Latin American Languages and Societies | Open Access Articles

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 …

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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