‘Coca Mestiza’: Small Farmers, Multiculturalism, and the War on Drugs in Colombia

Author

Miryam Nacimento, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Anthropology

Advisor

John F. Collins

Committee Members

Marc Edelman

Jeff Maskovsky

Sarah Besky

Subject Categories

Social and Cultural Anthropology

Keywords

Colombia, Mestizaje, The War on Drugs, Peasants, Illicit Economies

Abstract

In Colombia, mestizo (mixed race) small farmers who cultivate illicit coca have historically been subject to marginalization and violence. They are criminalized by an antidrug state policy narrowly focused on coca eradication—an intervention that stigmatizes and dispossesses the peasantry by violently uprooting and destroying the coca plant, the farmers’ main source of income. In coca production areas, these farmers also receive violence from illicit armed groups that compete to exert control over illicit coca economies. In response, coca growers claim that they are invisible to a state that disregards the negative impact of antidrug interventions on peasant lives. Inspired by Colombia’s multiculturalist framework that grants differential political representation and territorial autonomy to Indigenous and Black communities, the mestizo farmers increasingly participate in a national campaign for the official recognition of peasants as subjects with political and cultural rights. They demand the state’s acknowledgment of their distinct “peasant culture,” the creation of autonomous peasant territories, and the protection of their livelihoods from eradication interventions (an exclusive prerogative of ethnic groups). The farmers insist they are not drug traffickers but victims of the war on drugs, a conflict that puts their identities and cultures at risk of disappearing. The coca growers employ elements of multicultural policies aimed at protecting Indigenous communities and make claims to cultural specificity and land rights in the name of a mixed-race, mestizo, peasant identity.

This study analyzes recent identity changes experienced by coca producers in Colombia. To this end, I examine coca growers’ multifaceted experiences of dispossession caused by both the drug trafficking business and a plant-centered antidrug state policy focused on violently eradicating coca crops. Based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in three rural municipalities and the capital of the southwestern department of Cauca, this research reveals three main findings. First, I argue that the violence exerted on mestizo farmers by the cocaine business and Colombia’s drug war state has shaped these farmers’ forms of self-understanding and their mestizo subjectivity, leading them to go through painful experiences of cultural loss. Second, this study demonstrates that the war on drugs, the cocaine industry, and the multicultural framework of recognition prevalent in Colombia are catalyzing novel forms of ethnic-based politics among mestizo coca farmers as they seek to resist the rule of illicit capital and re-signify state criminalization. In so doing, coca cultivators are pushing the boundaries of a multiculturalist framework that disregards their experiences of cultural loss because they are not seen as “ethnically different.” Finally, the third central finding of this study relates to the mutually constituted character of race, identity, material relations of agriculture, and coca as a plant species. I demonstrate that mestizo farmers’ ideas of cultural loss and their intricate attempts at establishing ethnic specificity arise from distressing shifts in their relationship with coca, the land, and the environment.

Recommended Citation

Nacimento, Miryam, "‘Coca Mestiza’: Small Farmers, Multiculturalism, and the War on Drugs in Colombia" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5871