Another History of Violence

• Author: Ulrich Oslender
• Published date: 01 September 2008
• Date: 01 September 2008
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X08321961
• Subject Matter: Articles

Another History of Violence

The Production of “Geographies of Terror” in

Colombia’s Pacific Coast Region

by

Ulrich Oslender

A conceptual framework of “geographies of terror” can serve as a critique of contempo-

rary dominant geopolitical discourses on the “war on terror” and as a methodological tool

for studying the impact of terror and its spatial manifestations on local populations on the

ground. Applying this framework to the study of violence in Colombia’s Pacific coast

region allows critical engagement with the discourses on “forced displacement” that have

become institutionalized in Colombia to refer to the systematic terror campaign unleashed

by armed groups on rural black populations in this region. Beyond the usual focus in dis-

placement debates on humanitarian assistance and resettlement of the displaced population

in the cities, this framework stresses the need to empirically engage with and conceptually

address the situation in the countryside, where rural dwellers are threatened by armed

actors on an everyday basis but also resist the imposition of these regimes of terror.

Keywords: Terror, Forced displacement, Resistance, Afro-Colombia, Black communities

There is a politics of terror against our communities and we have to be prepared for

it.If we want to propel a project of resistance, we need to learn how to deal with fear.

—Black activist from Colombian Pacific coast

Political violence seems endemic in Colombia, and, perhaps not surpri-

singly, Colombia’s social sciences have created their own category of experts on

77

Ulrich Oslender is a research fellow in the Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the

University of Glasgow. Between 2005 and 2007 he was seconded to the Department of Geography

at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), under a Marie Curie Outgoing International

Fellowship funded by the European Union. He has worked since 1995 with the social movement

of black communities in Colombia. Research for this article was supported by the UK Economic

and Social Research Council (RES-000-22-0770), the EU’s Marie Curie OIF scheme, and the

Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Versions of this article were presented at the

“Post-war Violence and Conflict” conference at the Institute of Latin American Studies in

Liverpool in September 2004, the Society for Latin American Studies Annual Conference in Derby

in April 2005, the Cultural Geography Methods Workshop at UCLA’s Department of Geography

in December 2005, and the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San

Francisco in April 2007. The author thanks participants for their many insightful comments. He

also thanks five reviewers for Latin American Perspectives and John Agnew, Gisela Cramer, and

Hester Parr for constructive critiques. He is particularly grateful to the many Afro-Colombian

community leaders who have so generously shared their time, energy, and thoughts with him

over the past 13 years. Their struggle cannot fail to encourage and inspire.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 162, Vol. 35 No. 5, September 2008 77-102

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X08321961

© 2008 Latin American Perspectives

violence: the violentólogo. These experts focused for a long time on the complex

history of political violence in Colombia, the roots of which were commonly

located in bipartisan clientelist political structures as the motor of the succes-

sive civil wars of the nineteenth century and the notorious period of national

slaughter between 1946 and 1966, known as La Violencia, which cost the lives

of hundreds of thousands of Colombians. Yet in a landmark study the

Comisión de Estudios sobre la Violencia (1988) acknowledged other forms of

violence than political as enmeshed in Colombian society. As one of the most

respected non-Colombian violentólogos has pointed out on numerous occa-

sions, the multilayered phenomenon of violence, affecting the whole of society

from national governance to everyday lives, has made it increasingly difficult

to reduce its explanation to a simple cause-and-effect equation (Pécaut, 2000).

Moreover, violence runs like a red thread not only through the country’s

official history but also through the personal, intimate life histories of most

Colombians. Everyone seems to have a story to tell about a relative black-

mailed, a friend kidnapped, a neighbor shot, a colleague disappeared, or fam-

ily friends driven off their lands. This is not to essentialize Colombians as a

violent people (far from it), but the effects of a four-decades-long civil war,

dirty counterinsurgency wars, and terror campaigns that expel peasants from

their lands in their thousands have created a context in which violence has

become an everyday cultural fact. Violence has become deeply engrained in

the collective psyche and helps to define the “being Colombian.” Plays, rap

music, and poetry readings tell histories of violence and of the ways people

deal with it on an everyday basis. The Casa de Poesía Silva in Bogotá, for

example, organized in October 2004 its fifth annual public poetry reading,

“Alzados en Almas” (“Risen in Souls,” a word play on the Spanish “alzados en

armas” [risen in arms]). Its leitmotif was first sounded in 1998 at the opening

of the first festival: “Faced with 15 or 20 thousand Colombians risen in arms,

we are more than 30 million risen in souls; we want social justice and a revo-

lution in political traditions and in government administration through ways

other than violence, death, and crime.”1The same institution invited

Colombians in 2003 to participate in the national poetry competition “Descanse

en Paz la Guerra” (May War Rest in Peace), a call heeded by 6,972 people who

sent in some 30,000 poems. The winners were announced on May 23 of that

year in front of an audience of 6,000, when the 20 best poems were read out.

Scenarios like these have become increasingly common and represent

spaces of contention in which Colombians, rejecting all kinds of violence,

express their frustration and anger but also their hope that a more peaceful

society is possible. The increasing importance of these spaces and events as

fostering hope and peace in war-torn societies has recently been recognized

through the award of the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize to Medellín’s

International Poetry Festival. As the Right Livelihood Awards Committee

announced on September 28, 2006, in Stockholm, the festival’s idea of pitting

poetry against terror has earned it the award “for showing how creativity,

beauty, free expression, and community can flourish amongst and overcome

even deeply entrenched fear and violence.”2Started in 1991 by poets con-

nected to the literary magazine Prometeo, the annual 10-day festival now

attracts around 80 poets from up to 55 countries who participate actively in

poetry readings in public spaces throughout Medellín—at universities and

78 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES