AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

RESEARCH ARTICLES

“The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”: A Multispecies

Approach to Territorial Peace in Colombia
Angela J. Lederach

ABSTRACT I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with a social movement, the Peaceful Process of Reconciliation
and Integration of the Alta Montaña, to explore practices of peacebuilding in rural Colombia. I use a multispecies
lens to interrogate the discourse of territorial peace (paz territorial), revealing the ways in which both violence and
peace intertwine human and nonhuman lives and relations in the Alta Montaña. Through analysis of the everyday
assemblages forged between people, animals, forests, and crops, I demonstrate how the multispecies approach
to peacebuilding found in the Alta Montaña sharpens our understanding of the mutually reinforcing processes of
violent conflict and environmental degradation. As a result, I argue that multispecies anthropological analysis also
enables a capacious conceptualization of peace, one that recognizes the full life-worlds of people as they seek, in
their everyday lives, to reweave—and create anew—the social and ecological fabric of their communities. [violence,
displacement, multispecies, peacebuilding, Colombia]

RESUMEN Me baso en el trabajo de campo etnográfico con un movimiento social, el Proceso Pacı́fico de Recon-
ciliación e Integración de la Alta Montaña, para explorar las prácticas de construcción de paz en Colombia rural. Uso
un lente de multiespecies para interrogar el discurso de paz territorial, revelando las maneras en las cuales tanto la
violencia como la paz entrelazan vidas y relaciones humanas y no humanas en la Alta Montaña. A través del análisis
de ensamblajes cotidianos forjados entre personas, animales, bosques y cultivos, demuestro cómo la aproximación
de multiespecies a la construcción de paz encontrada en la Alta Montaña aclara nuestra comprensión de los pro-
cesos mutuamente reforzadores del conflicto violento y la degradación ambiental. Como resultado, argumento que
el análisis antropológico de multiespecies también hace posible una conceptualización amplia de la paz, una que
reconoce los mundos de vida completos de personas en la medida que buscan, en sus vidas diarias, retejer—y crear
de nuevo—la fábrica social y ecológica de sus comunidades. [violencia, desplazamiento, multiespecies, construcción
de paz, Colombia].

O n the morning of October 10, 2016, campesino (small

farmer)1 leaders gathered in an open-air casa comunal2
meetinghouse overlooking the peaks and valleys of Montes
de Marı́a, in rural northern Colombia. With the picturesque
view of the Montemariano Mountains on the one side and
the ruins of a burned-out and bullet-pocked church on the
other, the casa comunal stands witness to the complicated
and entangled histories of violence, collective organizing,
state abandonment, and environmental abundance that in-
fuse everyday life in the Alta Montaña. A steady mountain
breeze provided relief from the otherwise hot Caribbean
day as the general assembly of the Peaceful Process of Rec-
onciliation and Integration of the High Mountain (Proceso
Pacı́fico de Reconciliación e Integración de la Alta Montaña)
began. The first meeting in the Alta Montaña since the na-
tional plebiscite election, the somber atmosphere that filled

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 119, No. 4, pp. 589–602, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
C 2017 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12925

590 American Anthropologist • Vol. 119, No. 4 • December 2017
the casa comunal was palpable. Only a week earlier, Colom-
bian citizens had rejected the historic peace accords signed
between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionar-
ias de Colombia, or FARC) by a razor-thin margin.
Two of the coordinators of the youth wing of the move-
ment, the Youth Peace Provokers, stood and called for a
concrete plan of action in response to the election: “As
youth who provoke peace,” Saray3 urged, “we are dreaming
of a grand march to the urban center.” Her counterpart,
Pablo, further explained, “We have to continue the struggle
. . . so that this can be a territory that heals, that fights for
its land, in order for us to remain in our territory. We are
always on this path, always on this journey.”
As they prepared for the march, the young organizers of
the Peaceful Process of the Alta Montaña insisted that rather
than focus solely on general support for the national peace
accords, their message needed to highlight territorial peace
(paz territorial)—the particular vision and approach to peace
that emerges “from and for the territory.” Specifically, they
sought to center environmental concerns in their demand
for peace, revealing the intimate relationships campesinos
have with the campo (countryside). Saray explained:
The violence that our communities have lived through requires
that we fight to build peace from here. The territory is where
we live, here is where we feel good, and therefore we must
accommodate the territory so that we can live in peace. The war
has also been violent to the environment and we must reconcile
with her. There used to exist beautiful fauna and flora in the
Alta Montaña, but due to the solitude that was lived as a result
of the displacement, due to the bullets, due to the presence
of armed groups, many birds died, many displaced. Without
someone planting crops, the birds had nowhere to eat and they
died, and so, the earth suffered a lot, the water sources suffered,
and the trees also suffered.
Sitting side by side on the open-air patio, the green
mandarin trees glistening under the Caribbean sun, Pablo
elaborated:
You see, the land felt so battered that this affected the avocado
trees to the extent that today there are more than seven thousand
hectares of avocado [trees] that are dead. This is also abandonment,
because the land felt alone without its people. And this is the
important aspect, it is important that one lives in a way that the
earth feels that they are living of it, they go hand in hand, so that
while we [campesinos] are working the earth, we are also, at the
same time, protecting her. (interview, October 15, 2016)
In this article, I explore how the Peaceful Movement of
Reconciliation and Integration of the Alta Montaña (here-
after, the Peaceful Process) conceive and practice peace in
everyday life in order to ground the discourse of territorial
peace in a particular place. Drawing on fifteen months of
ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017,
I argue that the insistence of the mutually constitutive re-
lationship between the campo and the campesino found in
the Alta Montaña reveals the ways in which both violence
and peace are experienced and understood as more than hu-
man. In particular, campesino leaders of the Peaceful Process
center the death of the avocado tree—and with it, the un-
raveling of a fragile ecosystem—in their vision and approach
to peacebuilding.4 I contend that the practices of territo-
rial peace employed by the Peaceful Process emerge from
within a relational framework, which contrasts sharply with
technical approaches to peacebuilding that exist in the re-
gion. As a result, I argue that scholarly analysis of territorial
peace requires an approach that is attentive to the ways in
which campesinos build peace within an ecology of mutual
relations of care.
In his definition of a “relational ontology,” Arturo Es-
cobar writes that “things and beings are their relations, they
do not exist prior to them” (2015, 18). Here, I contend
that a multispecies lens, which emerges from within a rela-
tional ontological analytical approach that focuses scholarly
analysis on the everyday entanglements of humans and the
environment, provides critical insight into practices of terri-
torial peace in the Alta Montaña (de la Cadena 2010; Escobar
2015; Fuentes 2010; Haraway 2008; Imanishi [1941] 2002;
Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Kohn 2013; Tsing 2015). By
decentering the human and reorienting theoretical inquiry
toward relationality, I suggest that multispecies anthropol-
ogy makes a significant intervention in the interdisciplinary
field of peace and conflict studies, offering contributions to
both theory and practice. Specifically, a multispecies lens
brings into sharp relief the ways in which violence disrupts
multiple lives and relations. In doing so, multispecies anthro-
pology unearths not only the social but also the ecological
dimensions of peacebuilding in the Alta Montaña de los
Montes de Marı́a, Colombia.
Montes de Marı́a is known as one of the “territo-
ries most affected” by the internal armed conflict that has
ravaged Colombia—a label quantified by the number of mas-
sacres, disappearances, arbitrary arrests, selective assassina-
tions, and forced displacements that have taken place over
the past half century.5 Such labels can serve to acknowledge
the experience of war in places that continue to face the last-
ing effects of the armed conflict, but they also obscure how
histories of violence are entangled with histories of grass-
roots peacebuilding. Such obfuscation can have devastating
effects, particularly when state and international institutions
ignore decades-long peacebuilding processes that have ex-
isted in the regions most affected by the armed conflict
(Esquivia 2009). Contrary to dominant narratives surround-
ing the peace talks that have taken place in Havana, Cuba, the
peace accords were not just the result of formal negotiations
between political elites but rather emerged from the tireless
work for peace led by grassroots communities throughout
Colombia.
The plebiscite results further evidenced the gap between
rural and urban life that lies at the heart of the internal armed
conflict in Colombia. In the regions on the peripheries—
those most affected by the armed conflict—people voted
overwhelmingly in favor of the peace accords. For leaders
in the Alta Montaña, who have dedicated their lives to the
daily work of building peace in the midst of violence, the
 Lederach • “The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”
FIGURE 1. Under a torrential rainstorm, more than 1,000 campesinos
from the Alta Montaña marched for peace in El Carmen de Bolı́var on
October 19, 2016. The banner held in this photo reads: “For a Colombia
in peace, the Mountain moves” (Por una Colombia en paz, la Montaña se
mueve). (Photograph courtesy of Elmer Arrieta Herrera, youth documenter
of the Peaceful Process) [This figure appears in color in the online issue]
uncertainty (incertidumbre) that accompanied the plebiscite
results was not new. The election revealed what many in the
Alta Montaña knew all too well: the signed peace accords
were not an end but rather an important step in the contin-
uous struggle for stable and lasting peace. “Peace,” leaders
reminded me—and one another—in the days following the
devastating outcome of the plebiscite, “is not signed. Peace
is built.”
The spontaneous mobilizations that emerged overnight
throughout Colombia’s largest cities in the aftermath of the
plebiscite, however, challenged the urban/rural divide in
unexpected ways. “In Bogotá, they are saying, ‘Todos somos
Bojayá’ [We are all Bojayá].6 Students are asking for our for-
giveness, they are marching,” a member of the coordinating
committee of the movement explained to the group of lead-
ers that gathered under the shade of the casa comunal, “The
greatest loser of this was the ‘no’ because they awoke the
masses that were asleep.”7 Despite the welcomed gestures of
solidarity from the university students in the capital city, the
direct threats to physical security experienced by communi-
ties where social mobilization continues to be strategically
stigmatized—and dangerously delegitimized—as “guerrilla
activity” (rather than celebrated as citizen participation) ex-
poses one of the many ways the chasm between urban and
rural life in Colombia continues to be experienced. For
campesino leaders in the Alta Montaña, peace remained a
“dangerous” endeavor. What the mass mobilizations in cities
(with their focus on the peripheral regions most affected by
the armed conflict) provided to rural communities in places
like the Alta Montaña, however, was a distinct opportunity
to amplify and render legitimate the demand for territorial
peace (Figure 1).
After a month of concerted mass mobilizations and po-
litical negotiations, the government and the FARC signed
591
FIGURE 2. Studying the Colombian peace accords in the Alta Montaña.
(Photograph courtesy of Omar Marcial Rodriguez Vides, audiovisual doc-
umenter of the Peaceful Process) [This figure appears in color in the online
issue]
the Final Accord for the Termination of the Conflict and
the Construction of a Stable and Lasting Peace, which
both the House and the Senate ratified unanimously in De-
cember 2016,8 marking a political end to fifty-two years
of internal armed conflict (Alto Comisionado 2016). Al-
though nearly half of all negotiated peace accords revert to
armed conflict within five years, empirical evidence demon-
strates that peace accords that include local actors are more
durable (Högbladh 2012; Paffenholz 2010). In response to
these findings, Colombian negotiators used the underlying
framework of territorial peace in the construction of the
peace accords (see Figure 2). Territorial peace seeks to in-
crease systematic attention to local peacebuilding processes
in the territories in an attempt to transform the historic
inequalities between Colombia’s “territories” and the cen-
tralized state power found in the interior of the country,
which lie at the heart of the armed conflict (Jaramillo 2013).
However, concrete articulations of what peace means and
how it is built by those located in rural communities most
affected by the armed conflict remain underdeveloped and
abstract in wider national conversations, threatening to un-
dermine the “territorial focus” that the text promises (Alto
Comisionado 2016, 6). As the implementation of the peace
accords begins, there is an urgent need for heightened atten-
tion to the ways in which communities most affected by the
war understand and work to build peace in their territories.
In the days leading up to the march, the Youth Peace
Provokers published an “Open Letter” in the prominent
Colombian newspaper, El Espectador, to the student activists
responsible for organizing the marches that took place in
the largest cities throughout Colombia, making visible and
concrete their vision of territorial peace:
We hope that this friendship that you have planted will not end
with a peace march or rally, but that we continue reweaving the
ties between countryside and city, periphery and center, region
and capital . . . . We, campesinos, have a strong connection with
the land. When you live, work, and feel the land, when you taste
592 American Anthropologist • Vol. 119, No. 4 • December 2017
the harvest that comes from the land, you have a connection to the
land. And when we, campesinos, are threatened by something,
the land wails, nature itself cries out. (Jóvenes 2016)
I analyze the interconnected lives of campesinos, av-
ocado forests, traditional crops, mountain landscapes, and
monkeys that form a distinctive niche in the Alta Montaña
to uncover the particular ecological imagination that infuses
grassroots peacebuilding found there. I argue that the multi-
species approach to peacebuilding found within the discourse
and practices of territorial peace in the Alta Montaña prob-
lematizes dominant, technical approaches to peacebuilding
operative in the region. In particular, I uncover how distinct
notions of temporality, place, and relationality found within
campesino approaches to peacebuilding require attention to
everyday, processual practices that reveal the co-constitutive
dimensions of human and political ecologies.
OF AVOCADOS, FUNGI, AND WAR: SLOW
VIOLENCE IN THE ALTA MONTA ÑA
The Alta Montaña de El Carmen de Bolı́var exemplifies
the complexities and consequences of the Colombian armed
conflict. As a result of its rich topography, the Alta Montaña
became a strategic base for multiple armed factions beginning
in the late 1980s (Esquivia 2009). Isolation born from every-
day violence and social repression came to define day-to-day
life in the Alta Montaña for over two decades. As armed ac-
tors exerted control over the daily movements of individuals
through roadblocks and death threats, limiting the possibil-
ity of organization and trade between rural communities,
rumors of collaboration with armed groups responsible for
violent acts also circulated. Like Michael Taussig’s descrip-
tion of a “culture of terror,” the “intermingling of silence
and myth” generated fear and hostility between communi-
ties and served to unravel the social fabric that previously
united the region (1987, 8). Violent confrontations between
rival armed groups as well as massacres and selective assassi-
nations of social leaders resulted in the forced displacement
of entire communities from the Alta Montaña.
There is, however, no single, unified story of the
armed conflict, forced displacement, and return in the
Alta Montaña. Some people were displaced for extended
periods of time, others were displaced sporadically and
periodically—returning when direct confrontations be-
tween armed groups struggling for territorial control
decreased—and still others remained “resistant,” living side
by side with the armed groups that operated in and around
the region for decades. While the vast majority of families
who live in the Alta Montaña today returned “voluntarily”—
without state assistance or guarantees—several communi-
ties returned with military accompaniment. The complex,
multiple, and competing ways in which people in the Alta
Montaña experienced the armed conflict resulted in the con-
struction and fortification of barreras invisibles (invisible barri-
ers) as communities became stigmatized as either “guerrilla”
or “paramilitary.” The imaginaries that maintained these
“invisible walls” continued to separate communities in the
Alta Montaña even after the armed groups left the region.
In their official report (2010) on land struggles on the
Caribbean coast, the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica
(National Center for Historical Memory, or CNMH) as-
serts that displacement is not an isolated, one-time event
but rather an ongoing process of rupture. In Colombia, the
paramilitaries and the state legitimized brutal violence and
disappearances through the discourse of “criminality,” erod-
ing the category of neutrality and normalizing violent dis-
possession through the rubric of national security (Ramı́rez
2011; Tate 2015). Today, the current risks involved in re-
turning to land from which people were originally displaced
reproduce the violence of dispossession even as “postcon-
flict” peacebuilding begins. Most alarming are the hundreds
of grassroots activists whose lives have been threatened as
a result of advocating for peace and dignified return, over
150 of whom have been assassinated since the signing of the
peace accords (Defensorı́a 2017).
Such experiences require careful attention to ongoing
processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in
contexts where structural inequalities are historically, po-
litically, and legally produced in relation to land (Aparicio
2016; Fattal and Vidart-Delgado 2015). This is particularly
true in Montes de Marı́a, where the complex entanglements
of the paramilitaries, military, guerrilla factions, and crim-
inal gangs with wider “development” projects spearheaded
by multinational corporations have exacerbated the current
economic and political ambitions of elite actors who seek to
gain access to land. Specifically, the arrival of mega-industry
projects like palm oil production facilities and teak tree plan-
tations has radically transformed the social and geographi-
cal landscape of the region, impacting human and nonhu-
man relations (Coronado Delgado and Dietz 2013; Junieles
Acosta 2017; Rey Sabogal 2013). The cycle of physical vio-
lence, displacement, exile, and dispossession result in what
CNMH (2010, 28) has termed the “peasant tragedy” (trage-
dia campesina), seamed through with threats to personhood,
belonging, citizenship, and survival.
Although I agree that displacement is an ongoing cycle, I
contend that the process of becoming displaced (desplazado)
is not one solely of repeated ruptures but also includes
everyday violence that weaves itself into the backdrop of
“ordinary” life (Das 2007, 7). For campesinos who cultivate
the land and in turn are nurtured by the land, ordinary life
includes daily farming practices founded on relationships of
reciprocity forged between humans and nonhumans (Ingold
2000). The violent severing of these relationships results in
an extended sense of being lost (perdido) and uprooted (de-
sarraigado), even as people remain in place. Unfortunately,
peacebuilding frameworks that externalize humans from the
environment deny recognition of the multidirectional and
multidimensional experiences of violence and displacement.
Consequently, local conceptions and practices of peace are
also obscured, which can have dire costs for those most
deeply affected by violent conflict.
 Lederach • “The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”
FIGURE 3. A barren field, previously densely forested, with dead avocado
trees. (Photograph by author) [This figure appears in color in the online
issue]
In Slow Violence, Rob Nixon (2011) advocates for a recon-
ceptualization of displacement that includes attention to the
ways in which the land itself is changed by violence. Nixon
expands Johan Galtung’s (1969, 12) conceptualization of
structural violence to center “questions of time, movement,
and change, however gradual” in what he calls “slow vio-
lence.” He exposes how the overwhelming attention to dra-
matic single events of environmental destruction elide the
gradual processes of slow violence, which disproportionately
affect the daily lives of people in marginalized communities
across the globe.
Multispecies anthropology extends Nixon’s conceptual
framework of slow violence by enabling an analysis of vi-
olence and of peace capable of attending to the multiple
lives and relations that comprise particular ecologies (de la
Cadena 2010; Escobar 2015; Fuentes 2010; Haraway 2008;
Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Kohn 2013; Tsing 2015). An
“anthropology beyond the human” recognizes the dynamic
and multiple selves that are entangled in a web of relations,
emergent in the life course (Kohn 2013, 16). Indeed, schol-
arly contributions that recognize the co-constitutive and dy-
namic relations between human and nonhuman life fly in the
face of dominant Western environmental discourse built on
the exoticization of nature as devoid of human life (Cronon
1996; Haraway 2008; Kohn 2013; Kirskey and Helmreich
2010). As both Saray and Pablo recounted, the forced dis-
placement of campesinos from the Alta Montaña—or the
absence of human life—facilitated the destruction of a fragile
ecology knit together by the relationships forged between
campesinos and the campo.
At the height of the violence in the Alta Montaña, the
Phytophthora cinnamomi fungus entered the region.9 Since
then, Phytophthora cinnamomi has killed over 90 percent of
the avocado trees, the primary income-generating crop in
the Alta Montaña (see Figure 3). While many in the Alta
Montaña believe that the fungus first arrived in the region as
593
part of a military eradication strategy that targeted the guer-
rilla’s primary forest cover, others, including state institu-
tions, maintain that the Phytophthora’s arrival was a “natural
disaster” (Unidad de Vı́ctimas 2014). Despite these differ-
ences, there is widespread agreement that the armed conflict
and forced displacement, which prevented campesinos from
attending to the trees, enabled the devastating spread of the
fungus.10 The loss of shade for farming crops, the endanger-
ment of native animal and plant species, and the dramatic
depletion of waterways demand careful reconsideration of
the violence wrought by forced displacement and armed
conflict. As Jairo, one of the leaders of the Peaceful Process
described: “Today, even with two months of dry season, the
water channels dry up. Before, the avocado protected the
water. In other words, the avocado is needed as much for
nature, for the environment, as it is needed economically”
(interview, December 4, 2016).
A singular focus on human experience of displacement
and violence fails to adequately attend to the ways in which
the armed conflict severed mutual relations of care between
campesinos and the campo, impacting fragile ecological sys-
tems. Without campesinos present to care for the land, birds
died of hunger, trees were displaced, and rivers dried up,
leaving the land to cry out for her people.
In 2012 the Peaceful Movement of the Alta Montaña
formed in an effort to respond to past and continued
violence—mobilizing, specifically, around the shared loss
of the avocado.11 Working across lines of enmity, the lead-
ers of the Peaceful Process articulated the movement as one
of reconciliation with two primary and related objectives:
first, to reunite and reconcile rural communities divided
across the “invisible walls” that had emerged as a result of
the armed conflict, restoring a sense of shared identity; and
second, to demand collective reparations from the Colombian
state as a result of the harm caused by the war.12 A year later,
the movement led over 1,000 campesinos in a week-long
nonviolent march that resulted in a signed agreement with
the government, initiating the largest collective reparations
process in the country.
While war reparations are often associated with jus-
tice and human rights activism, the Peaceful Process places
social, economic, and ecological justice at the center of
their vision of peacebuilding.13 However, finding ways to
render visible the multiple lives lost as a result of the vi-
olence has posed a significant challenge for the Peaceful
Process, as leaders seek to make their claims to collective
reparations legible within the state’s narrow frame of victim-
hood. Unfortunately, current analyses of the impact of the
armed conflict, which inform how the state measures “harm”
in communities that are subject to collective reparations,
overlook the impact of violence on the interconnected lives
of humans and nonhumans in the Alta Montaña. Informed
by dominant environmental discourse, which seeks to pro-
tect a commodified nature from the destructive presence of
humans, these policies ignore the ways in which displace-
ment destroys multigenerational and mutually constitutive
594 American Anthropologist • Vol. 119, No. 4 • December 2017
relationships between campesinos and the campo, rendering
the ontological politics of the Peaceful Process invisible (de
la Cadena 2010, 352; Escobar 2015; Peluso 2012).
“NOT JUST AN AVOCADO”: CONTESTED
APPROACHES TO PEACE
Storytelling plays a central role in the assemblies, meetings,
and life of the Peaceful Process. One story that frequently
circulates when movement leaders gather together pertains
to a meeting that several of the leaders had with the governor
of the Department of Bolı́var. Before the meeting began,
Sergio, who had traveled eight hours from his home to
Cartagena, pulled an avocado out of his pocket and placed it
on the table that stood between the movement leaders and
the governor. “I have brought you this avocado,” he said, “but
I want you to know that this is not just an avocado. For us,
this is our health care, our economy, our food security, our
transportation, our life. Today, we no longer have avocados.
I have brought you one of the last” (retold to author, June
13 and 29, 2015).
The avocado economy formed a dense web of social rela-
tions between communities, providing employment oppor-
tunities for farmers, harvesters, cooks, transporters, shop
owners, and buyers. For nearly two decades, Montes de
Marı́a remained the leading producer of avocados in Colom-
bia, harvesting 71,962 tons annually at the peak of pro-
duction (Yabrudy Vega 2012, 7–10). In a context of historic
state abandonment, the avocado also provided autonomy for
campesino communities as well as access to basic services
like transportation, education, and health care. The loss of
autonomy that has accompanied the death of the avocado has
fundamentally altered economic and social relations in the
Alta Montaña. Jairo further detailed the economic impact of
the death of the avocado:
Before, the campesino did not need the government at all. Because
the avocado provided enough so that the campesino could also
plant their ñame, yuca, and plantains. But today, campesinos who
no longer have the avocado must go to these banks to take out
loans just to plant their crops . . . . For many this has gone badly
and they have had to displace. (interview, December 2016)
The economic and environmental resources afforded
by the avocado forests enabled campesinos to generate in-
come through the harvest of avocados while simultaneously
engaging in subsistence farming that permitted families to
live comfortably off the land. The disruption of agroforestry
practices used to cultivate traditional crops like yuca, ñame,
and plantains, which are central to campesino identity and
culture in the Alta Montaña, have contributed to continued
cycles of displacement. Unable to generate enough income
for subsistence farming and basic needs, campesinos have
been forced to rely on state programs, bank loans, and pri-
vate foundations, which now dictate the terms and conditions
of agricultural projects in the region.
Private foundations and the state continue to privilege
and invest in monoculture projects like teak tree, pineapple,
and palm oil cultivation. Monoculture production erodes
FIGURE 4. A leader from the Peaceful Process demonstrates one of the
avocado trees that has been “resistant” to the fungus. (Photograph courtesy
of Elmer Arrieta Herrera, youth documenter of the Peaceful Process) [This
figure appears in color in the online issue]
the campesino ecosystem built around agroforestry prac-
tices and denies the possibility of polyculture subsistence
farming around which campesino life, autonomy, and iden-
tity are built (see Figure 4). Diego, a leader from the Peaceful
Process, explained:
The avocado economy was one of the most important that we
had in Montes de Marı́a . . . . But what is happening here, alters
the whole campesinado (peasantry). Monocultures alter our entire
ecosystem . . . . Palm plantations generate agrochemicals, which
seep into the land and into the reservoirs . . . what we see is a
monopoly between the environmental authorities, the state insti-
tutions, and the palm oil companies who are in favor of anything
that produces. The environmental and the social dimensions do
not matter, the only thing that matters is production. We have
denounced . . . these interventions that are negatively impacting
our environment but [the authorities] have done nothing. What it
has generated are threats against leaders . . . who are in processes
that challenge the palm oil monoculture. Some have said that we
are against palm oil. We are not against palm oil. What we are
against is the damage it has done to our bodies of water, what
we are against is the damage it has done to our environment . . .
palm oil plantations have displaced us again. . . . Families are
worse off than they were before because they are left without
land. (interview, January 4, 2017)
Arturo Escobar contends that plantation agricultural
models—like those used for teak trees and palm oil—
threaten to erase “local relational worlds” through modes
of production that “emerge from a dualist ontology of hu-
man dominance over so-called nature” (2015, 20). Sergio,
a movement leader in the Peaceful Process, further reiter-
ated the differences between monoculture—or crop-based
farming—and the “forest-based” farming campesinos use in
the Alta Montaña:
Here, the campesino is not used to cultivating crops. Here, the
campesino is used to cultivating forests . . . the avocado is a native
tree, and it is a large tree and it grows without any technical
assistance . . . and ultimately it is a tree that becomes dense
vegetation, and it is there that you see the mico [monkey], there
that you see the squirrel, you see all of the animals that live there
 Lederach • “The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”
. . . and this is beautiful. How beautiful! And this is a forest, it’s
a forest more than it is a crop. (interview, March 28, 2017)
As families in the Alta Montaña struggle to survive in a
changed and changing environment, they are continuously
renegotiating social and ecological relations threatened with
erasure. As a result, movement leaders not only work against
state-based and corporate agricultural models but also simul-
taneously engage in consciousness-raising (conscientización)
campaigns in their own communities as part of their work
to preserve campesino life and economy. Finding ways to
encourage campesino families to maintain rather than sell
their land to large corporations, as well as raising awareness
about the consequences of logging and sand extraction in
the increasingly dried-out streams that run through the Alta
Montaña, now forms part of the daily work of social leaders.
Diego elaborated:
As a leader, I say let’s not destroy this [the environment] because
it’s what permits us to stay, it is what permits the continuation
of family agricultural systems, of campesino agriculture . . . .
As a leader, I keep insisting and continuing to watch over these
resources so that this beautiful campesino economy that we have
will be preserved and will survive over time because, for us, the
campo is our life. You see? And if the campo is our life, it is unjust
to murder, kill, or negatively exploit something gives us our life,
that which helps us to give life to many others. There is not more
to say than my life is the campo, my life is the campo, and I will
die for the campo, for the leadership, because it is what is in my
blood. (interview, January 4, 2017)
The stark contrasts between monoculture agroindus-
trial practices and campesino farming practices reveal highly
contested understandings of what is required to build a “sta-
ble and lasting peace” in Colombia. The grand opening of a
private-sector peacebuilding foundation, created by a multi-
national company accused of land dispossession in the region,
provides one example of what Lyons calls a “communicative
disjuncture,” which emerges when relational frameworks
collide with technical approaches to peacebuilding that ob-
jectify the environment as a separate, commodifiable entity
(2014, 214). The director of the foundation opened the
forum with a “long-term” vision for sustainable peace and
development in Montes de Marı́a:
Today we are talking about planting . . . teak trees [teca], on
campesino land . . . . This is very important, because this is a
long-term approach. Right now, in this region, people only think
in terms of immediate needs, with yuca and ñame harvest. But
families that plant teca are thinking in twenty-year timeframes.
After the introductory speech, Miguel, a leader from the
Peaceful Process, offered words of welcome:
I want to begin by thanking you because what the campesino needs
today is land . . . and the hope that you offer is a beautiful one
. . . I want to say to you all that a campesino is not a campesino
because they live on the land or work the earth, the true [verdadero]
campesino is known by their form of production, and what is this?
Those who remain on the land, those who plant yuca, those who
sow ñame, those who plant crops that are part of our traditional
customs. We are the ones who preserve our native seeds, the
595
ones who preserve the culture of this zone. (public forum, July
10, 2015)
When he finished, Miguel joined the director in the public
signing of a document officially welcoming the foundation
into the region.
These two visions for peace in Montes de Marı́a, built
around radically different conceptions of what constitutes
campesinos and campesino life, reveal what Viveiros de Cas-
tro has called an “equivocation,” which he defines as “not just
a ‘failure to understand’ but a failure to understand that
understandings are necessarily not the same” (2004, 11).
For the private foundation, peace is understood within a
neoliberal economic development model that requires shift-
ing traditional agricultural practices in the region in order
for campesinos to fulfill market demands that will guaran-
tee “long-term” sustainability. Miguel, however, challenges
the ontological possibility of a campesino engaged in mono-
culture production at the heart of foundation’s vision for
teak tree plantations in the region. A campesino, Miguel
reminds us, is not just someone who farms for production;
a “true campesino” is forged through a particular set of prac-
tices. Such practices, like the preservation of native seeds
and the cultivation of traditional subsistence crops, ensure
campesino autonomy and contribute to campesino identity
and culture. Miguel’s critique underscores the relational
framework operative in the Peaceful Process, which moves
beyond the narrow economic frames imposed by state and
private-sector projects that merely replace one economic
commodity with another. For Miguel, his core identity as a
campesino is inextricably bound together and only made possi-
ble through a particular set of relations and material practices
with the campo. In a separate conversation, Pablo further
explained the relational framework at the heart of territorial
peace in the Alta Montaña:
Our identity is the identity of the campo—and this was lost as a
result of the armed conflict . . . . We are building peace in order to
recover our territory, our identity. One of the greatest things we
can do is protect our land . . . today we are being displaced by the
massive purchase of land . . . but if we [campesinos] have land and
education, we can maintain our territory so that from generation
to generation we can live in our territory. But this requires that
projects are not created on the desks of someone from outside of
the territory, instead that the people from the grassroots are the
ones who are called to build the projects. (interview, September
16, 2016)
Pablo understands peacebuilding as an ongoing pro-
cess that centers relationships within a multigenerational
timeframe. Paz territorial operates within an “alterna-
tive temporal register” not easily recognizable to linear,
project-based peacebuilding frameworks (Lyons 2014, 232).
For campesinos in the Alta Montaña, the threat of vio-
lent displacement has not ended with the signing of the
peace accords. Indeed, the experience of slow-moving vi-
olence problematizes the temporal register operative in
the state’s “postconflict” discourse and demands a radical
reconfiguration of how peace is imagined and practiced
596 American Anthropologist • Vol. 119, No. 4 • December 2017
in order to ensure future generations can remain in the
territory.
Territorial peace also challenges technical peacebuilding
programs, developed on desks outside of the territory and
later implemented by external “experts.” The inundation
of state and (I)NGO actors in the region—what grassroots
leaders frequently refer to the “phenomenon of the seven
vests”—underscores the disarticulation found in technical
approaches to peacebuilding that are dominant in the re-
gion. External actors arrive in communities in brandished
vests that mark their institutions (as well as their expertise)
to implement peacebuilding projects with little acknowl-
edgment of ongoing peacebuilding processes (and expertise)
in the region. Territorial peace, in stark contrast, demands
not local appropriation of externally designed projects but a
radical change in practice, in the way things are done. Peace
must be built from within the territory rather than imposed
from the outside, emerging from an intimate understanding
of the co-constitutive relationships between campesino and
campo, territory and identity. To do so, territorial peace
also demands a significant shift in how “expertise” is defined
and valued.
Unfortunately, programs built uncritically upon bio-
centrism/anthropocentrism and nature/culture binaries ob-
scure the ways in which humanitarian efforts can work in
tandem with neoliberal logics to legitimize violent dispos-
session and forced displacement (Guha 1989; Igoe 2010;
Neumann 2001). This is particularly true in the face of
encroaching and powerful multinational corporations that
legitimize their claims to the land in the name of “sus-
tainable development” through violent representations of
campesinos as lacking technical expertise, unknowledgeable
about the environment and the market, unable to operate
with long-term perspectives, and, therefore, destructive.
The burden campesinos face to make themselves legitimate
as “experts”—with intimate knowledge born of generations
of cultivating the land—is tremendous in a context where
long histories of racism, discrimination, and disenfranchise-
ment of rural farmers continue to guide the actions, policies,
and discourses of private-sector, (I)NGO, and state institu-
tions alike (Gill 2016; Guha 1989; Lyons 2016; Neumann
2001). Here, cycles of violent displacement are not inter-
rupted but are instead normalized under the auspices of in-
ternational peace and development. In this way, neoliberal
models of “peace” and “sustainable development” constitute,
rather than transform, slow-moving violence.
How, in such contexts, is lasting peace built? How is
an ecology of home imagined and created in the face of
slow-moving violence?
“GUERRILLA AND MICOS”: SYMBOLIC POLITICAL
ACTION AND MULTISPECIES RELATIONS
In June 2015 the Peaceful Process began to outline a new
strategy for a political campaign. Despite the movement’s
successes, actual implementation of the agreements they had
signed with the government continued to pose a challenge.
FIGURE 5. Campaigning for the Peaceful Movement of the Alta Montaña.
(Photograph courtesy of Omar Marcial Rodriguez Vides, audiovisual doc-
umenter of the Peaceful Process) [This figure appears in color in the online
issue]
As the Victim’s Unit, the state’s primary war-reparations of-
fice, struggled to find ways to include the ecological damage
of the war in their technical reports of harm, concerns about
the invisible linkages between the armed conflict and the loss
of the avocado tree became a central theme in the internal
meetings and public assemblies of the Peaceful Process. Their
demands for greater attention to the plight of avocados also
continued to be marginalized in local and municipal politics,
which reduced their ability to contribute to real change in
the region. How could they make the loss of avocado trees
recognizable as a harm of war to state officials? With the
support of Sembrandopaz, a local accompaniment organi-
zation, the Peaceful Process created a “significant group of
citizens” to run as a political party in the municipal elections.
Unlike traditional political parties, however, they refused to
put forward a single candidate, choosing instead to run as a
collective body.
In one particular meeting leading up to the elections,
movement leaders discussed their campaign strategy. Al-
though the majority of those who gathered had left their
homes at dawn, walking several hours to the urban center,
time was too precious and too much was at stake to take
an afternoon break. Instead, small plastic cups of hot, sweet
coffee (tinto) were passed around to combat the fatigue that
accompanied the midday heat. Most of the conversation cen-
tered on the challenge of representation. Traditionally, the
lead candidate of a political party serves as the “face” of the
party, appearing on posters, flyers, and the election ballot.
What could they use instead? What might capture the heart
of their movement—and reflect the change they hoped to
create? After discussing the effectiveness of a group photo,
someone suggested they instead use an image of the mico titi,
or cotton-top tamarin, a native monkey of the region. Re-
newed excitement permeated the gathering, breathing new
life into the meeting (Figure 5).
The decision to make the mico titi the face of the move-
ment’s political campaign exemplifies the ways in which
 Lederach • “The Campesino Was Born for the Campo” 597

leaders place human and nonhuman relationships at the cen-

ter of their understanding of peace in the aftermath of vio-
lence. As one of the leaders recounted,
At one point, the state said that there was only guerilla and
monkeys here. In other words, they were saying that there was
no civilian population . . . . So when we started to organize to
show that there were civilians here, we said if this is a region of
guerrilla, then we are the micos . . . and we identified with the
mico titi, which is native to this zone and which is also threatened
with extinction . . . we wanted to show that the 6000 hectares of
avocado also formed the habitat of the mico titi . . . that here we
also care for them and help maintain them in the territory even
though they are threatened with extinction, because we identify
with those two things. If we were labeled as a mico before, why
not identify with those micos? And by doing this, we are also able
to show that the mico titi is endangered. You see, what we are
trying to do here is to reactivate the mountains again, and in order FIGURE 6. A campaign hat for the Peaceful Process political movement
to make this visible, we have the mico titi, which are threatened
with extinction. And with this, we are also able to make visible featuring the mico titi, or cotton-top tamarin monkey. The text of the hat
the threats against the movement, to show how they wanted to encourages voters to “mark” the mico titi for municipal council elections.
extinguish us as well. (interview, September 18, 2016)
(Photograph by author) [This figure appears in color in the online issue]
The armed conflict not only unraveled the social fabric
of human communities but also disentangled the ecological
The Peaceful Process eventually succeeded in their de-
fabric of the Alta Montaña, knit together by campesinos, avo-
mand to have the death of the avocado included as a harm
cado forests, and native species. Violence, armed confronta-
of the armed conflict in the state’s official diagnostic report
tions, and the forced displacement of campesinos resulted
that informs reparations in the region (Unidad de Vı́ctimas
in the death of the avocado trees and destroyed the primary
2014). However, the underlying approach to reparations and
habitat of the mico titi. Nixon (2011) contends that the
peacebuilding conducted by state and private-sector actors
most significant challenge for those facing the consequences
continues to privilege technical expertise and technocratic
of slow violence is finding innovative ways to render visible
implementation, obscuring the ways in which slow-moving
the imperceptible processes of violence that extend gradually
violence has extended into the lives of campesinos in the Alta
across a deep time horizon. The use of the mico titi as the face
Montaña even after the war was declared over. As Sergio
of the movement works against the “representational bias”
reflected:
present in the state’s approach to peacebuilding and repa-
rations (13). Symbolic forms of political action also spark The government is duro [reluctant, wary] to provide monetary
new imaginative capacities alert to the invisible processes reparations to the victims of the conflict, duro, duro, duro, and
of slow violence. Invoked in the meetings and assemblies, now, to provide reparations for a plant—because they don’t see
it from an environmental point of view, they don’t see it from this
etched on T-shirts and hats, and displayed on motorcycles of point of view, but what was lost in the Alta Montaña is part of an
movement leaders, the mico titi makes powerfully present environmental harm that is gigantic, it’s huge, and to recuperate
the absence of ecological life-worlds destroyed by violence itself, it will require many years. (interview, March 28, 2017)
and displacement (Figure 6).
The mico titi, however, is not merely instrumentalized Everyday practices of territorial peace in the Alta
as a strategic political tactic. Endangered, but not extinct, Montaña, in contrast, emerge from within a distinct ecologi-
the mico titi does not just symbolize but also comprises the cal imagination, which mobilizes alternative understandings
fragile web of relationships present in the Alta Montaña that of temporality, sociality, and place. Territorial peace also
are necessary for survival. The invocation of the mico titi in opens new possibilities for peacebuilding in the face of on-
the work of the movement affirms the lives of monkeys as going, slow violence.
lives that count. The entangled relations of monkeys, avoca-
dos, and small farmers are what make life possible in the Alta PLACEMAKING AS PEACEBUILDING:
Montaña and enable the mountain to be “reactivated” again. INTERSPECIES (RE)WORLDINGS IN THE
“To be entangled,” Kristina Lyons writes, “is not simply to AFTERMATH OF VIOLENCE
be intertwined, as in the joining of separate and preexisting The overlapping and compounding processes of armed con-
entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence flict, mass displacement, and slow violence severed mutu-
outside the relation itself” (2014, 224). Close to extinction ally constitutive relationships between campesinos and the
and forcibly displaced when their homes became uninhab- campo in the Alta Montaña, contributing to people’s sense of
itable, the mico titi illuminates past and continued threats being lost (perdido) and uprooted (desarraigado). Attention to
to the ecological fabric of the Alta Montaña—as well as the the fragmented worlds, lives, and relationships found at the
fierce resistance of its inhabitants. “limits of life,” however, also reveals the ways in which peace
598 American Anthropologist • Vol. 119, No. 4 • December 2017
is shaped and built through everyday practices (Das 2007,
218). In contrast to project-based, technical frameworks that
employ a linear approach to “postconflict” peacebuilding,
territorial peace requires an understanding of peacebuilding
as an ongoing process, constructed through multidirectional,
emergent, and everyday practices of placemaking. For those
caught in the midst of slow violence, peace is built through
the daily practices of living that make “resistance, resiliency
and flourishing” simultaneously available rather than sequen-
tially ordered (Lederach and Lederach 2010, 54). Indeed,
the experience of slow-moving violence necessarily requires
an approach to peacebuilding that also includes movement.
Practices of territorial peace in the Alta Montaña reflect the
ways in which self- and world creation is “always in move-
ment, made up of materials in motion, flux, and becoming”
(Escobar 2015, 18).
Pablo, reflecting on the significance of participating in
community peacebuilding, explained, “I was completely lost
before. At the first meeting, I didn’t know any of the other
veredas [small, rural town]. I didn’t know any of the commu-
nities or history. I didn’t know anyone. The political discus-
sions were completely different than anything I had known
before” (conversation with author, July 19, 2015). Slow vi-
olence results in the uprooting of identity and territory for
those who are physically displaced as well as for those who
experience “displacement without moving” (Nixon 2011,
19). Peace, therefore, requires practices that allow people
to reroot (arraigarse) themselves, reestablishing relationships
through which a sense of self and place can emerge. Although
Pablo was physically located in his home community, reroot-
ing self (arraigarse) and locating place (ubicarse) required a
multidimensional process that included knowledge of geog-
raphy, an understanding of social and ecological history, the
establishment of relationships with people and communities
in the region, as well as political engagement.
In communities where there is no electricity, little cell-
phone reception, and no Internet, collective organizing re-
quires constant movement across the vast mountain land-
scape in order for meetings to occur between the multiple
communities that comprise the Alta Montaña. The embod-
ied movement between rural communities also serves to
reestablish relationships of trust in a climate of distrust.
Leaders insist that “knowing one another and the territory”
is foundational to building peace in the territory. Daily tasks
of farming and collective organizing across the vast land-
scapes of the Alta Montaña are constitutive acts of self- and
world creation found in the “eventfulness of the everyday”
(Das 2007, 216–18; Nordstrom 1995, 142). Indeed, phys-
ical labor coupled with storytelling, memories, music, and
art construct “taskscapes” built on reciprocal relationships
between campesinos and the campo that allow individuals to
(re)construct themselves as ethical subjects in the midst and
aftermath of violence (Das 2007; Ingold 2000, 154).
For example, the Peaceful Process organizes public as-
semblies in a different community every month. At each
assembly, individuals from the host community are asked
to narrate how their community was named. As one leader
recounted at the beginning of an assembly:
Every time we meet together in a different place, we tell a part of
the history of our vereda, how it got its name. We share memories
from the past . . . . We also have a story of how Deer Stream
received its name, maybe it’s not as beautiful, but I will tell it.
This area was known, at one point, for having a lot of deer. It
was an area full of avocado trees and made up part of the coffee
region . . . . Now it is only a name, there are no deer here now.
(public assembly, June 13, 2015)
In this ritualized practice, the naming of the first families
who established the community is followed by a narrative
that reconstitutes the place names found within the commu-
nity. Like Basso’s (1996) account of the Western Apache,
place names transport people across time and space, con-
necting them to generations of ancestors who have come be-
fore and are alive within the landscape. Nixon echoes Basso,
advocating for greater awareness of the “affective and histor-
ically textured vernacular landscapes,” constructed across
generations and imbued with “accumulated cultural mean-
ing” (2011, 17). Vernacular landscapes have the power to
contest and transform “official landscapes” that are forged
through instrumental and bureaucratic processes that exter-
nalize the environment from human relationships. The very
name, “Deer Stream,” invokes and makes present the multi-
ple lives lost as a result of the war and the subsequent death of
the avocado. The multigenerational and multispecies imagi-
nation operative in the recitation of place names used at the
beginning of the monthly assemblies of the Peaceful Process
renders visible otherwise unseen casualties of war.
Place-name narratives transform the experience of be-
ing “completely lost” and “uprooted” through performative
acts that (re)weave self and world in the midst of devastating
loss (Austin 1962; Tambiah 1981). These narrative rituals
are also coupled with the embodied experience of moving
through the geography of the Alta Montaña. As people walk,
often for hours, from one community to the next, their sense
of place is established and strengthened. Roots are not estab-
lished through stasis but rather through constant movement.
As Arturo Escobar contends, the physical movement, em-
bodied in social movement organizing, is also a form of
“reterritorialization,” which enacts a deep claim to land and
place (1997, 56). Arraigarse—to root oneself—requires ev-
eryday place making practices that include iterative travel
across landscapes infused with social meaning.
Indeed, the primary slogan of the Peaceful Process em-
phasizes movement as a force for peace and constructive
change. Etched on T-shirts and proclaimed during collective
actions, ¡La Montaña se mueve! (The Mountain moves!) is a
powerful statement of the multiple and entangled agencies
operative in the Alta Montaña. Significantly, the mountain
is also alive, shaping and shaped by the unfolding relation-
ships that comprise the ecology of the Alta Montaña. In
Colombian Spanish, moverse (to move) is synonymous with
desplazarse (to displace), illuminating the ways in which peace
is not merely formed as an oppositional reaction to violent
 Lederach • “The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”
displacement but rather emerges through active and imagi-
native practices of place making informed by the particular
experiences campesinos in the Alta Montaña have had with
violence. As one of the movement leaders exclaimed during
a general assembly, “We are here because we are people who
know how to move.” Se mueve (to move oneself) signifies lead-
ership, knowledge, and a prized capacity for effecting social
change. Those who know “how to move” engage in every-
day practices of place making, weaving webs of relationships
between people, memories, and geographies.
For Anna Tsing, hope and possibility are found in
campesino farming practices precisely because of the pro-
found capacity small farmers have to feel “the life of the
forest” around them (2015, 179). Tsing underscores the
significance of research that centers “indeterminacy” in the
analysis of everyday social practices, revealing how such
practices are simultaneously “repetitive” and “open ended”
(47). She asks: “What if our indeterminate life form was not
the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions
over time?” (47). The slogan ¡La Montaña se mueve! offers one
response to Tsing’s inquiry, reflecting the ways in which
the embodied and iterative movements of campesino lead-
ers through the geography of the Alta Montaña result in the
shared experience of “transformation through encounter”
between mountain and human life (47).
An ecological imagination that recognizes environment
not as static but rather as emergent in the life process informs
subjectivities as well as peacebuilding practices in the Alta
Montaña. Geography not only shapes collective organizing
practices but also activist subjectivities (Li 2016; Oslender
2016). People and their actions come to embody aspects of
the places they inhabit as a result “of interconnected social
and environmental processes” (Oslender 2016, 35). In the
Alta Montaña, peace is built through daily practices of place-
making that reveal unexpected possibilities for “resurgence,”
even in the face of slow-moving violence, illuminating “the
force of the life of the forest, its ability to spread its seeds and
roots and runners to reclaim places” (Tsing 2015, 178). Such
practices emerge from a relational approach to peacebuild-
ing that recognizes the life force of the natural environment,
not as static or abstract but rather as constantly moving.
CONCLUSION
My own awareness of the ways in which human and non-
human entanglements (and their disruption) infuse grass-
roots conceptions and practices of peacebuilding in the Alta
Montaña first emerged after a jarring conversation I had
with a leader I will call Rosa. A passionate, older woman
with a quick wit and contagious energy, Rosa faced repeated
death threats over the course of a decade as a result of the
armed conflict in Colombia. A leader in her community,
Rosa posed a threat to armed actors seeking to gain access
to the fertile, isolated, and strategically located lands that
comprised her home. Neutrality, at the height of the vi-
olence in rural Colombia, was not a category recognized
by the FARC, ELN, paramilitaries, or the state. After each
599
near-death confrontation with a comandante of one armed
group, Rosa immediately became suspected of “collabora-
tion” by another. As a result, her name rotated across the
hit lists of the eight different armed groups who had set up
bases in and around her community.
“Why,” I asked Rosa, “in the face of repeated threats to
life did you stay?” A slow smile crept across her lips. My
logic was backwards. Forced displacement, she explained,
also threatens life by enacting a slow form of death that
extends over time—the death of hunger, the death of lone-
liness, the death that accompanies the loss of personhood.
She had witnessed these deaths occur among friends and fam-
ily who were forcibly displaced to urban centers. You see,
she concluded, “The campesino was born for the campo and
the campo for the campesino. The campesino is like a fish.
A fish without water suffocates, and the campesino without
the campo dies. The campo without the campesino is like a
desert. The campesino gives life to the campo, and the campo
gives life to the campesino.” Rosa’s insistence on the mu-
tually constitutive relationship between the campo and the
campesino issues forth in my analysis of violence and peace
in the Alta Montaña, demonstrating the valuable insights
that multispecies anthropology has for our understanding
of political violence and peacebuilding. In particular, the
fundamental linkages that leaders in the Peaceful Process
make between ecological relations of care and peacebuild-
ing requires recognition of the ways in which both violence
and peace intertwine human and nonhuman lives. “As soon
as one starts talking about peace, one must start with the
environment,” one of the leaders of the Peaceful Process
clarified, “The violence left its own contamination . . . but
despite all that . . . nature itself is returning once more
to the region . . . if we care for the environment, we are
caring for ourselves, and if we care for ourselves we will
live in peace, and so, I think this is the point” (interview,
November 22, 2016).
In this article, I have argued that scholarly analysis of
violence and peace requires attention to the co-constitutive
relations forged between human and nonhumans in the Alta
Montaña. In particular, I have explored the ways in which the
armed conflict and forced displacement in the Alta Montaña
disrupted mutual relations of care forged between campo and
campesino, contributing to the widespread death of avocado
forests. The death of the avocado has fundamentally altered
ecological, social, and economic life in the Alta Montaña,
forcing communities to find new ways to survive and heal
in the midst of slow violence. The ongoing processes of de-
territorialization and reterritorialization that have emerged
in the wake of the avocado’s death and the experience of
slow violence in the Alta Montaña pose a challenge to the
state’s discourse of “postconflict” peacebuilding and demand
alternative approaches to building peace in the region.
When asked what it means to be a campesino, people
in the Alta Montaña often begin by describing the human
and nonhuman relationships that are central to their identity
and sense of self: “To be a campesino is to breathe pure air,
600 American Anthropologist • Vol. 119, No. 4 • December 2017
to wake up to the birds singing, to cultivate and harvest the
land, to walk peacefully through the countryside with one’s
burro [donkey]. It’s that. For me, that is what it means to be
a campesino” (interview, April 2017). In this article, I have
asked: What happens when co-constitutive relationships of
care are torn asunder by armed conflict and forced displace-
ment? How do communities reweave social and ecological
relationships in the face of slow-moving violence? I argue
that theoretical analysis attentive to human and nonhuman
assemblages also underscores the limitations of projects built
upon the strict separation of “nature” and “culture,” and ex-
poses the ways in which slow-moving violence extends itself
into the “aftermath” of war. In contrast, a multispecies lens
reveals the ways in which campesinos advocate and prac-
tice a more relational, processual, and dynamic approach to
building territorial peace. Such an approach stands in stark
contrast to the technical and project-based frameworks that
currently dominate state and private-sector peacebuilding
programming in the region.
As the implementation of the peace accords in Colom-
bia begins, there is an urgent need for heightened attention
to grassroots peacebuilding approaches in the regions most
affected by the Colombian armed conflict. Careful analysis
of the everyday assemblages forged between campesinos,
avocado forests, traditional crops, cotton-top tamarin mon-
keys, and mountain landscapes in the Alta Montaña brings
into sharp relief the multivalent practices of peacebuilding
used by campesinos in the Alta Montaña as they establish
roots, creating self and world in the face of slow-moving
violence. I have argued that a multispecies lens offers a more
capacious understanding of peacebuilding, one that recog-
nizes how the daily routines of harvesting yuca and caring
for avocado trees are deeply intertwined with social and
political organizing. Indeed, the campesino gives life to the
campo, just as the campo gives life to the campesino.
Angela J. Lederach Department of Anthropology and Kroc Insti-
tute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, Notre
Dame, IN 46556, USA; alederac@nd.edu
NOTES
Acknowledgments. This article would not have been possible
without the ongoing support and friendship of the Proceso Pacı́fico
de Reconciliación e Integración de la Alta Montaña, Jóvenes
Provocadores de Paz, Sembrandopaz, and the Observatorio de
Conflictos, Desplazamientos y Construcción de Paz at the University
of Cartagena. I am especially grateful for the critical analysis, reflec-
tions, and careful suggestions provided by Julio Parra Arrieta and
Domingo Rafael Deavila Buelvas, Jocabeth Canoles Canoles, Jorge
Pérez Castro, Naun Álvarez Gonzalez, Geovaldis Gonzalez Jimenez,
Angelina Gonzalez Jimenez, Reinaldo Ovalle Olivero, Ciro Canoles
Pérez, William Jaraba Pérez, Aroldo Canoles Ramos, Ricardo Es-
quivia Ballestas, Larisa Zehr, and Jeff Yoder. Special thanks to Omar
Marcial Rodriguez Vides and Elmer Arrieta Herrera for audiovisual
contributions. I am also thankful for the multiple readings and invalu-
able feedback I received from Catherine Bolten, Agustı́n Fuentes,
Ann Mische, Leslie MacColman, Leo Guardado, Chris Haw, Jesse
James, Dana Townsend, and Katy-Marie Lance. Very early versions
of this article benefited from the input of participants and discussants
at the 2016 UIC Second City Anthropology Conference. I also want
to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at American
Anthropologist for their careful and constructive feedback. This re-
search was made possible through generous funding from Fulbright,
USAID ND Global Development Fellowship, Kellogg Institute for
International Studies, and the Kroc Institute for International Peace
Studies.
1. All translations are my own.
2. Communal house, often used for meetings held by community
action councils in Colombia.
3. All personal names are pseudonyms
4. The term “peacebuilding” encompasses the manifold processes
and social practices that address the root causes of violence,
repair relationships, and build just societies in an effort to trans-
form violent conflict (Lederach 1997; Schirch 2005).
5. The label “territorios más afectados/territories most affected”
is woven throughout the peace accords in concordance with the
underlying framework of territorial peace (Alto Comisionado
2016, 7).
6. Located in the Department of Choco, along Colombia’s Pacific
coast, Bojayá is known as the site of one of the worst massacres
of the Colombian armed conflict, which occurred during a
violent confrontation between the FARC and the paramilitaries
in 2002. On October 2, 2016, 95.8 percent of the population
in Bojayá voted in favor of the peace accords (Registradurı́a
Nacional 2016).
7. The plebiscite vote prompted a response of either “yes” or “no”
to the question: “Do you support the final agreement to end
the conflict and build a stable and lasting peace?” The election
became highly polarized as a result, with the two campaigns
framed as “those of the yes” and “those of the no.”
8. While no elected representative voted against the revised peace
accords, several chose to abstain.
9. Phytophthora cinnamomi is a soil-born fungus that infects the root
system of trees, preventing the absorption of water and nutri-
ents. The first signs of Phytophthora cinnamomi include yellowing
foliage and dry branches. Phytophthora cinnamomi also impacts
surrounding soil, often resulting in damage to wider ecosystems
(Department of the Environment and Heritage 2004).
10. For campesinos who were “resistant,” the direct threats to life,
frequent armed skirmishes, and social regulation imposed by
armed groups severely restricted their mobility, unraveling the
daily practices of mutual care forged between campesinos and
the campo, which, in turn, prevented them from adequately
addressing the spread of the fungus. The violence as well as
the presence of armed groups also led to increased isolation and
further abandonment by state institutions tasked with supporting
small agriculture. While a number of campesinos sought external
support to prevent the spread of the fungus as early as 1997, the
state did not offer a response until 2008 (ICA 2009). By 2009,
 Lederach • “The Campesino Was Born for the Campo”
more than 70 percent of the avocado trees in the region were
affected, and by 2013, 7,000 hectares of avocado trees had died
(ICA 2013; López Tovar 2009).
11. In 2015 the movement renamed itself the Peaceful Process of
Reconciliation and Integration of the Alta Montaña to legally dis-
tinguish the political (Peaceful Movement of the Alta Montaña)
and social wings of the movement.
12. The Law 1448 of Victims and Land Restitution and Regula-
tory Decrees (Ley 1448 de Vı́ctimas y Restitución de Tierras y
Decretos Reglamentarios) of 2011 provides the right to collec-
tive reparations for communities that can demonstrate a shared
identity and experience of victimhood as a result of the internal
armed conflict.
13. Leaders of the Peaceful Process explicitly understands the move-
ment as a peace movement, dedicated to the work of “reconcil-
iation, integration, and development” in the rural zone of El
Carmen de Bolı́var, Colombia.
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