43
The Territorial Turn: Making Black
Territories in Pacific Colombia
Karl H. Offen
Department of Geography, University of Oklahoma
Over the last decade, a wide range of global forces have combined to promote the
territorial titling of collective lands to indigenous and black communities in the
lowland tropics of Latin America. This marks an unprecedented turn in land titling
and reform in the hemisphere. In this paper, I describe the territorial turn in collective
land titling in the Pacific region of Colombia. In particular, I describe the World Bankfunded Natural Resource Management Program’s effort to demarcate and title some 5
million hectares of national lands to black community councils in Pacific Colombia
since 1996. In so doing, I examine how environmental, human rights, and multilateral
lending interests have come together over the last few decades to strengthen ethnic
rights to collective lands throughout the Latin American lowlands. Although it is too
early to make definitive assessments, I argue that the machinations of the World Bankfunded project interacted in very complex and significant ways with how black social
movements instituted a novel ethnic-territorial relationship. The project has
widespread implications for black and indigenous territorial aspirations throughout the
lowland tropics and for better understanding how identity and territory constitute one
another. Keywords: Pacific Colombia; rural blacks; World Bank; territory.
Introduction
Throughout the lowland tropics of
Latin America, a new form of territorial
governance is taking shape. While it is
too early to fully assess the implications
of this, the process is likely to affect geographic change for decades to come.
The new mode of spatial organization
varies from place to place, but generally
involves some form of administrative
devolution of territory to indigenous
and, to a lesser extent, black peoples who
have historically claimed it. Some of
these new territories are larger than
Rhode Island and contain the most
biodiverse places remaining on the
planet. Many are forming in Amazonian
countries such as Brazil, Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador,
Peru and Bolivia, and the eastern watersheds of Central America. This
reconfiguration of national territory and
the power-sharing arrangements being
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2(1), 2003
negotiated for territorial governance are
quite recent and in dramatic contradistinction to past approaches to indigenous and black land claims in the
lowland tropics. After centuries of ignoring, wishfully controlling, concessioning off, or “opening up” these
ostensibly “unoccupied national lands”
(tierras baldías), many Latin American
governments now recognize indigenous
and black land rights and have set out to
demarcate and collectively title their
claims.
The legal framework initiating these
changes reflects important constitutional
reforms that have redefined Latin
American countries as multiethnic and
pluricultural: seventeen such reforms
have swept Latin American countries
since 1987 (Van Cott 2000a; 2000b).
Motivations for these reforms are tied to
a wide constellation of internal and ex-
44
Journal of Latin American Geography
ternal forces, including bottom-up localized pressures for social change and
top-down global pressures for politicaleconomic reform. The former are part
of the “new” social movements—
movements based around interests such
as indigenous rights, gender, or the environment rather than class—that have
put forth an alternative vision of democratic society in Latin America (Alvarez,
Dagnino and Escobar 1998). These
social movements are characteristically
transnational, whereby global and local
social organizations reinforce mutual
interests (Brysk 2000). Global pressures
come in the form of multi- and bilateral
aid and lending organizations whose
policies have changed to reflect the end
of the Cold War, global environmental
issues, and a stated concern for human
rights (Brysk 1997; Gros 1997; Yashar
1999; Van Cott 2001).
Underscoring the advancement of
ethnic rights and the new territoriality in
Latin America has been the 1989 promulgation of the International Labor Organization’s Convention on Indigenous
and Tribal Peoples (ILO 169).2 A revision of its 1957 assimilationist convention No. 107, ILO 169 puts pressure on
governments to recognize indigenous
peoples’ traditional lands and to grant indigenous peoples some form of administrative autonomy (Tomei and Swepston
1996). The specific ways that ILO 169
defines collective cultural rights have influenced the language of indigenous and
black territorial demands, Latin American constitutional reforms (Van Cott
2000a, 2001), World Bank operational directives (Davis 1993; Gray 1998), and
other international conventions such as
the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity (Gray, Parellada, and Newing
1998). Most notably, once ratified, ILO
169 takes on the force of domestic law
and provides indigenous and, increasingly, black groups legal leverage to hold
national governments accountable for
their actions and inactions (Plant 2000).
Regionally, the impacts of ILO 169 have
been substantial because 12 of the 17
countries that ratified it are Latin American.3
As “ethnic communities” distinct
from the national culture, many rural
blacks who are able to demonstrate a history of customary tenure arrangements
often emulate indigenous strategies for
land recognition (Thorne 2001). The Pacific region of Colombia provides a case
in point. In order to address calls for
democratic reforms in a country torn
apart by 40 years of civil war, Colombia
elected a constituent assembly and
changed its constitution in 1991.4 Although the constitution did not set out
to address ethnic issues per se, it redefined the country as multiethnic and
pluricultural. Backing up rhetoric with
deeds, the new constitution’s Transitory
Article 55 (AT-55) required Congress to
pass a law granting “black communities”
(comunidades negras) of the “Pacific watershed” collective property titles to the rural and riparian areas that they occupy
“in conformity with their traditional systems of production.” As a result of AT55, Law 70 was passed two years later.
Law 70 guarantees black communities of
the Pacific “territorial rights.” By 1995,
procedural Decree 1745 required a multitude of governmental institutions and
agencies to work together to demarcate
and title black territories to representative community councils (consejos
comunitarios). Required by law to receive a
title, the councils were newly created
ethno-territorial and political entities required to solicit and administer the new
territories. Between 1996 and May of
2003, the Colombian government demarcated and titled 122 black territories.
These territories enclose over 4.5 million
hectares, contain 1,250 black communities, and represent 270,000 people (Figure 1). Size and population vary
dramatically; one territory contains as
few as 30 people living in a single community, while the largest territory contains 30,000 people in 90 different
communities and encompasses more
than a half million hectares. Not yet
complete, the project is already among
the most ambitious and radical territorial
re-orderings ever attempted in Latin
America (Table 1).
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
45
Figure 1. Territorial entities in Pacific Colombia as of May 2003. Sources IGAC and INCORA 2002;
INCORA 2003a.
Perhaps more surprising still, the entire process was funded by $3.25 million
of a $39 million loan provided by the
World Bank to the Colombian government in 1994. The loan initiated the
Programa de Manejo de Recursos Naturales, or
the Natural Resource Management Program (NRMP), of which collective land
titling of black territories was a small
part. But more than money wedded the
World Bank to this project. As an institution, the World Bank played an important role in legitimizing black demands
by ensuring the passage of Law 70 and
funding consultations leading up to the
important procedural Decree 1745. This
development is all the more interesting
in Colombia because rural black com-
46
Journal of Latin American Geography
munities had no tradition of expressing
their political demands in the form of
ethnic or territorial claims. The impetus
for traditional land recognition as an
‘ethnic territory’ came, essentially,
from Law 70 and the bottom-up and
top-down pressures that got the law
to specify the nature of territorial
rights in the first place. The process
of negotiating the meaning of these
territorial entities is still in progress,
but
some
results
speak
for
themselves: over the last seven years
a convergence of interests have
come together to ensure that 4
percent
of
Colombia’s
national
territory has been titled to rural
black communities who, for the
previous 500 years, enjoyed no territorial
rights whatsoever.
Colombia’s case is not entirely
unique; the legal recognition of
black land rights is steadily gaining
Constitutional reform in Ecuador
granted Afro-Ecuadorians collective
rights to their ancestral lands. The World
Bank gave these rights meaning when it
linked ancestral lands to what it called
“ethno-development,” projects intended
to build “on the positive qualities of indigenous cultures and societies, including a sense of ethnic identity, close
attachments to ancestral land, and
the capacity to mobilize labor, capital, and other resources to promote
local empowerment and growth”
(WB 1997:5). The Indigenous and
Afro-Ecuadorian Peoples Development Project is the first World Bank
project in Latin America intended
solely
for
‘ethno-development’
(Marquette 1996; Partridge, Uquillas
and Johns 1996; Van Nieuwkoop
and Uquillas 2000). Brazil has also
borrowed World Bank money to title
lands claimed by former quilombos, or
Table 1. Collective land titles of black communities adjudicated and under review by INCORA
as of May 2003. Source: INCORA 2003a, 2003b.
momentum throughout Latin America.
Rural blacks in Ecuador and Brazil have
also received collective land titles, while
similar titling projects are underway in
Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, and
Belize (Thorne 2001). As in Colombia,
the World Bank has played a critical role
in moving the process along.5 The 1998
autonomous communities of runaway
slaves. Since Brazil’s constitutional
change in 1988, 724 remnant quilombos
have been identified, with 259 of them
located in the northeastern state of
Bahia. These formerly autonomous territories are estimated to contain 500,000
people, twice the number of Brazil’s in-
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
digenous population. Although titling in
Brazil is slow due to the arduous
ethnohistorical evidence necessary for
processing, some 35,000 people have received 22 titles totaling 366,973 hectares
(Véran 2002). In Nicaragua and Honduras, the World Bank forcibly linked loan
guarantees for national land administration projects to concerted governmental
efforts to address indigenous, black, and
Garífuna land claims in their Caribbean
regions (Dana 1998; Gordon, Gurdián
and Hale 2003; Offen 2003). These
Central American projects are also tied
up with a broad range of schemes
funded by the Global Environmental
Facility
(GEF),
especially
the
Mesoamerican Biological Corridor
(MBC)—a multidimensional project
seeking to link and expand protected
areas across national boundaries
throughout the isthmus’s Caribbean
slope, but in direct overlap with indigenous and black land claims.6
In this paper I explore the forces driving ethnic territories in the lowland tropics of Latin America, and specifically the
process of forming black territories in
Pacific Colombia—a region known locally as el pacífico (the Pacific). I use secondary literature and institutional
reports to describe how black territories
came to be in the Pacific, and how globalized institutions and their agendas
shape a discursive relationship between
identity and territory. I also discuss how
different literatures have approached
this subject differently. Academics have
examined the territorial transformations
in Pacific Colombia by emphasizing the
role of newly formed black social movements (Escobar and Pedroza 1996;
Escobar 1997, 1998, 2000; Restrepo
1997; Villa 1998; Grueso, Rosero, and
Escobar 1998; Oslender 1999, 2000,
2003; Hoffmann 2000; Wade 2002a).
These writers articulate how black
movements filled political spaces
created by the new constitution of
1991, and how they contributed to a
new political ecology by forming
ethno-territorial organizations required
by Law 70. Other studies, often
produced with global or national institu-
47
tional support, have emphasized
instead the interaction between legal
and institutional reforms, and particularly the role of the World Bank in creating the social spaces and political
climates that nurtured the rise of black
social movements and insured their
participation. I try to reconcile these
diverging approaches by locating
community land titling in Pacific
Colombia within what I see as a
broader turn toward defining and
creating ethnic territories throughout
the lowland tropics of Latin America.
Following clarification of what I mean
by “the territorial turn,” I introduce the
unique characteristics and historical
geography of Pacific Colombia. The
following section chronicles the development of black territorial demarcation
and titling in Pacific Colombia in relation to bottom-up pressures and topdown reforms. A concluding discussion
then contextualizes the territorial turn
within broader issues of territory, identity, and environmental governance in
regions characterized by high poverty
and high biodiversity.
The Territorial Turn
The distinction between a land and a
territorial claim is important. Rural people have material, symbolic, and spiritual attachments to the land that
supports their livelihood, and a given
land claim might be buttressed by an
enunciation of these attachments. Yet,
by itself, a land claim does not challenge the existing rules and regulations
that govern property rights. A territorial claim is different; it demands an alteration of the rules. Territorial claims
are not simply a land or collective property claim that seeks to ‘plug into’ the
existing institutional arrangements governing private property. Territorial
claims are about power, an assertion of
identity, autonomy, and a measure of
control over encompassed natural resources. In Latin America, territorial
claims based on “ethnic rights” also
represent a critique of the official myth
of the mestizo, or mixed-race, nation
48
Journal of Latin American Geography
and its effacing twin, mestizaje, an ideology that denies the existence of ethnic
and cultural difference while simultaneously discriminating against it (Wade
1993, 1995). Territorial claims, thus, seek
to impose a new territoriality within
“national space” to redefine a people’s
relationship to the state. The legal
recognition of territorial rights and a
territorial title promise to enact this new
relationship.
For Robert Sack, territoriality is “a
spatial strategy to affect, influence,
or control resources and people, by
controlling area...[as a] basis of
power... related to how people use
the
land,
how
they
organize
themselves in space, and how they
give meaning to place” (1986:1,2).
What makes territorial demarcation
so important in Latin America is that,
following Sack, “how people give
meaning to place,” as well as how “they
organize themselves in space” are mutually constitutive of the processes
through which territories are struggled
over, legally conceived, physically demarcated, and cartographically represented.
Place meanings and spatial organizations
are not ontological givens but are bound
up with the lived experiences that give
them sustenance. Thus, place meanings
and the social networks woven through
them can never be separated from the
political process seeking their territorialization. Livelihood practices, vernacular
idioms of place, and the cultural cadences rooted in landscape mediate any
cultural notion of territory, and are consequently entwined with the political
strategies seeking territorial realization.
Moreover, for rural folk in Latin
America, place experiences and notions
of territory are imbued with struggle,
conflict, and violence, as well as a history
and memory of those experiences. For
rural blacks in Latin America, this means
slavery, self-liberation, and “invisibility”
in the national culture (Arocha
Rodriguez 1998a). All these factors come
in to play as territory and territorial
rights take on new meanings and opportunities. What is at issue, then, in understanding what I am calling the territorial
turn in the lowland tropics of Latin
America, is not just land or who gets
what land, but rather, as Arturo Escobar
puts it, “the concept of territoriality itself as a central element in the political
construction of reality” (1998:72).
To fully understand how the idea of
territory, as a form of collective property
engendering rights extending beyond existing private property relations, has become not only “the claim of choice”
among many indigenous and black organizations, but also that of global financial institutions, we need to appreciate
the convergence of interests underscoring the territorial turn. In other words,
we need to answer the following questions. Why has the World Bank—an institution which just 15 years ago galvanized
human rights and environmental activists
to condemn its projects—taken up the
banner for biodiversity conservation “as
one of the most pressing issues facing
humankind today” (Horta 2000:179)?
Conversely, why is the World Bank
funding the institutionalization of
indigenous and rural black territories in
the lowland tropics of Latin America?
Why are many environmentalists and international NGOs rejecting protected
area models that exclude native residents
in favor of working with and through
them? How has the proliferation of participatory mapping projects (Herlihy and
Knapp 2003) affected the linkage between territory and identity, and hence
territoriality? How have human rights
groups infused their strategies with the
notion that cultural rights require safeguarding access to traditional lands and
resources? In short, why have many of
the historically antagonistic entities in
Figure 2 converged around the demarcation of indigenous and black territories?
The short answer to these questions is
relatively simple: various groups have
mobilized to ensure that their interests
receive attention within global environmental and indigenous rights agendas. A
full treatment of the longer answer is beyond the scope of this paper, but would
involve several components. The first is
the realization by global institutions and
environmentalists that local people pos-
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
49
50
Journal of Latin American Geography
sess important environmental knowledge
about the places they inhabit. Second is
the realization that any attempt to
protect ‘the home’ of local residents
without their direct participation and
empowered involvement will fail. As
such, many recalcitrant conservationists
now accept the need to include some
genuine and sustained social justice for
conservation to succeed (Stevens 1997;
Zerner 2000; Offen 2004). With the
adoption of ILO 169, as discussed
above, the insertion of social justice into
conservation projects is also the law in
many Latin American countries. A third
thread would need to fully analyze the
ways in which NGOs mutually interact
with indigenous and black peoples and
their organizations (Brysk 2000;
Perreault 2003). The transnational activist network and the “NGOization” of
the indigenous and black rights movement are among the most important
forces helping to expand land rights,
land claims, and political autonomy in
Latin America today.
The changing role of technology is an
important dimension of the territorial
turn. While new media technologies facilitate transnational partnerships, the
proliferation of geomatic technologies
and techniques via those same partnerships has played an equally important
role in affecting indigenous and black
spaces (Poole 1998; Dana 1998; Chapin
and Threlkeld 2001; Herlihy and Knapp
2003). There are several sides to this. On
the one hand, global positioning systems
and western cartographic techniques
have been used by environmentalists
working with indigenous peoples to improve natural resource management
strategies (Poole 1989; CSQ 1995;
Herlihy 1997). Although intended to delineate local environmental use-zones,
completed maps have often taken on the
aura of a land claim in the eyes of indigenous and black peoples (Stocks, Jarquín,
and Beauvais 2000; Chapin and
Threlkeld 2001). Other participatory
mapping projects explicitly employ
geomatics to advance a land or territorial
claim (Poole 1995, 1998; Stone 1998).
What is interesting and under-appreci-
ated is the influential role of geomatics
(techniques, technologies, maps) and the
physical process of demarcation in shaping indigenous and black conceptions of
what constitutes their territory (Offen
2003, n.d.). History, culture, politics, and
technology merge through participatory
mapping projects to inform and redefine
community ideas of themselves, their
territory, and their relationship to one
another (Offen 2003). Regardless of the
intent of the map, its high-tech gloss can
lend an urgency and legitimacy to a spatial claim. If produced in conformity
with official cartographic conventions,
maps can possess a quasi-legal stature
that influences their interpretation (Dana
1998). The availability of geomatic technologies and the proliferation of the
partnerships that bring them into use
among indigenous and black groups are
part and parcel of the territorial turn in
Latin America.
Globalization
in
general
and
neoliberalist pressures in particular are
intertwined with the demands made by
multi- and bilateral lending and aid organizations. Central to imposed state reform in Latin America has been a
simultaneous opening up and closing
down—that is, a decentralization of
state duties to lower-level administrators
and a devolution of costs and services to
the private or NGO sectors (Fox and
Brown 1998). For example, throughout
Latin
America,
most
municipal
governments are now elected and receive
a share of regional or national revenues.
This change is a fairly significant form
of territorial re-ordering in its own right.
In Colombia, for example, the new constitution of 1991 defines the nation as
“decentralized” and mandates new
modes of fiscal autonomy to local levels.
By some estimates, 30% of national
revenue is currently being transferred to
Colombia’s
1,034
municipalities
(Nickson 1995; Uribe 1997). Gros
(1997:46) calls the Colombian form of
devolution
“a
species
of
neocorporatism,” a gamble by a discredited state that has little to lose. Indeed,
one of the great paradoxes of the
neoliberal sweep is that it simultaneously
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
weakens central-state institutions at the
same time that it places new demands
upon them. It would be a great tragedy if
the territorial turn is not accompanied by
the necessary funds to manage the territory effectively (Oviedo 2001).
Changing the priorities and strategies
of the World Bank has been critical to
the territorial turn and a direct response
to domestic pressure in the bank’s major
donor countries (Gray 1998; Horta
2001). The World Bank is now the
“world’s main financier of projects specifically aimed at the environment and
biodiversity
conservation”
(Horta
2001:191). The bank is also the leading
financier of projects seeking to demarcate indigenous and black land claims in
Latin America. Overall, the bank’s persistence has turned “paper rights into actual collective land titles” (Thorne
2001:1). But why is the World Bank doing this? Simply put, the bank views collective titles as necessary to stabilize
property regimes in developing countries, to remove biodiverse lands from
the vagaries of market forces (by insuring that collective properties can not be
transferred), to foment foreign direct investment, and to attract appropriate
technologies to biodiverse areas. From
the bank’s point of view, each of these
goals is mutually compatible and essential for limiting environmental degradation in areas of high poverty and
biodiversity (Davis and Wali 1994;
Pichón, Uquillas and Frechione 1999;
Sánchez Gutierrez and Roldán Ortega
2001; WB 2001, 2002a).7
Critics of global environmental intervention have not been swayed by the
changing rhetoric and policies of the
World Bank. For many World Bank critics, the newly “green” and socially responsible actions represent little more
than an extension of previous models of
predatory capitalism. Arturo Escobar,
for example, writing about Pacific Colombia, views the Global Environmental
Facility’s
(GEF)
concerns
with
biodiversity in the region as “a certain
kind of mutation in the modus operandi of
capital” (1996:123). For Escobar and
others, the mantra of biodiversity pro-
51
tection has become a discourse justifying
a new kind of global intervention to protect industrial and northern interests,
particularly the potential profits to be
derived from genetic resources. For
Escobar, the notion of biodiversity and
the global calls to protect it “anchor a
discourse that articulates a new relation
between nature and society” (Escobar
1998:55). However, Escobar also sees
the discourse of biodiversity (which values and seeks to protect cultural difference) as potentially supporting land
rights. That is, Escobar sees the rhetoric
of biodiversity expanding to include the
notion of “territory plus culture,” a new
discursive formation integrating the
natural and cultural in new ways
(2001:161).
Other skeptics of territorial titling are
quick to point out that such titling is
rarely done solely for purposes of improving the social justice demanded by
indigenous and black peoples but, rather,
for “instrumental purposes like nature
conservation.” Thus, the recognition of
territorial rights puts indigenous and
black recipients in a “contractual relationship” with funding agencies supporting collective territorial titling. Under
this paternalistic bargain, residents are
given limited control of territorial
resources in exchange for their
commitment
to
conserve
them
(Hoekema and Assies 2000:255). Within
the new territorial arrangements, state
institutions continue to oversee and approve resource use in a vaguely defined
form of shared governance. The longterm possibilities of the territorial turn
to create a genuine space for social
justice and nature conservation depends
on how the new territories are legally
incorporated into the state. In Colombia,
as elsewhere, the nature of territorial
autonomy is being negotiated by the
same forces responsible for the territorial turn.
Pacific Colombia
Just as the “American West” or “Great
Plains” are not clearly defined spaces in
the United States, so too the Colombian
52
Journal of Latin American Geography
Pacific is not clearly defined in Colombia
(Figure 3). That is not to say that people
do not have clear notions of what Pacific
Colombia means. For most urban and
highland mestizo Colombians, the region
is an exotic forest inhabited by “indios y
negros;” a place marginal to the interests
of the country and somewhere they have
no intention of ever visiting. Of course
local residents have a different view, but
until scholars began investigating the Pacific after World War II, local geographical perspectives were not widely known.
The pioneering works of Robert West
(1952, 1957) changed this and established the foundation upon which Colombian scholars have built a durable
corpus of Pacific Colombia studies (e.g.,
Whitten
and
Friedemann
1974;
Friedemann and Arocha Rodriguez
1986; Leyva 1993; Comacha and
Restrepo 1996; Restrepo and del Valle
1996; Escobar and Pedrosa 1996; Maya
1998; Vargas Sarmiento 1999b; Comacha
and Restrepo 1999; Agier et al. 1999;
Wade 2002b).
A vague set of eastern boundaries
notwithstanding, there is nothing like a
couple of projects to give meaning to a
region in Latin America. And, being one
of the most biodiverse regions on the
planet, the Pacific region of Colombia is
courted by many projects seeking to demarcate its boundaries and assign them
new meanings. According to the web
page of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Pacific’s
northernmost Department of the Chocó
“possesses the greatest plant biodiversity
on the planet,” and at least 25 percent of
all plant species identified are endemic
(UNDP 2000). Among the environmental projects to have descended on the Pacific in the 1990s was the Plan
Biopacífico (PBP). Having run from
1992-1998, the PBP was funded by a $3
million Swiss donation and a $6 million
grant provided by the GEF and administered by the UNDP. The PBP created a
new regional concept, the “Chocó
Biogeográfico,” an area comprising
75,061 km2, or 6.2% of the national territory. The objective of the PBP was the
consolidation of “a new development
strategy based on the application of scientific knowledge and the identification
of biodiversity management options that
work in consort with local communities
to guarantee its protection and sustainable use” (Casas C. and Bosoni S. 2002).8
In contrast, the World Bank-funded
NRMP (1994-2003) that is responsible
for titling the black territories discussed
in this paper extends the Pacific region
to encompass some 10 million hectares,
or around 8% of the national territory.9
This new regional designate covers the
entire Department of the Chocó, and
the western portions of five Andean departments: Antioquia, Cauca, Nariño,
Risaralda, and Valle de Cauca.
Covering 1,300 km. in length from the
Darien gap in Panama to northwestern
Ecuador, and running up the west side
of the Andean Cordillera Occidental, the
Colombian Pacific is as vast as it is diverse. West (1957) identifies three landscape types on the Pacific slope: plains
of recent alluvium, hills of dissected
Tertiary sediments, and mountainous areas of Mesozoic rock. These landscapes
are found in varying degrees within three
distinct watershed regions that also serve
as proxy cultural-historic zones. In the
north, the Río Atrato drains a large depression between the coastal Serranía de
Baudó and the Cordillera Occidental
northward to the Gulf of Urabá on the
Caribbean. Here the coast reflects the
rocky Baudó escarpment and does not
display the alluvium and mangrove deltas
common in the south. The middle section of the Pacific region is denoted by
the northeast-southwest directional watersheds of the Ríos Baudó and San
Juan. A vast coastal plain drained by the
east-west Ríos Micay, Patía and Mira, and
their thousands of tributaries extends to
the south of the port city of
Buenaventura. Throughout the Pacific
slope of Colombia, rainfall can be as
high as 10,000 mm. a year, making it one
of the rainiest places on earth. Closed
forest canopy is said to comprise 7.6 million hectares, or three-quarters of the
entire Pacific region (Leyva 1993; ONIC
et al. 1995; Casas C. and Bosoni S. 2002).
This forest canopy represents a wide
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
Figure 3. Pacific Colombia
53
54
Journal of Latin American Geography
range of tropical forest types that include
semi-homogeneous (frequently flooded)
or heterogeneous (interfluvial ridges and
foothills). The former is represented by
large mangrove, cativo, and nato ecosystems.10 Mixed forests range from true
rainforest in the Serranía de Baudó and
upper foothills, to naidí palm cluster associations in lower river deltas, with
every combination possible mixed in
(West 1957; Leyva 1993; del Valle
1996a).
Population estimates for the Colombian Pacific region vary widely. The last
Colombian census took place in 1993,
the first year in which national ethnic
data was sought (Hoffman 2000). Approximately 1.8 million people live in Pacific Colombia, or 4 percent of the
national total of 42 million.11 The region
is poor by national standards, and has
among the country’s lowest regional social and economic indicators. Half the
Pacific’s population is rural. About 90
percent of the Pacific’s inhabitants are
black, or Afro-Colombian, with various
indigenous groups making up about 4-5
percent.12 Nevertheless, the majority of
all Afro-Colombians live in urban areas
outside the Pacific, particularly along the
Atlantic Coast and in the Cauca Valley
(Wade 2002a). Law 70 does not apply to
Afro-Colombians in urban areas nor to
those outside the Pacific region specified
by Law 70—but legislation to effect rural black land titling throughout the
country is under way (Garcés M. 2003a).
Pacific Colombia contains five different indigenous groups: the Embera
(Chamí, Catío, Siapidara), Wounaan,
Zenu, Tule (Kuna), and Awa. With the
exception of the Awa, who live exclusively in southern Nariño close to the
border with Ecuador, the vast majority
of the Pacific region’s indigenous peoples live in the Department of Chocó.
The various cultural and linguistic
groups of the Embera make up the majority. While the Tule and Wounaan live
in the lower Ríos Atrato and San Juan
respectively, most indigenous peoples
have retreated in recent years into the
foothills of the upper Río San Juan, the
Serranía de Baudó, and the many eastern
tributaries of the Río Atrato. The 181
indigenous reserves or resguardos in
Pacific Colombia—56 of which were
created or expanded by the NRMP
project discussed here—cover almost 20
percent of the land area (see Table 2).13
Indian-black relations in the Pacific are
complex. On the one hand, “each group
maintains fairly definite ethnic boundaries,” but group relations are mediated
by intermarriage, compadrazgo (god-parenthood), and vertical economic networks (Wade 1995:345). The nature of
Law 70 and the different legal designation of indigenous resguardos (see below) has prevented the formation of
multiethnic territories in the Pacific despite several kinds of overlap, particularly in the Chocó.
Like many places in the lowland
tropics, rural families in the Pacific typically combine subsistence production
with a range of cash-generating activities. These latter activities fall into two
categories: wage labor and self-employed, or collective extraction. Self-employed or collective extraction includes
gold panning, timber extraction, palmito
harvesting, fishing, and harvesting of
aquatic resources such as fish, crustaceans, snails, clams, oysters, and bivalves
in the delta regions. Rural Afro-Colombians live in dispersed communities on
alluvial terraces and levees along the
lower, middle, and upper courses of the
Pacific’s vast river networks (West 1957;
Whitten and Friedemann 1974; Whitten
1986; Restrepo and del Valle 1996). Rivers serve as a longitudinal axis of community economic activities that vary
depending on community location along
the axis. Along a metaphorical
horizontal axis are areas for gathering,
hunting, and agricultural activities.
Agriculture is of course strongly
conditioned by soil fertility, drainage,
and mulching options in relation to the
needs of the region’s staple crops:
plantain, manioc, maize, sweet potato,
rice, sugar, fruit trees, peach palm
(chontaduro), coconut, and naidí palm
(Restrepo and del Valle 1996; Escobar
1998). This adaptive spatiality has come
to inform political organizing strategies
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
based on “the logic of the river,” a watershed space of social practices and
lifeways conditioned by a particular and
often dramatic hydrology (Oslender
2002a:94). These same socio-spatial
forms and lived experiences—what
Oslender calls “aquatic space” and what
Law 70 conceptualizes as “traditional
systems of production”—buttress and
justify the territorial claims made by
black community councils (Restrepo and
del Valle 1996; Villa 1998; Oslender
1999, 2002a, 2003). Traditional black
conceptions of these lived-spaces in the
Pacific have been shaped by the ways in
which Afro-Colombians came to reside
there.
Historical Geography
The traditional lifeways and territoriality of Afro-Colombians in the Pacific are
influenced by the circumstances of slavery and the process of liberation. Only
in New Granada (present-day Venezuela,
Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador) were
African slaves used consistently and in
large numbers for an extended period of
time as the chief source of labor in
mines (Whitten 1986). New Granada
was the most important gold producing
55
and in the foothill gravels of the Pacific.
At the close of the 18th century, the
Chocó was producing more gold than all
other mining districts in New Granada
combined (West 1952).
The Spanish Crown licensed the importation of African slaves to the
Americas in 1513. It is estimated that
135,000-170,000 Africans entered New
Granada legally by the mid 17th century
through Cartagena de las Indias (Arocha
1998a).14 African resistance began immediately. A culture of cimarronaje (fugitive
slaves) and palenques (autonomous communities of runaway slaves) quickly
emerged around Cartagena. By the late
17th century, 20 palenques existed within
two days travel of Cartagena, and their
distribution spread to the Río Magdalena
and Cauca valleys during the 18th century
(Friedemann 1998; Romero and Lane
2002). Due to a wrecked slave ship in the
Esmeraldas Province along the north
coast of the Audiencia of Quito, Ecuador, an independent “zambo republic” with
some 500 Afro-Amerindian people
formed by the end of the 16th century
(Cummins and Taylor 1998; Whitten
1986).15
Gold mining on the Pacific slope of
Table 2. Pacific Colombia by entities and areas in 1991 and 2003 following Constitutional Reform and
black land titling as part of the World Bank-funded NRMP. Source: INCORA, 2001, 2003a.
region in colonial Spanish America, and
the third most important mining region
after Peru and Mexico in the New World
(West 1952). In the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods, Colombian gold was
found in vein and placer deposits in
three areas: the Cauca Valley, the upper/
middle portions of the Río Magdalena,
Colombia can be analyzed in two
phases: before and after Indian pacification. The first phase, roughly 1510 to
the mid 17th century, began as forays
from the Gulf of Urabá in the north and
Popayán in the south. Strong Indian resistance by the Kuna and the Embera on
the lower and upper sections of the Río
56
Journal of Latin American Geography
Atrato respectively, coupled with stiff resistance by numerous indigenous groups
in the southern Pacific, prevented the introduction of sustained mining enterprises (Almario and Castillo 1996; Maya
1998; Vargas Sarmiento 1999a).
Throughout the first phase of Pacific
slope gold mining, enslaved black and
Indian laborers generally worked placer
digs together with native technologies,
but frequent rebellions and Indian attacks limited productivity. Early mining
centers surrounding Nóvita in the upper
Río San Juan watershed, for example,
were abandoned in the late 16th century,
shifting Spanish focus to the Cauca Valley where black slaves had been gold
mining since at least 1544 (West 1952).
But Indian resistance did not last; the demographic collapse of indigenous peoples throughout Western Colombia was
pronounced and as steep as anywhere in
Spanish America (West 1952:80;
Almario and Castillo 1996).
The second phase of gold mining occurred after the Spaniards established a
measure of control in the Barbacoas
(southern) and Chocó (northern) provinces of the Pacific during the 17th century. Peace with the renegade “zambos”
in Esmeraldas opened up the Barbacoas
area to extensive colonization. By the
end of the 17th century, black and Indian
gangs were mining from Barbacoas to
Buenaventura, the former connected by
road to Popayán and the latter to Cali
(West 1952; Whitten 1986; Romero and
Lane 2002). Not until the penetration of
Franciscan missionaries along the Río
Atrato in 1648 did gold mining become a
sustained activity in the Chocó. Despite
the fact that the Chocó remained marginal to Spanish control and saw a minimum presence of Spanish or Creole
elite, it was the principal mining site in all
Colombia between 1680-1810 (Maya
1998; Vargas Sarmiento 1999a). As
Barbacoas and the Chocó increased production, the demand for African labor
grew. This demand prompted a change
in the Asiento contract system that
brought slaves to the New World and, in
1640, Cartagena was opened to Dutch,
English, and French traders. African
slaves poured into the Chocó immediately thereafter and to Barbacoas by the
end 17th century (Vargas Sarmiento
1999a). This demographic expansion
placed “gangs” of African slaves along
every major river of the southern coastal
plains by the late 18th century and coincided with the near destruction of native
peoples (West 1957:100; Whitten 1986;
Almario and Castillo 1996).16
Black manumission and self-liberation
occurred early and continually. By the
mid-18th century, Pacific Colombian society comprised escaped slaves, slaves
who had purchased their freedom—
known as libres—and enslaved Africans,
all of whom had social and economic
contacts with one another (Taussig 1980;
Whitten 1986; Almario and Castillo
1996; Maya 1998). Population estimates
for this period vary, but we can assume
that around 25,000 people of African
heritage resided in the Pacific by the last
quarter of the 18th century (West 1957;
Sharp 1976; Almario and Castillo 1996;
Vargas Sarmiento 1999a). Though slaves
always made up the majority of Pacific
black populations in the colonial period,
this ratio was only maintained via constant importation (Romero and Lane
2002:35).
Accompanying the increase in mining
activity was an increase in slave revolts.
By the early 18th century, uprisings were
common in Citará (Quibdó), Tadó,
Barbacoas, and Guapí. Escaped slaves
formed their own palenques or joined
the growing number of libre communities. The palenque El Castigo in the
southern Pacific region had a church and
300 people by 1732 (Romero and Lane
2002:34). Palenques had elected leaders
and organized social and religious life
around
Afro-Hispanic
traditions
(Whitten 1986:44). To this day in Pacific
Colombia, “black culture is generally
more Iberian in derivation” than would
be the case in full-blown slave societies
such as Brazil or the Caribbean; it exhibits very little if any discursive attachment
to Africa (Wade 1993:6, 2002a; Agier et
al. 1999). By the mid-18th century, black
peoples had made the Pacific their home,
and the Spanish considered them “na-
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
tives of the place” (Vargas Sarmiento
1998a:32).
Social networks linked free and slave
communities in binding ways. Libre
communities traded tobacco and liquor
to slaves, and offered an important
source of marriage partners to enslaved
black men. By law, children born of enslaved men and free women were free. In
this way, blood and fictive kin relationships formed between slave and free
communities along “various portions of
the same river system... [and occasionally] from distant rivers” (Romero and
Lane 2002:35). “Furthermore, extension
of family links among aunts, uncles,
cousins, maternal and paternal grandparents, godparents, and godchildren served
to weave a fabric of relationships so
tight that slave owners could never break
it. For its members, slave or free, this
fabric was the fundament of social life”
(Romero and Lane 2002: 36). This
tightly bound kinship network became
even more spatially anchored following
the formal abolition of slavery in 1851.
With the end of slavery, blacks fled the
mining camps of the foothills and dispersed along river banks throughout the
littoral forest (West 1957; Friedemann
1998[1985]). The mining town of
Barbacoas, for example, was quickly depopulated as blacks recreated a mining
economy of their own in nearby tributaries. According to Friedemann, black
miners formed social networks called
troncos, groups of families who trace their
origin to a common ancestor with rights
to live, mine, fish, and do agricultural
work in a specific territory. Tronco rights
are inherited from ancestors who took
possession of the land following 1851,
but extend back to the libre and
palenque social network traditions that
preceded
abolition
(Friedemann
1998[1985]:183-185; Romero and Lane
2002).
While placer mining continues as an
important economic activity for most
Afro-Colombians of the Pacific, by the
second half of the 19th century new extractive economies began to link their
lives to global markets. By the 1850s,
Castilla rubber was being extracted from
57
the Pacific slope and moved down the
Río Atrato to the port town of Turbo on
the Gulf of Urabá (Parsons 1967:29). By
the close of the 19th century tagua
(ivory) nuts, from which buttons were
made, began to replace Castilla rubber in
economic importance. From native
palms, tagua nuts are found chiefly in
the inundated forests throughout the
lower Río Atrato watershed and in the
coastal regions south of Tumaco. Meanwhile, a steady trade in mangrove bark
(used to produce tannic acid for
leatherworks) occupied many laborers
during the early 20th century. Later,
sugar became important along the
southern coastal plain, and bananas and
rice transformed the Urabá delta,
affecting the lives of people up stream in
myriad ways.
The Pacific changed dramatically in
the 1950s (Pedroza 1996). The government
expanded
Tumaco
and
Buenaventura ports, while railroads,
roads and pipelines descended from the
highlands. The region’s first lumber mills
sprang up at this time, and giant lumber
enterprises representing both national
and international capital received large
concessions (del Valle 1996b). In the
1950s, the World Bank initiated its first
mission to Colombia by introducing African oil palm plantations near Tumaco
(Escobar 1996). This occurred at
roughly the same time the government
decreed that all tierras baldías would
form part of a protectorate system, a
process that occurred throughout much
of the lowland tropics of Latin America.
By the early 1960s, many of these same
‘protectorate lands’ were opened up to
colonization and private titling. The
Agrarian Law of 1961 not only ignored
the customary land claims of resident
Afro-Colombians in the Pacific, but
used accusations of “irrational land use”
by black communities to justify the need
to title lands to individuals—the exact
opposite of the rationale behind the territorial turn in titling today! As intended,
the Agrarian Law sparked large-scale
colonization and land privatization—
18% of the Pacific region become privatized at this time, some to individual
58
Journal of Latin American Geography
black families (Sánchez Gutierrez and
Roldán Ortega 2002:5). In the 1980s,
the rhetoric of “sustainable development” gained strength and the government initiated an “apetura,” or opening
policy, to encourage new forms of capital
investment that included schemes for hydroelectric power generation, an interoceanic canal through the Río Atrato,
and shrimp farms near Tumaco (Barnes
1993; Pedroza 1996; Ng’weno 2001).
Relative isolation from the wider Colombian civil conflict ended definitively
in 1996. The displacement of some
13,000 people, mostly by paramilitary activity in the lower Río Atrato, is among
the highest in the country (Sánchez
Gutierrez and Roldán Ortega 2002).
Nariño is also a site of increasing drug
production, and large swaths of the region are caught up in drug trafficking.
Black land titling has also threatened
powerful interests, further escalating violence in the region as landed interests
employ paramilitaries to threaten or kill
black community leaders (Oslender
2002b). On the other hand, there is also
evidence that secure land titles have encouraged some displaced people to return to their communities, particularly in
the Chocó (Ng’weno 2001:30; Sánchez
Gutierrez and Roldán Ortega 2002:20).
The fact that the NRMP managed to
generate widespread participation, and
to demarcate and title collective black
territories throughout much of the worst
violence in the Pacific’s recent history,
testifies to its importance.
Making Black Territories
Law 70 creates black territories in Pacific Colombia by defining the notion of
a “black community” that can become
invested with territorial rights. The law
does this, essentially, by elaborating a
“black ethnicity,” something constituted
by culture (traditional production systems), history (palenques and self-liberation), and geography (rural riverine and
Pacific). For Hoffman (2000:133) the
new territoriality has “become the decisive criterion for the newly officialized
[black] ethnic identity.” Yet, Wade
(2002a) points out that Law 70 represents a certain amount of cooptation of
the larger black civil rights movement in
Colombia by legally defining rural black
rights at the exclusion of black rights
more generally. Investigating the process
of how top-down reform came about in
ways that constrained and enabled black
social movements by defining the rules
of the game, thus, becomes an important part of understanding the entire
ethno-territorial process in Pacific Colombia.
Black Social Movements
Before the ratification of Colombia’s
1991 constitution, Afro-Colombians had
little experience with political organizations constituted by either ethnic or territorial issues: “[T]he first time that the
Pacific became discovered as a ‘region’
by its inhabitants” occurred after 1991
(Oslender 2003:23). It was in the
political space created (and defined) by
the constitution that black social
movements began to construct the
Pacific as an “ethnic region” constituted
by black territories (Villa 1998; Oslender
2003). In this way, “the Pacific” became
an ethnic region comprised of a
collection of black communities each
held together by the “logic of the river,”
the contiguous watershed space
traditionally occupied and used by black
communities in consort with one another. Thus, in the political opening created by the 1991 constitution, black
organizations publicly articulated what
territory meant to them, and how AT-55
should be interpreted to fulfill their
newly specified “territorial rights.” Black
movements needed to assemble this discourse because, according to Arturo
Escobar (1998:71), “the concept of territory is a construction that does not
fully emerge out of the long-standing
practices of the communities.”
Despite a historical and quotidian geography that spatialized social relations
to land and aquatic spaces, a politically
articulated ethnic-territorial consciousness had no public tradition. Black organizations themselves acknowledged
this ambiguity when spokespersons for
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
the Organization of Black Communities
(OCN) stated that “those who know
more [about these things] say that we are
an ethnic group” (Balanta and OCN
1996:255). Thus, for many scholars, the
ethnic-territorial discourses that emerged
among black organizations in the post1991 period were more tailored to fit the
specifications of the law than were representative of long-standing cultural or
political traditions (Hoffman 2000). Legislation led to a new conceptualization of
past social-spatial experience. The buildup to Law 70 thus provided “the decisive
space” in which the emerging black social movement took on ethnic and cultural characteristics, and linked those to
political notions of territory (Grueso,
Rosero and Escobar 1998:200).
When the first black political organizations formed in the 1960s and 1970s they
comprised urban student populations inspired by the Civil Rights movement in
the United States and by peasant and
worker associations formed under the
guidance of the Catholic Church to resist
government-sponsored incursions, particularly in the Chocó (Wade 1993, 1995;
Grueso, Rosero and Escobar 1998). Such
organizations were generally tied to political parties and were not organized
around ethnic or cultural difference; they
were class-based movements that sought
equality before the law.
In the late 1980s, the strategies of
black leaders began to change in Colombia. As indigenous movements became
“green” and increasingly successful in
reaching out to transnational NGOs,
black leaders began to emulate their organizational strategies and aligned themselves politically: “As indigenous peoples
consolidated
their
ties
to
the
transnational environmental movement,
rural blacks allied themselves with domestic
indigenous
organizations”
(Thorne 2001:6). According to Wade
(1995:346), black leaders in the Pacific
began to cultivate “an ‘indian-like’ identity in the eyes of the state.” Yet this
strategy achieved only limited success.
Even after the constitutional reform of
1991, blacks remained largely invisible
when compared to the unquestioned
59
“ethnic legitimacy” bestowed upon indigenous peoples by anthropologists and
other “cultural fundamentalists” (Arocha
Rodriguez 1998b:219, 1992; Restrepo
1997; Wade 2002a). Still, AT-55 helped
turn invisibility into visibility. For the
first time in Pacific Colombia, black urban-educated movements and ruralpeasant social organizations united
around shared notions of identity (the
right to be black), territory (the logic of
the river), autonomy (political power),
and a self-vision of development
(Grueso, Rosero, and Escobar 1998;
Wade 2002a).
The NRMP and the World Bank
What were some of the larger forces
at play leading to the passage of Law 70
in 1993? To hear some scholars describe
it, the entire process was dictated by the
new black social movements such as the
Process of Black Communities (PCN).
But to understand the process more
broadly, and to better appreciate how
territory became indelibly tainted by
identity, we need to look more closely at
how land demarcation and titling was
funded, that is, to the origins of the $39
million Natural Resource Management
Program (NRMP) funded by the World
Bank in 1994. While black social movements may have identified a territorial
discourse within the space created by
AT-55 and Law 70, the specifics of how
these demands led to territorial demarcation and actual territorial titles relates to
the NRMP.
The NRMP grew out of a 1985 Forest
Action Plan funded by the Dutch government and The Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations
(FAO). As with similar plans throughout
Latin America in the 1980s, emphasis
was placed on the vigilance and control
of forest regions. Initially the NRMP did
not set out to break out of this mold.
Early NRMP proposals included a discussion of Indian resguardos but not
black territories. The four-year processing period before the signing of the
NRMP in 1994 changed this. In 1992 the
Bank floated the NRMP proposal at a
workshop in Yanaconas, near Cali. The
60
Journal of Latin American Geography
workshop was attended by the institutions of national government, regional
representatives, 28 community-based
groups, NGOs, the High-Level Consultancy Commission charged with writing
Law 70, and national institutions responsible for Pacific Coast development
among Afro-Colombian communities
(Ng’weno 2001:13). This meeting occurred just a few months after the first
Asamblea Nacional de Comunidades Negras
(National Assembly of Black Communities) (ANCN) met in Tumaco, where divided black leaders met to forge a united
response to AT-55 as stated above
(Ocampo Villegas 1996; Grueso, Rosero
and Escobar 1998). The World Banksponsored Yanaconas meeting, then, allowed the ANCN’s ethno-territorial
demands to be aired publicly for more or
less the first time, and, perhaps more importantly, integrated into the NRMP.
The titling of Black community
land was an essential factor introduced through the process of participation [initiated at Yanaconas].
Representatives of Black and Indigenous organizations and communities helped reorient the
institutional strategy to include the
preservation of cultural and ethnic
identity, the recognition and
granting of community territorial
rights and the collective use of
natural resources by the local communities, as the bases for the
sustainable development of the
region. As a result of the
workshop the National Planning
Authority (DNP) [the highestlevel national authority] agreed to
guarantee the articulation of Transitory
Article 55 . . . The financial
readiness and impulse to support
the writing of [Law 70] on the
part of the World Bank helped
forge it into being. (Ng’weno
2001:13, 53-54; emphasis added)
From experiences generated at the
Yanaconas meeting came the creation of
Regional Committees, groups made up
of representatives of the government in-
stitutions charged which institutionalizing black and indigenous participation in
the NRMP in conformity with the
World Bank’s Operational Directive
(OD 4.20), requiring local participation
in projects effecting indigenous and
ethnic communities.17 Indeed, before the
loan went through, the World Bank’s
Environmental Department had actually
“lobbied the Colombian government to
include the black rural farmers of the
Pacific Coast in its constitutional
provisions recognizing ancestral land
rights.” As Gray notes further, “This
case appears to be one of the first World
Bank projects in Latin America to address OD 4.20 comprehensively”
(1998:289).
Institutional reviews of the black land
titling component of the NRMP are unequivocal in their claims that World
Bank credence was essential to getting
Law 70 written and passed as it was,
when it was. These reviews further
highlight the World Bank’s role in the 18
months of consultations between
governmental agencies and black and
indigenous leaders between 1994 and
1995 that led up to Decree 1745
(Ng’weno 2001; Thorne 2001; Sánchez
Gutierrez and Roldán Ortega 2002). The
staying power of the bank was also
important. When a series of crises
sprang up during mid-term review of
the NRMP in 1997, efforts were made
to “kill the project” (Thorne 2001:8).
Many commentators, including Escobar,
assumed that the “project was going to
be discontinued” for lack of governmental commitment (1998:74). Although the World Bank is responsible
for having funded black territorial demarcation and titling, many scholars
commenting on the overall process
make no mention of the NRMP or the
World Bank (e.g., Wade 2002a).
Social Cartography, Mapping, and Ethnic
Conflict
An important part of the territorializing process took place in social-cartographic forums in communities after
territorial claims had been filed by representative community councils. These fo-
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
rums were held under the auspices of
INCORA and the Instituto Geográfico
Augustín Codazzi (IGAC) (Garcés
2003b). For leaders to articulate black
territoriality is one thing, but for communities to come together to define their
collective boundaries based on historical
and contemporary land use, as well as estimations of future needs, is quite another. As with participatory mapping
projects elsewhere in Latin America,
much of the territorial consciousness
arises through and during the process of
talking about space and its meaning in
cartographic forums.
Community organizations, but
especially Afro-Colombian organizations, felt that the process
of titling enhanced their cultural
cohesion and awareness. Through
this process the communities
demarcated and reactivated the
oral history of their people and
territories and built up the selfawareness and education about
their culture. The titling process
consisted in making social maps
of the territory including maps
for the future and the past, of
narrating and recording the
history of the people, their
culture and their traditional practices and detailing the social relationships with the communities
around them. This took place
through a community intellectual
movement including hunters,
gatherers, the elderly and
traditional doctors to reconstruct
the history of settlement of the
territory, and to explain from
their own perspective the importance and use of the natural resources that exist.... Most
importantly, as expressed by some
of
the
Afro-Colombian
participants, the young and the
old, the men and women were put
together to synthesize traditional
knowledge about the biological
resources and the community
territory as part of their own
identity. The communities felt
61
that this combined effort was
particularly
informative
and
useful. (Ng’weno 2001:36-37, 41).
As geographers have described in
other participatory mapping contexts,
public discussion of a territorial claim
coupled with a territorial representation
and its historic-cultural significance is
wholly bound up with changing notions
of territoriality that the finished map intends to represent (Chapin and
Threlkeld 2001; Herlihy and Knapp
2003; Offen 2003, n.d.).
Just as territorial mapping and demarcation have the power to affect the
meaning of territory, so too can it generate inter- and intra-ethnic conflict. In Pacific Colombia, the “exercise of titling
itself produced an escalation in ethnic
conflict over territory” (Ng’weno
2001:31; see also Villa 1998). This problem was aggravated by governmental
policy of “saneamiento” (cleansing) indigenous resguardos to remove black residents. “With the possibility of obtaining
legalization of their territory some Black
communities no longer accepted the
principals behind ‘cleansing,’ arguing
that these lands were traditionally ancestral lands. ... pockets of land within
resguardos became bones of contention” (Ng’weno 2001:32). A related issue
was the question of compensation for
black “improvements” to land within
newly created indigenous resguardos,
particularly the labor intensive process
of making canals to float out timber during high tides (Sánchez Gutierrez and
Roldán Ortega 2002; Restrepo 1996).
Critics have viewed the problem of ethnic conflict in terms of legal rigidities
defining ethnicity and ethnic rights. “The
increasing rigidity of norms for the use
and appropriation of lands, as an inevitable corollary of the delimitation of
collective territories, generates friction
between users who earlier shared the
area according to more flexible arrangements in which the ethnic factor hardly
ever played a role as prime and ultimate
criterion of legitimation” (Hoffman
2000:134). By legalizing ancestral lands
based around a stiff concept of ‘ethnic-
62
Journal of Latin American Geography
ity’—itself articulated and constructed
through the process of guaranteeing of
territorial rights—Law 70 essentially prevented the recognition of multiethnic
spaces, even if such spaces were themselves traditional.
The process of cleansing, demarcating, and titling pitted legally defined ethnic groups against one another, especially
in the Chocó where the first collective
black titles were issued beginning in
1996.18 During the initial stages of
titling black territories, indigenous
groups felt slighted. From its inception,
the NRMP intended to create 44 new
resguardos and expand 12 others, but indigenous leaders felt their demands were
taking a back seat to black territories.
Letters of protest arrived at the World
Bank during the mid-term review of the
NRMP in late 1997. Part of the bank’s
strategy for resolving the many crises
was the creation of an Action Plan of
recommendations cum guidelines that
insisted on new mechanisms for
strengthening inter-cultural dialogue
(Sánchez Gutierrez and Roldán Ortega
2002:23). This worked. “Only with the
formation of the Action Plan and clear
corresponding strategies and criteria did
the Land Titling and [intra-ethnic] Regional Committee components of the
NRMP gain its own momentum after
moving very slowly” (Ng’weno 2001:28).
Attesting to the relative success of the
Action Plan is the fact that 95 of the 122
black territories titled between 1996 and
May of 2003, and 70 percent of the total
area titled, was completed after 2000—
after the Action Plan had been put in
place (INCORA 2001, 2003a).
Black Territories and Natural Resources
Despite all the legislative changes affecting territorial configurations in Pacific Colombia, the most important
change may be yet to come. Article 286
of the 1991 constitution outlines a new
Organic Law of Territorial Ordering
throughout Colombia. Decree 436 recognizing this law was passed in 1993, but
regulatory legislation has not been forthcoming. Until this legislation comes
about, the power of black community
councils to administer their territories
remains ambiguous. The ethnoterritorial
community
councils
articulated in Law 70 (Chapter III, Art.
5) currently have a strictly private or
corporate legal character. The councils
and the territory they oversee remain
within municipal purviews, and are
dependent on municipalities for the
transfer of resources for their management. Nevertheless, black territories remain outside of the oversight
jurisdiction of the municipalities, a contradictory situation that benefits no one
(Ng’weno 2001:34). Community councils deal with internal matters of land
claims, access, and resource management. They can also—with proper ministerial approval—establish contracts
with third parties for the exploitation of
natural resources. Thus, neither the
communities nor their councils “own”
the natural resources on or below their
territories. The councils are, in effect,
caretakers with limited self-rule. The
new Agrarian Reform Law 160 of 1994
states that INCORA and the Ministry of
the Environment must certify that community land uses comply with the land’s
“ecological function,” but the law does
not specify what this function is. This
ambiguity gives the government a great
deal of leeway in empowering or dis-empowering black territoriality. But the
laws governing black territories are in
flux and bound up with the Organic
Law and, particularly, the fate of
indigenous resguardos.
Since the Constitution of 1991, indigenous cabildos (councils) are legally responsible for managing public funds for
public works emanating from the national government and for administering
justice within indigenous resguardos.
However, until national legislation
procedurally recognizes the new Indigenous Territorial Entities (ETIs)
outlined under the Organic Law, cabildo
funds continue to be managed by local
municipalities (Jackson 1996; Ng’weno
2001). In theory then, resguardos are
territorial entities of a public nature on
par
with,
but
distinct
from,
municipalities. Within the myriad of
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
complex negotiations working out the
Organic Law, it is expected that black
territories will be redefined as AfroColombian Territorial Entities (ETAs),
giving them the same political,
administrative, and judicial powers
theoretically enjoyed by indigenous
resguardos (Garcés 2003b). As political
bodies governing the new ETAs,
community councils would have
substantially more power to control and
manage the natural resources in their territories. The outcome of this negotiation, however, is impossible to predict.
The designation of mangrove swamps
remains another problematic aspect of
black territorialization. As wetlands,
mangroves fall under management requirements specified in the RAMSAR
Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, ratified by Colombia
in 1971. Based on their interpretation of
this convention, the Colombian government initially considered mangroves unavailable for titling. When the first
collective title distributed in Nariño
came back to the soliciting black council—acronym ACAPA—in 1998 and
half their communities remained outside
the claim, they protested (Sánchez
Gutierrez and Roldán Ortega 2002).
This protest held up the distribution of
titles throughout the southwest Pacific
region, where communities depend on
mangroves for their livelihood. The
crisis was diffused somewhat in 1999
when INCORA recommended to the
Ministry of the Environment that
mangroves not be excluded from
collective titling. In the same year, the
ACAPA title was re-issued with the
original mangrove claims (Ng’weno
2001:75; Sánchez Gutierrez and Roldán
Ortega
2002:21).
Other
Nariño
communities said to be affected by the
exclusion of mangroves as of March
2001 (Oslender 2002a:103) have now
received their titles (INCORA 2003a).
The issue of mangroves is an important
one and part of a larger problem of
negotiating territoriality over aquatic and
land spaces. Where governments have
been willing to negotiate the shared
governance of land-spaces, these same
63
governments have interpreted estuary,
delta, and sea claims by indigenous and
black
peoples
very
differently
(Nietschmann 1995, 1997; Mulrennan
and Scott 2000). To the extent that Pacific Colombia’s land-sea interface claim
and titling issues have been resolved, it
would represent a further ground-breaking precedent in tropical Latin America.
Territory and Identity in the Age of
Biodiversity (and Poverty)
The territorial turn in indigenous and
black land titling throughout the lowland
tropics of Latin America represents a
convergence of disparate interests. New
social movements pressured governments to recognize cultural difference
and to institutionalize conditions to guarantee collective cultural rights. For indigenous peoples this political pressure
actually preceded and helped push constitutional reforms recognizing collective cultural rights in the first place. In
contrast, for many black groups, constitutional reforms created the initial opportunity to negotiate the meaning of
cultural difference and to organize politically around ethnic claims akin to those
proffered by indigenous groups. For
many indigenous and rural black peoples—especially those in the lowland
tropics of Latin America, in areas
deemed national lands—the central element of collective cultural rights is territory, a space of land security and
political autonomy in which unique life
visions can take root. The territorial turn
in collective land titling received a boost
in Latin America when the World Bank
became a global leader in facilitating and
financing the territorial turn.
To get the World Bank’s attention,
black communities in the lowland tropics
had to be thought of as ‘ethnic’ and ‘traditional peoples’ who had the right to be
covered by the bank’s Operational Directive (OD 4.20). Over the last decade the
World Bank has increasingly associated
the plight of rural blacks with that of indigenous peoples, and it has applied
common strategies to both groups. One
World Bank document discussing Afro-
64
Journal of Latin American Geography
Peruvians views them as having a shared
experience to that of indigenous peoples: “the Afro-Peruvian population has
suffered similar conditions of historical
discrimination and lack of justice and a
common sense of identity related to a
common historical struggle for basic human and civil rights [as have indigenous
peoples]” (WB 2000:49). The concept of
‘ethno-development’ first articulated in
the context of Ecuador has also been
part of the bank’s changing perspective
on ethnic rights. It should be noted that
the language and spirit of ethno-development through land security has found
its way into Colombian documents as
well, and is now part and parcel of the
discursive relationships linking black
communities to international aid agencies and multilateral lending institutions
(INCORA 2001; Garcés Mosquera
2003a).
The brutal history of forging ethnic
identities in territorial cauldrons in Europe and elsewhere does not seem to
dampen the territorial turn in Latin
America. Though intended to help protect the environment and safeguard
multiculturalism, the territorial turn will
also affect social relations in unpredictable ways. When locally negotiated space
is rigidly territorialized, it creates a binary
order of inclusiveness and exclusiveness
that necessarily modifies social relations
that once spanned spatial boundaries.
The possibility that local environmental
knowledge and sustainable practices
based on adaptive and dynamic social arrangements could be negatively affected
by new territorial regimes has apparently
never been considered, despite the fact
that related problems have occurred in
southern Africa (Walker and Peters
2001), Southeast Asia (Peluso 1995), and
the Artic (Rundstrom 1995).
The territorial turn will also impact
Colombian politics in unforeseeable
ways. Christian Gros, for example, argues that only with “extreme difficulty”
will ETIs and ETAs be able improve the
needs of a modernizing country
(1997:50). Gros suggests that ETIs and
ETAs and their promotion of differences will only create “new internal fron-
tiers” that will “parcel the social body of
the country” (1997:51; see also Gros
1991, 2000). Whether Gros’s speculations prove true, or whether a fragmented ‘nation’ might not be desirable,
remains to be seen. Regardless, what is
clear is that few people are asking questions about the implications of linking
ethnic identity to territoriality in Pacific
Colombia or elsewhere in the lowland
tropics of Latin America.
One way to begin thinking about the
implications of the territorial turn in society-nature relations is to speculate how
development aspirations of black communities might influence territorial designs. Have, for example, most black
territories conformed to the historicallyrooted logic of the river? While stressing
that most communities have, Oslender
(2002a) highlights two contexts in which
this logic was mediated by other concerns. In one case, a community named
Soledad on the upper Rio Guajuí decided it had more in common politically
and economically with communities on
the Río Napi, 2-3 hours away by foot in a
neighboring watershed. More interesting,
however, is the story of the Community
Council Unicosta in Nariño. Oslender
(2002a) argues that Unicosta’s territorial
claim and INCORA’s rapid and positive
reply were related to its heavy promotion
by
the
French-owned
company
Alimentos Enlatados del Pacífico
(ALENPAC) which has been exporting
naidí palm hearts from Unicosta’s territory for the last 17 years. From the beginning, ALENPAC influenced the
composition of the community council,
financed necessary workshops, and paid
the filing costs for Unicosta’s territorial
claim. For Oslender (2002a:101) “The
formation of the Community Council
Unicosta followed less the spatial patterns of the river basin as organizing
structure but the specific demands of
external capital.”
This is not an unanticipated development. Indeed, one could argue that this
is what the World Bank has intended all
along. In her review of the NRMP,
Bettina Ng’weno states that “The main
thrust of the Bank Assistance to Colom-
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
bia from the mid 1980s has been to help
establish a policy environment supportive
of growth led by the private sector. The
NRMP progressed to set the groundwork for investment through institutional strengthening with titling as a vital
part” (Ng’weno 2001:14; emphasis
added). With high rates of poverty and
new aspirations for “development,”
many community councils could turn to
third parties to exploit natural resources
in exchange for social or economic improvements. This is most certainly what
the World Bank intended. In eastern
Nicaragua, for example, the territorial
turn among the Miskitu Indians is based
in part on their desire to benefit from
their natural resources in the same ways
that others have in the past, and the
bank is well aware of this (Offen 2003,
2004). Similar sentiments are not
unknown in Pacific Colombia. For
example, one black organization stated
that “people are conscious that [the
natural resources] they possess are
valuable and that they are disposed to
reclaim this value.” But the protection of
cultural identity is as important as
material improvements: “when we say
we want to protect our cultural identity,
we realize that culture is not stable, thus
we say we want to protect and develop
our cultural identity.” Still, community
leaders are acutely aware that developing
cultural identity might require exploiting
available resources, including the region’s
“germplasm bank” (Balanta and OCN
1996:261, 262). While benefit sharing,
administrative transparency, and environmental management might improve
under new territorial regimes, the exploitation of natural resources under the direction of foreign capital and remote
markets will likely continue to be the
norm.
On a more optimistic note, secure
land titling—combined with a less ambiguous form of shared governance—
might genuinely help to conserve natural
resources and to protect the environment. In other words, World Bank
theory might work. After all, many environmentalists have long stated that improving land security and access rights
65
for indigenous peoples is the most viable
way to protect the environment (e.g.,
Stevens 1997). Reviews of the NRMP
suggest that the World Bank steadfastly
believes that territorial titling will simultaneously attract appropriate types of
foreign investment and provide a secure
base to protect biodiversity (Sánchez
Gutierrez and Roldán Ortega 2002).
The long term [sic] effect of
titling has been conservation
through appropriation assuring a
solid base for conservation.
Because of the stability that titles
provide [the Ministry of the Environment has] witnessed an
interest in conservation by communities of the region. Thus
making titling a determining
factor in the defense of
biodiversity. The titling of
property changed people’s way of
thinking about their region, especially for Black communities. Now
that the land is removed from the
market there has been a
repopulating of the territory accompanied by a rise in ethnic
identification. (Ng’weno 2001:41)
Optimistic outcomes are possible, but
certainly no “long term effect” for either
social justice or environmental conservation can yet be evaluated in the Colombian Pacific.
Conclusion
Over the last seven years the Colombian government has demarcated and titled 4.5 million hectares of national lands
to over 120 community councils representing over a quarter million AfroColombians. Embedded within a $39
million dollar loan provided by the World
Bank intending to strengthen natural
resource
management
in
Pacific
Colombia, the titling project is among
the most ambitious undertaking of its
kind in Latin America. Not yet complete,
and with the scope of black territoriality
yet to be fully determined, the project
could have significant implications for
66
Journal of Latin American Geography
ethnic groups throughout the lowland
tropics of Latin America and beyond. In
reviewing the project, I have tried to
highlight the territorial turn in collective
land titling; that is, the linkages between
a novel black territoriality and the institutions of global capitalism. I have
shown that although black communities
had little experience organizing around
ethnic or territorial issues before the
constitutional
reform
of
1991,
contemporary
ethno-territorial
discourses have become anchored in
traditional cultural ecologies and sociospatial networks dating back to the
colonial period. In this way, I argued that
contemporary mapping projects build
upon traditional (if not publicly) articulated cultural sentiments of space to give
territorial conceptions new meanings.
Drawing on comparative research from
Central America and elsewhere, I have
emphasized the role of not only
geomatics in shaping people’s ideas of
territory and their relationship to it, but
also how the social and intellectual process of demarcation comes to anchor
identity in place in the context of political openings that reward such modes of
political articulation.
I departed from many other academics by underscoring the role of the
World Bank in assisting territorial devolution in Pacific Colombia. I considered
the World Bank on several different levels: as the number one financier of
projects seeking to devolve territory to
rural black and indigenous communities
in Latin American; as the largest financier of environmental protection/interventionist projects in the world; as an
institution with more power than many
national entities to shape the language
and timing of reform laws and the procedural decrees implementing them. I argued that the World Bank helped create
important social spaces in which black
territorial aspirations and ethnic discourses became viable contributors to
the political process negotiating the territorial turn in Pacific Colombia. I also
suggested, however, that the World Bank
is naive or disingenuous if it believes
that territorial titling alone will be
enough to inspire black communities to
sustainably manage their natural
resources. Territorial devolution needs to
be accompanied by a transfer of
appropriate financial resources, genuine
administrative power, and progressive
laws instituting them if new ethnicterritorial regimes are going to improve
social justice and
environmental
conservation in Latin America.
Notes
1
Research for this paper was conducted during trips to Colombia during
the summers of 2001 and 2003. Comments from Clemencia Rodriguez and
anonymous reviewers improved an earlier draft of this paper. I owe a debt of
gratitude to Todd Fagin who made the
two maps.
2
The International Labor Organization (ILO) is an independent and specialized entity of the United Nations. It
promotes social justice and international
standards for human and labor rights.
3
Latin American countries to have
ratified ILO 169 through December of
2003 include Mexico (1990), Colombia
(1991), Bolivia (1991), Costa Rica (1993),
Paraguay (1993), Peru (1994), Honduras
(1995), Guatemala (1996), Ecuador
(1998), Argentina (2000), Venezuela
(2002), Brazil (2002).
4
Constitutional reform sought to demobilize guerrilla groups shunned by
Colombia’s two-party rule system; it did
not intend to resolve ethnic issues per se.
Still, ethnic issues did enter the political
reform process more as a way to help recoup state legitimacy because violence
and development issues in peripheral areas were linked to guerrilla activities
there and inspired the government to
consider concessions to minority
populations as part of the reform process (Gros 1991, 1997; Wade 1995). No
Afro-Colombians were among the constituents elected to re-write the Colombian Constitution in 1990.
5
The World Bank is actually a group
of associated but legally and financially
distinct institutions: The International
The Territorial Turn: Making Black Territories in Pacific Colombia
Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), The International Development Association (IDA), The
International
Finance
Corporation
(IFC), and The Multilateral Investment
Guarantee Agency (MIGA). The institution technically overseeing the NRMP in
Colombia was the IBRD, yet I refer only
to the World Bank.
6
The GEF provides grants to help developing countries protect what it defines as ‘the global environment.’
Founded in 1991, the GEF works in four
areas: global climate change, protection
of the ozone layer, protection of international waters, and biodiversity conservation—which receives the largest share
of funding. All the GEF projects are
managed through one or more of its implementing agencies: the World Bank,
the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the United Nations
Environmental Program (UNEP).
7
Latin Americanists will recognize
that this World Bank position is incompatible with neoliberal theory that, for
example, forced the Mexican Government to dismantle and, effectively, privatize its collective property system. The
difference points to the high priority attached to “biodiversity conservation” by
the World Bank and its partners (e.g., the
GEF), and their strategy of how best to
integrate local rights guarantees with an
attractive investment climate. It also reflects the fact that bank strategies must
abide by national laws (as defined by the
new constitutional reforms) and international conventions seeking to guarantee
ethnic rights and protect cultural difference.
8
It is significant to note that the
clause
of
working
with
local
communities was inserted after a 1995
meeting brought representatives of black
and indigenous communities together
with PBP personnel (Escobar 1996:129).
9
Besides being significantly larger, the
Pacific region of the NRMP differs in
several important ways from the Chocó
Biogeográfico of the PBP. The latter includes
several
municipalities
in
Antioquia on the northeastern side of
the Gulf of Urabá, whereas the Pacific
67
of the NRMP does not. Meanwhile, the
NRMP designation extends into the
western foothills of the Andean
Departments of Antioquia, Cauca, Valle
de Cauca, and Nariño to conform with
Article 2 of Law 70.
10
The mangrove forests in the Department of Nariño are the largest in the
Americas.
11
Population estimates are only as
good as regional designations and these
vary according to the user (DANE 1993;
Ng’weno 2001; Sánchez Gutierrez and
Roldán Ortega 2002). With a population
of some 42 million in 2002, Colombia is
the second most populous country in
South America after Brazil, but at
439,734 square miles it is less than half
as large as Argentina.
12
The Colombian census agency
DANE claimed in 1993 that 930,000, or
2.75% of the national population, was
black (Ocampo Villegas 1996). This is
woefully inaccurate. A 1997 U.N. report
estimated that blacks make up 6 million
or 16 percent of the Colombian population (CIDH 1999). Meanwhile, Hoffman
(2000:123) estimates that Afro-Colombians make up 10-12 percent of the population, while Oviedo (1992) puts their
percentage the range 14-21 percent.
Wade (2002a:6, 21) provides a range of
black population estimates but notes
that the Colombian National Planning
Department has now settled on 26
percent of the total population.
13
Colombia’s 1,072 indigenous
resguardos contain 83 indigenous groups
and make up 24 percent of the total national territory, yet indigenous peoples
make up 2 percent of the national population (Gros 1991, 1997; IGAC 2003). In
Colombia, the institution of the
resguardo extends back to the colonial
period, but in 1890 indigenous peoples
were given the right to possess collective
property and elect cabildos, or councils.
The resguardo almost disappeared in the
1960s but, Colombia’s ratification of
ILO 107 in 1967 allowed resguardos to
survive and expand.
14
Between 1492-1600, slave traders
brought some 75,000 Africans in bondage to the Spanish American colonies,
68
Journal of Latin American Geography
half of which went to New Spain.
15
The Spanish term zambo refers to
the offspring of Africans and Amerindians. During peace negotiations in Quito
with the “zambos,” a painting of the
nascent republic’s leader, Don Francisco
de Arobe and his two sons was commissioned and sent to King Philip III of
Spain in 1599 (Romero and Lane 2002).
The well-known portrait is the oldest
signed and dated painting from colonial
South America (Cummins and Taylor
1998).
16
By the last quarter of the 18th century, miners also began taking platinum
in the headwaters of the Ríos Atrato and
San Juan. Always available but previously
undesired, the Chocó remained the
world’s only supplier of platinum until
1820, strengthening the importance of
the Chocó in the eyes of Spain (West
1952:64).
17
The World Bank’s operational directives concerning indigenous and tribal
peoples put forth in 1982 and again in
1991 were affected by ILO Conventions
107 and 169 respectively (Gray 1998).
Like ILO 107, the bank’s older regulation OMS 2.34 viewed indigenous assimilation as inevitable and desirable.
The focus of OMS 2.34 was on the mitigation of the negative impacts of bankfinanced projects. In contrast, the OD
4.20 of 1991 emphasized indigenous,
and now rural black, participation in the
projects that affect them. Currently, the
bank is debating a new OD 4.10 to replace OD 4.20 (WB 2002b).
18
Among the first titles issued was the
large 525,664 hectare title to one of the
few black farmer organizations to have
formed before 1991, the Campesino Association of Atrato Integral (ACIA)
(INCORA 2001; de la Torre and ACIA
2002).
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