Privatization of War in the Ecuadorian-Colombian Border: Racism, Dispossession and Post-Conflict Violence

• In Event: Latin American STS Experimentations: Innovating Security Studies in the Region

Abstract

The Colombian peace-building process has generated various post-conflict damaging socio-economic effects, particularly amongst Afro-Latin American communities living at the Ecuadorian-Colombian border. A key aspect of Colombia's current post-conflict scenario, and the ethnic discourses surrounding peace-building, is the privatization of war, broadly understood as the recruitment of private security companies to undertake military operations. For example, in Colombia, a US company was in charge of aerial fumigation of glyphosate as part of the drug war in the early 2000s. In this light, I analyze the process of privatization of the Colombian civil war and its post-conflict violent spinoffs as part of an ongoing transformation of warfare led by Washington since the nineties when war conceptualizations begin accommodating the interests of transnational corporations. In doing so, my paper illustrates how ethnic discourses on Latin American Blackness interact with shifting dynamics of privatized warfare in the region, and how securitized ethno-racial categories and racism informs the bi-national political strategy to deal with the FARC’s dissident groups.

Author

• Jose Figueroa, Universidad Central del Ecuador