Os camponeses do “Nudo Del Paramillo”: desapropriação e reprodução da vida numa região de fronteira agrária

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the historical processes of territorialization and social reproduction conduced by the peasantry in a mountain region located in the south of the Colombian Caribbean coast called 'Nudo del Paramillo.' A region is both a forest containing high levels of natural biodiversity and a disputed area of agricultural frontier expansion. During different periods throughout the 20th Century, legal and illegal actors conducted uninterrupted and connected regimes of territorial dispossession related to local, national, and international dynamics of capital accumulation, more recently presented in the form of environmental conservation. Notably, in 'Nudo del Paramillo' the dynamics of the armed conflict intertwined with those of capital accumulation, land concentration, and environmental conservation. In such a context, entire peasants' populations were victimized, displaced, and dispossessed from their lands, resources, and livelihoods. Thus, for analyzing challenging processes of peasant territorialization amid the enforcement of subsequent regimes of dispossession are relevant to understand how the local population dealt with natural resources' access. For understanding the emergence of such territorialization processes, the paper will consider the social and territorial configuration of the region since the beginning of the 20th Century. At this time, cattle-ranching haciendas gained a dominant position in terms of the construction of social order and territorial hoarding. As a result of that accumulation, peasants have been increasingly confined into the forest of the agrarian border, which also implied that they arguably developed autonomous livelihoods. With the development of former dispossession regimes, the state appears mostly as a stripping agent through environmental conservation policies that criminalized peasant's livelihoods. The irruption of the armed conflict dynamics also brought into the scene the expansion and consolidation of illegal economies, such as coca cultivation. In this way, the research pretends to offer a local and historical point of view of changes caused to the Colombian agrarian structures and its impacts on local peasant populations. The paper will use territorialization approaches of Latin American studies, as well as political ecology ang agrarian history as theoretical frameworks that permits understand the particular kind of discrimination and dispossession established at these local context, and stablish dialog with global south approaches.