Ethnic Land Rights as a Faustian Bargain? On the Afro-Colombian Struggle for Alternative Livelihoods and Its Limits

Abstract

From the 1990s onwards, ethnic minorities in Latin America have been granted collective property rights to protect their natural livelihoods and culture from extractivism and armed conflict. In the Colombian case, this legal innovation was largely the product of Afro-Colombian communities’ activism around cultural identities whose legal outcomes have been celebrated in post-development literature as evidence for subaltern groups regained self-determination and emancipation from unsustainable extractivist development models and violence. While other authors have since pointed to collective land rights’ essentializing tendencies and actual limitations in challenging extractive capitalism, including the Colombian drug economy, less attention has been given to what explains their limited outcomes in securing alternative livelihoods. Drawing on evidence from two Afro-Colombian communities, this article argues that ethnic land rights tend to disregard the communities’ own material entanglement with extractivist capitalism and that this complicates the search for effective ways of securing ethnic communities’ livelihoods.

I. Introduction

Colombia is notorious for its agrarian conflicts. By 2012, conflicts involving guerrilla and paramilitary groups—driven by competition over land for agribusiness, mining and drug production—had forced the displacement of communities from 8.3 million hectares of land (Sankey, 2022: 1). At the same time, Colombia became in 1993 the first Latin American country to grant collective land rights to Afro-descendant rural communities who, as inhabitants of Colombia’s resource-rich and fertile Pacific coast region, were in danger of being dispossessed of their territory. This legal recognition of one of Colombia’s poorest and most economically marginalized minorities ¹ grew to become one of the most ambitious processes of land titling in Latin America (Offen, 2003) ² and gave rise to a powerful Black identity movement (Grueso et al., 1998; Oslender, 2016; Restrepo, 2008, 2013).

So-called post-development scholarship has interpreted these ethno-territorial social movements as game-changing anti-capitalist resistance. Referring specifically to Afro-Colombian communities in the country’s Pacific lowlands and their ‘traditional mode of living’, Arturo Escobar (1997, 1998, 1999) claimed that their ‘cultural politics of difference’ were a powerful counterhegemonic contesting force that promotes alternative sustainable resource management. Hence, Escobar saw the recovery of ‘cultural difference’ (through and for collective land rights) as signs of a new post-developmental modernity in a region where development initiatives have traditionally centred on natural resource exploitation (Agudelo, 2005).

This still prominent argument (e.g. Ziai, 2015) has been challenged since, showing that an impossible standard of authentic traditional culture has been imposed on ethnic groups (e.g. Povinelli, 2002) and that ethnic territorial projects have coexisted and sometimes even facilitated agribusiness expansions (Anthias, 2018; Asher, 2018; Melo, 2014). Along these lines, the ‘territorial turn’ (Offen, 2003) has been defined as ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ (Hale, 2011), whereby ethnic peoples are declared guardians of the land without any financial support ³ (Hale, 2002, 2005; Postero, 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2004). Collective land rights have also been described as ‘green multiculturalism’ (Cárdenas, 2012). They defer the responsibility not only of land protection but also of environmental vigilance to Black communities, while simultaneously integrating them into a ‘greened’ extractive capitalism, such as in oil-palm cultivation for biofuel production.

These analyses point to the limits of ethnic rights and collective titling in circumventing the extractivist world economy. They do not explore, however, how culturally legitimized collective land rights and their disregard for communities’ material entanglements with global extractivism contribute to Afro-Colombian communities’ enclosure into a conceptual and practical dead end. This article goes beyond revealing land rights’ limitations by showing that politically motivated idealization can even contribute to blocking the very process of conceiving concrete strategies for material improvement.

To show how communities’ entanglements with the global economic system determine communities’ land rights’ effectiveness, I will draw on materialist Political Settlement Analysis (PSA) (Khan, 2010). PSA argues that property rights will only be effective if they produce resource flows that benefit existing power holders or help to establish new ones (Khan, 2004). In other words, property rights need to produce surplus that secures their protection and enforcement. Yet, nature reserves, in particular in developing countries with extensive land and often limited state governance capability, do not produce monetary surplus and are often not sufficiently integrated in the political economy as to be actively protected from processes of primitive accumulation, that is the ‘[violent] accumulation [of resources] for profit making’ (Marx 1976 cited in Gray and Whitfield, 2014: 13). I will then turn to communities’ cultural politics around land rights and how over time their inherent essentialism tends to complicate the identification of viable economic alternatives to extractivism.

I will do so by drawing on four months of ethnographic fieldwork between July 2019 and February 2020 in the Afro-Colombian communities Yurumangui and Alto Mira y Frontera in the Colombian Pacific region and 32 open and semi-structured interviews with community leaders, activists and government officials. Focusing on the relation between collective land rights and material conditions, the article will argue that land rights’ current effectiveness depends on external resource flows. Yet, the exclusively cultural discourse around territorial rights conceals communities’ long-standing subordinate integration into and dependence on the global economy. Disregarding this reality makes it difficult to conceive effective ways of alternative internal resource creation.

In Yurumangui’s case, the land rights have helped to consolidate the community’s political agency, only because its members had strong external political and financial support. In addition, inhabitants were less exposed to extractivist interests than in Alto Mira y Frontera, where many inhabitants were already incorporated into the palm oil industry before the community was collectively titled. In both cases, however, communities struggle to uphold effective self-determination given their need for monetary income. Hence, I suggest that ethnic land rights, conceived as a conservation mechanism, turn into a bit of a Faustian bargain for Afro-Colombian communities: As collective land rights’ identity-based legitimation by itself cannot bring about material improvements in a context of structural violence, armed control and limited state action, community members are compelled into extractivist activities, which directly contribute to the destruction of their territory. To be clear, this is not to claim that communities would be in a better position without ethnic collective territories. It is to show that to durably improve ethnic communities’ security and economic livelihoods, land rights’ and communities’ dependence on material resources must be acknowledged.

The article begins by summarizing the rise of the Afro-Colombian territorial movement. It shows how Afro-Colombians’ collective property rights were legitimized through Afro-Colombian ‘culture’ and how this ‘culture’ came to be mainly defined as subsistence agriculture, even though these practices do not adequately reflect Afro-Colombian current economic realities. The remainder of the article aims to reveal the long-term consequences of this ‘strategic essentialism’. ⁴ The first part compares collective land rights’ effects in two politically and geographically diverging Afro-Colombian communities to show that this essentialism can serve political mobilization in the first place, but that its effectiveness already depends on communities’ material context. The second part then theorizes this finding on the material conditioning of land rights through PSA, while also uncovering the long-term limitations of essentialist land politics in not only conserving but also conceiving viable alternative livelihoods. I conclude by arguing that ultimately local communities’ socio-economic difficulties can only be adequately addressed if their long-standing entanglement with the global capitalist economy and the needs that result from it are fully acknowledged and analysed.

II. The Afro-Colombian Land Rights Movement or the Strategic Invention of Afro-Colombian Culture

The resource-rich Colombian Pacific region has accommodated ever-growing numbers of enslaved Africans, gradually replacing indigenous labour in agriculture and gold mining from the 1500s onwards (Wade, 2002). Though originally inhabited by secluded indigenous tribes, the region has been incorporated into the global capitalist economy for centuries. By the time slavery was abolished in 1851, local formerly enslaved groups, namely libres (Blacks who had been freed through self-purchase) and cimarrones (fugitive slaves), had started migrating along the region’s (now) sparsely populated rivers. Here, they continued to mine for international markets while also fishing, hunting and growing subsistence crops (Hoffmann, 2004). With the increasing national and international demand for gold, other precious metals and natural resources such as tagua (vegetal ivory), rubber, cocoa and wood, even more inhabitants started to split their time between subsistence agriculture and the gathering of export goods (Leal and Restrepo, 2003).

In 1959, a Forest Law turned most of Afro-Colombian communities’ lands into state forest reserves and tierras baldías (empty or uninhabited lands) that the Colombian government could issue exploitation permits for. From the 1960s onwards, Afro-Colombian livelihoods have been threatened by large-scale African palm plantations, mining, logging and shrimp farming. Furthermore, Colombia’s Forest Law put an end to many peasants’ tenancy agreements in the interior of the country, pushing them to look for land in the Pacific region (LeGrand, 2003). Ongoing state abandonment, increasing guerrilla and paramilitary presence, as well as rising illicit drug cultivation, further threatened Afro-Colombian communities’ survival.

Seeing their common denominator in their shared bread-winning activities rather than in their ethnic origin, the local peasants initially started to grapple with these multiple threats by organizing themselves in peasant organizations rather than mobilizing their ethnicity (Arocha, 1994; Gutiérrez and Restrepo, 2017). Subsequently, however, the grassroots movement inspired student activists from the region’s urban centres and gradually also from the Atlantic Coast and Bogotá. They started drawing on the civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States, as well as African independence movements, including the négritude ideology of Senegal’s president Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire and Leon Damas to mobilize the rural communities in the Pacific region (Wade, 1995). These activist groups, notably the still active Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), developed a new form of culture-oriented resistance politics to ‘challenge the conventional political culture harboured in the practices of traditional political parties and the state, unsettle the dominant project of national identity construction and defy the predominant orientation of development’ (Grueso et al., 1998: 197). The activists’ proposal for Colombia’s 1991 ‘multiculturalist’ constitutional reform aiming at protecting the ethnic minorities’ livelihoods, centred around two closely tied demands: (a) recognition of Black cultural difference, which is reflected in specific culturally inflected production practices and (b) territorial autonomy.

The reason for this assumed connection between Afro-Colombian culture and land use is Colombia’s history of formally recognizing indigenous territorial rights based on respective communities’ historic occupation of national lands. Despite remaining geographically isolated and materially disadvantaged after the abolition of slavery in 1851 (see Arocha and Friedemann, 1986; Taussig, 1980; Wade, 1991), the country’s Afro-descendants were, in contrast to Colombia’s indigenous population, seen as regular citizens with no special rights. Consequently, Black land rights had to be legitimized along indigenous lines: Proving Afro-Colombian communities’ cultural distinctiveness based on their special connection to the lands they inhabit, despite having occupied them much later than Native Americans (Ng’weno, 2007).

As a result, in 1993, an appendix law to the new Colombian constitution granted collective land rights to Black communities, who ‘have been occupying state-owned lands in the rural riverine zones of the Pacific basin, in agreement with their traditional production practices’ (Law 70, Article 1), further defining Black communities as ‘the group of families of Afro-Colombian descent that possess their own culture, share a history, and have their own traditions and customs that reveal and conserve identity consciousness that distinguish them from other ethnic groups’ (Article 2.5). While this definition emphasizes the importance of shared culture and history, it also establishes a direct link between who is considered ‘Afro-Colombian’ and ‘traditional production practices’. Article 19 of Law 70 then defines these practices as ‘hunting, fishing or gathering of products for subsistence purposes [that] shall take precedence over any commercial, semi-industrial, industrial or sporting use’. Yet, in reality, Afro-Colombian communities were far from being self-reliant subsistence farmers, but had long relied on selling raw materials and cash crops according to global economic demand (Leal and Restrepo 2003). Given this context, the cultural foundation of Afro-Colombian collective land rights appears to have moved towards a ‘disjuncture between idealised visions of ‘ethnodevelopment’ and the complex, often less than ideal realities of indigenous livelihoods’ (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015: 265). Just as indigenous people, Afro-Colombian communities are often represented as ‘traditional, isolated and un-acculturated ethnic groups’ (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015: 265), whereby collective land rights are conceived as a protection mechanism against displacement and acculturation.

This original purpose explains the collective rights’ restrictive legal framework, which forbids the use of Afro-Colombian lands as collateral to protect biodiverse Afro-Colombian lands from commodification, ‘land grabbing’ and outright destruction. As a result, collective territories become ‘non-market spaces’ where people are thought to live exclusively off subsistence practices. In reality, however, Afro-Colombian communities have long lost their self-sufficiency, and despite legally controlling their territory, are involved, to varying degrees, with the market as agricultural producers, providers of primary goods, wage labourers and consumers (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015). Marginalized Afro-Colombian communities therefore saw collective land rights both as a compensatory justice mechanism supposed to limit destructive capitalist resource extraction and as a tool for material advancement. Though it is more than questionable that loosening titled lands legal protection would improve Afro-Colombian communities living conditions (Harvey, 2005)—not to mention biodiversity protection—leaving the intimately linked issue of environmental protection and economic survival unaddressed, has been creating disillusion among community members.

By comparing two Afro-Colombian communities with collective land titles in diverging socio-economic contexts, the next section reveals that land rights’ effectiveness is strongly correlated with material resources. It does so by showing that essentialist ethnic land rights’ mobilizing force depends on communities’ specific historical and geographical context.

III. The Conditions of Land Rights-based Agency: Yurumangui Versus Alto Mira y Frontera

The communities chosen for this study acquired collective land rights in the late 1990s and mid-2000s, respectively. Yet, their current situations differ substantially. Yurumangui, located three hours by boat away from Colombia’s biggest port city, Buenaventura, is viewed today as an exceptional bastion against palm oil and coca cultivation (cf. Lobo and Vélez, 2020). Since the 1990s, it has benefited from the direct involvement of national activists with the community and has never been a drug production area, even though neighbouring communities very much are. It is against this background that Yurumangui has even managed to win a land restitution sentence against the environmentally damaging activities of a mining company (Lobo and Vélez, 2020). Alto Mira y Frontera, on the other hand, is located next to the almost impenetrable Ecuadorian border, a hotspot for drug smuggling and the Southern regional capital of Tumaco, where palm oil cultivation has been expanding since the 1960s. This area is infamously known since the early 2000s for uniting the highest amount of coca fields and extrajudicial killings in the region (Agudelo, 2001) (see Figure 1 for concrete locations), which has led to the gradual disappearance of local activism and the relative political isolation of the community.

Figure 1.

Source: Lobo and Vélez 2020, additions by the author.

By reason of these opposite starting points, the two communities complement each other in showing the role of material conditions in shaping culturally legitimized collective land rights’ mobilizing force. My data collection was based on qualitative methods, including participant observation in and among members of the two communities between July 2019 and February 2020, field notes and open and semi-structured, subsequently anonymized interviews, which I recorded and transcribed for their subsequent analysis. For complementary background information, I used newspaper articles, legal documents and internal documents of the two communities.

I chose the two communities based on prior discussions with researchers from La Javeriana University in Bogotá who had previously worked with both communities. I was put in touch with national activists based in Bogotá as well as with local leaders from both communities, who then invited me and respectively accompanied me to Yurumangui and Alto Mira y Frontera, where I spoke to local authorities as well as locally based leaders. In total, I conducted 32 open and semi-structured interviews, half of them in Bogotá and the other half either on-site in Yurumangui or Alto Mira y Frontera or in the nearby cities of Buenaventura and Tumaco (see Figure 1 above). Before each trip from Bogotá to the field (four in total), I was in close contact with one specific leader on-site to ensure that there were no security concerns. I presented my research project to the community members upon arrival on-site, and my interviewees gave informed consent to being totally anonymized research participants.

Before returning to Europe, I transcribed my interviews. I then coded them according to thematic themes (e.g. ‘culture’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘development’ and ‘resistance’) that I identified through an abductive approach that combined my pre-fieldwork readings with a close analysis of my interviewees’ discourse. It is in this way that the tension between the leaders’ culturalist discourse and the expressed material necessities of the respective communities first came to my attention.

Yurumangui: How Strategic Essentialism Can Drive Political Agency

In Yurumangui, the land-titling process was accomplished on the ground through the strong politicization of community members along identity lines as a consequence of national PCN activists’ regular visits to the community, as well as regular exchange in Buenaventura (cf. Asher, 2018). Community members mobilized based on a shared rural Afro-Colombian identity. This identity is linked to the community’s territory, as a member of the Community Council of Yurumangui demonstrates through this self-description:

I’m black, I need a territory. They’re almost symbiotic elements. […] If there is no territory, we are doomed to disappear as a collective subject. It is on the territory where we become what we are. This is our banner of defence. ⁵

After the proclamation of Law 70 in the mid-1990s, Yurumangui’s local land-titling council was founded with the official mandate to promote and defend the Afro-Colombian culture, identity and territory. ⁶ According to one of Yurumangui’s leaders, this ‘territory of life’ was defined as a territory where ‘you can still drink the water, where people can still bathe on the beaches, where we still see what we are and where people are not ‘poor’ as long as they have a place to plant a banana tree’. Or, to put it in the words of another emblematic leader of the community, a place where ‘the rich are not the ones who have the most but the ones who need the least’. ⁷

Refusing to consider themselves as poor is one of the community’s various resistance strategies against their economic assimilation as wage workers. This ideological standpoint challenges the added value of the agribusiness model, which delegitimizes subsistence agriculture as ‘the economy of the poor’ and promotes industrial agriculture (such as the palm oil industry) as stable employment and income guarantee (Mol, 2016). Yet, based on their sporadic experience with coca cultivation within and around the community, leaders concluded that monetary income alone would not improve their living conditions but rather destroy their communitarian organization, as this quote from an interview with a worried community leader in Yurumangui shows:

Unfortunately, the money from drug trafficking has made people lose their habits and their tastes have risen […] Many young people don’t see the territory as a life option anymore, the planting of the papa china. ⁸

Consequently, the leaders adopted a discourse that values the territory. To that end, they insist on Afro-Colombians’ cultural specificity rather than acknowledging its material deficiencies. Rather than declaring themselves ‘excluded from development’, which according to Arturo Escobar and Alvaro Pedrosa would ‘open […] the political and institutional space required for the State, international cooperation and entrepreneurs to take on the task of “modernising”’ (1996: 81), community leaders revalue their natural habitat. Whilst also seeing a correlation between the decline in subsistence agriculture and the regional rise of violence, one of the leaders saw ‘modernity’ as the key driver for inciting people to move closer together and to abandon their arable lands. To counteract these trends, Yurumangui’s leaders invest a lot of time and energy in building a cultural identity that ties community members to the territory. At Yurumangui’s general assembly in January 2020, the community’s elected representatives repeatedly emphasized the importance of standing together in the fight against coca cultivation and industrial mining.

Frequently heard slogans included ‘La tierra es la vida y la vida no se vende, se ama y se defiende’ [The territory is life and life is not for sale, it is loved and defended) or ‘Alerta y camina, hasta la victoria siempre. Cómo? Luchando, quedando. Conciencia al pueblo’ [Be alert and move, until victory always. How? By fighting, by staying. Conscientiousness to the people]. Besides, identarian slogans and political manifestos decorated much of the village, including a citation from Bob Marley’s 1980 Redemption Song, ⁹ an indication of the movement’s intellectual roots (see Figure 2) as well as a manifesto against coca plantations, palm tree cultivation and government and corporate violence (see Figure 3 for the picture and Figure 4 for its translation).

Figure 2.

‘Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds’.

Figure 3.

Manifesto in the Community of Yurumangui. ¹¹

Figure 4.

Translation by the Author of the Manifesto from Above.

At the same time, the community leaders and the Colombian government seem to mainly channel their efforts and financial support into cultural projects: memorials for the victims of the regional violence and the display of cultural artefacts, for example. In September 2019, the Ministry of Culture accorded 20 million Colombian pesos (approximately 5,000 US dollars) to the construction of a memorial centre in one of Yurumangui’s seven interconnected villages. In February 2020, construction works were almost completed. In 2015, the Pacific region’s typical marimba music and traditional dances were inscribed as intangible cultural heritage of humanity by the UNESCO. A four-year plan (2015–2018) for conserving and promoting the region’s music was established between the Community Council and the five directorates of the Ministry of Culture, who visited the Community on this occasion. The activities included the construction of informal meeting places in various villages, so-called mentideros, and a TV show on three traditional female singers from Yurumangui. The latter was broadcast on national TV under the name of Matronas in March 2018. ¹²

As the community’s legal representative remarked, these initiatives are supposed to protect the community’s culture, el mundo de adentro [the inside world], against el mundo de afuera [the outside world], the latter referring to all the spaces that are already ‘imbued’ with hegemonic Western values. According to Escobar and Pedroso, ‘the intense encounter between hegemonic modernity’ (which they define as progress-focused European enlightenment ideology) ‘and marginalised communities’ (1996: 14) can ultimately help the latter to develop a clear political standpoint to overcome the encounter’s oppressive elements and modify it according to their own values.

Yurumangui’s leaders’ skilful consolidation of cultural difference to defend their territory and future as a community certainly qualifies for Cedric Robinson’s state-critical concept of culture and spirituality-based resistance (Robinson, 1983). There is, however, a tendency in research on rural movements to automatically equate grassroots-level territorial resistance with radical, anti-capitalist politics that challenge agribusiness and the promotion of diversified and sustainable small-scale farming practices (Martínez-Torres and Rosset, 2010; McMichael, 2008; Ploeg, 2018). Yet, recent agrarian studies research has shown autonomy struggles are often more a reaction to specific subsistence problems than a form of systemic opposition to global production practices (Anthias, 2018; Holt Giménez and Shattuck, 2011; Sankey, 2022; Stahler-Sholk, 2007).

In the following section, I will compare the situation in Yurumangui with the context of Alto Mira y Frontera to show that Yurumangui’s anti-extractivist resistance is based on specific material conditions and related power relations rather than on their land rights per se.

Alto Mira y Frontera: How Strategic Essentialism’s Effectiveness Is Materially Conditioned

As opposed to Yurumangui, relatively shielded from the region’s armed actors, the community of Alto Mira y Frontera, north of the thickly wooded Ecuadorian border, is known for accommodating armed groups’ drug trafficking and paramilitary counteroffensives since the 1990s. Today, most of the community’s inhabitants either cultivate coca or work for one of the nearby palm oil companies. While Yurumangui has until now been spared from cocoa plantations as well as direct intervention of agribusiness and mining companies on its territory, the Alto Mira y Frontera region saw the palm industry firmly establish itself two decades ago, when ethno-territorial organizations started promoting cultural difference as an anti-developmentalist resistance strategy. Activist networks’ more limited influence in the region began to dwindle even more when the diverging interests on the territory started causing violence. As a priest from the nearby Diocese of Tumaco pointed out:

Here, land titling mostly concentrated on preserving the land and also the cultural part, but this was lost when the war came, and the communities couldn’t sustain themselves. They began to immigrate, and traditions were lost. Fortunately, in other communities the culture and tradition were well preserved and that sustained them, but here, the war has been very intense. So here it was all about survival, hiding and keeping quiet. And those who talked too much, most of them have died. It’s a culture of fear. ¹³

Given this record of terror, many local actors lament the social effects of people’s involvement in the drug industry. A local mestizo palm cultivator and employee of the Government Agency for Territorial Renovation (ART) in Tumaco, identified people’s related loss of values as the foundation of the region’s plights:

We have to work on the issue of values, the issue of legality, because today our young people are only looking for fast money: ‘Five years to study for what? I make one trip [smuggling cocaine] and that’s it’. This mentality has taken over our youth. ¹⁴

The surprisingly joyful priest from Tumaco, similarly, saw the recent cultural and social changes as a result of the new profit sources and the abandonment of the traditional subsistence agriculture:

Before, people cultivated bananas, went fishing for their own needs. But that didn’t allow for major development. It was only for subsistence, but people wanted progress. For example, before, they couldn’t buy strong engines for their boats. The one who could afford the most bought a 15 [PS engine], the others had 6 [PS engines] and that’s slow…. Then after the arrival of coca some people bought a 40, a 150, a 200. And that’s rapídísimo [laughs]. Before, travelling to another village took all day, now with coca, with a 200, it takes half an hour. These are the contradictions of life. A lot of suffering but also … [laughs]. ¹⁵

Twenty years ago, Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig had already come to the same conclusion that ‘there would be no 200-horsepower motors [in the Colombian Pacific region] without cocaine’ (2004: 169), though he was not sure what was driving this thirst for speed: ‘Some practical reason, […] the thrill of being modern […] [or] the thrill of speed itself’ in a region where life was otherwise as slow as to almost seeming to ‘go backwards’ (p. 167).These descriptions can be taken as evidence for the accelerated integration of the region into global cash circuits and corresponding disengagement from ‘traditional production practices’. In an interview in Bogotá, Libia Grueso, a human rights defender, co-founder of the PCN and Goldman Environmental Prize Laureate, agreed that land titling could not fulfil its original purpose of protecting Afro-Colombians’ traditional livelihoods in the omnipresence of the drug economy and the agribusiness. She argued that Afro-Colombian communities’ incorporation into extractivist capitalism, such as the palm oil sector, actually increased despite the presence of collective land rights. Owned by the country’s powerful political right and represented by national development institutions, such as the FES (Foundation for Education and Social Development) and the Foundation Carvajal (a name often whispered by my interviewees), agribusiness actors quickly found ways to circumvent communities’ new territorial control. Together with the municipal administration, they created small grower cooperations such as CORDEAGROPAZ in 1999. Small growers’ ‘productive alliances’ with palm oil firms that were said to protect farmers from other sectors’ higher price volatility and give them access to credit (Sankey, 2022), allowed palm oil firms to control (titled) land, its production and its inhabitants without formally owning it. Backed by public funds and international organizations, such as the Interamerican Development Bank and the Plan Colombia, a bilateral agreement between the US and Colombia for their mutual ‘war on drugs’, palm oil cultivation was now promoted as a ‘productive’ alternative for peace and economic stability (Mol, 2016: 85) as well as source for ‘clean’ biodiesel production (Cárdenas, 2012). According to anthropologist Roosbelinda Cárdenas, this instrumentalization of sustainability goals for economic profit has turned large parts of independent Afro-Colombian farmers into ‘alleged green capitalists’ (318).

Between 1999 and 2007 alone, the area under palm oil cultivation rose from 20,996 hectares to 34,610 hectares, with small growers accounting for 40% of the production (Lemaitre, 2011: 39). As Grueso points out, collective land titles were ‘no longer a problem [for the palm industry], because effective land control is assured through its use, not through its titling’. ¹⁶ This observation points to the importance of distinguishing ‘property’ from ‘access’ as having ‘the ability to derive benefits from things’ as opposed to having ‘the right to benefit from things’ (Ribot and Peluso, 2003: 153).

The expansion of agribusinesses’ land control was supported by the Colombian state. While officially granting collective land titles, the conservative government and its military forces also collaborated with the paramilitary organization Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). Under the banner of the US-financed ‘war on drugs’, AUC targeted social organizers and spread terror that made many inhabitants leave their lands. The land title was also of little help for Alto Mira y Frontera to resist pressures from the FARC guerrilla (Fuerzas armadas revolucionarias de Colombia), which, until its disarmament as part of the national peace accord in 2016, was very active in the region. Indeed, in 2008, two years after Alto Mira’s lands had finally been officially titled, the initiation of manual coca eradication—a commodity, which had become the guerrilla’s main source of income—resulted in death threats against all the members of the community’s directive board. As a result, many were forced into several months of exile in Bogotá and Cali.

The land titling has brought us deaths, disappearances, displacements, little by little, drop by drop—not massively but drop by drop. ¹⁷

The palm oil firms, on the other hand, arranged themselves with the FARC by dividing up the territory while still benefiting from Colombia’s national agenda for the promotion of biofuels through tax breaks and financial incentives (Lemaitre, 2011). The intensity of the violence and the stigmatization of social leaders had a paralysing effect on the region’s social movements. In this context, Alto Mira y Frontera’s remaining community leaders saw no alternative to cooperating with external economic actors, such as the palm oil industry. One of Alto Mira’s new generation of representatives cautiously explained this changed social reality as follows:

Despite of what happened in the past, today we have a good relationship with these companies, there is communication. With some of these companies, we organise round tables and agreements to carry out some activities with communities. With that we have made progress. Previously it was not like that. […] Look at the Community Council of Alto Mira that has had many deaths because of this issue. So, you don’t go into this with great depth to uncover this situation because if you put your thumb on it you start getting into things that … So, it’s better to try to dialogue and adapt to the situations that we are facing every day. ¹⁸

Using PSA allows us to read these various entanglements between companies, FARC, AUC and state forces as expressions of underlying resource flows and corresponding power relations. Given the historic weakness of the Colombian state (especially in remote regions) (e.g. Bejarano and Pizarro, 2004; Ramírez, 2015) and related paramilitarism and territorial capture as well as its continuous dependence on volatile natural resource exports (e.g. Oviedo-Gómez and Viafara, 2022), Colombia’s political settlement relies on illicit rent flows between all these actors, undermining the effectiveness of the civil population’s legal rights. Indeed, the case of Alto Mira y Frontera illustrates clearly how territorial rights struggle to secure alternative non-capitalist livelihoods in the context of these strong economic interdependencies. Rather than being ‘bounded spaces of cultural difference’ (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015: 264), many Black territories accommodate a vast range of actors with diverging economic interests who arrived due to different waves of colonization, economic development, settlement and agrarian reform. Making these ‘entangled landscapes’ (Moore, 2005) intelligible through land titling does not resolve conflicts over territorial and resource sovereignty, nor does it provide alternative economic options to those already entrenched on the territory. Besides, the context of the armed conflict and the absence of collective organizing structures like the PCN contributed to a gradual disappearance of the community’s political project of economic sovereignty and made its leaders vulnerable to co-optation.

Comparing community members’ land rights conceptions and applications in two contrasting socio-economic contexts has allowed me to show that essentialist collective land rights can only drive counterhegemonic politics and grant a certain level of territorial security if leaders have external sources of finance and are sheltered from contrary economic interests. Yet, over the long run, the lack of consideration of culturally legitimized land rights for communities’ material needs seems to lead, nevertheless, to a situation in which many community members are drawn to selling their labour to extractivist companies, even if these companies directly contribute to destroying their livelihoods. The final section of this article will analyse what explains this limited effectiveness of ethnic land rights in securing Afro-Colombian livelihoods over time.

IV. Rights as Paradoxes or How the Faustian Bargain Came About

Collective territories have long been confronted with drug trafficking and eradication programmes, paramilitary, guerrilla and dissident violence, as well as militarization and state-led development projects, often provoking displacement. At the same time, as demonstrated before, they continue to be incorporated into agribusiness and mining projects. Thus, it has become increasingly evident that property rights by themselves struggle to grant territorial security.

PSA explains this deficiency by pointing out the role of underlying economic and political power relations in securing property rights’ effectiveness. PSA defines these ‘political settlements’ as historically rooted power configurations between classes and groups that are shaped by domestic economic structures as well as dependency relations within the global political economy (Khan, 1995). Hence, PSA relates to a long tradition of Latin American dependency theory (e.g. Cardoso and Faletto, 1979, Furtado, 1977) and Structuralism (e.g. CEPAL, 1950). Dependency theory explains the lack of structural economic transformation towards increased economic complexity and diversification in peripheral economies by their lasting inequitable integration into the world’s economic and political system during colonial times, including its inherent division of labour and unequal exchange (Emmanuel, 1971). Latin American Structuralists, who gathered in the 1950s at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean under the direction of former central bank president Raúl Prebisch, shared dependency theories’ concern with postcolonial economies’ structural transformation, given the unequal power relations between the centre and the periphery. Yet, they remained optimistic about the possibility of eventually overcoming these extractivist relations (cf. Palma, 2016).

In the case of the Colombian Pacific, collective property rights struggle to guarantee territorial security due to already established power relations between economically powerful and politically well-connected actors, such as the palm oil or drug industry and local populations’ effectively long-established dependence on monetary income from extractive sectors. The related extractive economic practices could only be trumped by alternative sources of financial income, but as conservation vehicles, collective territories struggle to provide this alternative income to communities.

Indigenous and Black communities’ collective territories in Latin America are indeed legally excluded from land markets by being inalienable, inseverable and imprescriptible. This means that they cannot be commercialized, divided into smaller land plots or used as investment collateral. This deliberate protection mechanism does not apply to subsoil resources (e.g. gold, petrol, gas, etc.), which remain property of the state that can issue exploitation permits to private companies. The same applies to wood. While local communities are allowed to use firewood for their personal use, timber commercialization equally requires an official exploitation permit. ¹⁹ As a result, Afro-Colombian activists and community members increasingly question the desirability of owning collective land rights for their own needs.

No one wants to invest in the territories of the black communities, no private investor because they have no guarantee of their money. Because the first guarantee is the land. But the black communities cannot be dispossessed of their land, and they do not have other assets of any value, that is why no private investor is associated with them. We must think of other models that allow a partnership so that others come to invest what we need to reach an agreement. ²⁰

At first glance, this statement might seem contradictory given that there are many extractivist companies in the Colombian Pacific region. Yet, the quote effectively reveals land rights’ ambivalent position as a legal protection mechanism amongst broader processes of marketization and community members’ expectations of ethnic land rights.

Ethnic land rights’ neglect of these material desires has to do, as we have seen, with their specific legal justification, but also with their origin in the global environmental crisis. Originally considered a purely scientific matter, from the 1990s onwards, the new global concern for biodiversity conservation was reformulated as necessarily socially inclusive. As a result, ‘traditional practices’ of local communities were viewed as aligned with international biodiversity protection goals (Hoekema and Assies, 2000). Multi- and bilateral aid and lending organizations such as the World Bank pressured national governments to protect their natural habitats and politically involve their marginalized populations in the preservation efforts as ‘guardians of the forest’ (Brysk and Wise, 1997; Gros, 1997; Van Cott, 2001). In this context, land-titling initiatives for indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants emerged across Latin America, particularly in Amazonian countries such as Brazil, Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and the eastern watersheds of Central America. In Colombia, the Natural Resource Management Program (PMRN) and Proyecto BioPacífico were specifically conceived to regulate natural resource use through property rights and enhance local participation in nature conservation (Leal, 2015). Yet, this ‘legal inclusion under conditions’ is increasingly seen by Afro-Colombian communities as their effective exclusion from economic benefits:

There are some people who say that we were purposefully put in charge of the forest by the state. […] That the state’s strategy was to collectively title [certain] areas as environmental reserve zones while making sure that the lands of the state’s members, sons of traditional aristocratic families, were not chosen for collective titling. They said: ‘I want to continue exploiting my lands, my lands have to be productive. The lands we’re going to use for collective titling are the lands of the black people.’ I’m not saying that. That’s the thesis I heard from several people who believe that this was the state’s strategy: to establish natural reserve zones precisely where the weakest live, to exclude them from business. Sometimes I do believe it. It is not crazy. That thesis isn’t that crazy. […] I think [collective land titling was the result] of black people’s claims, who were dispossessed of their lands. That they were losing their livelihoods and the state capitalised on that. ²¹

Afro-Colombian communities role as ‘guardians of the forests’ (see Wade, 1999) confronts them with a dilemma. Leaders must claim culturally justified territorial rights based on assumingly environmentally sustainable and culturally engrained subsistence agriculture, while also being confronted with community members’ dependency on external monetary incomes. Given the limited sources of revenue in the territory, community members are easily attracted to socially and environmentally destructive coca cultivation and mining.

Nevertheless, leaders in Yurumangui prioritized the consolidation of shared cultural values at the expense of potentially divisive financial considerations. During the community’s General Assembly, no economic projects were addressed. There was, for instance, no mention of either an unsuccessful USAID-funded fish-and-chicken farm or the community’s planned participation in a REDD pilot project, ²² which one leader laid out with all its details in a subsequent private conversation. According to him, 70% of Yurumangui’s inhabitants continue to live off the territory’s forest wood, which is sold illegally to merchants in Buenaventura. Nevertheless, he considered that the REDD funding scheme ultimately demanded too much administrative effort and personal commitment to represent a viable long-term option. ²³ These considerations point to both the contentiousness of communities’ monetary activities given the omnipresence of extractivism and drug cultivation and community councils’ administrative overload.

To avoid the fate of Alto Mira y Frontera of being simply incorporated into either the all-encompassing palm oil industry or the drug business, community representatives in Yurumangui decided to stick to framing the preservation of Afro-Colombian culture and subsistence practices as a way out of poverty. In this account, it was assumed that once the territory was shielded from external development interventions through land titles, economic alternatives would naturally emerge. Accordingly, one Afro-Colombian activist noted:

I don’t know if it would be a dichotomy, but we believe that if we have access to land from there, we can also generate progress for the community. It has to do with how the community’s own development (desarrollo propio) can create its own dynamics of income, of food security within the territory. ²⁴

I argued that this shared set of cultural values and related ethnic commonalities (that is, community members’ African descent) can clearly represent an essential foundation for resistance against the economic status quo. Yet, community leaders permanent ‘strategic essentialism’ of Afro-Colombian culture, overemphasizing its traditional economic practices, contributed to idealize Afro-Colombian socio-economic realities and circumvented open discussions of their economic constraints. Wendy Brown (2000) described such a situation as the limiting paradox of liberal rights systems. Drawing on Foucault’s ideas on the regulatory powers of identity (2008), she argues that legal rights need to address subordinated legal subjects’ particularities to effectively address their invisibility. Yet, she also points to affirmative legislation’s limitations in merely mitigating and not resolving the foundations of subordinating power. In the case of Yurumangui, the essentialist land rights have indeed helped to denounce the ongoing processes of violent, often state-funded commercial land grabbing by creating the foundation for alternative economic narratives. Yet, at the same time, the rights essentialist legitimation circumvents their ability to address the fundamental question of Afro-Colombian livelihoods and contribute to creating new, sustainable non-extractivist sources of income.

Though the first aim of the Afro-Colombian movement was to protect their territorial livelihoods from outright destruction and state repression, activists also always hoped for better material living conditions through land rights. Afro-Colombian communities’ effective exclusion from and subordinate position in the global economy make them, however, dependent on the state’s redistribution of economic surplus. This explains why movements’ counterhegemonic aspirations coincided with their demand for stronger state presence and service provision. In Yurumangui, for example, leaders rejected ‘western culture’, ‘mass media’, as well as the educational system and state development projects as incompatible with the ‘traditional cultural vision’ of their communities. Yet, they saw no contradiction in defining ‘living well in the territory’ as having ‘[a] little house, health, education, water and energy service’. ²⁵

Yet, while humanity urgently needs an economic model that fulfils these basic human needs sustainably, welfare states often continue to be financed by extractivism, particularly in Latin America (e.g. Burchardt and Dietz, 2014).

V. Conclusion

The article’s overall analysis has shown that collective land rights, means to grant territorial security and environmental protection over economically embattled but politically marginalized lands, are structurally constrained. PSA reveals that their frequent ineffectiveness is linked to the rights’ dependence on material resource transfers. If Yurumangui’s leaders could cultivate a strong anti-extractivist Afro-Colombian identity, it was thanks to the community’s connections with national activists and its relative territorial seclusion from external economic interests. Alto Mira y Frontera, on the other hand, was confronted with strong economic actors and high levels of violence, resulting in most of the community members being incorporated into the local extractive economy.

Yet, the article also shows that collective land rights’ cultural legitimization and Yurumangui’s leader’s consequent tendency to leave communities’ involvement with the global economy and need for monetary income unaddressed, eventually turns the rights into something of a Faustian bargain for communities. Lacking alternative sources of income, community members are impelled to engage in the very extractivist or illicit activities that collective land rights were meant to circumvent in the first place.

Hence, the article empirically challenges post-development perspectives that depict ethnic land rights movements as durably promoting alternative, self-sufficient and sustainable production systems without acknowledging communities’ effective entanglement with the global monetary economy and the dilemmas that result from it. In addition to previous research that has already pointed to the overidealistic nature of identity politics, the article specifically reveals the long-term limits of ‘strategic essentialism’ in improving communities’ livelihoods. I argue that though these identity politics, which present Afro-Colombian communities as traditional, economically self-sufficient entities, represent a strong rallying force to begin with, they complicate a realistic discussion of economic alternatives in the long run. The article, therefore, aims to make a case for acknowledging and analysing subaltern communities’ entanglements with (global) capitalist production systems and the concrete constraints and opportunities it creates to conceive realistic sustainable economic alternatives for rural ethnic communities to destructive extractivism. Once this structural context is thoroughly analysed and understood, alternatives to extractivist activities, such as community forestry models, productive diversification initiatives or REDD+ models can be assed in a more meaningful way for local communities—politically and economically.