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How do states achieve popular recognition and symbolic power as “The State,” a collectively recognized entity that serves the common good? While classic work has described the state idea as produced by the actions of state officials, it is ultimately ordinary citizens who must recognize the state as such and consent to its rule. This article, based on 20 months of ethnographic research in a village that, after decades of armed group control, is a key site for the implementation of Colombia’s landmark peace deal, describes how the formation of the state’s symbolic power occurs (or not) through local emotions. I focus on a coca substitution program that has both stoked pre-existing local desires for the promise of the state as carrier of peace and progress and that has, largely because of its outsourcing to different contractors, failed to live up to its commitments, causing economic collapse and generating feelings of betrayal, mistrust, confusion, and impotence. I show how local feelings respond to the regional transformation state formation has caused, popular representations of the state, and their direct interactions with substitution program officials, including non-state actors. I argue that more than simply byproducts of state formation, these emotions are constitutive of the local imaginations of “The State” that are key to the state’s development of symbolic power. It is in the realm of everyday life and emotions, the interplay between local desires for state presence and the frustrations generated by their actual encounters with state power, that state rule is achieved—or not.

En este ensayo visual, basado en 24 meses de investigación etnográfica en Briceño, uso imágenes para describir cómo la población local ha vivido e influenciado una transformación sistemática del territorio. Me enfoco en tres temas: la inversión estatal, especialmente el programa de sustitución de cultivos ilícitos, asociado al proceso de paz; la lucha campesina por desarrollar nuevas actividades económicas tras la desaparición de la coca; y la amenaza de los megaproyectos, particularmente la represa Hidroituango y una posible mina multinacional de oro, apoyadas por el poder estatal. Muestro que en Briceño hay una tensión fundamental en el proceso de paz entre dos visiones para el futuro del campo colombiano: como sitio de producción campesina o extracción capitalista. Dicha tensión se resolverá en el plano territorial, donde convergen políticas económicas, proyectos capitalistas y economías campesinas.

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