Post-conflict Colombia is a toxic place. Despite the recent peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas, it currently experiences an increasing number of murders of community leaders, political activists, and ex-combatants. Forced displacements are also on the rise. There is uncertainty about the formation and rearmament of FARC dissident groups and the upsurge in the territorial power of other armed groups. The government has authorized the resumption of glyphosate aerial fumigation of coca plantations. Colombia experiences another worrying ecological reality: the increase in deforestation of national parks, environmental licenses for mining exploration, and land privatization.Paradoxically, many of the areas threatened by these practices were "protected" by the now-demobilized rebel group, and its most common war technology—improvised landmines. If perversely, explosive pollution was an antidote, or at least a deterrent, for voracious growth. The (weak) implementation of the peace accords has left territories that were formerly contaminated by landmines and occupied by rebel political action at the mercy of other agents of war, many of which might not be recognized as such.Grounded in two years of fieldwork in the Pilot Project of Humanitarian Demining, which put guerrillas and demining soldiers to work together to "decontaminate and liberate" minefields, this visual essay seeks to think through peace as a pharmakon: both cure and poison. The peace accords allow and encourage the cleaning and demilitarization of rural landscapes. Yet, this process has a downside: it opens those territories to other types of political and environmental occupation.Two clarifications: The concept of peace that concerns me is liberal; peace as a synonym of the construction of an unquestionable 'common world'—peace as post-conflict. My notion of toxicity is both material and figurative; I am interested in the harmful material legacies of war and peace and their affective and political configurations in the social.
Description