WP 553 'One hundred years of solitude, accumulation and violence: A comparative historical analysis of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta Valley', by María Eugenia Bedoya

María Eugenia Bedoya Arias is one of the three ISS MA Research Paper Award winners for the academic year 2011-2012.

The other two award winning papers are written by Martha Jane Robbins and Madhura Chakraborty.

Comment by one of the jury members

“This historical-anthropological critique of power and violence in Colombia is well-executed and contributes to a paradigm shift towards interdisciplinary academic research across critical development studies, political and ecological anthropology, and labour history. Capitalising on the aesthetic, emotional, and political resonance of Gabriel García Márquez’s magnum opus, the author weaves a cogent and urgent narrative of the power dynamics and systematic violence that scarred a century of collective memory. This creative framework lends the author’s research on the banana republic and the rush for green gold a refreshing perspective, one which persuasively changes the scholarly landscape from standard political sociology, anthropology and history into the beginning of new heights in the analysis and understanding of development.” — Comments by external juror Dr. Cissie Fu, Director of Studies and Assistant Professor of Political Theory, Leiden University College, The Hague.

Abstract

This is an analysis of two moments in the Colombian history within a century of difference, where isolation, accumulation and violence interact in a region brought into the worlds’ imaginary by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred years of Solitude.

A valley between four natural borderlines: the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, the Perijá hills, the Central and East ‘Cordilleras’ -mountain range- and the Magdalena River in the departments of Cesar and Magdalena (Colombia) part of what was called the department of ‘Magdalena Grande’ was blessed – or perhaps coursed – with wealth in natural resources; plenty of water streams, a unique biodiversity, cultural affluence and immense reserves of one of the purest steam coals.

This paper attempts to draw a picture of the superimposed and persistent power structures that apparently facilitate the accumulative processes and imbalances within one century of difference, making use of violence as means to maintain equilibrium. Environment is changed trough politicized violent inflictions over society and nature. The resultant scars are the ones inflicted on a collective memory, as this valley is and will always be recalled by the poetic truth of the narrative of Gabriel García Marquez who recreated this mythic environment as ‘Macondo’. He remembers his own story of early childhood that here serves as an excuse to analyze a region that is again being bled by accumulation.

Keywords

Coal, banana, extraction enclaves, isolation, accumulation, violence, political ecology of violence, Colombia.

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