“Everyone decided to declare war on the forest”: between territorial peace and pacification in the Colombian Andean-Amazon

Abstract

In post-peace agreement Colombia, everyone declared war on the forest. In the Putumayo region, these wars take their own particular forms. Scientifically, the Putumayo is described as an Andean-Amazonic rainforest. For the indigenous and local inhabitants of the Putumayo, it is the Andean-Amazonic selva. We present three wars on the forest with material and discursive specificities and critically distinguish those that inherently involve violence from the ones that do not. We draw on a mix of empirical material to analyze how the wars on the forest have manifested in the Andean-Amazon. We find that both deforestation and the responses to combat it are two wars on the forest with one thing in common: violence. We also find that the selva is a territorialized political proposal with its own discursive and material elements. Drawing on the concept of territorial peace, we discuss the ambivalence of peacebuilding in relation to violence because it both legitimizes the continuation of violent wars on the forest while providing openings for territorial defense projects. This approach provides analytical avenues to observe the differences between peace and pacification. We contend that violence is incompatible with peace but not with pacification. Further, peace and pacification efforts can coexist under the discursive guise of peacebuilding. We show that peace requires the absence of violence but cannot be defined as the absence of violence alone, for such an understanding cannot distinguish a peaceful context’s territorial relations from those of a pacified context.

Keywords

• deforestation
• environmental defenders
• mining
• putumayo
• violence