161. Voices from the Coca Fields: Women Building Rural Communities
- Author:
- Ana Jimena Bautista-Revelo, Blanca Capacho-Niño, Luis Felipe Cruz-Olivera, Margarita Martínez-Osorio, Isabel Pereira-Arana, and Lucía Ramírez-Bolívar
- Publication Date:
- 02-2021
- Content Type:
- Book
- Institution:
- Dejusticia
- Abstract:
- In Colombia, the prohibition on drugs—better known as the “war on drugs”—has been a breeding ground for armed conflict, poverty, marginalization, and stigmatization. Coca, a sacred plant for some people and a loathsome one for others, a source of life or of death, is at the center of the debate over state building and peacebuilding in the country. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Colombia currently has 146,000 hectares of coca;1 following the peace accord signed in 2016 between the national government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country is facing enormous pressure to reduce this number to secure peace in rural areas and to increase the state’s presence in historically neglected regions. But behind every number—behind each hectare of coca cultivation and every conflict—there are people trying to survive in the face of hostile conditions and a weak state presence; what the numbers of hectares of coca crops do not show us is the extent of poverty, exclusion, and resistance experienced by those who are involved in various aspects of the coca economy in order to scrape by and overcome everyday conditions of violence and oppression. This book explores the experience of the human faces behind these numbers—the lives of the people from a specific region in Colombia who grow coca as a means of survival within the context of precarious living conditions and constant disputes between armed actors. We selected the Andes-Amazon region of Colombia—particularly the department of Putumayo—as the focus of our study, for it is a region where violence, colonization, poverty, and state building converge around coca cultivation and pose particular challenges to the implementation of crop substitution programs as proposed in point four of the final peace accord signed between the Colombian government and the FARC. In addition to this particular region of study, we focus specifically on the experience of women coca growers. Those who grow coca in the southern part of the country share experiences of poverty, stigmatization, criminalization, and a historical state focus on militarization and resource extraction as opposed to human rights and well-being. And within this fragile panorama, the lives and bodies of women coca growers are marked by unique experiences of violence, oppression, and resistance, stemming from their being rural women in a stigmatized, militarized, and profoundly patriarchal region. The perspective of women coca growers from the Andes-Amazon region thus allows us to understand how the war on drugs has shaped particular life experiences and has resulted in specific gender-based impacts. Identifying these differentiated impacts not only helps fill existing gaps in the literature but also sheds light on the challenges facing the implementation of a gender approach as outlined in point four of the peace accord and, on this basis, propose concrete recommendations for ensuring the application of such an approach in crop substitution efforts. With this in mind, this book’s focus on the socioeconomic situation of women coca growers in the Andes-Amazon region rests on the idea that the country’s drug policy should replace its almost exclusive emphasis on the elimination of illicit crops with one that considers the differentiated impacts of the drug economy and the ways in which these impacts deepen inequality in different settings. Indeed, within the framework of the global prohibition on drugs, which stems from United Nations conventions, Colombia’s strategies to reduce the size of the drug trade have focused almost entirely on repressing coca cultivation—that is, reducing the amount of coca leaf that is harvested. Nonetheless, no solutions have been offered to address the persistent conditions of poverty in rural Colombia that have a differentiated impact on rural women.2 The policies of the war on drugs have placed an excessive emphasis on the plant’s elimination, which has meant that campesinos who derive their livelihood from coca cultivation have had to deal with a military state focused on eradicating, fumigating, and criminalizing, as opposed to a state based on the social rule of law that offers alternatives for overcoming the high rates of rural poverty. Voices from the Coca Fields sheds light on the living conditions of women coca growers with the aim of providing recommendations, mainly in the context of the implementation of the peace accord, that offer ways to effectively incorporate a rights-based perspective into the crop substitution programs and alternative development plans that are currently being carried out throughout the country. In particular, we believe that such a perspective should incorporate a gender focus as one of its key pillars, for the construction of stable and lasting peace is achieved only by addressing the state’s historical debt with women. Peace requires women—it requires their voices and experiences—and thus it is critical to listen to and take seriously their claims and demands.
- Topic:
- Agriculture, War on Drugs, Women, Rural, Land, Armed Conflict, Gender, and Coca
- Political Geography:
- Colombia and South America