Citation

Ossa S, Rosa M, Caja A, Natolini R, Moll Rexach L, Britt-Arredondo C. South Central Review 2007; 24(1): 37-55.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, The Johns Hopkins University Press)

DOI

10.1353/scr.2007.0016

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article focuses on a set of both national and international public policies that pivot around the 'Plan Colombia,' an intervention scheme inscribed within the parameters of the two main global wars of our time: the war on drugs and the war on terror. This US-Colombia initiative was designed to pacify and to incorporate into the global economy a series of areas in the Andes-Amazon conceived of as explosive and infested with drugs and terrorists; a 'pacification' that actually constitutes what may be considered a "peine forte et dure" addressed to the indigenous and mestizo inhabitants. This article seeks to document these practices so that the evidence speaks for itself. It exposes these interventions as a device for collective abuse, as a sort of social "iron maiden." Through containment and physical violence, chemical poisoning, different forms of terror and psychological pain and stress, forced confinement and displacement, neglect and humiliation, these "iron maiden" practices are effectively bleeding entire landscapes and populations. Through the analysis of these practices, the article proposes a reflection on the State: both in Colombia and as modern-colonial institution. It approaches the State from an ethnographic perspective: not as a totalizing set of abstract institutions, but as the visions, interests, and practices of particular groups. It explores in particular the relationship between the geopolitical imagination of the groups that have embodied the State in Colombia and the bloody history of the occupation and pacification of its National territory.