Abstract

VELEZ-TORRES, Irene  and  VELEZ GALEANO, Hildebrando. Conflicting plexus: a territorial and historical view of environmental conflicts in the upper Cauca river basin. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2019, vol.42, n.1, pp.177-206. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v42n1.73181.

Since the 1980s the Upper Cauca region in southwestern Colombia has featured a series of environmental conflicts related to the expansion of the sugar agro-industry, mining, hydroelectric power generation, and drinking water supply systems, among others. Likewise, since 2000, local communities have endured the violent confrontations among guerrillas, paramilitaries, criminal bands, and the national army for control of the territory and its environmental assets. Despite the complexity of the environmental conflicts, their analysis has focused on the emergence of conflict situations, rather than on the explanation of geo-historical processes. On the basis of a shared experience of activist research, grounded in accompaniment to communities, permanence in the territories, and a qualitative methodology that included workshops and interviews, the authors suggest the adoption of the category of conflicting plexus to characterize the web of historical and territorial interactions of environmental conflicts. We argue that these conflicts constitute complex socio-ecological structures that must be analyzed on the basis of perspectives that evince the power structures involving actors, historical processes, and territorial configurations. An analysis based on these plexus makes it possible to explain the ways in which the emergence of a certain conflict implies a spatiotemporal break, a segment characterized by greater complexity. In this sense, we suggest that this category allows for understanding that emerging conflicts become potential future conflicts, and are determined by past conflicts, which are affected by and affect other geographies. In the case of the Upper Cauca, the spatiotemporal convergences among the environmental conflicts show that they are basically associated with the imposition of the capitalist economic model. In this region, such model is evident in the development of economic and political power in connection with the expansion and industrialization of sugar cane, a process that has been the focal point of the formation of the State and of ethnic-racial social and spatial segregation.

Keywords : Afro-descendant population; conflicting plexus; environmental conflicts; gold mining; sugar cane; water grabbing.

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