Artefacto Explosivo Improvisado: landmines and rebel expertise in Colombian warfare

Abstract

In Colombia, almost all antipersonnel mines are improvised. Crafted with ordinary materials, improvised mines are inexpensive and cannot be easily sensed by metal detectors. Their Spanish technical name is Artefacto Explosivo Improvisado. In this article, I purposefully maintain the name to emphasize the material, technical, and political nuances I observed during my eighteen-months of fieldwork with landmine survivors, demining experts, and guerrilla soldiers in rural Colombia. Here, artefacto explosivo improvisado is not only an empirical object, a deadly explosive device, it is also a conceptual tool through which I reflect on the “thing” to which it refers (i.e. the improvised landmines), as well as on the historical and material practices that make it possible and that are made possible by it (i.e. the asymmetrical war in Colombia and what I later frame as “rebel expertise”). Through this concept I analyze the fragile, ephemeral, and recalcitrant nature of the improvised landmines, highlighting the material, economic, and temporal peculiarities of war contamination in Colombia. I also use the words artefacto explosivo improvisado to consider the guerrillas’ material culture and the bodily practices and technical knowledge of explosivistas – those who design, assemble, and install improvised landmines. Highlighting their ingenuity and creativity, I frame their know-how as “rebel expertise.” That is, an embodied, local, and irregular knowledge that confronts the technocratic, standardized, and external expertise of humanitarian demining. Throughout the article, I confront the inseparability of improvised landmines and the technical and military actions that brought them into existence.

Keywords

• colombia
• landmines
• humanitarian demining
• material culture
• ethnography