“The City is Like a Disease for Displaced People, once They Touch It, They will Never be Cured”: Urban Displaced Peoples and the Land Restitution Program in Cartagena, Colombia

• In Event: Percepciones de (in)seguridad

Abstract

Colombia has approximately five million officially recognized Internally Displaced People (IDP), the largest number of IDPs worldwide. The Colombian government’s plan for compensating IDPs and other victims of the internal conflict is laid out in the Victims’ Law of 2011. Central to this law is land restitution/allocation that in conjunction with the provision of subsidies to cover basic necessities will grant, according to the government, economic and social security for IDPs and for the nation. This paper, based on preliminary fieldwork, explores the tensions between the state’s goal of promoting and sponsoring displaced people’s return to their previous rural lives and what IDPs relocated in the urban area of El Pozón, Cartagena themselves see as their necessities. A key concern of IDPs is that the agrarian life proposed by the state carries risks of re-displacement and greater economic and social insecurities because of the re-emergence of neoparamilitary groups who pose threats to land restitution plans and because of low market demand for their products. I argue that urban re-located IDPs use their social mobility and the invisibility granted by the city to contest the state initiatives for compensating victims. I offer an analysis of the tensions between the state and urban re-located IDPs through the lenses of anthropology, and suggest that the importance of land as the key for “curing” Colombian society from violence is not a practical solution for some groups of IDPs that after several decades of conflict no longer consider themselves campesinos, but urbanites.

Author

• Gloria C Perez Rivera, Vanderbilt University