Neoliberalismo en el campo colombiano: ser campesino (colono) en el siglo XXI

Abstract

This work develops this premise: the class struggle is a theoretical principle fit to understand consistently the history of the rural communities in Colombia. In this work a concrete case is studied: that of the communities settled into the watershed Losada-Guayabero, in the Colombian Amazon, among the departments Caquetá and Guaviare. This case stands on the illegal situation of the communities because their settlement into the Natural National Parks Tinigua and Picachos. The right- wing governments (From Alvaro Uribe government until Ivan Duque’s one) have dealt with this case as a national security case, i. e., by means of the use of military operations against the communities. The communities, despite this kind of treatment, remain settled in the watershed up to the present. This study treats two aspects: on the one hand, the theoretical analysis and conceptual discussion on the realm of the cultural studies; on the other hand, the analysis of the speeches uttered by the relevant actors of the case, i. e., the peasants and the senior officials. Besides this analysis, the elements of the laws ruling the issues on the environmental conservation are studied also, because these laws prop the behaviour of the governments. On this line of study, this work treats two main concepts, namely: the concept of peasantry and the concept of settler. These two concepts are fundamental to the study of both the laws that rules the agrarian issues and the peasant communities settled beyond the agrarian frontier, particularly those settled into the Natural National Parks. In essence, this work aims to use this case study as an example to reinforce the importance of the concept of class struggle as a fit tool for the sociological analysis of the development of the peasant communities. Peasantry is a class in decay because the policies of the contemporary capitalism, thus the difficulties that stumble a definition of the concept of peasantry acquire expression both trough aspects of theoretical difficulties, and through the way in which these communities are considered by the agrarian laws that reduce the peasant at the level of a mere agrarian worker.