Editing Eden: A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia

7. Normative Views, Strategic Views: The Geopolitical Maps in the Ethnic Territorialities of Putumayo

7.NormativeViews,StrategicViews TheGeopoliticalMapsintheEthnicTerritorialitiesofPutumayo MargaritaChaves Space is a social construction, and in turn, all social processes occur in a spatial dimension, whether conscious or not. However, the relationship is not unequivocal. Societies rarely relate to unique and coherent spaces. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity In Putumayo, a colonization frontier in the southwestern Amazon of Colombia, the proliferation of demands for ethnic recognition propitiated by multicultural policy has posed a challenge for the institutions that handle state ethnic policies. These institutions attempt to maneuver in the midst of three related circumstances: the constant increase of populations defined as “ethnic”; the differential access to rights and services, such as health, education, and land allocation; and the conflicts generated among ethnic constituents (groups, collectives, individuals) due to competition for land. To confront this situation and to limit the reach of the groups that seek ethnic recognition, the 192 margarita chaves state has demanded that the groups demonstrate ethnic authenticity by reference to cultural singularities and attachment to an ancestral territory. But despite the fact that ethnic identity and territory are not intrinsically connected, the conflation of the two is at the center of identity discourse and politics. Who benefits from this conflation? How does this change in time and space? How does this vary even within a single region? In this chapter I examine the consequences of inscribing ethnic identity into space from contrasting perspectives: the discourse of re-ethnicized and indigenous migrants and that of the legal state apparatus and its functionaries. The analysis is based on my recent work on identity politics in diverse areas of Putumayo, where indigenous and re-ethnicized peasant colonists coexist.1 I use the term “re-ethnicized” to refer to processes of reconstruction of ethnic identity on the part of mestizos and indigenous people who only recently refused ethnic singularity for self-identification. Much of this process is linked to the rights and benefits that the Colombian state now confers under its multicultural policies. This reconstruction of ethnic identity combines the instrumental enunciation of the powerful artifice of difference with cultural productions associated with the revival of past things. Throughout this chapter I seek to explore the spatial dimension implicit in processes of re-ethnicization, which I have partly alluded to in other works (Chaves 2003a, 2003b, 2005). Upon closer inspection, in the spatial and ethnic mobility characteristic of displaced populations and related to re-ethnicization converge complex economic, political, social, and cultural dynamics whose motion is dictated not only locally, but also in state and global arenas. Two of these dynamics are particularly relevant here. One is the constant spatial displacement of an important segment of indigenous and peasant populations within and outside of regional boundaries generated by the search for viable economic alternatives. Included in this type of forced mobility is the process of colonization of the Upper Amazon originating in the Andean highlands, a consequence of land expropriation that Andean peasants and indigenous populations 193 normative views, strategic views underwent throughout the twentieth century. Forced displacement resulting from the threats represented by armed struggles between guerrillas and paramilitaries, who since the late 1990s have struggled to control key areas for coca production and commercialization, must also be taken into account. Unlike what happens in other regions in which the paramilitary presence has come hand in hand with a counteragrarian reform, that is, the expulsion of peasants and indigenous populations from their land for private appropriation, paramilitary intervention in Putumayo has focused on controlling coca producers by means of intermediaries who extort a percentage of their profits from producers of coca paste. (For an excellent analysis of these relations , see Jansson 2006.) The state military apparatus, as the main agent behind the conflation and implementation of antiterrorism and antinarcotics policies, has also played an important role in this struggle (see Ramírez, this volume). The second dynamic relates to the way state intervention geared to controlling space and populations has generated processes of identity mobility. In particular it is important to understand the state’s need to administer urban and rural re-ethnicized dwellers as well as displaced communities. Specifically the state seeks to regulate their demands over civil rights and the benefits associated with ethnic recognition (land, health services, education, and economic incentives) in a context in which all are sorely lacking. These two dynamics coincide in time and space in Putumayo, where peasant and indigenous populations have redefined their...