Irrigating Modernization: A History of Water, Technology, and in Colombia’s Caribbean(1950-2000)

• In Event: Changing, Evolving, Engineered Landscapes

Abstract

In the history of the Agrarian Reform in Latin America, the role of land, social movements, and the state have been widely studied across the continent. But with a few exceptions, the question of what happens when we turn our focus to water and technology in the second half of the twentieth century remains to be investigated. This paper examines the evolution and history of irrigation districts in Colombia’s Caribbean, a region intensely scrutinized during the times of the Agrarian Reform, where water has been historically an “object of concern” because of its abundance and “unpredictability”. By focusing on three irrigation districts -La Doctrina, Sevilla, and María La Baja-, located in different regional environments, this paper argues that the history of irrigation technologies in Colombia’s Caribbean is the history of different -and often contradictory- projects of agricultural modernization, entwined with the infrastructural legacies of the banana plantation, the knowledge practices of afro-Colombians in rice and sugar production, and the everyday lives, both human and nonhuman, that hosted and reshaped the technological intervention of irrigation districts. Although the three case studies were created or repurposed by the state in the times of the Agrarian Reform to increase agricultural production, their different trajectories bring to the table the discussion on the “unexpected consequences” of infrastructure: While the landscape transformations of María La Baja turned groups of peasants into fishers and provided opportunities for potable water to the region’s inhabitants, La Doctrina has been intensely object of dispossession by paramilitary organizations and the toxic effects of pesticides. Despite its differences, in the three cases, a new ecological agent became dominant in the late nineties: palm oil.

Author

• Juan Camilo Franco, University of Wisconsin-Madison