Mangling life trajectories: institutionalised calamity and illegal peasants in Colombia

Abstract

This article discusses the institutionalisation of calamity – in the form of fumigation and exposure to lethal violence – and its consequences over coca peasants and workers in Colombia. I show how institutionalised calamity indelibly marks their life trajectories, through repeated episodes of ‘total loss’. At the same time, it is a major illustration of a process of co-constitution of class, citizenship and state. In effect, institutionalised calamity endows illicit rural classes and economies with specific characteristics that diverge from the typical identikit attributed to peasants in some agrarian studies. These peasants and workers are much more mobile and risk prone, and less localistic and deferential, than it is frequently assumed, and have different demands with respect to markets, government and land. All this leaves a deep and lasting imprint on the claims for rights and recognition pacts demanded by them, triggering a double and apparently contradictory dynamic of rejection and inducement vis-à-vis the state. They resist state sallies into their territories, and the violence, brutality and stigmatisation associated with them. But, on the other hand, they push for infrastructure and regulation, indispensable not only for coca crops but also for any viable transit to legality. This dynamic has important spatial expressions.