Political Geography 38 (2014) 68e78

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Political Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Governmental extractivism in Colombia: Legislation, securitization and the local settings of mining control
Irene Vlez-Torres*
Department of Geography & Geology, University of Copenhagen, Oester Voldgade 10, DK-1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark

a b s t r a c t
Keywords: Mining Governmentality Legislation Securitization Afrodescendants Colombia

This paper analyzes the previous decade of governmental extractivism in Colombia, designed and imposed through two main power mechanisms: legislation and securitization. In examining the governments disposition and the territorialized settings of mining control, I identify two ofcial architectures of rights: one supporting the private accumulation of capital through the foreign exploitation of mining resources and the other aiming to concede ethnic rights. While the two architectures compete in the juridical arena, a violent dispute has developed in the overlap between the geographies of mining concessions and the geographies of ethnic communities within the territorial settings of mining control. Legal and illegal military securitization has emerged as a complementary mechanism for territorial control. By looking at the case of La Toma in the Alto Cauca region, I conclude that the countrys previous two presidencies have actively promoted differentiated access to and control over land-based resources, excluding Afrodescendant communities from accessing the environmental goods in their territories while favouring private actors. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction In 2010, the Colombian Constitutional Court acknowledged the legal presence of Afrodescendant communities in La Toma district, suspended all mining titles in the territory, and made it mandatory for any project affecting the traditions of the local community to proceed only with their free, prior, and informed consent. The decision was made public in April 2011, and became a source of pride and hope for local inhabitants who had struggled to preserve their territory and gain access to land-based resources, particularly gold and water. However, the same day that the news broke amid celebrations by the local community, an illegally armed group entered the territory, took over one of the artisanal gold mines traditionally worked by the community, kidnapped two people, and threatened to kill more than 10 local miners who were warned never to mine there again. This violent action was neither the rst nor the last that local miners have had to face: a few months later, three backhoes (guarded by illegally armed people) arrived to extract gold from the Ovejas River in La Toma territory; in April 2009, nine miners were killed by paramilitaries in the same area. While exogenous violence increased in La Toma territory after 2000, legal actions by the government have also come to affect local

* Tel.: 45 31 631252705 (cell). E-mail address: irenevt@gmail.com. 0962-6298/$ e see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.11.008

communities access to and control over gold resources. By 2009, more than 95% of La Toma District had been granted to external persons and companies in the shape of mining titles by INGEOMINAS ethe public institution that administrates the countrys mining and geological resourcese (Observatorio de Discriminacin Racial, 2011). As a consequence, the local community has faced various eviction attempts by the local government, which claimed to be protecting the rights of mining concession holders. Mining laws and programmes that grant private access to gold resources in La Toma are the result of a decade-long ofcial extractivist rationale for governing land-based resources, aimed at securing the territories and underground minerals for private exploitation; due to the empirical context analyzed here, I dene land-based resources as those on the ground such as soil, nutrients, and water, but also and mainly underground, such as gold and other minerals. Consequently, national foreign mining investment increased more than fourfold between 2002 and 2011 (Ministerio de Minas y Energa, 2012) and the social conicts associated with mining have intensied and been geographically propagated (CINEP/PPP, 2012). Extractivist policies implemented under the regimes of President Uribe-Vlez (2002e2010) and President Santos-Caldern (2010e) contradict the international regulations that were made constitutional after 1991, and aimed to protect ethnic rights. As a result, differences and tensions have emerged among government institutions in relation to favouring the rights of mining titleholders versus the rights of local communities. Despite the tension, private

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access to land-based resources has tended to prevail over ethnic communities rights. Although no large-scale mining project is currently underway in La Toma, the mining titles, local violence, and constant eviction attempts have colonized peoples imagination (Bebbington, 2012; Bebbington et al., 2008) with the idea of being dispossessed by the multinationals. This paper critically addresses (i) the governments rationale for extractivism; (ii) the tensions between two legal architectures, one supporting private mining and the other protecting ethnic rights; and (iii) the territorialized violent settings of mining control in La Toma. By exposing the tensions and limits of the constitutionalization of ethnic rights (Eslava, 2009), and the escalated legal and violent disputes over natural resources in La Toma, this paper concludes that bureaucratization and violence have come to order resource-rich territories and communities over the last decade in Colombia, illustrating the extractivist rationale that governs minerals and mining zones. In order to study the history of the communitys struggle to access and control land-based resources and gain recognition of their ethnic rights, I have adopted a participatory action research approach (Fals Borda, 1979; Hale, 2006). Two principles frame this approach. First, I conceive of knowledge not as a product but as a construction e a situated process (Katz, 2001) with a history of production (Harding, 2005: pp. 220e221). Second, in terms of challenging power relations, I consider that knowledge should be collectively built and owned; its creation should be based on the political history and practices of the community (Escobar, 2003), and it should aim to transform social injustices (Fals Borda, 1979). Accordingly, my approach has been to contribute to the local contestation of dispossession by critically analyzing the struggle over land and land-based resources, and by collectively building knowledge-power tools that could prove useful for the community and social organizations. My position is that of a politically active and engaged scholar with a clear trajectory in environmental and ethnic social movements, who has aimed at building critical knowledge as well as contributing to their struggle for territorial defence. To develop this research, I have collated the studys objectives, products, and schedule with the local authority in La Toma (Consejo Comunitario1) and the most representative Afrodescendant social organizations working in the territory (Palenke del Alto Cauca and Proceso de Comunidades Negras [PCN]). Between 2009 and 2013, I developed six complementary research techniques: (i) workshops to build memory lines of the history of local socio-environmental conicts; (ii) social cartographies to create maps that show traditional livelihoods and the historical transformation of local landscapes and waterscapes; (iii) revision of archives preserved by local leaders to characterize their bureaucratic trajectories to access rights; (iv) revision of relevant legislation, plans, and programmes that frame the governments rationale and mechanisms for controlling land-based resources; (v) participatory documentary processes engaging local youth in order to tap their autonomous representations of territorial dispossession; and (vi) interviews with local leaders and public ofcers to acknowledge their positions related to the control of land and land-based resources. Drawing on the case of La Toma, this paper explores extractivism as a development scheme in Colombia, designed and imposed through two main power mechanisms to ofcially govern mining resources: legislation and securitization. Development is understood here as one of the more signicant forms of state formation in Colombia over the last six decades (Escobar, 2000); as demonstrated by Li (1999) in the case of Indonesia, development is a discourse in which the national interest and progress of the nation are the governments moral claims to legitimize its control over natural resources by means of protecting and allocating

commoditized resources. My argument is that such claims have a deep-rooted adverse impact on local societies that, under certain development projects deployed locally, end up being dispossessed from their livelihoods and marginalized from the national project of wealth. In order to understand the governments rationale in postcolonial societies, it is useful to empirically question the articulations, tensions, and disputes between political and civil societies (Ballv, 2012) in situated state-building processes (Li, 2007b; Lund, 2006; Sikor & Lund, 2009). Thus, building on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality (Foucault, 1998; 2007), I examine how concrete power mechanisms have created differences among the population through discriminatory and hierarchized access to and control over land-based resources. Consequently, I use the framework of colonial power developed by Quijano (2000) and Mignolo (2003) to frame the classications that create the experience of ethnic and racial2 subordination in Colombia. These are derived from the unequal distribution of wealth and materialize in the distinctive division of labour and conictive allocation of land and land-based resources. I conclude, therefore, that, in Colombia, control over land and land-based resources has been a successful strategy for private capital exploitation and accumulation (Harvey, 2007) by means of two complementary power mechanisms: legislation and military securitization. This analysis draws mainly, on the one hand, on a study of the governments ofcial rationale given in the national public policies, programmes, and laws that have come to situate the disputed control of gold mining. On the other hand, I use the data built with the community through complementary participatory techniques to reect on the territorialized features of such control. I start by introducing the geographical and historical conguration of the struggles for land-based resources in La Toma to illustrate how legal regulation and military securitization have produced conicting extractivist landscapes. Next, I bring out the different legal frameworks within the government that order landbased resources and territorial ethnic rights. The emerging juridical parallel can be understood in the tensions that arise between the norms that aim to protect communities rights on the one hand, and the regulations that promote foreign mining investment on the other. In the fth section, I discuss the governments rationale for embracing extractivism through legislation and military securitization over the last decade. In the sixth part, I present the case of La Toma and the territorialized settings of gold control. Finally, I conclude that, despite the heterogeneity within the government, extractivism for private and foreign accumulation has been juridically promoted and given military protection, generating legal parallels and causing conicts over land-based resource access and control to escalate. While La Toma is a representative case of local disputes over resource control in Colombia, it also illustrates the mechanisms of the governments territorial control in a postcolonial context. The geography and history of La Toma as a mining setting La Toma District consists of 1300 households settled in an area of 7000 ha (Observatorio de Discriminacin Racial, 2011: p. 35). The district is located in the region known as Alto Cauca, between the upper watershed of the Cauca and Ovejas rivers in the southwest mountain chain of the Colombian Andes (see Map 1). Its geostrategic location in relation to the Pacic Ocean, and rich agricultural land and subsoil have made La Toma a violently disputed territory among drug trafckers, foreign and domestic private actors, the government, and local inhabitants. Gold mines were established in this region in 1636 under a colonial regime and with a workforce of African slaves. Since the abolition of slavery in 1851, local

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Map 1. La Toma District in the Municipality of Surez, Department of Cauca, Colombia. Source: Open Street Map 2013 (at: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map5/51.500/-0.100) and SIG-OT 2013 (at: http://sigotn.igac.gov.co/sigotn/).

inhabitants have depended on artisanal gold mining, small-scale agriculture, and shing for their livelihoods. Furthermore, by calling themselves agro-mineros (agro-miners), they have built a cultural identity rooted in territorialized agro-mining activities, and threats against the territory have become threats against the communitys culture and livelihoods. In 2000, the Ministry of Mines conceded the rst mining title in La Toma to a private person; by 2009, more than 95% of the territory had been granted in concessions to private actors. Although contested, mining titles are not the only threat to the communitys territorial control. A leader from La Toma narrates the history of struggle for land and land-based resources as follows: Here, the state has only grabbed what is ours. Its actions have caused us to lose and never to prot. We, the black communities in this territory, have always tried to live in peace, but they come, invent their policies and destabilize us. First, between 1930 and 1960, the multinational corporation Asnaz Gold Mining came; between 1960 and 1970, the community started to cultivate again, establishing our traditional agro-mining farms. But later, in 1980, the Salvajina dam came and people lost their economic stability once again. (.) Recently, in the period of conict [with the paramilitaries], the phenomenon of multinational mining arose and we were declared illegal miners. These policies have created a mess! (La Toma, 07/2011). In 1985, the completion of La Salvajina dam resulted in the ooding of the most important traditional gold mines and also the most fertile agricultural land. A decade later, the dam was privatized and all promises of development were broken: hospitals, motorways, and schools were never built, and the projects negative externalities e including the overwhelming wave of outmigration e were neither recognized, mitigated, nor compensated for (Vlez-Torres, 2012a). In this scenario, it is possible to argue that the current struggles over mining resources in La Toma have come to add conict and impoverishment to a historically marginalized community. I refer to this as a trajectory of

racialized/ethnicized dispossession to highlight the ways in which the governments development schemes have been designed to favour private actors against the will and welfare of local Afrodescendant communities. Hence, this case is particularly interesting as La Toma constitutes a territory in which the plans to implement large-scale mining projects have added not only to peoples dispossession but also to part of a long-standing process of ethnically-based social organization. Although local communities have resisted these spatialized power mechanisms, and other academics have emphasized the importance of studying alter/anti-geopolitics from the perspective of subaltern subjects and social movements (Castree, 2004; Escobar, 2001; Koopman, 2011; Oslender, 2004; Scott, 1989), in this paper I concentrate on analyzing the governments legal disposition to control land-based resources and their resort to military means in doing so. An ethnically-based territorial turn and the disputed building of the mining frontier Central to understanding the case of La Toma is the coexistence and tension between constitutional ethnic rights and national policies on mining and security. In this section, I analyze the main characteristics of these juridical architectures of rights in order to argue that the securitization of private large-scale and foreign mining has tended to prevail over pro-community rights. This territorialized hierarchy of rights draws on the extractivist Colombian governmentality that has, over the last decade, framed the creation of juridical and military mechanisms. This extractivist rationale has, in turn, driven the dispossession of local communities from their livelihoods, marginalizing them from the national project of wealth. Plural and progressive constitutionalization of ethnic rights With the Political Constitution of 1991 and subsequent legislative arrangements, economic neoliberalism was implemented

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simultaneously with a multicultural state policy that aimed at recognizing cultural differences among the Colombian population (Bebbington, 2009; Bocarejo, 2011; Escobar, 2010; Vlez-Torres, 2012b). The Constitution declared Colombia to be a multi-ethnic and pluri-cultural nation, and indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and Rom peoples were recognized as ethnic groups. In accordance with the ILO Convention No. 169, collective property rights were constitutionally granted to Afrodescendant communities and indigenous peoples when organized in Consejos Comunitarios and Cabildos, respectively. This legal entitlement to land was of great political importance for ethnic communities and organizations e it was a triumphant recognition of the territorial rights of poor rural communities who, since the abolition of slavery in 1851, had been unable to access a legal instrument to formalize their land tenure. As a result of this policy, between 1996 and 2003, over 4.5 million hectares were titled collective black territories on the Pacic Coast (Offen, 2003: p. 44). However, land entitlement was not as successful outside the Colombian Pacic region. Legal requirements tended to trap Afrodescendant communities from the inter-Andean valley in a complex economy of rights (Li, 1999: p. 313), compelling them to technically demonstrate and politically negotiate their ethnicity in order to assert their rights to collective property and to free, prior, and informed consent. In the Colombian context, it is reasonable to argue that it was not just social mobilization (Restrepo, 2002) and the multicultural illusion (Bocarejo, 2011) that widened the new Constitutions understanding and protection of ethnic rights. It was also the need to confront the seizing of land and land-based resources that made the protection of ethnic rights meaningful. As a result of multistakeholders negotiations among social movements, political actors, and the demobilized M-19 guerrilla group, the Constitutional Assembly took into account historical claims to protect traditional communities and their territories. The constitutionalization of ethnic rights was, in this process, a big political step in recognizing and protecting indigenous and Afrodescendant communities. However, despite their intention to protect the rights of historically marginalized communities, private actors interest in commoditized land-based resources did not decline after the Constitution came into effect. While the land-grabbing mechanisms affecting local communities access to and control of their territory have often been violent, some of these mechanisms have been legally facilitated by the government. As argued by Oslender (2008: p. 97), though the possibility of territorial control for black communities was set in motion through Law 70 of 1993, (.) the reach of this legislation has since been subverted by territorial violence that has prevented the newly acquired legal rights from being exercised. While violence can be seen to be the result of the constant dispute over the governments political legitimacy, (legal and illegal) military mechanisms for controlling land-based resources have become key pieces of the state-building process (Grajales, 2011). In this scenario, a spatialized economy of violence has emerged and socially embodied processes of violence (Oslender, 2008) have become systematic techniques for gaining private access to land and landbased resources, limiting the territorial control of local communities. The constitutional declaration of cultural and ethnic plurality was intimately associated with access, use and control over land, ascribing new rights in land as it ascribes new forms of [cultural] recognition and being (Ngweno, 2000: p. 18). The ethnic and territorial change that the Constitution brought to the political arena reects a social d and not always coherent d construction of nature (Katz & Kirby, 1991) based on (i) the recognition that identity and place are mutually dependent constructs; and (ii) on a novel

understanding of nature as located resources that needed to be legible for state interventions (Asher & Ojeda, 2009: p. 295). As a result, while ordering, exploiting, producing, and developing nature into commodities have been aims of government policy thereafter, communities have contested the mechanisms and rationale of these institutional arrangements e which are fundamental to capital accumulation e by creating autonomous lifeplans. By recovering and enhancing traditional knowledge and practices that emphasize a relation to nature in less commoditized ways, discourses on solidarity economies and sustainable productivity systems have emerged between the ethnic social movements. Controversies have emerged among social movements and academics in relation to what has been called a multicultural neoliberalism. Some have argued that multicultural policies on afrmative action and differentiated rights have been essential to the consolidation of a neoliberal system, veiled by cultural diversity and biodiversity (Asher & Ojeda, 2009). To grasp how international organizations have contributed economically and institutionally to shaping the ethnically-based territorial turn in Colombia (Offen, 2003), it is useful to read about the World Banks role in the Proyecto Biopacco (Asher & Ojeda, 2009; Oslender, 2007) and the Natural Resource Management Program in the Pacic basin (Ngweno, 2000, 2007). These studies argue that, while the Bank has reinforced some of the interests of ethnic communities by recognizing their territorial rights, its views on land entitlement differ from those of the latter: the Bank sees this formalization process as a necessary means to creating clearly dened spaces to be governed by the state, and produced, extracted, and developed by the economy. The result has been, therefore, a disputed representation of what (bio- and cultural) diversity should be conserved, what territory must be built, and who is to determine the criteria. However, a simplistic correlation between neoliberalism and multiculturalism runs the risk of denying the long-standing processes of identity-based social organization among indigenous and Afrodescendant communities (Restrepo, 2002). While the constitutionalization of ethnic and territorial rights (Eslava, 2009) has enforced particular ethnic identication processes e framed in regimes of social representation (Oslender, 2007) and initiatives of social mobilization towards legally formalized ethnic rights e it can also degenerate into articial identities constructed strategically to access differentiated rights that give economic advantages to ethnic communities over other demographic groups (Chves & Zambrano, 2006). In order to prevent a hasty conclusion about instrumental essentialism, it is important to acknowledge the history of ethnic identity building and social organization. In other words, it is necessary to recognize that ethnicity might be used in strategic ways to create tactical identity positions in a constellation of power relations that are no less legitimate (Friedman, 2002; Hale, 2006). This can occur in the interaction between the social trajectories of identity building and the state-lead formalization of rights where a new setting of ethnic regulation and exercise has emerged. In this scenario, communities, organizations, and the government have come to contest social representations of ethnicity, exercises of ethnic rights, and discourses on territorial governance. Building on the correlation between social and regulatory identity regimes, it is useful to reect on the ways in which Afrodescendant ethnicity is connected to the idea of rural bio-diverse territories. Such an association is important to the scope of this paper as it raises the question as to how disputes over access to and control over resource-rich territories involve different actors on a stage where issues of territory, autonomy, and culture intertwine. Accordingly, the social and legal bases of La Tomas struggle to defend its territory illustrates the interaction between the bureaucratized regulation of identity, the struggle for territory, and the disputed rights to access land-based resources.

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Reecting on the social and legal regimes that reect the discourses on land rights, property, and territory requires us to examine the transformation of the state and its governing mechanisms, particularly bureaucratization and securitization. The government ensemble analyzed here is the one that aims to control, among land-based resources, underground minerals. This analytical focus turns the attention away from the (as yet delayed) collective land entitlement that the community has the right to access in their struggle to control underground resources e with an ethnicized discourse of territorial autonomy. Yet, on paper, ethnic communities can be legally allocated Special Mining Zones and granted the right to free, prior, and informed consent. The case of La Toma illustrates that the struggle for territorial autonomy can be more complex, bureaucratically dense, and violent when mineral resources are at stake. Paraphrasing Li (2010: p. 399), the inalienability of land-based resources in ethnic territories has been more a statement of what should be rather than of what actually is. In the case of La Toma, the gap between rights on paper and the common experience of limited access to rights is closely linked to the very political difculties e and not just casual bureaucratic procedures e of establishing the legality of their ethnicity. Having drawn out the tension over ethnic rights, I now focus on the mining and security policies that have been in force over the last decade. The national mining policy In order to increase foreign investment and, apparently, to fuel national exports in developing countries, between 1985 and 2001 mining legislation changed in more than 90 countries, including Colombia (Bridge, 2004: p. 407; Gutirrez, 2012: p. 24; Hilson & Yakovleva, 2007). In this process, a new type of competition has arisen between resource-rich nations d not in terms of their production of commoditized resources but in relation to their ability to offer the most attractive legal framework and territorial guarantees for the extraction and control of land-based resources. Government arrangements for promoting such competition between states have resulted in the growing military securitization of mineral resources among Latin American countries (Delgado-Ramos, 2010: p. 11). Enhanced by different international nancial institutions, these new institutional xes (Bridge & McManus, 2000: p. 21) have aimed at ordering resource-rich territories in line with the interests of the international mining industry. In Colombia, military securitization has been a mechanism to control underground resources, used by the last two presidencies and implemented through explicit policies that aim at securing the national territory. Interestingly, the threats perceived by the government are internal and mainly associated with the forces of terrorism ewhich in hegemonic discourses have been made equivalent to guerrilla groups. Such policies have been less oriented towards the protection of civil society and more to guarding landbased resources to be exploited, produced and developed. Thus, the ofcial emphasis on territorial securitization suggests an understating of nature as a means of capital accumulation. As such, the threats are perceived to be against the economy eand less against traditional livelihoods, for example. One important feature of the military securitization in Colombia is that it has been coproduced, on the one hand, by the legal army and ofcial policies on national defence; but also, on the other hand, by illegal armies. In particular, paramilitaries e who have resembled governments aims to ght terrorist guerrillas and to protect (neoliberal) economic projects e have played a key role in the military securitization of local mining settings. Though not explicit in their public statements, it is a truism that drug trafcking has been an important practice among paramilitary groups.

The stabilization of national economies, the adjustment of regulatory regimes, and the pacication of conicting landscapesdparticularly relevant to ghts against the guerrillas in Peru (Drinot, 2011) and Colombiadhave all been part of government efforts to introduce new opportunities for mineral extraction and capital accumulation in areas not traditionally targeted by the large-scale mining industry. As a result, the frontier of underground extractivism has expanded and new mineral reserves have emerged. As shown by Bridge (2004), the mining bonanza in the 1990s was not a global trend since foreign investment was channelled primarily towards newly targeted countries in the global South, often restricted to a few primary commoditiesdcopper and gold in particulardand directed to newly liberalized economies. In this context, the mining boom experienced in Peru, Chile, and Colombia should be analyzed in relation to the geopolitical adjustment of the international extractive industry, which had recongured the global and local geographies of extractivism. The recent expansion of mining in Colombia has been deeply inuenced by the economic neoliberalization of the early 1990s and the rise of the international price of gold after 2000, which was associated with the economic crisis affecting Europe and the nancialization of gold. It was precisely during this gold boom that the Colombian government decided to strengthen its extractive mining sector through foreign investment. Under the Mining Code of 2001 (Law 685), domestic mining companies were liquidated and the state moved away from the mining industry to become a regulatory apparatus. In 2003, CARBOCOL was liquidated under Decree 520 and Ecopetrol became a shareholding company; in 2004, under Decree 254, MINERCOL followed suit (Duarte, 2012). Soon after, and building on the new Mining Code, President Uribe-Vlez and President Santos-Caldern focused on developing a trustable securitization strategy for investors; their politics increased foreign mining investment more than fourfold from USD 466 million in 2002 to USD 2162 million in 2011 (Ministerio de Minas y Energa, 2012). I refer to the Colombian governments mining policies as extractivist for several reasons. First, the government has promoted the large-scale extraction of oil, gas, and non-renewable minerals while neglecting local communities (and their future generations) use of these resources and access to them. Second, the government is explicitly committed to attracting private foreign investors who over-accumulate surpluses in spaces different from the locales of exploitation. Finally, the beneciaries of such political power and economic transfers are dominant social classes and groups (Borras, Franco, Kay, & Spoor, 2011: p. 37) e that is, primarily foreign mining companies. While the national mining policies incorporate a very poor calculation of the social and environmental costs of mining, they have been designed in a way that represents negligible prots to the national economy. Through a detailed economic analysis, new research has demonstrated (Fierro Morales, 2012: pp. 66, 70; Rudas, 2012) that the state does not earn royalties on the prots earned (4e 6% in the case of gold); rather, it ends up indirectly subsidizing foreign mining. In the case of gold over the period 2002e2010, while the state received only 3.8% in royalties, it did not receive the taxes that were supposed to be threefold what it received in royalties. In other words, and due to the controversial calculation of royalties and tax exemptions, Colombia has become a scal mining paradise for private companies investing in Latin America (Pardo, 2012). A quantitative analysis of royalties, taxes, and DFI can be found in the literature referred to above. For our purposes, it is important to highlight that, while the government poorly calculated the real costs of private and foreign mining, the sectors contribution to the national economy has been marginal and, in many cases, cannot be precisely evaluated due to the lack of an adequate geological system to identify the sources and follow up the extraction.

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Since 2000, the Colombian government has expected to achieve mining competitiveness by attracting new investors, modernizing production, and securitizing the exploration and exploitation of mining resources (UPME, 2006: pp. 19e21, 31). Compared to the nationalization of extractive industries that took place in countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Argentina during the last decadedleading to an increase in corporate joint ventures where the state became a partner (Borras et al., 2011: p. 27)dthe Mining Code of 2001 and the Mining National Plan of 2006 (UPME, 2006: pp. 14e15) have led the Colombian state to withdraw from mining production. As explicitly stated in these policies, the state should not compete for better production or better market conditions, but only to encourage investment (UPME, 2006: p. 46). Consequently, while the state remains the owner of the subsoil, by relinquishing its control over production, it has accomplished its controversial self-ascribed role of facilitating and promoting mining activity rather than developing it. Though the ofcial discourse may appear nationalistic on the surface, the resource management strategy allows new forms of dispossession to affect local communities, not in the sense of separating the state from subsoil ownership, but in granting private concessions to individuals and corporations, preferably with foreign capital, while privatizing access to land and land-based resources. The Colombian state has assumed the position of a broker whose main responsibility is to address the management of natural resources to attract and full private investors demands. In terms of the legislation established to achieve this aim, I will introduce some considerations relevant to analyzing the case of La Toma. First, it is necessary to consider that the Mining Code made legal only those mining activities that were granted through mining titles (Law 685/01, Art. 14). This juridical decision has brought about at least three problems in exercising traditional mining rights in ethnic territories:  First, though Special Mining Zones can be allocated to ethnic communities (Art. 31), in the case of Afrodescendants this right is conditional on the previous concession of collective territories by INCODER. However, the legalization of such collective land ownership by Afrodescendant communities is far behind schedule, particularly in the case of communities settled in the inter-Andean valley. In fact, recognizing the governments inefciency in legalizing collective territories, in 2011 President Santos-Caldern implemented the Plan Cauca aiming to sanear [clean up and reorganize] land allocation claims by indigenous peoples, Afrodescendants, and peasants in the Alto Cauca region. Despite this novel effort, the allocation of collective titles has been delayed and so are the opportunities for local communities to be granted legal mining titles.  Second, since the concession dynamic works on the premise of rst in line, rst in law (Gutirrez, 2012), artisanal, informal, and small-scale miners who want to legalize their activities often nd that someone has already been granted a deed in their traditional mining area.  Third, even when the community has been granted collective land ownership and, later, a mining title, the government imposes the same economic conditions on the community as it would on any private investor in terms of taxation and royalties. This has led many communities to acquire an enormous debt to the state because they do not have the experience or technical and nancial capacity to respond to requirements that are tailored to private foreign companies (interview with a public ofcer from INGEOMINAS, Popayan, 02/2013). While the mining legislation presumes an efcient ethnic legislation that is far removed from reality as well as a technical and

nancial capacity that is nonexistent among ethnic communities, the practical outcome is the unequal allocation of land-based resources. The racialized/ethnicized social differentiation supporting this allocation of mining titles has excluded local ethnic communities from accessing and controlling their territories while granting the right to mining exploitation to private (ideally foreign) actors. Revising a decade of national governmental extractivism As other studies have shown (Delgado-Ramos, 2010; Hilson & Yakovleva, 2007; Peluso, 1993), state management and control of commoditized land-based resources has had the consequence of empowering government use of military force to protect and allocate natural resources. While governments have designed and implemented legal mechanisms of dispossession that have come to limit communities territorial control, militaries, paramilitaries, and other (para)statal organizations have contributed to the escalation of local violence. Challenging the Foucauldian understanding of the rule of government as being performed less by coercion and more by persuasion (Li, 2007a: p. 275), military violence in Colombia and other postcolonial contexts has been a key mechanism through which to govern resource-rich territories. The case of La Toma is paradigmatic to understanding some of the territorialized tensions of Colombian governmental extractivism as it illustrates how normative regulation and (legal and illegal) militarization have interlocked in the disputed access to land-based resources and in the overall control of the communitys territory. Democratic securitization: the government of Uribe-Vlez (2002e 2010) Though the Mining Code was legislated in 2001 during the presidency of Andrs Pastrana-Borrero (1998e2002), the context of violence at the time required more than a legal framework to attract foreign investment (Gutirrez, 2012). Thus, it was during the government of lvaro Uribe-Vlez (2002e2010) that Colombia faced a process of securitization through militarization to recoup the governments territorial control. The primary national policy during those eight years included the Poltica de Defensa y Seguridad Democrtica (Policy of Democratic Defence and Security), whose main aim was to win the complete control of the territory by the State to ensure the full imperium of law, governability and thus strengthening the rule of law (Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, 2003: p. 9). Three aspects of this policy should be highlighted to understand the governmentality in question: (i) It claimed that terrorism and criminal terrorists were outside the national project and, therefore, condemned them as natural enemies of the state: The antithesis of the policy of democracy is terrorism (.) in relation to terrorism it can only be one answer: to defeat it. (Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, 2003: pp. 5e6). (ii) Security and democracy were linked in a way that the securitization of the population and territories were not only the responsibility of the military forces, but also a duty of civil society: Security cannot be achieved only through the efforts of the security forces. This will be a state-wide effort and an effort of all Colombians. Later, the security forces will take the rst step in this effort of articulating a comprehensive response to the security challenges. The second [step] has to be given by the state as a whole, and the third by the whole society (Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, 2003: pp. 7, 10). And (iii) the governments rationale was that security increases economic opportunities and, therefore, the imperium of lawdas a result of securitizationdwould guarantee development and economic prosperity (Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, 2003: p. 7).

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Once terrorism/terrorists had been dened as enemies of the state, civilians were made responsible for collaborating with national security forces, and national security was linked with economic development. The following were thus some logical consequences that could impact the states territorialization in locales such as La Toma. (i) As economic development was made dependant on security, and security depended on societys cooperation, to oppose government-led economic development would be seen as opposition not only to the economic regime or development scheme, but also opposition to national security. (ii) In consequence, opposing the national development scheme (i.e., mining policies, projects, and investors) would imply becoming an obstacle to national security and, therefore, one of the natural enemies of the state. In other words, to oppose development could count as terrorism whether by illegal groups or communities. In this context of securitization, and among great human rights scandals3 and the disputed allocation of mining titles, by 2009 more than 7.4% of the national landlocked territory was under mining concessions and more than 35% requested by private actors and companies for mining entitlement (Rudas, 2010: p. 50). Mining through security and for prosperity: the government of Santos-Caldern (2010e) In 2010, President Juan Manuel Santos-Caldern came into power after having led an election campaign aimed explicitly at the consolidation of the former presidents national policy of security. In its introductory presentation, the new Poltica Integral de Seguridad y Defensa para la Prosperidad (Integral Policy of Security and Defence for Prosperity) made it clear that Colombia needed to rene its national security policy in order to expand private investment and the economy, and achieve prosperity. Again, security was conceived as the primary mechanism through which to achieve the governments overall objective in Tercera Va, the fundamental principle of which is to bring the market up to the possible and the state up to the necessary level (Departamento Nacional de Planeacin, 2011: p. 2). Interestingly, by linking together security, economy, and prosperity, the governments rationale articulated territorial control for private investment with a moral commitment to the good of the Colombian population. According to the defence scheme designed by the Ministerio de Defensa Nacional (2011: pp. 21e22), two main forces were seen to threaten national security: one, threats, in which illegal actors and environmental catastrophes seem to play an equivalent role; and two, counter-threats, divided between government-related powers (executive, legislative, and judicial) and others (civil society and private industry). As can be observed in the Plan de Consolidacin Territorial (Plan of Territorial Consolidation), military control is still the governments main mechanism for granting security. As argued by Gonzlez Posso (2012), the regions prioritized for implementing this plan have not shown any decrease in paramilitary presence and action while they are demonstrably the most strategic zones of guerrillas territorial control. This throws up the question asked by a young local leader from La Toma: Security for whom? (La Toma, 04/2012). The national policy on security answers this question by explicitly stating that such security is aimed at the ve locomotives of prosperity, meaning the economic private sectors that are supposed to bring prosperity to all (Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, 2011: p. 11). The mining and energy sector is one of those locomotives to be strengthened through security and for prosperity (DNP, 2011: p. 15). In so doing, the government has identied three strategies for enhancing the condence of private investors: (i) improving the mining-related bureaucratic system (trustworthy institutions, coherent legal frameworks, and swift licensing processes); (ii)

designing new information systems; and (iii) increasing productivity. In line with Li (2007a), I argue that, by framing the mining policy in discourses of productivity, efciency, and technication, the question of extractivism has been moved from a political arena to a technical matrix. Despite the hegemony of such technical discourses, it is precisely in trying to strip mining of its political dimension that the government has taken a political position on extractivism: the politics of technication. Political reections and responses have emerged from the communities who recognize the limitations and negative consequences of the governments technical rationale: With the mining legislation, with all the requirements that the Ministry of Mines and Energy are asking us to full, they are leading us to disorganization. Do you understand? In the community, we see mining as a traditional livelihood, a survival activity. But now, the Ministry and the Mining Plan is asking us to be competitive. Thus, becoming competitive disorganizes us because what we expected to last for the next 400 years, we will now have to extract in two or three years. This is very complex because what the government is saying is that the [miner] person has to be suitable: he has to have the technical and economic capacity to develop the mining activity on a larger scale. But subsistence mining does not give us all that. Surprisingly, what we want to do, which is artisanal ancestral mining, had led the government to call us illegal miners. (Interview with local leader, La Toma, 04/2011) As we can conclude from this reection, extractivist governmentality is understood by community leaders from La Toma to be a threat to their agro-mining livelihoods and to the associated moral and cultural values that the community associates with this socioeconomic tradition. Local control of mining resources: the case of La Toma (2000e 2013) In La Toma, dispossession associated with traditional agromining has different congurations that can be schematized as follows: (i) the dispossession of land and land-based resources through the mining titles granted to private actors; (ii) the dispossession of land-based resources in terms of quantity and quality (Bebbington et al., 2008: p. 2891) through the incursion of backhoes that mine in the Ovejas River, reducing the number of available riverine places for artisanal mining and the availability of gold extractable from the riverbank; (iii) the dispossession of the capacity to control land and land-based resources in the form of restrictions imposed by paramilitaries through militarization, threats, and murder; and (iv) the dispossession of the moral and cultural values associated with traditional agro-mining when the community has been pressured by the governments discourse on productivity and competitiveness. This section addresses the spatialization of the governments juridical and security mechanisms that have sculpted the local setting of dispossession and the arrangements for mining control in La Toma since 2000. Paramilitary control and mining concessions (2000e2004) In 2000, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) initiated their territorial control over the Alto Cauca region. This control was consolidated after the incursion of 500 paramilitaries into the Alto Naya in 2001, which displaced more than 3500 indigenous, Afrodescendant, and mestizo (mixed-descent) peasants, and assured the AUCs military hegemony in the territory for subsequent years. Besides disputing the military and political control of the guerrillas,

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the paramilitaries aimed to take control of the routes for drug trafcking towards the Pacic and to protect private trade and mining businesses. As a consequence, during the next three years, any movement of people, food, and commodities was controlled by AUC paramilitaries, not only restricting the local communities socioeconomic dynamics of agro-mining production, but also preventing them from being able to control their territory in terms of mobility and knowledge. Fear and silence became the golden rule. When asked what they knew about private mining titles, inhabitants most common response was that everything was done on the back of the community during the AUCs terror regime. This response became meaningful when the local leaders explained that it was only in 2004 that the community in La Toma was informed about eviction proceedings having been launched against them through an administrative act in the municipality of Suarez. The municipality asserted that it was protecting the private mining right of the entrepreneur Hctor Jess Sarria, whose claims the community had ignored till then. In this context, it seems pertinent to ask who produces what knowledge in relation to land-based resources in certain territories, and what power relations of territorial control interlock with such knowledge production. As one public ofcer from INCODER replied when asked what challenges communities faced in accessing their ethnic rights, The main barrier for them is their lack of knowledge because they do not even know what they are legally entitled to and what they have. In La Toma, knowledge has been the privilege of private investors in two ways: rst, only they have been aware that a mining title is required to carry out legal mining; second, only they have known in advance which mining titles have been granted and which could be requested. Privileging private actors with knowledge about the formal procedures necessary to access mining titles and excluding the local community from information about legal decisions concerning the allocation of mining titles was a power mechanism deployed simultaneously with the paramilitarys control of the territory. Both bureaucratized legislation and (legal and illegal) militarization played against local inhabitants power of knowledge, limiting opportunities to access their right to legally carry out artisanal mining in their territory. The anti-progressist stigma (2004e2010) Though AUC paramilitaries began to demobilize in 2005, it was precisely between then and 2008 that death threats against the community intensied as never before. One leader from La Toma describes this period as follows: When the paramilitary phenomenon began, the violence also began and the local leaders were declared military targets (.). The rst threat here was the stigma. We were stigmatized by saying that we were from the Polo; after linking us to this [left-wing political] party, they said that we were from the guerrillas; later, when all that persecution rose, they said we were anti-progressist. And nally, they declared us military targets (from the documentary La Toma: Afrodescendant territory with many suitors). In 2006, the multinational corporation Anglo Gold Ashanti started to work in La Toma. According to the testimonies of local inhabitants, a group of engineers was always around, peeping at and sampling the land around (interview with Arnulfo Lucumi, 2011, from the documentary La Toma: Afrodescendant territory with many suitors). However, in November 2009, at a meeting with local leaders and the mayor of the Suarez municipality, a representative of the multinational stated that they had never owned a mining title and were only exploring and doing social projects with the community. Still, representatives from the community and from the multinational agreed that it was in the interest of Hector Jess

Sarria, as the direct beneciary of the mining title BFC-021 and the mining licence, to negotiate the deed in order to collaborate with the corporations mining plan.4 Notwithstanding this, and given the communitys constant reluctance to accept a large-scale mining project in the territory, the corporation declared at the meeting in 2009 that they were cancelling for the time being the corporations project of mining exploration. While the corporation remained informally present in the territory and the community from La Toma confronted its presence publically, their anti-progressist stigma among neighbours and the municipal authorities continued to grow. This resulted in an escalation in the death threats against local leaders, which one young inhabitant from La Toma criticized as follows: They are so cynical that when they threaten us, they say that we are opposing progress and development. But I do not understand what progress they are talking about, if they [governments and companies] have promised us progress before and I do not see any real benet from their development projects (from the documentary La Toma: Afrodescendant territory with many suitors). While the government declared the traditional agro-mineros to be illegal based on the Mining Code, the paramilitaries declared them military targets for opposing progress. The resemblance between the governments discourse on progress and the paramilitaries accusations is more than sheer coincidence. Some of the written death threats issued by paramilitaries explicitly identied the disagreement between the community and the Uribe-Vlez government as the main reason for deserving death. This situation resembles Drinots (2011: p. 191) description of Alan Garcias mechanisms of sovereignty after 2006, when a signicant proportion of the national population was seen as an obstacle to the desired national development. In the Peruvian context, ofcial discursive strategies were deployed to assimilate such opposition to insurgent groups whose supposed objective was to destroy the nation. Interestingly, this illegal status has been the most troubled sphere of dispute between the community from La Toma and government institutions. One young leader from La Toma has expressed it like this: Now the multinational Anglo Gold Ashanti, previously called Kedhada S. A., is coming to seize our land by claiming to have mining titles given by the state. But they all know that La Toma is a traditional Afrodescendant mining territory: mining in La Toma started in 1636! Why then, did they not declare us illegal 400 years ago? Now, in the 21st century, in 2011, they come to treat us as illegal. This does not seem fair to me (from the documentary). La Toma: Afrodescendant territory with many suitors On the same lines, another community leader declared: One thing needs to be said in relation to the term illegal: whereas the Mining Code has posited us as being illegal, in reality it is the multinationals (.) that are illegal. I want to formulate a question: are we, who have engaged in traditional mining for centuries in this country, the illegal miners? For me, the illegal ones are those that have big environmental impacts on the country and, instead of releasing an ounce of gold for other people to work with, only generate pollution (speech by social leader in the Encuentro Nacional de Consejos Comunitarion, Bogota, 05/2012). These quotes illustrate how stigmatization by the paramilitaries and threats against the communities opposing corporate mining occurred in parallel with the normative declaration of their

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illegality. In contrast to communities in Ghana who afrm that they are mining illegally and try to change such conditions through negotiations with the companies and government (Hilson & Yakovleva, 2007: pp. 110e111), the local community from La Toma have argued and defended their legitimacy as traditional miners. What is more, this cultural agro-mining tradition has been the main moral axis of their social and legal mobilization.

mechanisms to govern minerals and mining territories, while upscaling local violence and bureaucratizing social marginalization. Governing mining: rationale, mechanisms, and the local setting of land-based resource control Over the last decade, legislation and military securitization have been the two main power mechanisms deployed by the Colombian government to control land-based resources, particularly minerals. Such governmental extractivism is rooted, on the one hand, in the creation of policies, laws, and programmes that compromise the rights of the local population to access these minerals; and, on the other, in promoting military territorial interventions as the only means to secure private (and foreign) investment. While the governments rationale and mechanisms have favoured private actors and marginalized rural ethnic communities, legal and territorial disputes for control of land-based resources have intensied. A contradictory and ambiguous legislation has emerged, and legal and illegal military disputes have also played a role in the local settings of mining control. Colombian governments have not shown much interest in designing a mining policy that complies with both international agreements and national legislation on ethnic rights. Instead, largescale private mining has been promoted as a primary extractivist development scheme, framed within a national policy on territorial securitization to attract foreign investment. The territorialization of these governments extractivist rationale has disrupted the artisanal agro-mining of Afrodescendants in La Toma. As a consequence, the local community has been subject to the illegalization of their artisanal mining activity and legal and illegal military control of the land-based resources in their territory. Though the local community has upheld the legitimacy of their artisanal gold mining and recognition of their ethnic rights, in this paper I have concentrated on analyzing the governments extractivist mechanisms to control mining and some of the territorialized effects in La Toma district. By analyzing the territorial setting of mining control and the state-building process in La Toma, we can draw four reections on the Colombian extractivist governmentality. First, despite the constitutionalization of ethnic rights achieved by the political Constitution of 1991, the conicting principles of the neoliberal economy have simultaneously been incorporated into the Constitution. Second, and as a consequence, two juridical architectures of rights have emerged: one supporting the private accumulation of capital through the foreign exploitation of mining resources, and the other aiming to grant ethnic rights. In the third place, territorialized governmentality has resulted in the differentiated access to and control over land-based resources, excluding Afrodescendant communities while favouring private foreign actors. Three legal mechanisms frame this unequal access to and control over mining: (i) making legal artisanal mining conditional on the delayed allocation of collective land to ethnic communities in the Alto Cauca; (ii) giving entitlement priority only to the rst person/company to ask for it without recognizing the history of mining activities in the territory; and (iii) requiring that all entitlements have the same technical and nancial capacities without recognizing local communities have not developed this experience. Despite the porosity of the statedimplicit in the juridical and bureaucratic ambiguities in the case of La Tomadthe territorialization of the governments juridical arrangements to control mining resources has ended in giving private actors privileged access while dispossessing local communities from their territorial control. This rationale can be understood as a form of racial/ethnic marginalization inherited from colonial times, and reproduced through novel governing mechanisms such as the military

Sentence T-1045-A and the ongoing threats of eviction (2010e2013) After being denied their ethnic and territorial rights by different government institutions and regional courts of justice (Observatorio de Discriminacin Racial, 2011), and facing the new threat of eviction by the municipality of Suarez, in May 2010 the Consejo Comunitario from La Toma proceeded to take legal Accin de Tutela in order to claim the writ of protection of fundamental rights from the Constitutional Court. Considering the various ambiguities present in government institutions, and appealing to the ethnic rights provided by the political Constitution of 1991, the Tutela was given in favour of the community. Thus, through Sentence T-1045A, the court recognized the presence of ethnic communities in La Toma district and suspended the granting of any mining titles until a free, prior, and informed consent process was developed. The intra-state legal vagueness and contradictions may not accidental. In fact, disorganization within and among the bureaucratic apparatus and its information systems may be considered a governing technique: certain (private) actors take advantage of the institutional chaos as an opportunity to control land-based resources. Local communities have characterized this as the strategy of shing in troubled waters. In this context, it does not come as a surprise that the same day that the sentence was made public in April 2011, three backhoes guarded by paramilitaries came into La Toma and started mining in the Ovejas River. In terms of understanding the complexity of the military control of land-based resources, the following explanation by a local leader is illuminating: Mining and territorial governance is a complex issue because one can say to foreign miners, you cannot enter here. In practice, however, one must recognize that the armed conict and what the paramilitaries are doing through their politics of fear and terror (.) is actually implementing locally a policy against our self-governance. (.) To make the situation worse, there is also the problem of the environmental public institutions that give licences to some of these backhoes, and also the municipal institutions that let them work in our territories (speech by social leader in the Encuentro Nacional de Consejos Comunitarion, Bogota, 05/2012). This explanation makes it clear that military violence as a mechanism for territorial control is not the monopoly of the government but is a highly contested source of power. Local violence complicates the state formation process in Colombia as ethnic rights are denied in practice by the inertia of a violent regime that has historically favoured private interests. In this sense, and building on Painter (2006), whereas it is possible to agree on the porosity of the state in the case of La Toma due to the contradictions and tensions among government institutions, it is also possible to argue that a states blurred coherence, weak legitimacy, and disputed control is its colonial heritage; it is also a product of its contested power regime, deployed by ethnic/racial elites over a majority seen as inferior in the social hierarchy (Mignolo, 2003; Quijano, 2000). Such inherited colonial power (Quijano, 2000) has been reshaped and reproduced through juridical and military

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securitization and juridical promotion and protection of private, large-scale and foreign mining. Thus, and in the fourth place, the spatialized juridical mechanisms of mining management have resulted in dispossession and in the escalation of violent conicts at the local level. While competition between two legal architectures has emerged in the juridical arena, in the territorial settings of mining control a violent dispute has developed in the overlap between the geographies of mining concessions and the geographies of ethnic communities. Despite the tensions between the competing juridical architectures and overlapping geographies, the previous two national governments in Colombia have favoured accumulation by private actors while dispossessing local Afrodescendant communities of their territorial control. This accumulationedispossession circle can be understood as a geographical unequal transfer of capital in the form of raw materials produced in one site and tapped in another (Katz, 2001: p. 710). Whose livelihoods and territories are to be dispossessed is not a random choice but the result of a segregation action by means of allocating resources and guaranteeing the territorial control of land-based resources to one small group of society and not to the other. By practicing selection/exclusion in the legal allocation and military protection of natural goods and services, the Colombian ruling governments during the last decade have deliberately contributed, and actually sponsored, an unequal and ethnicized class formation (Li, 2007a: p. 107). While this governing ensemble has enhanced foreign large-scale mining, it has reproduced colonial racial/ethnic hierarchies in their power matrix of the unequal distribution of wealth, and led to the distinctive division of labour and conictive allocation of natural resources. This unequal access to and control over underground resources denotes a racialized governments rationale, which, by allocating rights to actors that are higher up in the social hierarchy, has added to the historical marginalization of Afrodescendant communities. (Para-)state violence has paralleled and territorially facilitated the legal dispositions for this private and foreign accumulation. As with other postcolonial governments (Delgado-Ramos, 2010; Drinot, 2011; Hilson & Yakovleva, 2007; Kalpagam, 2000; Koopman, 2011; Peluso, 1993), in Colombia the control of landbased resources interlocks with military mechanisms that are not the monopoly of the state but pieces of a complex power game with many interests and legal and illegal actors. The government discourse on securitization resembles that of the paramilitaries who claim to be protecting the progress and development of the nation. In so doing, contradictions within and oppositions to the ofcial development scheme led by the government are not only declared illegal, they are also condemned and persecuted by illegal armies. As a consequence, while legal and illegal military mechanisms have been used to control resource-rich territories, violence has became a key piece of the state-building process. As a result, a spatialized economy of violence has emerged; once the Colombian governments extractivism had been developed through juridical and (para)military mechanisms aimed at enhancing foreign mining, a complex geography of terror has came to frame local territories, limiting their control by local communities. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the local community and the Consejo Comunitario from La Toma, the Palenke del Alto Cauca and the Proceso de Comunidades Negras for their trust and generosity in sharing their beliefs and struggles with me. I want to thank the public ofcers I interviewed for this study in Bogot and Popayn for their valuable time. I would like to acknowledge the institutional and economic support received from COLCIENCIAS and the University of Copenhagen. Finally, I am grateful to Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, Katherine

Gough, Jytte Agergaard, and the anonymous reviewers of Political Geography for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Endnotes
Recognized by Law 70/1993 and regulated by Decree 1745/1995, the Consejos Comunitarios are the administrative authorities mandated to organise Afrodescendant communities in their defence and protection of ethnic and territorial rights. While I acknowledge that there are internal power tensions and negotiations within the community, such heterogeneity and internal organizational dynamics are beyond the scope of this paper; here, I concentrate on the interlocution that the community has established with the government as a collective subject in order to defend their ethnic and territorial rights against dispossession and displacement. 2 Though the conceptual take that aims to differentiate between race and ethnicity is important, in this paper I assume both terms to be correlated, rst, because both are social constructions marked in Latin America by historical processes of discrimination and impoverishment (Wade, 2010); and, second, because in Colombia, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses of power are based simultaneously on ethnicity and race. 3 The mapping exercise of national conicts articulated to the extractive industry developed by CINEP/PPP (2012) shows that the violation of human rights are related to (i) the poor labour conditions in the large-scale mining projects, (ii) the displacement of small-scale agrarian economies and the weakening of rural households subsistence strategies, (iii) the uncalculated and unrepaired environmental damage to water and landscapes, (iv) the violence and corruption that locally and structurally supports the mining industry, and (v) the negative impacts on customary traditions and social relations of rural communities. 4 Act No. 062, 5th November 2009, Consejo Municipal, Municipio de Surez, Departamento del Cauca.
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