group – took a more bellicose approach to local elites, armed groups,
and the state, but they demobilized in 1991 as a condition for participating in the
Constitutional Assembly (Espinosa 1996; Peñaranda Supelano 2015). At times, the indi­
genous movements of northern Cauca have also worked in coalition with the region’s
Afrodescendant and mestizo populations.6 Although black movements did not assume an
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 371

explicitly ‘ethnic’ character until the 1990 s, grassroots organizations in black communities
exercised considerable influence in many municipalities throughout the region and they
included many leaders who would eventually become an integral part of the Process of
Black Communities (Proceso de Comunidades Negras, PCN) social movement.7 After the
adoption of the Colombian Constitution of 1991, the indigenous and black movements of
northern Cauca recalibrated their multi-pronged strategy of simultaneously seeking
recognition from the state, running for local offices, and using direct action tactics to
build autonomy.
However, the intensification of the conflict in the late 1990 s interrupted the
momentum of ‘new social movements’ like the ACIN and PCN that were making
innovative demands for democratic change (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998). The
conflict also constrained the ability of communities in northern Cauca to publicly
engage in meaningful dialogue and critical reflection about the ongoing transforma­
tions. It silenced voices of dissent and imposed regimes of social control. The region’s
inhabitants, already subject to violence, feared retaliation for openly speaking out about
the impacts of the conflict. Even so, many continued to denounce violence and
dispossession at great risk.
The escalation of the armed conflict also coincided with the tepid implementation of
multicultural policies in northern Cauca. The initial enthusiasm about modernizing
Colombia through multicultural reforms became subdued after officials came to under­
stand the breadth of black and indigenous demands (Paschel 2016). Slow-moving bureau­
cracies and fading political will undermined the reach of the reforms. Nevertheless,
multicultural policies seemed to offer war-torn black and indigenous communities
a semblance of security and self-determination in the face of looming displacement and
dispossession. The impacts of the armed conflict thus exposed the tensions between
community-based struggles for autonomy and the promise of protection through inclu­
sion in the state’s multicultural policies. The autonomy/inclusion dialectic provides
a space for understanding why social movements that struggled to prove that ‘another
world is possible’ became embroiled in the bureaucratic machinations of the neoliberal
nation-state (Gutiérrez Aguilar 2014).8
Their shift towards participating in government institutions might be understood as
merely pragmatic or opportunistic, but this perspective obscures the expansive potential
of state power. Building on the work of Foucault, Brown argues that:

The paradox of what we call the state is at once an incoherent, multifaceted ensemble of
power relations and a vehicle of massive domination . . . Despite the almost unavoidable
tendency to speak of the state as an ‘it,’ the domain we call the state is not a thing, system, or
subject, but a significantly unbounded terrain of powers and techniques, an ensemble of
discourses, rules, and practices cohabiting in limited, tension-ridden, often contradictory
relation with one another (Brown 1995, 174).

As such, the discursive power of the nation-state exceeds the structures and elected
offices that it brings into being, but there are certainly nodes of state power – such as
government institutions, the military, police, etc. – that engage in explicit forms of
subjection and subjugation. For Aretxaga, ‘the confluence of violence and paternalism,
of force and intimacy, sustains the state as an object of ambivalence, an object of
resentment for abandoning its subjects to their own fate and one desired as a subject
372 A. DEST

that can provide for its citizens’ (Aretxaga 2005, 260). A shared – even if somewhat
disjointed or contradictory – ideology can give coherence to the nation-state and serve
as what Aretxaga calls the ‘untenable hyphen’ that links the two words (Aretxaga 2005,
257–59).
Beginning in the 1970 s and 80 s, neoliberalism became the ‘untenable hyphen’ of
Latin American nation-states. As a political project that facilitates capitalist development
by eliminating protectionist economic policies and spreading a cosmopolitan consumer
culture, neoliberalism disrupted significant aspects of the conservative politics of the
previous era, such as obsequiousness to traditional elites and the Catholic Church. By
doing so, it also undercut Latin American nation-states’ commitment to the assimilationist
ideology of mestizaje.
Colombia’s 1991 Constitution heralded the epoch of neoliberal multiculturalism into
one of the most unequal countries in the Western hemisphere. The Constitution simulta­
neously marked the formal shift towards multicultural policies and triggered the wide­
spread implementation of neoliberal reforms that privatized national industries. The turn
towards multiculturalism appeared to create space for challenging the exclusionary and
racist foundations of the nation-state by expanding the rights of black and indigenous
subjects. According to Hale, ‘in part taking the rise of cultural rights activism as an
inevitable given, and in part actively substituting a new articulating principle, the emer­
gent regime of neoliberal multicultural governance shapes, delimits, and produces cul­
tural difference rather than suppressing it’ (Hale 2005, 12–13). Neoliberal multiculturalism
thus has the ‘distinct effect of . . . extending the state’s grid of intelligibility, defining
legitimate (and undeserving) subjects of rights, and remaking racial hierarchy’ (Hale 2005,
14). The culmination of these transformations resulted in the de facto creation of new
constraints on rights-based activism that continue to influence rural politics in northern
Cauca.
Colombia’s experience with neoliberal multiculturalism could therefore be understood
as a ‘passive revolution.’9 Gramsci conceived of passive revolution as a process whereby
the state mitigates the influence of ‘antagonistic groups’ through ‘gradual but continuous
absorption’ (Gramsci 1971, 59). The seductive power of a passive revolution resides in its
ability to create ‘a period of expectation and hope’ by offering the possibility of seemingly
progressive reforms that ultimately ‘reinforce the hegemonic system and the forces of
military and civil coercion at the disposal of the ruling classes’ (Gramsci 1971, 120).
Interpreting neoliberal multiculturalism as a passive revolution does not imply that the
nation-state seamlessly returned to a previous iteration of the ideology of blanqueamiento
(whitening) or that the transformations associated with multiculturalism emanated exclu­
sively from the government and powerful international institutions. Instead, it suggests
that the passive revolution of neoliberal multiculturalism in Colombia resulted in
a conjuncture where the nation-state reinstated its hegemonic position as arbiter over
the rights of its legal subjects, and the armed conflict played a crucial role in pushing rural
black and indigenous communities into the hands of the nation-state (Cárdenas 2012;
Ng’weno 2007).
Returning to the autonomy/inclusion dialectic makes it feasible to conceptualize the
potential for organizing under the parameters of neoliberal multiculturalism. If passive
revolution functions as a process and not a closure, then neoliberal multiculturalism can
be understood as a terrain of political contestation. Black and indigenous social
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 373

movements in Colombia have attempted to work through the state apparatus in

a strategy that could be interpreted as a form of building ‘dual power,’ except that
black and indigenous social movements typically do not aspire to take control of the
entirety of the nation-state like the leftist guerrilla groups (Lenin 1964 [1917]). Instead,
many rural black and indigenous movements attempt to achieve a distinct form of
autonomy akin to what Cattelino calls ‘interdependent sovereignty,’ which describes
the limited forms of autonomy that can be attained by articulating a kind of cultural
politics based on identities formally recognized by the settler colonial nation-state
(Cattelino 2008, 177). Recognition from the state, therefore, plays a central role in
determining the reach of black and indigenous peoples that assert cultural rights through
the state’s multicultural policies.
Neoliberal multiculturalism creates space for governments to use ‘cultural rights to
divide and domesticate indigenous movements’ (Hale 2004, 17). Millamán and Hale
(2006), following Rivera Cusicanqui, explore this phenomenon as a defining feature of
the ‘era of indio permitido’ (‘authorized indian’) where integrationist expressions of race-
based activism are increasingly accepted, while other more radical demands are shunned.
For Hale:

Compliance with the discipline of the capitalist market can be individual, but may be equally
effective as a collective response; if civil society organizations opt for development models
that reinforce the ideology of capitalist productive relations, they can embody and advance
the neoliberal project as collectivities not individuals. As long as cultural rights remain within
these basic parameters, they contribute directly to the goal of neoliberal self-governance;
they reinforce its ideological tenets while meeting deeply felt needs; they register dissent,
while directing these collective political energies toward unthreatening ends (Hale 2006, 75).

Smith and Rahier expand on the concept of ‘indio permitido’ in their analyses of ‘negro
permitido’ in order to address the ways in which the phenomenon applies to Afro-
descendants in the region, as well (Rahier 2014, 146; Smith 2016, 6, 102).
Taken together, these concepts provide a vantage point to understand the ultimately
moderating impulse of neoliberal multiculturalism even in its potentially radical guise of
‘autonomy,’ thereby reaffirming Laclau and Mouffe’s argument that, ‘Autonomy, far from
being incompatible with hegemony, is a form of hegemonic construction’ (Laclau and
Mouffe 2014 [1985], 127). Cultural rights activists that push beyond the realm of permis­
sible politicking by advocating for explicitly anti-state or anti-capitalist forms of struggle
face criminal charges and stigmatization. The government’s willingness to criminalize
certain forms of social protest reveals the more repressive arm of neoliberal multicultur­
alism, which diminishes the legal space for articulating oppositional politics.
Given the conditions of the internal armed conflict and the perceived advantages of
attempting to integrate into the nation-state, the revolutionary valence of many black and
indigenous movements subsided as they increasingly participated in the ‘recognition
odysseys’ of neoliberal multiculturalism (Klopotek 2011). In northern Cauca, their ability to
effectively assert autonomy declined significantly with the spike in militarization following
the paramilitary invasion of the Calima Block of the United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC) in the late 1990 s (Villarraga
Sarmiento 2018). As the armed conflict increasingly brought non-combatants into the
frame of war, many people were forcibly displaced from their communities into
374 A. DEST

neighbouring towns and cities. Extractive industries and agribusinesses took advantage of
the conflict to accumulate land and acquire mining licenses. By 2015, for example, 90% of
arable land in the municipality of Puerto Tejada was dedicated to sugarcane production,
as well as 92% in Padilla, 57% in Villa Rica, and 62% in Guachené (Aguilar Ararat, Acosta,
and Moreno Mina 2015, 18)”. The conflict literally transformed the landscape of northern
Cauca.
In The Nation and Its Fragments (Chatterjee 1993), Chatterjee interprets Gramsci’s
notion of passive revolution the following way:

New claimants to power, lacking the social strength to launch a full-scale assault on the old
dominant classes, opt for a path in which the demands of a new society are ‘satisfied in small
doses, legally, in a reformist manner’ – in such a way that the political and economic position
of the old feudal classes is not destroyed, agrarian reform is avoided, and the popular masses
especially are prevented from going through the political experience of a fundamental social
transformation. (Chatterjee 1993, 211)

This blunting effect of neoliberal multiculturalism’s passive revolution strengthens the

hegemony of the nation-state and seems to confirm Lorde’s dictum that ‘the master’s
tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde 2007 [1984], 110). As a passive
revolution of ‘gradual but continuous absorption’ into the nation-state, neoliberal multi­
culturalism established the conditions for asserting non-threatening forms of autonomy
(Gramsci 1971, 59). Instead of outright exclusion, it offered clemency, or what Rivera
Cusicanqui calls ‘conditional inclusion,’ to those willing to abide by its logic (Rivera
Cusicanqui 2012, 97, 100).
Enclosure vis-à-vis neoliberal multiculturalism is not, however, a given. By dwelling in
what might be called the ‘negative dialectics’ of autonomy/inclusion, some social move­
ments reject a closure or synthesis that conforms to the nation-state’s promotion of vulgar
identity politics (Adorno 2007 [1966]; Holloway, Matamoros, and Tischler 2009). That is,
they refuse to mobilize exclusively through the nation-state’s categories of blackness and
indigeneity, or what Coulthard calls the ‘colonial politics of recognition’ (Coulthard 2014).
Their struggles thus create space to challenge the ideological and material underpinnings
of neoliberal multiculturalism.

The Afro-Descendant Women’s Mobilization for the Care of Life and

Ancestral Territories
Northern Cauca was once a relatively isolated frontier of the Spanish Empire, where
colonizers imposed forced labor regimes on indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans.
Over time, maroons and other formerly enslaved Africans eventually fled from the Spanish
and built communities in the hills and mountains far from the colonial centres of Popayán
and Cali (Bryant 2014). One of these communities, Yolombo, was founded in the 1630 s
between the Ovejas and Cauca Rivers and eventually became part of the Afro-Colombian
Community Council of La Toma: the birthplace of the Afro-Descendant Women’s
Mobilization for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories.
At the margins of metropolitan development schemes, northern Cauca’s peasantry
(campesinado) planted subsistence crops and mined gold in the mountains and rivers.
Despite their relative isolation, they were not outside of the purview of Colombian nation-
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 375

state formation. Throughout the twentieth century, international gold-mining companies

and the Coffee Growers Federation made inroads into the region. The consequences of
the so-called Green Revolution and the U.S. embargo of Cuban sugar transformed
sugarcane production in the valley surrounding Cali in the mid-twentieth century. In
1985, the Salvajina hydroelectric dam commenced operations, displacing surrounding
communities of black, indigenous, and mestizo peasants; resistance to this project con­
tinues today (Machado, M., D. López Matta, M. M. Campo, A. Escobar, and V. Weitzner
2017).
During the mid-2000 s, northern Cauca was subjected to another wave of colonization:
a gold rush high on cocaine and, more recently, marijuana (Caicedo Fernández 2017). The
rural communities of northern Cauca witnessed an influx of armed groups and new­
comers. The practically untraceable origins of gold facilitated money laundering, and
word of the secluded mountainsides of northern Cauca made its way to coca growers who
were pushed out of their homes by Plan Colombia, the multi-billion-dollar U.S.-supported
initiative that fused the ‘War on Drugs’ with the ‘War on Terror.’ Sidestepping official
licenses from the Ministry of Environment, the illegal gold miners – occasionally operating
in concert with the world’s largest multinational mining corporations – brought in retros
(short for retroexcavadoras or diggers) to expedite the extraction of wealth from the land.
During my first visit to an illegal mine in 2011, I was astonished by the scale of the
operations. I expected a covert hut with workers discreetly sifting gold from the earth.
Instead, loud machines ceaselessly ground out precious metal and dumped pungent
waste into mountain springs. Those rivers – now contaminated with mercury and cya­
nide – poisoned the earth, livestock, crops, and people.
In 2014, a group of women declared that they had enough. Death threats from
paramilitary groups associated with the gold miners could no longer constrain their
livelihoods. They were sick of being debased by the men who profited from their labour,
occupied their land, and called them ‘chatarreras’ (scrap dealers) because they gleaned
gold from the mud shifted around by the machines. The alphabet soup of armed groups
(AGC, FARC, ELN, Aguilas Negras, Rastrojos, etc.) made it almost impossible to determine
who controlled each mine. One of the largest illegal gold mines in San Antonio employed
upwards of one thousand people just a few kilometres from the Pan-American Highway
outside of Santander de Quilichao, and migrants from all over the country came to work
there. Impromptu food stands and new bus routes, as well as bustling brothels in
Santander de Quilichao, accommodated their arrival. In May 2014, part of the mine
collapsed, killing scores of people. It was shut down, temporarily, only after the tragedy
garnered international attention. Within months, people returned to San Antonio and
tried to revive the mine’s alchemic formula that turned death and destruction into profit.
After the tragedy in May 2014, the owners of the retros shuffled the heavy machines
around the region in order to avoid their confiscation by the authorities. In
September 2014, the Community Council of La Toma denounced the appearance of
twelve retros on the Ovejas River, but to no avail. Four years beforehand, the
Community Council of La Toma had successfully stopped a government-sponsored
eviction through a campaign that garnered widespread support from social movements
and lawyers’ guilds in Colombia and abroad. Still, the relentless pressure on the commu­
nity to exploit its mineral wealth continued in spite of decrees from the Constitutional
Court and appeals to Law 70 of 1993, also known as the Law of Black Communities.10
376 A. DEST

The women from the community – many of them affiliated with PCN and miners
themselves – met informally and discussed the ongoing impacts of the illegal mines,
including the contamination of the river and the loss of ancestral mining practices. They
floated the idea of organizing a women’s march to Bogotá to make the government listen,
but fear of retaliation from the paramilitaries put a hold on their plans. Furthermore,
patriarchal decision-making processes within local organizations made gaining wide­
spread support from the community more difficult.
Francia Márquez, the former Legal Representative of the Community Council of La
Toma and winner of the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize, grew frustrated. She told the
other women: ‘If no one is willing to go with me, I will walk to Bogotá with my two kids.’
Her righteous indignation sparked the group to pool resources and organize the cam­
paign that became the Afro-Descendant Women’s Mobilization for the Care of Life and
Ancestral Territories. For her cousins, aunts, nieces, and neighbours at the meeting, it was
unthinkable to allow Francia to confront the government alone.
Sofia Garzón, one of the participants in the Mobilization, emphasized: ‘I never felt true
solidarity like I did during the mobilization.’ Women from other Afro-Colombian
Community Councils and community-based organizations in northern Cauca joined the
original group after they left La Toma for Bogotá on 18 November 2014. In the opening
lines of their first statement, they define their struggle by connecting the legacy of
enslavement with the ongoing need to ensure the livelihoods of their posterity, or
renacientes:

We are black women from northern Cauca: the descendants of enslaved Africans and experts
on the ancestral value of our territories. We know that many of them paid for our freedom
with their lives. We know about the blood that our ancestors shed to get these lands. We
know that they worked for years and years under enslavement in order to leave it for us. They
taught us not to sell the land. They understood that we should guarantee the permanence of
our renacientes in the territory.11

This shared commitment to one another and the territory itself served as the basis of the
solidarity mentioned by Garzón.
During the journey, they met with social movements, trade unions, and student
organizations in various towns along the way, exchanging strategies and building con­
nections at each stop. The Maroon Guard (Guardia Cimarrona), the Afro-descendant
counterpart to the indigenous self-defense group called the Indigenous Guard (Guardia
Indígena), also accompanied the Mobilization by providing security and cooking meals.
On the international front, solidarity groups that included the Afro-Colombian Solidarity
Network (ACSN) in the United States and the Sami indigenous people, as well as folks in
Brazil, Canada, and Germany, provided material and symbolic support for the
Mobilization.
The Mobilization’s second statement declared, ‘Our fears are conquered walking
together and singing together.’ In the less than 100 kilometres between Suarez and
Cali, the Mobilization already made its presence felt, including coverage in Colombia’s
mainstream newspapers. Their statement went on to say:

The national government got in touch with us. They asked us to send a small commission to
Bogotá in order to talk about illegal mining. We said: ‘So now they have time[. . .]’ We thought
about how many times we asked the government to meet with us over the course of the year
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 377

and decided that we could meet with the National Government [. . .] but it wouldn’t be a small
delegation. It would be a meeting with our children, nieces, nephews, and all of the women
joining us along the way.

Their rejection of the government’s overtures made it clear that the Mobilization was not
interested in negotiating through representatives. Throughout the nine statements that
they wrote collectively during the course of the march to Bogotá, they reiterated how
they had already exhausted the legal avenues for denouncing illegal mining, armed
conflict, and displacement. The dead-end of legal recourse compelled them to act
differently. Their march defied the government’s strategy of quelling resistance through
incorporation and piecemeal offerings.
Upon arriving in Bogotá, the Mobilization met with representatives from the Ministries
of Interior, Defense, and Environment at the Ministry of Interior’s offices next to the
Presidential Palace. Hours of roundabout negotiations went nowhere, and the women
refused to leave until they reached a solution. They risked arrest and occupied the
government offices overnight. Outside, dozens of supporters of the Mobilization held
a vigil singing songs and holding candles in the hopes that increased attention would
stave off the anti-riot police (Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios, ESMAD) from pulling them
out by force. During the subsequent meetings with the government, the members of the
Mobilization felt increasingly frustrated by the government’s lack of political will to take
meaningful action. Francia Márquez passionately confronted the officials about a lower-
court decision that identified the residents of the Afro-Colombian Community Council of
La Toma as pertubadores de mala fe (literally, ‘bad-faith disturbers’), which roughly
translates into unlawful inhabitants:

Four hundred years contributing to the construction of this country . . . And we are ‘bad-faith
disturbers’? Four hundred years bleeding our people dry . . . And we are ‘bad-faith disturbers’?
Four hundred years enriching the pockets of others while impoverishing us . . . And we are ‘bad-
faith disturbers’? We need you to respond very clearly. Because we are not ‘bad-faith disturbers’!
What we have done is construct peace in this country! Real peace! Not the peace of empty
speeches! Not the peace by way of arms! It’s the peace of creating and giving birth to men and
women of goodwill! And that is what we’ve done as black communities, as black women!

How many of our women have been displaced from their territories so that they can raise your
children while you are in these offices? Instilling values in your children . . . And we are ‘bad-faith
disturbers’? How many of us have had to go to your homes to wash your underwear? And we
are ‘bad-faith disturbers’? Therefore, we want, as the compañera stated, for you to let us live in
peace! We don’t want the government to come to us now saying that it simply can’t do it. [. . .]

If the Colombian state cannot handle the problem, then tell us. So that we know whether or
not there exists a Colombian state or a social state of rights [estado social de derecho] for us;
whether or not the state exists for us . . . But let that be clear! Because we are sick! Because we
are tired! We are tired of being displaced! We are tired because we can no longer walk around
our territory freely! We are tired because today we can no longer go to the river to fish
because it’s full of cyanide and mercury! We are tired of all that shit! We are tired! And we can’t
take it anymore! And that’s why we are here! Even if it costs us our lives, we are going to
guarantee that our sons, that our daughters, can return to and continue to be in peace in our
territories. That is the legacy of our ancestors! That is what they did when they liberated
themselves from chains. And that is what we black women are going to do. Therefore, let it be
clear here. We don’t want excuses. We have had thousands of meetings with the government,
the ministry, the President . . . Everybody! And nobody has stopped the situation [. . ..]
378 A. DEST

What was this Colombian state created for? Wasn’t it supposed to serve the people? Wasn’t it
[supposed] to protect every Colombian man and woman? If not, what was this Colombian
State created for? What was the object of creating this state? If it wasn’t for that, then tell us. If
the objective is to pillage our territories; if the objective is to hand it over to other countries; if
the objective is to produce war by way of all these phenomena . . .

Mining and the so-called ‘engines of development’ are not generating peace. The only things
that they are generating are misery, poverty, hunger, and displacement! And if it’s not, go ask
every one of the four million displaced people why they were displaced from their territories.
We are not willing to be one more. We are not willing to have our children in the streets at the
traffic lights so that people in suits and ties can look at them as if they were garbage! We are
not willing to allow that to happen. We will remain in our territory because the territory has
been our father and our mother, and it will continue to be for our children.12

A recording of Márquez’s speech went viral soon after its publication, thereby drawing
more attention to the Mobilization’s demands on the government.
Her intervention also signalled a turning point for the other participants in the
Mobilization by exposing the nation-state’s hollow promises of freedom and equality
for black people, and particularly black women. Sofia Garzón reflected on the moment
with me in 2018:

It’s just that we were not even asking them to give us something. So, when Francia said: ‘What
are you here for?’ I thought: Wow . . . They’re here to guarantee that we’re not free, and they’re
here to guarantee that we can never be equal. Right? So, she said that, and we all started to
cry. I wasn’t the only one to tear up. I turned around and all of us were crying because I felt
that all of us realized at that moment that we arrived with the hope of getting a response
from the state. But the faces of the people listening and the welcoming that they gave us
could not compare with the gestures of love from people that accompanied us throughout
our walk there. It was like: ‘No. No. Nothing is going to happen here.’ [. . .] It was like when
you’re at a movie and you realize who the bad guy is: ‘Ohhh! That person who always said
they were my friend is the same person that put me in this truly bad situation.’ It was like that.
We finally became disenchanted with the state.13

Even so, the Mobilization eventually signed an agreement with the government that
included several promises to address illegal mining and recognize the collective rights of
black people in northern Cauca. They decided to sign the agreement out of a shared sense
of obligation not to return home empty-handed, many of them knowing that the docu­
ment itself would amount to little more than a piece of evidence in a future court case.
Within weeks of returning to northern Cauca, the Mobilization denounced the presence of
seventeen more retros in the community, and they subsequently received death threats
from paramilitary groups.
In spite of the disappointing results, Garzón reflected on her experience of the
Mobilization with reverence years later:

I feel like it helped me position myself. Right? To know not to expect anything. It’s different
when I relate to the ‘other’ knowing that I can’t expect anything from them. I feel like a lot of
people keep expecting things from the state. When we expect something from the state, we
don’t take control over our lives because we have ceded control over our lives to someone or
something else.

As such, Garzón considers the Mobilization’s 2014 march to Bogotá as the culmination of
a process through which she ceased to consider herself as a subject of the state, as someone
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 379

subjected by the state.14 By regarding the state as ‘other’ and eschewing the hollowness of
the nation-state’s social contract, she demands a new framework that centres her freedom
and self-determination both as an individual and as part of a collective. Since 2014,
paramilitaries, drug traffickers, extractive industries, and the nation-state have tested the
Mobilization’s conviction that ‘our love for life is greater than our fear of death.’ In the
context of continued violence, the women have sought to build networks of care for one
another and the territory that are not determined by government institutions or philan­
thropic funding. This form of community-building evades enclosure and expresses the
potential of political horizons beyond neoliberal multiculturalism.

The Liberation of Mother Earth Process

Under neoliberal multiculturalism, experiences of resistance and self-determination like
the Mobilization are pressured to succumb to capitalist modernity.15 For Reyes and
Kaufman, subaltern peoples are subjected to a ‘double-bind’:

When considered as merely excluded from the site of sovereignty due to their violent domina­
tion by the West, non-Western subjects have little choice but to demand an ultimate inclusion,
one in which their underlying humanity (i.e., sovereignty) might flourish. But when we examine
the nature of the ‘inclusive exclusion’ on which Western sovereignty functions, in which the
play of ontological universality and historical particularity creates hierarchical differentiations
assigned to geographic locations (Europe/non-Europe) within a single humanity, this demand
for inclusion serves as a surreptitious call for the self-annihilation of these subaltern subjects
and their particular historical differences. In other words, when these subjects are viewed as
‘excluded’ from sovereignty, the only trajectory afforded them on the road to freedom is to
‘assume’ sovereignty, to leave behind their historical existence against which the concept of
sovereignty has already been defined. (Reyes and Kaufman 2011, 511–512)

They go on to argue that the Zapatistas’ commitment to ‘rule by obeying’ (mandar

obedeciendo) ‘suggests that there is a form of social organization that completely
bypasses the sovereign and its necessary relation of command obedience. This is a form
of power that is not contracted to (via the “social contract”) nor derived from (via demand
or petition) the sovereign’ (Reyes and Kaufman 2011, 515). Analogous to the rebellious
spirit that resonates from Rojava to Ferguson, Missouri, the Zapatistas’ principle of mandar
obedeciendo challenges the basic premises of the recognition-based politics implicit in
neoliberal multiculturalism. Mandar obedeciendo demonstrates the potential for building
autonomous spaces of collective liberation that transcend the limits imposed by nation-
states and capitalism.
Throughout northern Cauca, autochthonous forms of mandar obedeciendo flicker and
inspire people to build alternatives to capitalist modernity. Like the Afro-
Descendant Women’s Mobilization, these experiences are rooted in deep histories of resis­
tance to enslavement, war, and exploitation (Ararat et al. 2013; Bryant 2014; Friede 1976; Mina
1975; Rappaport 1998). When they emerge, they embody what Rancière (2010) would call
‘dissensus.’ For Rancière, ‘Dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is
the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself. Political demonstration
makes visible that which had not reason to be seen’ (Rancière 2010, 38). For example, the
Nasa indigenous peoples’ struggle to ‘liberate Mother Earth’ (liberar la Madre Tierra) chal­
lenges ongoing forms of dispossession and colonialism in northern Cauca by engaging in
380 A. DEST

direct action. They don’t ask for permission from the owners of the sugarcane plantations, the
nation-state, established indigenous organizations, or other regional power brokers. Instead,
they cut down sugarcane and plant seeds; they reclaim the land (See Figure 2).

Figure 2. A participant in the Minga for the Liberation of Mother Earth plants seeds on land that they
reclaimed from the sugarcane companies, while the ESMAD anti-riot police fire tear gas on indigenous
activists in the background. He said: ‘Every time I strike the sugarcane with my machete, I remember
the land that they took away from us, and it gives me more strength.’ Photo by Author (July 2015).

In early August 2017, the Liberation of Mother Earth Process hosted the First
International Meeting of Liberators of Mother Earth (Primer Encuentro Internacional de
Liberadores y Liberadoras de la Madre Tierra) in Corinto, Cauca. At around noon on
3 August 2017, I started receiving alerts on my phone through various WhatsApp and
Telegram groups about the ESMAD anti-riot police destroying the event’s installations.
The choice of location for the meeting was itself a direct action: the land formally
belonged to a sugarcane conglomerate, and the Liberation of Mother Earth Process was
struggling to reclaim it. The invitation to the gathering asserted:

We believe that in order to liberate Mother Earth it is necessary to liberate thought. We say it
the following way: desalambrar la Tierra depende de desalambrar el corazón [freeing the land
depends on freeing your heart].16 That’s why we invite people from every corner of the world
to this meeting – as pueblos [peoples], as individuals, as collectives, as processes, as move­
ments – with the determination to liberate our hearts and the Earth through concrete
struggle and practice that confronts and moves beyond capitalism. (Proceso de Liberación
de la Madre Tierra 2017)

According to early reports, the anti-riot police barged in on the assembly grounds the day
before the meeting and knocked down the edifices built by the organizers over the course
of a month. Two indigenous organizers were reportedly injured as a result of the
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 381

confrontations with the ESMAD. On the bus to the First International Meeting, I sent a few
messages to friends inquiring about the status of the meeting. There were rumours that
the organizers were considering changing the location of the meeting in order to
guarantee a minimal level of security for the participants, but that turned out to be
untrue.
The last time that I travelled to Corinto was a few months earlier for the funeral of Javier
Oteca, an indigenous activist that was murdered in March 2017 under suspicious circum­
stances that appeared to implicate the neighbouring sugarcane refinery (See Figure 3).
The organizers of the International Meeting, many of whom also attended the funeral,
understood the risks of continuing with the gathering. The title of their August 4
communiqué boldly stated: ‘They will not dispossess us of our words or our territory;
the International Meeting of Liberators of Mother Earth continues moving forward (sigue
caminando).’

Figure 3. Funeral for Javier Oteca in Corinto, Cauca. Photo by Author (March 2017).

On the way to the meeting, my bus passed through two checkpoints where uniformed
and heavily armed men peered into the bus. The week before, two buses and one
hundred hectares of sugarcane were burned down. The fires led sugarcane conglomer­
ates to release public statements that stigmatized the Nasa indigenous people of north­
ern Cauca as arsonists (El País. 2017a, 2017b). That same week, former president Alvaro
Uribe decried indigenous peoples’ demands for more land during a public forum.
Afterwards, he followed up with a thread of tweets saying ‘no más resguardos indígenas’
(no more indigenous reservations) under the hashtag #SoluciónProblemasTierrasenCauca
(#SolutionToTheLandProblemsInCauca). Just a week beforehand, Congresswoman María
Fernanda Cabal – Uribe’s colleague from the right-wing Central Democratic Party and
spouse of the president of the Federation of Cattle Ranchers (FEDEGAN) – responded to
a question regarding access to land on a talk show saying: ‘I will tell you where the land is
concentrated. It’s in the hands of the collective territories of the black communities and in
the hands of the indigenous resguardos’ (Pulzo 2017). The anti-indigenous/anti-black
382 A. DEST

alignment amongst the private sector, news media, and right-wing politicians, as well as
the increased presence of the ESMAD anti-riot police, created a hostile environment
surrounding the International Meeting of Liberators of Mother Earth in Corinto.
Outside of the indigenous headquarters in Corinto, some young folks waited by a pick-
up truck. They were on their way to the International Meeting, and I hitched a ride with
them to the grounds. As we pulled up to the site, we saw members of the Indigenous
Guard – an autonomous self-defense group armed only with batons and walkie-talkies –
gather around a clearing under a tree. Pieces of the encampment torn down by the
ESMAD were scattered on the grass around us. Attendees sat in the shade, smoked
cigarettes, and made small talk. One of the organizers pointed us towards a path that
led down to the river and told us that the international campsite was over there. He told
us to return to the tree at 4 p.m. for a welcoming orientation and security briefing. The
situation still felt very precarious, and our fellow campers instructed us to cross to the
other side of the river if the ESMAD descended on the encampment again.
At 4 p.m., a disparate mix of about sixty people including indigenous comuneros
(peasants), anarchists, and students from surrounding cities met at the tree. One of the
organizers thanked us for coming, especially under the dangerous conditions and a 72-
hour eviction order from the ESMAD. He pointed out to the group that these circum­
stances reflected the reality of the indigenous struggle; that it was important for people to
understand the risks involved in liberating mother earth; and that the state’s disdain for
indigenous peoples manifested in the realities of their everyday lives. Another indigenous
leader laid out some ground rules for the event and established that photos should not be
taken of anyone’s face at the event because the photos could be used – as they had been
in the past – in legal proceedings against participants.
Throughout the International Meeting of Liberators, attendees introduced themselves
and broke out into working groups about the various threats facing social movements
that confront capitalism around the world. The ubiquitous threat of state violence served
as an equalizing force on the people attending the event. If the ESMAD invaded, we would
all be subject to tear gas, rubber bullets, arrest, or worse. This, however, was not the first
time the Process had organized under these conditions; diverse efforts to free the land, as
well as critical reflection on the conjuncture, have defined the Process’s strategy since its
founding in 2014.
In their 2016 document, Freedom and Joy with Uma Kiwe, the Liberation of Mother
Earth Process provides its own analysis of neoliberal multiculturalism:

Movements that couldn’t take power made a treaty with the State based on the recognition
of rights, which are more like crumbs or drops of honey. The result of that love affair – full of
wooing and candies – is the institutionalization of the movements. Better yet, it put the
tradition of struggle to sleep. Many movements gave up and married the State. They became
what we have always confronted. They made a nest within capitalism using the disguise and
discourse of the times of struggle. [. . .]

That is when we appear on the scene. The Liberation of Mother Earth is not a nest within the
State or within capitalism. We liberate the Earth from capitalism – we liberate ourselves – in
order to simply enjoy our lives to the rhythm of Uma Kiwe (Mother Earth) by eating, drinking,
dancing, weaving, and making offerings (29–30).
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 383

According to the Liberation of Mother Earth Process: ‘The ‘91 Constitution was not
going to leave us dazzled forever. We rubbed our eyes, and – as we said – we rose up
for the liberation of Mother Earth [. . .] after 14 years of lethargy’ (Proceso de
Liberación de la Madre Tierra 2016, 12). For them, multicultural rights stupefied social
movements and organizations into believing that the nation-state would provide
them with guarantees to challenge capitalist dispossession. Their ultimate rejection
of that framework created space for building alternatives that did not forestall their
efforts to enact wët wët fxi’zenxi – a vital aspect of the Nasa indigenous people’s
cosmovision, roughly translated to ‘the good life’ or ‘buen vivir’ – in the present
(Almendra Quiguanás 2017).
The praxis of the Liberation of Mother Earth Process not only puts the state on the
defensive; it is also a cutting critique of tendencies within the indigenous movement that
seek integration into or resources from the Colombian state. Their critique encompasses
both the conservative expressions of indigenous politics and the seemingly progressive
indigenous struggles focused on recognition and the implementation of legal rights.17 As
a result, some indigenous leaders in northern Cauca have publicly denounced the
Liberation of Mother Process’s legitimacy and privately pointed to the involvement of
non-indigenous participants as evidence of outsider interference. They fear that the
Liberation of Mother Earth Process could undermine their efforts to acquire funding
from the national government for indigenous governance projects. However – given
the primacy of the demand to ‘recuperate’ or ‘liberate’ land within the indigenous
movement and their long history of using direct action – organizations like the ACIN
have not taken a categorical position in regard to the Liberation of Mother Earth Process.
In spite of budding support in some communities of northern Cauca and among sympa­
thetic internationalists, the Liberation of Mother Earth Process faces immense repression
as it attempts to expand the arena of political contestation. By rejecting the politics of
indio permitido, they struggle to build alternatives to capitalist accumulation that resist
institutionalization under the ‘passive revolution’ of multiculturalism.

Against the ‘politics of death’

In April 2019, two gunmen barged into a meeting of black activists in northern Cauca.
They tossed in a grenade and started shooting. Both Francia Márquez and Sofia Garzón of
the Afro-Descendant Women’s Mobilization were among the individuals in attendance.
Márquez’s bodyguards returned fire and fended off the attackers. No one was killed
during that attack, but hundreds of activists have been murdered in Colombia since the
signing of the Peace Accords in 2016.18
Their brush with death is evocative of the predicament facing activists struggling for
self-determination beyond the framework of the nation-state. Márquez’s bodyguards,
who were largely responsible for preventing an atrocity, worked for the government’s
National Protection Unit (Unidad Nacional de Protección, UNP). Yet, Márquez and her
colleagues were targeted precisely for opposing the government’s policies. For example,
death threats from paramilitary groups typically accuse the black and indigenous com­
munities of northern Cauca of being ‘opponents of development.’ In recent years, the
threats materialized with the murder of dozens of social movement leaders throughout
the region despite the government’s discourse of peace. Márquez’s concrete need for
384 A. DEST

bodily protection overruled her principled position against inviting the state into their
lives. The formation of autonomous self-defense organizations such as the Maroon Guard
has played an important role in defending at-risk individuals and communities at the local
level. However, for individuals like Márquez that were forcibly displaced and continue to
receive death threats, immediate security concerns exceed the capacity of the Maroon
Guard to protect them at this particular moment. That desperation means reaching out to
the UNP, a government institution beleaguered with criticism for ineffectual security
measures and potential collusion with the counterintelligence apparatus of the state.
The move towards the UNP serves as an extreme example of how the autonomy/inclusion
dialectic manifests in the context of ongoing violence.
More often, the autonomy/inclusion dialectic reveals itself in the tendency of social
movements and political organizations throughout northern Cauca to participate in
electoral politics. For example, both long-time indigenous activist Feliciano Valencia of
the ACIN and Francia Márquez of the Afro-Descendant Women’s Mobilization ran for
office in 2018. Each of them launched campaigns promising that the special seats in
Congress for black and indigenous peoples would respond to the needs of the people, not
corrupt politiqueros (politicians). Valencia ultimately won a seat in the Senate, though
Márquez lost.
It may appear curious that Márquez opted to participate in electoral politics no more
than four years after she marched to Bogotá. In July 2019, I asked her about why she chose
that path despite her damning criticisms of the state during the 2014 Mobilization. She
responded:

I wanted to see what possibilities there were with more black people occupying those spaces.
Others arrive in Congress to persuade the people to support the politics of death [la política
de muerte]. The majority of them . . . But what do they want power for? To keep fucking
[jodiendo] with the lives of people? They’re building power, but for the traditional elites. What
kind of power could that be? It’s very difficult to break with that.

We have tried to build autonomy, but the people side with the politicians. The movements
are on the outside trying to build the consciousness of the people. The others use power to
legitimize themselves before the people, to implement policies, to kill. We’re simply in the
rear-guard resisting and resisting while they kill us and kill us. [. . .]

That’s the risk that I assumed. I was fearful about going into electoral politics, but I saw it as an
alternative that could slow down the politics of death. I saw it as an opportunity to use the
campaign as a space to reflect on ways to end the politics of death. I knew that I would not
change the minds of all of the politicians, but I could use my voice as a platform to send
another message to the people. I wanted to generate a political platform to organize the
people from another political perspective.

Márquez’s determination to participate in electoral politics reflected an awareness of the

limits to engaging with the state on its own terms. She also acknowledged the challenges
of building popular support for a political project of autonomy under the current
conditions.
A central aspect of her approach to participating in electoral politics hinged on
distinguishing herself from ‘the others,’ which she equated with the ‘politics of death.’
For Márquez, most elected officials – even when they came from the black communities –
ended up serving the interests of the state and capital. Her campaign was supposed to
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 385

serve as a platform for breaking with that style of self-serving politics. By engaging in
electoral politics, Márquez put into practice a saying that Carlos Rosero, one of the co-
founders of PCN, often repeats while preparing for workshops throughout northern
Cauca: ‘Hay que montarlo para desbaratarlo’ (you have to build it up to break it down).
I understand Rosero’s saying as an expression of the movement’s openness to creativ­
ity and self-critique, as evidence of a political project that refuses enclosure. His words
suggest a winking recognition that the nation-state as it presently exists will not resolve
the problems facing people. It can be strategic, according to this logic, to engage with the
state and build alternatives through state institutions because it could disrupt the status
quo and create unlikely opportunities, such as the collective land titling of millions of
hectares of land for black and indigenous communities. As such, social movements like
PCN attempt to build autonomy by manoeuvring through the opportunities available to
them in the nation-state and beyond (Alvarez et al. 2017). The key to this potentially
contradictory strategy, however, resides in the ability to resist the tendency towards co-
optation (Rahier 2012).
More than twenty-five years after the institutionalization of neoliberal multiculturalism,
the potential to ‘break it down’ by ‘building it up’ appears increasingly unlikely because
the strategy tends to reinforce the nation-state’s structures of domination (Hall 1996).
Movements like the Liberation of Mother Earth Process and the Afro-Descendant
Women’s Mobilization reveal a growing frustration with waiting on the government to
fill an empty seat (Proceso de Liberación de la Madre Tierra 2019). The two movements are
struggling to build their own strategies for survival and transformation that deny the
potential closure of the autonomy/inclusion dialectic. Becoming ‘disenchanted with the
state’ creates space for imagining possibilities and enacting alternatives that move
beyond the trappings of the nation-state’s discourse of multicultural rights.

Notes
1. It is worth noting that the Liberation of Mother Earth Process draws on a longer history of
‘liberating Mother Earth,’ which has its most immediate roots in a 2005 call-to-action by the
same name organized by the Association of Indigenous Cabildos of Northern Cauca (ACIN).
Prior to 2005, indigenous movements used the language of ‘recovery’ (recuperar) in their
strategy to reclaim land.
2. See Van Cott (2000), Warren and Jackson (2002), and Yashar (2005) for analysis on the rise of
multiculturalism in Latin America. I share Hooker’s perspective: ‘The impetus for the adoption
of group rights for subordinated racial and cultural groups most often comes from the
struggles for justice of such groups, while the immediate reasons dominant groups might
agree to consider such demands will vary and may include concerns about the stability of the
political community, international pressure, and so on’ (Hooker 2009, 157).
3. This article engages with recent scholarship and debates analyzing social movements in
Latin America (Alvarez et al. 2017). For more scholarship on black communities and
contemporary struggles for recognition in Colombia, see Agudelo (2005); Asher (2009);
Escobar (2008); Ng’weno (2007); Paschel (2016); Restrepo (2013); and Restrepo and Rojas
(2004). For more on indigenous communities in Colombia, see Bocarejo (2015); Campo
Palacios (2018); Chaves Chamorro (2005); Gow (2008); Jackson (2019); and Rappaport
(2005).
4. The thirteen municipalities of northern Cauca include: Santander de Quilichao, Buenos Aires,
Suárez, Puerto Tejada, Caloto, Guachené, Villarrica, Corinto, Miranda, Padilla, Jambaló,
Caldono and Toribio.
386 A. DEST

5. The ACIN was founded in 1994.

6. For more information on efforts to build interethnic and intercultural coalitions in northern
Cauca, see Mesa Interétnica e Intercultural del Cauca (2013). I analyze the role of mestizos in
the emergence of what I call ‘campesino identity politics’ in northern Cauca in my dissertation
(2019).
7. PCN was founded in 1993, and it has various regional associations named palenkes, or
maroon societies, throughout the country. The Palenke Alto Cauca operates in the region
of northern Cauca. See Restrepo (2013) for more on the ‘ethnicization’ of blackness. See Asher
(Asher 2017) for additional analysis of transformations within PCN’s demands. See Perry
(2013) for more on how grassroots community-based organizing is an important and largely
unrecognized aspect of black activism.
8. Gutiérrez Aguilar (2014) discusses a similar tension between what she calls the “community-
popular” and the “national-popular” whereby the “fluctuation between both perspectives is
expressed in systematic contradictions between, on the one hand, the desire to make the
previous political and economic order disappear or dissolve to spread different patterns of
coexistence and, on the other hand, the desire, which is equally present in the struggles
themselves, to find better ways to be included in that traditional order” (179).
9. Stuart Hall reaches a similar conclusion in referring to ‘multicultural drift’ in Britain as
a passive revolution (Hall and Back 2009).
10. Constitutional Court Sentence 1045-A of 2010 ruled on behalf of the Community Council of
La Toma.
11. See http://mujeresnegrascaminan.com/movilizacion/comunicados/for the complete list of
statements written by the Mobilization.
12. Manuel Matos, a dear friend and member of the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network (ACSN),
edited, translated, and subtitled a version of her speech on YouTube. https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=WeZoPACOOVU.
13. Emphasis added.
14. Here I am in dialogue with Hartman’s (1997) use of the term ‘subjection.’
15. According to Öcalan, ‘the real power of capitalist modernity is not its money or its weapons;
its real power lies in its ability to suffocate all utopias – including the socialist utopia which is
the last and the most powerful of all – with its liberalism’ (Öcalan 2015, 23).
16. The word desalambrar literally means to remove barbed wire.
17. For more on the question of ‘right-wing indigenism’ in the Pluricultural Organization of the
Indigenous Peoples of Cauca (Organización Pluricultural de los Pueblos Indígenas del Cauca,
OPIC), see Ramírez (2015).
18. According to the Human Rights Ombudsman, 479 social leaders were killed between
January 2016 and April 2019. The exact numbers, however, vary across monitoring agencies
(Gómez Cordón 2019).

Acknowledgements
This article began as part of my dissertation and benefitted greatly from the feedback of my
committee: Charles Hale, Christen Smith, Tianna Paschel, Juliet Hooker, Edmund Gordon, and Lina
Del Castillo. I am very grateful for comments from Kiran Asher, Ajamu Baraka, Daniel Campo
Palacios, Margarita Chaves Chamorro, Roosbelinda Cárdenas, Arturo Escobar, Sofía Garzón, Brian
Hicks, Jean Jackson, Francia Márquez, Joanne Rappaport, Patricia Richards, Axel Rojas, Carlos Rosero,
Robert Rouphail, Gimena Sanchez, and Shreyas Sreenath, as well as the anonymous reviewers at
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN ETHNIC STUDIES 387

Notes on contributor
Anthony Dest is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Lehman College. His doctoral dissertation,
After the War: Violence and Resistance in Colombia (University of Texas, Austin), was recognized as
the Best Dissertation of 2019 by the Peace and Justice Studies Association. His research has been
supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research
Council, and the Inter-American Foundation.

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