Colombia: old and new patterns of violence

Abstract

It is the link between the political economy of violence and the way it is played out on the ground in specific locations that I want to focus on in this essay. The armed conflict in Colombia is usually portrayed as one of Marxist rebels versus right-wing militias and the Colombian army, with the civilian population caught up in the crossfire. Discussions of the political and economic dimensions of the conflict often look at the role played by the illegal drug trade and natural resources such as oil and how they fuel the conflict by providing economic opportunities for the diverse armed actors.6 Yet these debates often fail to examine the wider global forces that significantly shape the violence and terror on the ground. I think it is important to examine the Colombian conflict within these wider strategies of globalisation, one of which is the expansion of a global economy of expropriation. For David Harvey, for example, the contemporary moment of 'new imperialism' is characterised by new cycles of 'accumulation by dispossession'.7 According to his analysis, one strategy for capital to overcome the crisis of overaccumulation (a condition whereby capital surplus lies idle with no profitable outlets in sight) is to seize common assets and turn them to profitable use. Today, then, we witness a new wave of 'enclosing the commons', pushed through by 'policies of dispossession pursued in the name of neo-liberal orthodoxy'. These processes are also responsible, in my view, for the escalation of the armed conflict in Colombia in regions that had hitherto been at its margins. The Pacific coast is one such region that was until recently considered a haven of peace, insulated from Colombia's cartography of violence, but has now become fully integrated into it. Below I examine this region as a lens through which the wider context of violence can be viewed and understood.