Living displacement

The loss and making of place in Colombia

Mateja Celestina

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526108739
• eBook ISBN: 9781526127655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Focusing on two cases of resettlement in rural Cundinamarca, Colombia, this book examines how displaced campesinos make sense of their displacement and how displacement shapes their everyday lives. It is based on a ten-month fieldwork employing ethnographic methods working, living and sharing with the displaced and their host. The book calls for a longer time-frame analysis of the phenomenon of displacement, which considers people's lives both pre- and post- physical relocation. It examines how violence and terror altered people's sense of place and set off displacement process before they actually moved. It analyses the challenges the displaced are facing in their subsequent place-making endeavours, including the negotiation of social relations, consequences of categorization, engagement with the physical land, and memories of violence to challenge the notion that displacement starts with uprooting and terminates with resettlement or return.

1

Introduction: reconceptualising displacement

…no one lives in the world in general. (Geertz 1996: 262)

At the end of 2016, Colombia counted more than seven million people displaced due to violence and conflict, a number which places it at the very top of the global statistics. The recurrent nature of the phenomenon, which has shaped the country’s demographics, makes displacement seem a natural occurrence. A somewhat contradictory process is going on. The greater the number of the displaced, the more desensitised Colombian society seems to be towards displacement. As an employee of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) commented, the displaced asking for money at the traffic lights have become part of the common landscape. They simply are. They have become a fact. Contrary to logic, the high numbers of the displaced have contributed to their invisibility.

But who are these people? How do they experience displacement? What is displacement? What does it mean to be displaced? What does it mean to them and to millions of other internally displaced persons (IDPs) around the globe? The number of forced migrants, particularly IDPs, is on the rise. If the media and the politicians are serving us with images of numerous refugees attempting to reach western countries on dingy boats fighting off the winter currents, hiding in and under trucks, travelling on top of trains or walking hundreds of miles along rail tracks, battling with barbed wired fences or passing through environments as hostile as the desert, the number of those who stay within the borders of their own countries, who remain hidden from cameras’ views, but whose plight is no less severe, is disproportionately larger. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC 2017) places the number of internally displaced due to violence and conflict above forty million at the end of 2016. The prospects are so bleak that Elisabeth Colson (2003) concludes that rather than attempting to affect policymaking, scholarly research into internal displacement is done more realistically in order to inform ourselves what we are to expect if displacement affects us. Keith Basso (1996a) laments that in the age of uprooted populations holding on to places will become a privilege and a gift. And Arturo Escobar (2008) with world-weariness concludes that today’s resettlement schemes and camps really are just pilot projects for the future. Displacement is indisputably a pressing issue that will continue to affect millions around the globe. It is also an issue that warrants greater and more nuanced scholarly attention.

There is a gap between displacement-producing and displacement-preventing mechanisms which is increasing and untenable (Escobar 2008). Knowing people’s plight might be insufficient to convince armed actors to stop waging power over their territories, to deter the forces of modernity which are generating displacement, to encourage criminal groups to give up their activities affecting lives of so many people, or indeed to persuade respective governments to curb such processes since they themselves often have a stake in them. Nevertheless, even if we are unable to stop displacement, an engagement with the phenomenon and those who are going through the process is crucial. After all, only a better understanding of the process might help restrain displacement and address the often poor policy responses. And only a better understanding of people’s experiences and attention paid to individual stories can help give back people the humanity they have lost through being grouped together and categorised as IDPs.

This book is an attempt to reveal the complexities of displacement processes. As Doña Flor and Martina, two of the research participants, pointed out, it is difficult to fully grasp the process if you have not lived through it yourself. Even if you do, displacement is so individualised that the meanings given to it differ. No two experiences are the same. The displaced might share certain similarities and aspects with others, but very personal circumstances such as one’s social role, the point in one’s life when displacement occurred, or one’s biography generally speaking make displacement a highly personalised experience. Explaining displacement might therefore seem an impossible task for the scholar.

Nevertheless, without undermining this diversity, there is a way to discuss the long nights, the fear, to interpret the loss, the hope, the anger, the disillusionment, the difficulties with forming attachment to a new place, the negotiation of relationships among the displaced and their ‘hosts’, grappling with the new identity, agency and the seeming impossibility to leave the past behind. It is possible to think of a general framework which allows for differences, contextualises displacement and which helps bring people’s experiences closer to our understanding. I propose to do so through conceptualising displacement as a process of loss and subsequent making of place. Displacement is not only about loss, trauma and struggle, but also about agency, getting to terms with the situation and an attempt to move on in life. Both the loss and the making of place are its essential and indivisible components (Celestina 2016; Turton 2005). In this introduction I make a theoretical case for thinking about displacement through such an approach. But before doing that I introduce the country where I listened to people’s stories of displacement – Colombia.

Conflict and displacement in Colombia

When I first travelled to Colombia in 2009, I was arriving in an unknown territory. Having read widely about conflict, violence, displacement, disappearances, recruitment of minors, sexual abuses and human rights abuses in general, I was surprised that at the Bogotá airport, apart from greater than usual presence of armed officers, conflict seemed as something belonging to a different place. The two months I spent in the country at the time left an impression that the country, and Bogotá itself for that matter, are living a number of different realities. While some regions are involved in fully fledged conflict, others are enjoying relative peace. While some Colombians are struggling to survive and make a living, others are leading luxurious lives. While some are attempting to heal the wounds of violence and conflict, for others these are a distant reality which they do not and wish not to engage with. These impressions only deepened during my ten-month stay in Colombia in 2011 and 2012, when I was gathering the narratives on which the material in this book is based. Between my first, second and third visit, the number of internally displaced steadily rose. A Colombian non-governmental organisation (NGO) CODHES, La Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement) recorded 286,389 new cases of displacement in 2009, 280,041 in 2010, 259,146 new cases in 2011 and 261,050 in 2012 (CODHES 2013).¹

For over a century a number of diverse actors have been trying to realise their opposing interests, aiming to get control over Colombian territory and its people. A chapter in a book would not be sufficient to describe and analyse the twenty-five national civil wars and about sixty regional wars Colombia experienced since its independence from Spain in 1810 (Ruiz et al. 2006) or to cover the numerous regional particularities of the conflict since almost every region is a story to itself. Other scholars (see for instance Hylton 2006; Palacios 2006; Pearce 1990; Sánchez and Meertens 2001) have in detail covered major historical events which have shaped the country. Here, I only briefly discuss the reasons and the actors involved in displacement at the national level.

Displacement is not a new issue in Colombia. Conflict and violence have accompanied much of the country’s history and have persistently affected civilian population. Displacement was present in the nineteenth-century civil wars, the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1903) and, in more recent history, the first major displacement took place during the period known as La Violencia, which started in 1948, with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal party leader.² La Violencia is usually thought of as a clash between the Liberal and Conservative parties for political dominance. Nevertheless, socio-economic circumstances, including persistently unresolved land question, should not be ignored. Rather than categorising it as war, Palacios (2006: 138) describes La Violencia ‘as some twenty years of crime and impunity facilitated by political sectarianism’ (see Figure 1). One of the consequences was extensive displacement; estimates say that up to two million people were displaced (Roldán 2002).

Figure 1The view from the natural bridge close to Porvenir, where truckloads of corpses were allegedly thrown into the River Sumapaz during La Violencia.

Conflict and tensions did not end with La Violencia. Social inequalities and discontent gave birth to various guerrilla groups in 1960s.³ The most important were the largest guerrilla group Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia); the FARC, which has recently undergone demobilisation under the administration of Juan Manuel Santos; Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army); the ELN, which is still active at the time of writing of this book but in process of peace negotiations; and Ejército Popular de Liberación (Popular Liberation Army), the EPL, which gained importance mainly in Urabá, and which demobilised in 1991. The guerrillas gained support among the peasantry, since small-scale peasants were under constant harassment from the big landowners who enjoyed military support. Nevertheless, some of that support has been lost since then, partly due to guerrillas’ involvement in drug trade and in part since some, including some of the interviewees for this book, believe the guerrillas no longer follow the initial political principles.⁴

The fighting between the guerrillas and the military gained new dimensions when a new actor entered the stage – the paramilitaries. The paramilitaries were financed by landowners who wished to cleanse regions of guerrillas and their supporters. They joined under an umbrella organisation Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia), AUC.⁵ The paramilitaries collaborated with the military and often did their ‘dirty work’. They are accountable for some of the greatest atrocities committed in the country and they were also the armed actor that generated most of displacement. Among others they contributed to greater land concentration or ‘counter-reform’ (Machado 2004). They drove people off their lands and enabled drug traders to buy large plots of land.

AUC demobilised during Álvaro Uribe Vélez’ administration (2002–10).⁶ The demobilisation was unsuccessful and new neo-paramilitary groups have emerged. Their structure is unclear but a visible link to the drug trade exists. They operate like private armies and use the same practices as the demobilised AUC, but unlike the latter they do not unite. They have territorial disputes among themselves, form temporary alliances with criminal groups and the guerrillas for the purposes of the drug trade. Since the number of registered IDPs in 2008 (380,863) was almost as high as at the height of conflict in 2002, the increase in the number of the displaced was linked to the existence of these drug-related emergent groups (Meertens 2010: S152).

In recent years in particular, there has been a stronger link between official national development projects, conflict and population exodus. Power, road and rural infrastructure projects coincide with the areas where armed conflict is most prevalent. In these areas there has been evidence of (neo)paramilitary involvement in displacement. Displacement has been present especially in regions where development projects are designed around the mono-cultivation of the African palm, where the lands ‘have to be “prepared” – emptied – for the entrance of capital-induced development’ (Oslender 2007: 759), which might otherwise lead to local resistance.⁷

Displacement in Colombia has therefore been generated from more than one source. Like conflict and violence it has been shaping the population, and the cultural and political mosaic of the country. The same as with conflict, the pattern of uprooting differs from region to region. Perhaps unsurprisingly those most affected by displacement come from the disadvantaged parts of the country’s society, where state protection is not a priority. These are campesinos (peasants), Afro-Colombians and the indigenous;⁸ people who, as Daniel Pécaut (2001) so adequately puts it, have never fully enjoyed their citizenship rights and for whom displacement is not a simple circumstance but is almost always lived as a permanent social condition.

The great majority of the displaced are in urban centres. They usually stay on the fringes of the cities, where they mix with the urban poor population. Therefore, while the areas they move to lie within cities, they are at the same time outside the cities in social, economic and physical terms (Salazar et al. 2008). Most displaced people come from a rural background and are not accustomed to urban life. This increases their alienation as well as the residents’ anxiety about the displaced’s impact on the city. The displaced are not welcome because the poor hosts and local governments see them as a burden for the public utilities and limited job market (Jaramillo et al. 2004; Salazar et al. 2008), since they increase poverty belts in urban suburbs (Osorio Perez 2000) and since their presence drives up property prices (Vidal López et al. 2011). Due to such problems and higher numbers, urban IDPs have received more academic attention.

In this book, in contrast, I explore the rural context. Not paying attention to those in the rural areas risks maintaining campesinos in an inferior position compared to urban inhabitants. Keeping them at the periphery of interest and concern reflects the historical position of smallholders and arguably also the countryside in Colombia. Lack of studies into rural lives and attempts at resettlement gives a false impression that those resettled into the rural environment do not face challenges in adaptation in the same way as the displaced in urban settings; in short, a campesino is believed to be a campesino everywhere, a general feature of urban bias towards the peasantry. Furthermore, in the advent of the current land restitution process, exploration of place-making in the countryside is pertinent. Estimates say that 8.3 million hectares of land have been appropriated (Grupo de m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Glossary
• Series editor’s foreword
• Map of Colombia
• 1 Introduction: reconceptualising displacement
• 2 Traversing the landscapes of (dis)trust
• 3 Displacement as an unwinding process
• 4 The road to Porvenir and Esperanza: the struggle for land
• 5 The making of a desplazado
• 6 Desplazado: to be or not to be
• 7 Displacement hierarchies: IDP community under question
• 8 Desplazados and their ‘hosts’: the quest for relational belonging
• 9 Taming the land
• 10 The remains of the place and times left behind
• 11 Conclusion: end of displacement?
• References
• Index