El campesinado de la Amazonia colombiana : construcción territorial, colonización forzada y resistencias

This thesis demonstrates that the Colombian peasantry has been constituted as such, from the construction and implementation of economic and agro-productive practices compatible with the environment; the habitus and costumes that the peasantry itself  has invented and recreated in the daily interaction with its family and community; and from the political struggle that it has undertaken not only to demand from the Colombian state its social, territorial and judicial recognition, but also to halt the territorial advance of agrarian businessmen.  For these reasons, the Colombian peasantry cannot be considered a conceptual category, a priori constructed, that is a-historically defined as a homogenous social group with the same characteristics at the global level.  In their political struggle to defend their territory, the Colombian peasantry has confronted agrarian businessmen who, oriented with an unidirectional logic, and an elitist, exclusive notion of “progress” and “development”, not only have denied the peasantry its territorial, economic, social and cultural rights, but also, in a patrimonial use of the state, have persecuted, stigmatized, and expelled the Colombian peasantry from the political community. The peasantry have confronted a state and a business group that, from the state of exception and their definition of this population group as “obstacles to development” and “enemies of the nation”, have abrogated the right, typical to the classic sovereignties, to decide who can live and who must die. The historical and successive dynamic of territorial expropriation of the peasantry, and the implementation of what is called in this thesis agrarian necro- politics, have been covered up from the concept of “spontaneous colonization” and from the discourse that presents the peasantry as “hero”, “entrepreneur”, “motherland builder”, when the peasantry has been compelled, because of economic, judicial or military reasons, to undertake new processes of forced colonization. The Colombian peasantry, in response to this dynamic, has undertaken intra-systemic and counter-systemic forms of resistance. It has never relented in its struggle for land rights - land that is part of its territory and that is considered inalienable- and for the right to have rights. Studying the case of peasants in the Colombian Amazonian region, it is demonstrated in this research that the Colombian peasantry has great capacity to face economic and political adversities, and to invent and re-do itself in new spaces. Through its attitude and its actions, the peasantry as a social subject has refused, obstinately and continually, to obey and be domesticated for the parameters of modernity.  It has resisted against attempts to alter its internal dispositions and ways of seeing the world, its habitus and re-creates itself daily in a modernity that threatens its subjectivity and autonomy. The peasantry puts together agro-ecological, socio-economic and political inclusion projects in the context of an agrarian development model that insists on denying it as a subject with rights.

Keyphrases: Peasantry, Colombia, Amazonia, Social Mobilization, Territory, Necro- politics, Colonization, Resistance, Identity, Colombia, Amazonia