Worlding Peacebuilding: Revisiting the Issue of Violence in Colombia’s San José de Apartadó Peace Community

Worlding Peacebuilding: Reflecting On Contemporary Peace Building

There are many worldviews, epistemologies, theories, and concepts in an enlarged sense of the international (Tickner and Blaney, 2013). The concept of worldism refers to the acknowledgment of multiple worlds, i.e., different ontological perspectives based on different social experiences (Ling, 2014). Accordingly, the concept of worlding refers to the inclusion of experiences from different social groups in epistemological parity. These experiences are not restricted to cultural conceptions of different states, which are integrated into an international scenario under the hegemony of modern Western thinking, but they also include different experiences of citizenship inside one state (Pettman, 1996).

Latin America’s colonial past led to a social-economic model defined by the enslavement of Black Africans and compulsory labor from Indigenous populations, as well as the latifundium regime, which made it difficult for poor, free laborers to access land. The process of independence in Spanish America, despite the support of the lower classes, was coordinated by the Creole elites, which would later take control of the independent territories. The colonial elites mobilized against foreign control, but they would rarely rebel against the nature of political authority, trying to ensure total control of the state apparatus.

As stated by Spivak (1985), the process of colonial domination established the “Enlightened knowledge” as the only scientific and true one and its imposition on colonized peoples created the figure of the Other, with Europe as a reference—the Self. The construction of a single possible truth is implemented through the recurrent epistemic violence against other experiences and worldviews. Although colonialism as a system of formal political domination was defeated, the constructs that stemmed from it—understood as the scientific, objective, and ahistorical knowledge that determines the categorization of human beings—remained present in the collective imagination of the colonized countries. This power structure is the cornerstone from which social relations operate. The process of state-making—or the construction of borders of belonging and authority—was founded upon the exclusion of ethnic and impoverished populations. The form of state power established in this territory can only be explained through this process of exclusion (Pettman, 1996: 5). The phenomenon of colonialism and, posteriorly, imperialism are constituent parts of global capitalism. The production relations substantiated by racism was the basis for the expansion of European domination over the rest of the world.

The modern notion of sovereignty implies that full citizenship within the borders of a sovereign state is inherent to every individual. The construction of otherness is designed from the supposed existence of an external threat that stems from other tates, all of which compose an anarchical international system. This perspective makes a clear distinction between the domestic and the international. Robert Walker (1993) points out that the link between the ideas of state and sovereignty leads to the conflation of ideas of space, territory, and identity. In this sense, the idea of a state political identity is territorialized and characterized as homogeneous, which camouflages differences, hierarchies, and internal oppressions. By claiming a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, the state takes control of the protection of its citizens, and one no longer thinks of the coercive apparatus as a source of domestic violence directed to certain social groups. Despite its modern conception, the state often promotes violence against minorities inside its national borders, and full citizenship is not inherent to all national individuals, but it is restricted to those who are eligible to be citizens.

The Neogranadian nation emerged as an independent state, and it tried to fit the liberal, constitutional, republican model based on the idea of equality among its citizens. However, the colonial legacy still permeated social relations and the Eurocentric, cultural, political, and economic centers of power, dictating the terms of the social organization and perpetuating the marginalization of different social experiences. All insurgent movements in Colombia share the same premise of illegitimacy of the state, given the constant violations of basic principles of citizenship. The peaceful movement of the Peace Community of Apartadó follows this same premise.

The idea of a homogeneous national identity strengthens the narrative of a full citizenship that is equally extended to all nationals. López-Alves (2012: 165) points out that in Latin America, the “one state, one nation” model dominated the narrative of state building promoted by local elites. This perspective invisibilized the extermination of marginalized Indigenous, Black and impoverished populations—also ontologically and epistemologically. However, despite the direct and structural violence promoted by the state, these cultural identities remain a strong presence (López-Alvez, 2012: 166). The notions of epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos, 2016) and pluriverse (Escobar, 2016) are important in this context. Epistemologies of the South (ES) leads to an active engagement with ways of knowing from those who have suffered injustices, domination and oppression. Santos believes that an epistemological transformation is needed “to reinvent social emancipation on a global scale” (de Sousa Santos, 2016: 18).

For de Sousa Santos (2016: 20), then, the main problem is how we largely ignore this diversity of alternatives of life, because our theories and concepts do not identify them as “valid contributions towards a better society.” As a consequence, we do not count these ways of knowing as knowledge, we conceive of them as superstitions, opinions, or subjectivities. Santos calls them epistemologies in order to resignify these ways of knowing. Escobar (2016: 13) claims that there is an ontological dimension to de Sousa Santos ES framework. When speaking about knowledge, the ES framework speaks about worlds. Escobar argues that these are “relational worlds” in which the defense of territory, life, and the commons are intrinsically one.

In violent armed conflicts, the normative hegemony of the upper echelons of society involves the power to dominate narratives on the conflict, which includes the control of the media. Naturally, this extends to the proposals for a solution to the conflict. Like Santos (2016), Mac Ginty and Firchow (2016: 3) point out that through acts of epistemic closure, top-down narratives of the conflict frame and reinforce its nature. However, as the case of the Peace Community of Apartadó shows, this closure does not imply that other ways to interpret the conflict and to propose solutions are completely bypassed.

Marginalized sections of the population, which are more directly involved in the armed conflict, have their own understanding of its causes, of the responsibility of the different actors, and of the possible paths for peacebuilding. This understanding is forged by the historical experience of the communities and their ancestry. Different stories not only reveal different perspectives of the conflict, but also raise questions about epistemology, positionality and power relations (Mac Ginty and Firchow, 2016). Similarly, different framings of the same conflict are conducive to different mobilizations.

The Peace Community of San José De Apartadó

Many forms of civil resistance to the actions of armed groups and state violence took form throughout the decades in this complex conflict. A particularly interesting one is the organization of the Peace Communities, which took different forms, in different regions of the country, totaling around 50 nuclei (Mallarino, 2003). These communities are basically constituted by internally displaced people who advocate the return to their lands and the recognition of their territories as neutral areas by all parts in the conflict.

The Peace Communities are a legitimate expression of civil resistance to war, to armed groups, to social exclusion, violence, forced displacement, the capitalist model of development, and the restricted democracy (Alarcón, 2018) that permeate Colombian reality. Jaime Zuluaga (2005: 18) points out that the civilian population has the right not to take part in the armed conflict and, according to Humanitarian International Law, not to commit to any of the sides. Therefore, the communities follow the principles of neutrality in regard to all armed groups in the conflict (including the state): autonomy, self-determination, formulating their own propositions designed to put an end to the violence, and managing the productive forces based on the principles of collectivity and fair trade, as well as a set of rules for conflict resolution and social organization.

Although the Peace Communities emerged as a response to the armed conflict, their experiences are not limited to survival strategies amid the conflict. They also include mechanisms to develop alternative economies that might offer a better quality of life, and the possibility to develop a participative democracy in which different worldviews are represented. The Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, located in the municipality of Apartadó, in the Urabá region of Antioquia, was one of the first communities organized under this model and, due to its national and international significance, has influenced the creation of other peace communities based on the same logic and goals. The Community of San José de Apartadó conveys some of its principles as follows:

In the face of the logic imposed by the capital, which seeks to multiply through the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few, the Peace Community searches for alternatives through community work which gives us all the possibility to sow and work the land to share its fruits, and through trade of agricultural products, improve prices for those who worked the land [. . .] Here, the most important thing is the individual, due to its existence by itself, and not what s/he is able to produce. The Community breaks with the idea that only what is useful is valid and what is not is disposable; displacement stems from this logic that crushes all that is not useful to the interests of power and capital [. . . .] This is a response to a way of thinking that generated a dehumanizing process manifested in the attitudes with which we relate and reproduce [. . .] Based on these old ways, the decisions of the communities are dismissed, since a handful of individuals take control of a representation that does not serve the common interest, but individual interests that do not benefit the people and that deny them the possibility to undertake their initiatives, and does not allow them to assume a role of historic importance and resistance. ⁷

The Community has a peasant culture. It is a racialized minority, but its identity is more peasant than ethnic. Its political identity is heavily influenced by land dispossession and the consequent forced migration. History has forged a particular worldview for the members of the community, shaped by the experience of an incomplete citizenship (Foucault, 1979).

The Community was founded on March 23, 1997 by nearly 300 peasant families that were expelled from their lands by the violence of military and paramilitary forces in the region, in retaliation for the actions of the Patriotic Union ⁸ which, in 1986, was taking root in opposition to traditional parties (Motta, 1995: 36). During this ten-year period, more than ten thousand people associated with the party were assassinated. Aggressions against the Community took various forms, as described by community leader Luís Guerra. “Considering all the death caused by the military and paramilitary forces, we the peasant communities of San José de Apartadó were completely left to our own devices, suffering aggressions from the army (. . .) we currently see a new strategy being used to attack us through economic blockade and open threats by both military and paramilitary groups. Since this government is composed of paramilitary forces that feel as part of the state (. . .) the government is using heavy economic and political instruments against the communities (. . .)” (El Tiempo, 2005: 4).

Luís Guerra was assassinated five weeks after this interview, in the Mulatos and La Resbalosa massacre. This act of violence left a deep mark in the Community, which began adopting the narrative of rupture with the state, ⁹ accusing the army of colluding with paramilitary forces to promote a series of assassinations and acts of violence. ¹⁰ The government subsequently placed a police unit a few meters from San José de Apartadó, which violates the members’ rule of zero tolerance to armed groups in the region. ¹¹ The community became once again a forcefully displaced group, since the presence of violence perpetrators represented a direct threat to its members. Indeed, the presence of any armed group in the region makes the community a target for the other side of the conflict. The community moved, but their members are still fighting for their rights, including the return to their lands in San José de Apartadó.

The Peace Dialogues and The Post-Agreement Period: A Peasant Point Of View

When Manuel Santos succeeded Álvaro Uribe as president of Colombia, a significant change in domestic politics took place, particularly surrounding initiatives towards ending political violence. Unlike Uribe, Santos recognized the existence of an armed conflict and, therefore, enabled International Humanitarian Law to be applied, the existence of victims of all sides of the conflict and their right for reparation (which allowed the approval of the Victims’ Law in 2011), besides the possibility of negotiations. Nonetheless, the Community of Apartadó remained skeptical of Santos, mainly because he endorsed the narrative about the effective eradication of paramilitary action in the country after the Peace Agreements led by his predecessor’s government (Burnyeat, 2018: 3853), which clearly did not happen. The peace agreement with the then-largest paramilitary group active in Colombia, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), conducted by Uribe in 2005, was viewed with great suspicion by the victims of the conflict given the continuity of the actions of this organization, as well as the repeated evidence of close links between the former president and the AUC. As Santos had been Uribe’s Defense Minister, there were many concerns about the new president’s reluctance to denounce the flaws in the agreement with the AUC. The Community had already made a series of reports about the threats made by paramilitary forces (especially the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, AGC) and denounced their close ties with large corporations and public forces. ¹²

At first sight, the relationship between the community and the state can be seen as contradictory. If, on the one hand, its members maintain the language of rupture with the state, labeling them as agents of violence, on the other, they reaffirm its obligation to ensure the community’s protection, repeatedly submitting petitions to the Constitutional Court of Justice. In fact, the Community recognizes the state as a belligerent agent that is a source of violence against the community, at the same time it recognizes the difficulty of overcoming the sovereign logic of the state and, as a last resort, appeals to the Constitutional Court. Despite the denunciation of state violence, some state institutions still seem to serve as the primary mechanism for repairing the violence suffered, including violence committed by state agents. On June 10th, 2020, the community made the following accusation: “For 22 years, our peace community has been constantly reporting the different forms of violence against the civilian population by armed groups and institutions. It becomes increasingly clear that armed groups are serving the interests of companies that have always wanted to vacate territories of peasants who do not submit to the extractive plans of destruction of nature in the Serranía de Abibe. Paramilitarism is nothing more than a strategy by the state in the service of these evil interests. Paramilitary forces are the most effective instrument to usurp the territories.” ¹³

The relationship between the community and the state reflects the experience of incomplete citizenship lived by the members of the community, as one of the many social sectors excluded from the political and socio-economic life of the country. Sovereign power acts differently on different bodies—or different classes of citizens (Foucault, 1979; Mbembe, 2018). Disposable bodies experience incomplete citizenships, an occurrence which runs counter to the guarantees embodied in the Constitution. By bringing the legal status of citizenship to attention, the community denounces its exclusion from the social contract. In the case of Colombia, the deepening of neo-extractivism and the promotion of capital accumulation in an orthodox, deregulated, and privatizing model, which gradually suppresses essential public services in service of a market democracy (Pettman, 1996: 18), has led to increasingly incisive actions by large corporations, which count on the state’s coercive apparatus and illegal militias to ensure their economic projects.

The fact that the government does not recognize the persistence of paramilitary groups in the region has led to serious distrust toward the possible consequences of the Peace Agreements, since those actors were not included in the process and remained active in the region. ¹⁴ The argument regarding a “paramilitary peace” ¹⁵ is constantly mentioned by the Apartadó Community. This is linked to the neoliberal development model that is being imposed on the region, a neo-extractive project that is endorsed by the government through the threat of paramilitary forces and in service of corporations. Such model expands extractivist activities (mainly related to mining, monoculture, oil drilling, and fracking) that are extremely harmful to the environment and directly responsible for forced displacement.

Although the Havana Agreements provide for the regularization of common lands in peasant communities and respect for their worldviews, their relation to the land and their philosophy of production, the reality is the formalization of land grabbing (INDEPAZ, 2018), the state’s endorsement of land use by large corporations, and close ties between neoparamilitary groups and investors, following the historical pattern of violence in the region. ¹⁶

The members of the Apartadó community have their own perspectives with regard to the Peace Agreements. Individual reparations for victims is broadly rejected. The argument is that individual financial reparations provided for the transitional justice, masks the intention to give the perpetrators of violence immunity and “revictimize the victims” (Burnyeat, 2018: 4055). This perception is linked to the local memory of the peace agreements with the AUC, in 2005, and to locals’ opinion of victims’ reparation, which is seen from a holistic standpoint. One of the community’s leaders says: “We do not seek money, we agree with reparations, but comprehensive reparations [. . .]. When you look at housing, healthcare, security for campesinos, land tenure, education” (Burnyeat, 2018: 4049).

In August 2014, discussions about the conflicts’ victims began within the Havana dialogues, and a victims’ commission was created to collaborate, in an advisory capacity, on issues involving reparations and rebuilding the social fabric. Representatives of the victims’ delegations were nominated in equal numbers by both parties to participate in the peace process. The delegations were responsible for the elaboration of a report that dealt with the history of the conflict, its causes and effects. These reports would be used as inputs for the debates on the victims’ issue. Five delegations were put together, each composed of twelve victims. Representatives of the Community of Apartadó were invited by the Catholic Church, and after refusing three times, they decided to send a representative to take part in the dialogue (Burnyeat, 2018: 4162).

Germán Graciano, chosen as the Community’s representative, brought a petition to the table, demanding that humanitarian zones be recognized. This petition was never accepted. The community’s reluctance in taking part in the agreements is explained by their disbelief in the possibility of finding a permanent solution to the conflict that includes the peasants and the victims in general. According to another member of the Apartadó community, “Peace would not be the correct word to explain the end of the armed conflict between the FARC and the government” (Burnyeat, 2018: 4162). In the Apartadó community’s view, a sustainable solution to the conflict would demand reconsidering the development model imposed on the territories. This community perspective is documented in several reports and interviews exposed in the work of the anthropologist Burnyeat (2018).

Reflections On The Territorial Peacebuilding Of Apartadó

The correlation between the development model and the continuity of violence experienced by the community can be explained by a broad historical review. Modern western ontology places Colombia in the world system first as a colony, and later as an independent Latin American country. The context is defined by the development of capitalism worldwide, which determines the idea of progress based on a single and narrow understanding of economic growth founded on the perpetuation of unequal social relations—or the One-World World (Escobar, 2016). These relations are guided by subjectivities established from the beginning of the colonization process, based on the distinction between races and social classes. Despite its remoteness in time, the logic of coloniality, which implies the erasure of the different local ontologies and epistemologies, still has a significant impact on working arrangements and land tenure in Colombia.

Knowledge, land, work, and food sovereignty are inherent to the idea of peasant peace. Local initiatives for peacebuilding are, therefore, also a subversion of colonialist subjectivities. Since the community members see the social conflict as the result of historic developments, the community searches for peace options that aim at overcoming power structures. We will address key initiatives that offer a counterpoint to the hegemonic structures of land tenure, working arrangements and historic narratives.

Colombia has the worst distribution of productive land in the region. Only 38.6% of Colombian territory is considered “productive”—the rest is either urban areas or tropical forest (Oxfam, 2017). (Tropical forests are considered “non-productive” from conventional economy’s point of view.) However, 73.78% of the productive land is owned by 1% of the population, in the form of large rural properties, while the rest belongs to the other 99% of the population, including the victims of conflict and ethnic communities. Landholding regularization also aggravates the current situation. According to data from the Kroc Institute, 28.5% of the Colombian territory is not registered in the national land database, and 66% of it has no updated information. ¹⁷ This situation makes land grabbing easier for illegal groups. Gloria Cuartas (2015), an academic and former mayor of Apartadó, argues that the capitalist development map, based on the existence of natural resources for extraction and export, coincides with the presence of armed forces. This relationship points to a possible link between multinational companies, paramilitary groups and the Colombian state in order to make the exploitation of these resources possible.

The lands of the Community were acquired collectively. The families bought many properties in the region and managed them collectively, distributing production between different ranches. The collectivist approach to land possession and cultivation is a form of protection from the many attempts of land grabbing by investors backed by paramilitary forces and with support from different state institutions. Members of the community often report violent action of paramilitary groups aimed at expelling them from their lands. These actions are both aimed at land grabbing and taking advantage of the peasant work force, forcing them into precarious working arrangements. The Community resists paramilitary attempts to occupy their lands by organizing in small groups to monitor the territory, thus protecting their common spaces of family agriculture.

According to Javier Giraldo (a highly-esteemed researcher and also an active participant in the peace process representing the Community of Apartadó), family agriculture, both for subsistence and integration to the fair-trade network is a critical point of the peace process, since they imply a model of production in disagreement with Colombia’s neoliberal perspective, whose continuity was stressed by President Santos as a sine qua non condition for the pursuit of peace agreements. ¹⁸ Food sovereignty allows peasants to refuse work in plantations or other extractive activities structured around the agroexport model, working arrangements they consider abusive. It is no coincidence that peasants denounce attempts by paramilitary groups to destroy their crops and forbid them to plant for their own subsistence. Giraldo exposes this logic, stressing that “. . .paramilitary groups are extorting and controlling the peasants, because they take advantage of the need for food to forbid them from sowing, with the intention to submit them to their projects and take their money or domestic animals, like cattle and horses, in exchange for allowing them to work their land for subsistence” (Giraldo, 2020: 17). Attempts by paramilitary groups to make the peasant ontology unfeasible are a serious obstacle to Havana’s precepts. Effectively implementing the peasant perspective on land use and commercialization of the goods produced would certainly be a form of worlding peacebuilding.

Along with organizing and defending family and subsistence agriculture, the community also attempts to preserve the environment from the advances of extractive activities. Urabá is a region where large extractive plantations predominate, mainly related to large fruit plantations ruled by international companies and legal and illegal mining activities, which have increased in the last few years. By forming collectives to buy land and cultivate it based on the principles of the community, this population resists the onslaughts of large landowners of predatory exploitation of the land and the peasant labor force. Those efforts are closely linked, since environmental degradation puts local production at risk. Pollution of riverbeds and soil degradation are some of the short- and long-term consequences of the advance of extractivist activities in regions that managed to remain intact due to the armed conflict. Long-term environmental degradation may widen social gaps and intensify social conflicts (Rodriguez, 2019).

According to a report published by members of the Community, extractive activities increased during the COVID-19 pandemic due to the restrictions imposed by authorities. The report denounced the close relationship between banana landowners and paramilitary forces, which act together to expand plantation, harm the environment and consequently, impact the community’s production. ¹⁹

The British anthropologist Gwen Burnyeat (2018: 4325-4381) has put forward an interesting interpretation of the correlation between production and the reproduction of collective identities. Collective identity is based on two central narratives: the radical rupture with the state and the organic social relations that permeate agricultural production. Both narratives refer to the means of production, reflecting the historic experience of peasants in Urabá. The strong connection to the land encourages peasants to resist forced displacement, further increasing their affective relationship with the territory and family agriculture work.

The narrative in regard to the state accords with the identitarian narrative of the foundation of an “alternative community” that values peasants’ knowledge and production method, their relationship to the land and the environment, their grassroots organizational process, and their refusal to be dragged into the armed conflict. The collective identity is reaffirmed by the attempt to legitimize a worldview and perspective of conflict from the experience of the Community. The community’s vision is not isolated, given the influence on several other ethnic and peasant organizations that organized themselves into Communities of Peace, inspired by the experience of Apartadó. Effectively including the ontology and epistemology of these communities in the implementation of the Peace Agreement is fundamental for its sustainability. A lasting peace cannot be built from a single hegemonic vision of conflict. Worlding peacebuilding enriches ways to address the peace process in an inclusive and sustainable way.

The ideas of self-sustainability and food sovereignty are important for the community, and they stem from their experiences of violence during the 1980s and 1990s, in the persecution of members from the Patriotic Union, when food blockades to territories dominated by the FARC were common. These blockades, perpetrated by military and paramilitary groups, led to the need to ensure food for the population with local production. As informed by members of the Community, “On several occasions, joint military and paramilitary operations have caused displacement (. . .) Between 2003 and 2004 there were seven displacements of families from the districts of Mulatos and Resbalosa. (. . .) We have also suffered economic blockades due to paramilitary and military checkpoints that prevent access to food and transportation for the community, resulting in a situation of hunger and isolation, such as the blockades that occurred in 1997, in 2000, in 2002, in 2003, and in 2004. There were also several armed robberies carried out by paramilitaries, who have confessed to work for high-ranking officers of the 17th Army Brigade, they have stolen a significant amount of money from us.” ²⁰

In September 1999, the Comissión Intercongregacional de Justicia y Paz sent a letter to the commander of the 17th Brigade denouncing the obstruction to the entrance of food in the community. The blockades were also denounced by the community in a letter to then-president Andrés Pestrana on April 17, 2002 (Giraldo, 2003: 92-95). If, on the one hand, ensuring income by producing organic cacao—the main agricultural product commercialized by the community—allows peasants to resist working arrangements imposed by the plantations, on the other, ensuring food sovereignty allows the community not to be involved in armed conflict by actors who restrict their mobility and access to food. The history of social organization and production organization is closely tied to state actions and that of illegal agents endorsed by the state.

Food sovereignty entails the need to organize all production in order to ensure the quality of the soil and the environment. Crops are diversified and organized according to their symbiosis (Burnyeat, 2018: 4858). Collectivity is a key aspect of resistance to violence and territorial peacebuilding. It is very difficult for families to resist attacks from armed groups that want to take their land if they are by themselves. The coming together of many families in the Peace Community strengthens their claims before the Constitutional Court. To a certain extent, it hinders attacks by illegal actors and makes mobilization before the International Community easier. Killings of social leaders, in isolation, tend to cause less repercussion than the slaughter of entire communities. The sense of collectivity, in addition to ensuring greater pressure on the judicial system, discourages violent actions by paramilitaries, given the inevitable consequences of media outreach, which would shock urban populations and demand emergency measures by the central government.

Another important aspect of local peacebuilding regards education in local schools and the quest to keep the memory of the struggles in the community alive, as well as its experiences and its perception of the nature of the conflict. The community has an education project based on local schools, whose teachers are fully qualified members of the community. The relationship between agricultural work and environmental sustainability, and the historical importance of this production method for the social emancipation of the community is key to the process of learning and reproducing the collective identity. This approach is distinct from the perspective of traditional schools in Colombia. Distrust towards institutions that are ideologically and materially bound to the state’s project has led the community to invest in the education of its members based on local values and experiences. These concerns are present in an account of May 15, 2019 (Giraldo, 2019: 18):

In the morning, a group of members from a community group from the location of Mulatos Medio of San José de Apartadó, together with teachers from another location that is maintained by the state, arrived at the Peace Town of Luís Eduardo Guerra, where they took pictures and showed interest in taking over that community space and install themselves there, usurping the property of the Peace Community. For 15 years, the community has been defending this space as a place of memory, because this is where the army and the paramilitary groups, on February 21, 2005, perpetrated the massacre of the leader Luis Eduardo Guerra and his family. Since then, the community has placed many families there, peacefully exercising the ownership that bases its legal property. It has also built communal facilities for the maintenance of peace, rejecting any form of armed presence and defending the land from the intentions of environmental destruction.”

The forced replacement of the pedagogical methods subscribed by the ontology of the community by an educational model ideologically elaborated by the state and implemented by its agents, which include teachers trained for this, is understood by the Community as a form of memoricide—and consequently, epistemicide. The aim is to resolve the values of the communities, passed on to young people at the local school, as well as erasing local memories built around the recall of the massacres against the communities that took place there. The state has its own narrative about the conflict, which is very different from the perspective of the Community. Educating the new generations about the structural causes of the conflict and the actors’ dynamics in the region is essential for the Community to preserve its values and continue seeking the means for peace in the midst of the local situation. ²¹

Memory building is an integral part of historiographic constitution. The space of memory built by the community is a manifestation of the conflict’s framing from their point of view. It highlights the community’s perception of the state’s role in the armed conflict. Attempts to delegitimize its history by erasing their symbols of collective memory reinforce the hegemonic narratives of the conflict.

Ensuring the conflict will not happen again requires a holistic understanding of its causal factors. Hence, memory building is paramount for the community, especially for the next generations’ understanding of the complexity of the conflict. Reports of attempted memoricide reveal a pattern of actions by the local legislators, which are heavily influenced by paramilitary groups, as shown by this account from December 26, 2019:

(. . .) the boldest policies against the peasant populations and against their ancestral values are presented as “democratic decisions” made by the communal juntas, although everybody knows that they are orders of the paramilitary groups coming from the highest ranks of the government (. . .) In this new strategy, the communal junta was charged with managing the memoricide, which is the annihilation of historical memory. Our community is under threat of destruction of memory monuments that signal sacred places where our leaders were cruelly sacrificed by military and paramilitary groups (. . .) For a long time, the Peace Community has been building a monument in memory of the massacre perpetrated by the army and the paramilitary on July 8, 2000 in the town of La Unión. The township’s communal junta has repeatedly threatened to destroy the memorial, stating that the government offered to build a multi-purpose sports arena in the same place. ²²

Claiming the ideas of coloniality of power (Quijano, 2005) and coloniality of knowledge (Lander, 2005), the peasant experience and knowledge are part of the hierarchy of knowledge embedded by colonialist logic. As stated by de Sousa Santos (2016), looking to other epistemologies might be a path for social emancipation, considering modern ontology’s inability to overcome the problems stemming from modern logic. It is therefore necessary to recognize the existence of different worlds, different ways to understand reality and, from there, recognize ontologies that point to possible paths out of contemporary crises. The concept of Epistemologies of the South offers to look at the world from the viewpoint of those who have systematically suffered injustice, domination and oppression in colonial, capitalist and patriarchal structures. In line with decolonial thought, Escobar (2016) coined the concept of “political ontology” in order to pinpoint the need to go beyond the western theory’s epistemic space, opening up spaces for the plurality of knowledges coming from “other worlds.” According to the author, “there is an enormous gap between what most of the western theories can extract from the field of social struggles and the transforming practices that are actually taking place in the world” (Escobar, 2016: 16). Analyzing and understanding the processes of peacebuilding at the local level, based on the experiences and knowledge of the communities in order to include the broader perspective of conflict resolution at the national level (and at the international level, in some cases) is fundamental for the construction of an inclusive and lasting peace. Worlding peacebuilding is a process applied to various conflicts around the world, involving different communities whose knowledge is neglected by the agents responsible for the implementation of a top-down peace process.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, we explored how the Community of Apartadó perceived the Colombian armed conflict, and to reflect upon the limits of peacebuilding in the Havana Agreements from a top-down perspective, without taking the peasant ontologies and epistemologies into consideration. In order to reach a structural comprehension of the object in question, we turned to the history of unequal land distribution and the labor and production regimes that permeated Colombian history since the colonial era, throughout the period of consolidation of the national state until present day. We tried to clarify the logic of power relations that was established on a local level, and the community’s perception of the state’s role as an important agent in the perpetration of direct and structural violence. We reflected on how subjective aspects of coloniality deeply permeate social relations in Colombia and substantially influence the way the most marginalized sectors experience the conflict.

The obstacles to the implementation of the Havana Agreements indicate the weakness of a peace process that, although innovative in regard to the victims’ participation, proved unable to overcome power relations that permeate the affected territories. Although the Havana Agreements sidelined one of the armed groups involved in the Colombian social conflict, the territorial power vacuum left by the FARC was not occupied by the state. In the case of the Community of Apartadó, this space was mainly dominated by paramilitary organizations. In the service of large, mostly foreign corporations’ interests, they try to discipline the peasant labor force and impose the displacement of communities from the lands in order to use them for extractivist activities. This is a violent way to impose a single model of development instead of a peace process that is both inclusive and plural.

From a critical and decolonial standpoint, we demonstrated the need to include different perspectives in a lasting project of national peacebuilding. The concept of worlding peacebuilding refers to an encompassing notion of peace based on local understandings of land tenure, working arrangements and their historic narratives. Family farming, collective land management, collective work aimed at prioritizing small farmers, sustainable land management through polyculture, fair trade, culture preservation and respect for the community's historical perspective are essential values defended by the communities and understood as fundamental for peace building at the territorial level.

The peasant experience of recurring structural violence in Colombian history, accumulated during the many decades of conflict and consolidated by ancestral knowledge, must also contribute to the peacebuilding process, which is led by state institutions. This contribution must be intimately connected to the peace process, in epistemological parity with other ongoing development projects, also respecting the terms of the Havana Agreements. Any lasting resolution to such a deep-rooted conflict needs to overcome inequalities and structural exclusion. Increasing the visibility of those experiences and recognizing peasants’ forms of knowledge and notion of peace that includes land, work, food sovereignty in parity with Western hegemonic knowledge—which is currently accepted as the only legitimate form of knowledge—is a prerequisite for a lasting, inclusive and plural peacebuilding process.