Narco‐frontiers: A spatial framework for drug‐fuelled accumulation

Abstract

Based on historical and ethnographic research conducted in a region of northwest Colombia and drawing on the stories of novelist Gabriel García Márquez, this article develops the analytical concept of “narco‐frontiers” to help disentangle the confusing political economy of agrarian spaces affected by the violence of the drug war. As socially produced spaces, narco‐frontiers emerge through the convergence of four interlocking processes: uneven development, internal colonialism, political violence, and narco‐fuelled dispossession. Although often depicted as “ungovernable” or “stateless” spaces, narco‐frontiers are wracked by extra‐legal regimes of rule in which the state is simply one actor among others. With the drug trade inducing violent agrarian change all over the world—from Colombia to Afghanistan, Burma to Central America—this article offers a spatial‐historical framework for understanding these dramatic transformations.

The ‘Colombianisation’ of Central America: Misconceptions, Mischaracterisations and the Military-Agroindustrial Complex

“…Colombianisationas a dangerous discursive formation that enables this military-agroindustrial nexusis both a driver and a result of a consistent pattern seen in many rural areas of Central America: the joint workings of the drug trade and the drug war tend to open up these spaces to more intensive kinds of capitalist development and state territorialisation. 89 The ultimate beneficiaries of the drug trade are not the world-famous capos who colour our sensationalist TV shows. The real winners are the supposedly legitimate banks, agribusinesses, large corporations, landowners and military forces at the helm of the military-agroindustrial complex.…”

¿Una paz fallida? Dificultades de la construcción de paz en Colombia tras el acuerdo con las FARC-EP

“…Lo referente a las dinámicas de la violencia en el escenario de implementación al Acuerdo de Paz resulta escasamente abordado, con la excepción de publicaciones como las de Salas et al (2018), Ríos et al (2019), Maher y Thompson (2019), Ballvé (2019) o Lemaitre y Restrepo (2019). Quizá, por esto último, los mayores aportes publicados hasta el momento parezcan reposar más bien en informes o dossiers de entidades como la Fundación Ideas para la Paz (2018Paz ( , 2019, Indepaz (2017Indepaz ( , 2018Indepaz ( , 2019, Fundación Paz y Reconciliación (2019, 2019b) o el mismo Kroc Institute (2017,2019).…”

Resistance to hydropower developments in contexts of violence and organised crime in Mexico

“…In the case of Central America, for instance, drug traffic leads to increasing deforestation (Tellman et al 2020), sometimes combined with illegal breeding of cattle as a way of laundering money (Devine et al 2020). The work of Ballvé (2018) shows how narco-frontiers are characterised by colonial logics, uneven development, violent politics and deforestation as a result of the production of cocaine. Insurgence, counterinsurgency, and violence have become part of everyday life.…”

“…Third, we look into how, within this context, everyday practices are transformed into acts of resistance and shape micropolitics in the context of hydropower developments. In doing so, we aim to contribute to literature that brings together violence, illicit actors, and violence specialists in natural resource conflicts in Latin America (Rasch 2017;Ballvé 2018;Middeldorp & Le Billion 2019). Whereas this literature provides for growing insights in how residents are criminalised and what sorts of violence they face, and more macro perspectives on the environmental changes of the narco corridor, there is still little literature about how these transformations work out on the local level, and how violence shapes the responses of communities towards hydropower developments.…”