Background article first
Dispossession: origin of the conflict over land in Cauca
Background article intro By: Pedro Augusto García Leal escribano– May 19, 2016
The struggle of the indigenous communities of Cauca for the liberation of the land involves ancestral claims that are part of an authentic culture of resistance, with its own historicity and worldview that cannot be confused with the processes of peasant struggle.
However, given the dynamics of the current conflict over land, the liberation processes can be interpreted as a conflict of ethnic roots that intersects with class conflicts over land.
A story of dispossession
Although the practice of dispossession against indigenous peoples has been constant since colonial times, it is possible to distinguish three central moments.
The first dispossession occurred in the colonial period, during the establishment of haciendas that began in the 16th century and ended in the 17th century, when the great war efforts of the indigenous communities of the department of Cauca and southern Tolima ceased due to expel the Spanish invader, the last of them recorded for 1656, as Víctor Bonilla recalls in his «Political history of the Nasa people».
The second moment occurs during the landed expansion of the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. By then, large landowner families from Cauca, such as the Mosqueras, the Zambranos, the Valencias and the Arboledas, held property titles over the ancestral lands of the indigenous peoples, despite the fact that Law 89 of 1890 guaranteed the non-alienable nature of the lands of the safeguards.
The mechanism for achieving these properties was illegality and violence.
The last moment takes place in the middle of the 20th century, when different factors combined to lead to the usurpation of indigenous lands. On the one hand, the violence of the 1950s allowed the increase of landed property in northern Cauca.
In the 1960s, the agrarian modernization policies and the international increase in the demand for Colombian sugar, generated by the blockade on the commercialization of Cuban production as a result of the 1959 revolution, allowed the increase and consolidation of sugar crops. cane in the North of Cauca, which implied a new cycle of expropriation of indigenous lands.
The history that explains the way in which the lowlands of Cauca are today under property titles of large landowners and mills clearly shows the illegitimacy of the origin of these properties, based on violence as a mechanism that allowed the concentration of land. and the necessary accumulation for the subsequent reproduction of capital.
On the contrary, the struggle of the indigenous communities is not for the private appropriation of these territories, but rather the movement seeks that the lands become part of the collective territories of the reservations.
Collective land, not parceled
The way in which the Nasa indigenous communities assume ownership of the land indicates a historical process of construction of collective identities that distinguishes them from the peasant movement.
Continue reading “Callout to prevent a Massacre against the Liberation Process of Mother Earth in Cauca, Colombia”
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