Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.–Colombia War on Drugs

Abstract

How is life in a criminalized ecology in the Andean‐Amazonian foothills of south‐ western Colombia? In what way does antinarcotics policy that aims to eradicate la mata que mata (the plant that kills) pursue peace through poison? Relatedly, how do people keep on cultivating a garden, caring for forest, or growing food when at any moment a crop‐duster plane may pass overhead, indiscriminately spraying herbicides over entire landscapes? Since 2000, the U.S.–Colombian War on Drugs has relied on the militarized aerial fumigation of coca plants, coupled with alternative development interventions that aim to forcibly eradicate illicit livelihoods. Through ethnographic engagement with small farmers in the frontier department of Putumayo, the gateway to the country's Amazon and a region that has been the focus of counternarcotic operations, this article explores the different possibilities and foreclosures for life and death that emerge in a tropical forest ecology under military duress. By following farmers, their material practices, and their life philosophies, I trace the ways in which human‐soil relations come to potentiate forms of resistance to the violence and criminalization produced by militarized, growth‐oriented development. Rather than productivity—one of the central elements of modern capitalist growth— the regenerative capacity of these ecologies relies on organic decay, impermanence, decomposition, and even fragility that complicates modernist bifurcations of living and dying, allowing, I argue, for ecological imaginaries and life processes that do not rely on productivity or growth to strive into existence.

Chemical warfare in Colombia, evidentiary ecologies and senti-actuando practices of justice

“…of USAID crop substitution programs and state-implemented alternative development projects to provide viable socio-economic alternatives to illicit coca cultivation (Lyons, 2016b; see also Ramírez, 2005). 4.…”

Cultivating Alternatives to Authoritarian Populism in Amazonia

“…The making and unmaking of political subjectivities, we show, are outcomes of acts of cultivation that involve not only humans but also soils, seeds, and plants (Bear et al. ; Lederach ; Lyons ; Moore ).…”

“…We advance these debates drawing on multispecies studies to argue that "the people" is never constituted-or challenged-in an ecological vacuum. The making and unmaking of political subjectivities, we show, are outcomes of acts of cultivation that involve not only humans but also soils, seeds, and plants (Bear et al 2015;Lederach 2017;Lyons 2016;Moore 2015).…”

“The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”: A Multispecies Approach to Territorial Peace in Colombia

“…This is particularly true in the face of encroaching and powerful multinational corporations that legitimize their claims to the land in the name of “sustainable development” through violent representations of campesinos as lacking technical expertise, unknowledgeable about the environment and the market, unable to operate with long‐term perspectives, and, therefore, destructive. The burden campesinos face to make themselves legitimate as “experts”—with intimate knowledge born of generations of cultivating the land—is tremendous in a context where long histories of racism, discrimination, and disenfranchisement of rural farmers continue to guide the actions, policies, and discourses of private‐sector, (I)NGO, and state institutions alike (Gill ; Guha ; Lyons ; Neumann ). Here, cycles of violent displacement are not interrupted but are instead normalized under the auspices of international peace and development.…”