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Selected Works

Winifred L. Tate

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Social and Cultural Anthropology

Violence And Pastoral Care In Putumayo, Colombia, Winifred L. Tate Dec 2014

Violence And Pastoral Care In Putumayo, Colombia, Winifred L. Tate

Winifred L. Tate

The southern Colombian state of Putumayo, a region of frontier colonization along the
Ecuadoran border, has been the scene of entrenched violence and illegal drug production for
more than three decades. During domination by the country’s largest and oldest guerrilla group,
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), peasant farmers in the area came to
supply more than fifty per cent of the coca used in the world cocaine trade. Beginning in the late
1990s, violence spiked as right-wing paramilitary groups steadily gained control of small towns.
At the same time, the United States orchestrated a major military counter narcotics …

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The Aspirational State: State Effects In Putumayo, Winifred L. Tate Dec 2014

The Aspirational State: State Effects In Putumayo, Winifred L. Tate

Winifred L. Tate

At the turn of the millennium, conditions in the Putumayo region of Colombia challenged
virtually every aspect of the standard narrative of the relations between state, society, territory,
citizenship, and rights. The normative ideal of modern state-society relations assumes territorial
control via a state apparatus capable of guaranteeing citizens’ rights and the rule of law when
threatened by illegal activities, armed actors undermining the state’s monopoly of force, or
interference from other nation-states. In Putumayo, however, it was not the national state
apparatus that attempted to safeguard the rights of citizens but rather a criminalized population of
smallholding cocaleros (coca …

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U.S. Human Rights Activism And Plan Colombia, Winifred L. Tate Jul 2014

U.S. Human Rights Activism And Plan Colombia, Winifred L. Tate

Winifred L. Tate

Non-governmental organizations claim to play a central role in defining U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the field of human rights. Here, I will examine the role of human rights and humanitarian groups in the debates over U.S. foreign policy towards Colombia, focusing on the design and subsequent additional appropriations for Plan Colombia, a multi-billion dollar aid package beginning in 2000. I argue that NGOs were able to build on the legacy of prior human rights activism focusing on Latin America, but failed to achieve significant grassroots mobilization around this issue. I examine the structural issues limiting such mobilization, as well …

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Human Rights Law And Military Aid Delivery: A Case Study Of The Leahy Law, Winifred Tate May 2013

Human Rights Law And Military Aid Delivery: A Case Study Of The Leahy Law, Winifred Tate

Winifred L. Tate

Explicitly prohibiting US military counternarcotics assistance to foreign military units facing credible allegations of abuses, Leahy Law creation and implementation illuminates the epistemological challenges of knowledge production about violence in the policy process. First passed in 1997, the law emerged from strategic alliances between elite NGO advocates, grassroots activists and critically located Congressional aides in response to the perceived inability of Congress to act on human rights information. I explore the resulting transformation of aid delivery: rather than suspend aid when no “clean” units could be found, US officials convinced their Colombian allies to create new units consisting of vetted …

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Proxy Citizenship And Transnational Advocacy: Colombian Activists From Putumayo To Washington, Dc, Winifred Tate May 2013

Proxy Citizenship And Transnational Advocacy: Colombian Activists From Putumayo To Washington, Dc, Winifred Tate

Winifred L. Tate

Proxy citizenship is the mechanism through which certain rights of citizenship—the ability to make claims for redress to a state—are conferred on activists through relationships with NGOs. Focusing on advocacy from within the policy process, U.S. and Colombian NGOs channeled political legitimacy and rights of access to Colombians, whose claims emerge from the experience of governance as articulated through testimony. This process, and its roots within the shared history of the Putumayo region of Colombia and Washington, DC, reveals emerging practices of citizenship claims and transnational political participation.

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