“We fight to the end”: On the violence against social leaders and territorial defenders during the post-peace agreement period and its political ecological implications in the Putumayo, Colombia

Abstract

Just over seven years into the implementation of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP in October 2016, the armed conflict has reconfigured and reactivated in several parts of the country. In the Putumayo department, tensions between the state, various armed groups, and rural communities over territory and crops for illicit use persisted, and even accentuated in the wake of the peace agreement. In this context, social leaders who represent ethnic and rural communities in these tensions are an extremely vulnerable group and are frequent targets of violent actions that aim to silence them. Through ethnographic work involving participant observation, interviews, and dialogues spanning over the course of three years, we inquire what defending territories means, who these social leaders are, and what their roles in defending territories are. We then analyze some implications of them being silenced. We find that social leaders in the Putumayo play key roles in terms of political participation as they are critical for both the discourse and practice of defending territories. We interpret the silencing of social leaders as the materialization of a political ecology of silence that, through a combination of direct and slow violence, produces oblivion and detachment. This erasure of social struggles from time and space places many communities back into a position of invisibility and historical irrelevance, jeopardizing the goal of a stable and durable peace.