2
For them three, as usual. For the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, its people and fishes, and, of course, to its water.
3 Abstract
This thesis studies the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, a network of places that are connected to an estuary lagoon of 450 Km2 in Magdalena, Colombia. The main analytical approach is the concept of waterscape. This approach highlights the power relations around water, which are useful to understand the scalar interconnections through social and ecological arrangements: rivers, streams, dikes, highways, institutes, laws, etc. From the perspective and methods of environmental history, the main objective is to prove how the processes of transformation of the waterscape in this region was driven by a discourse of modernity. In the particular context of the Colombian armed conflict, the processes that were triggered by this discourse manifested mainly by infrastructure and violence. Using the concepts from Maria Kaika in her book City of flows, I argue that what happened in the CGSM was a process of modernization, where modernity failed to fulfill the promises of development, progress and equality. It did not break the barriers of nature and poverty. On the other hand, the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta has been in a chronic crisis, one that peaked during the 90’s with the sustained ecological deterioration and the execution of five massacres and countless violent displacements. The waterscape becomes a useful concept to trace how all these processes are connected to the control of water as a resource and how one cannot be understood without the other. In the context of the Colombian armed conflict, this thesis aims to bring new elements to the discussion on how the long lasting inequalities also need to be read through reading water dispossessions. At last, I also subscribe this research in the broader Latin American context by joining the claims of the Water Justice movement to give more elements in the quest of more distributional rights through recognition.
Keywords: waterscape, modernization, Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, Colombian armed conflict, environmental history.
4 Resumen
Esta tesis estudia la Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, una red de espacios que están conectados a una laguna estuarina de 450 Km2 en Magdalena, Colombia. El principal acercamiento analítico lo hago a través del concepto de paisaje hídrico. Esta perspectiva resalta las relaciones de poder alrededor del agua, las cuales son importantes para entender las interconexiones en distintas escalas a través de arreglos sociales y ecológicos: ríos, caños, diques, carreteras, institutos, leyes, etc. Desde la perspectiva y métodos de la historia ambiental, el principal objetivo es mostrar cómo los procesos de transformación del paisaje hídrico de la región fueron impulsados por un discurso sobre modernidad. En el contexto particular del conflicto armado colombiano, los procesos que fueron impulsados por este discurso se manifestaron principalmente a través de infraestructura y violencia. Usando los conceptos de María Kaika en su libro City of flows, argumento que lo que ocurrió en la CGSM fue un proceso de modernización, donde la modernidad falló en cumplir las promesas de desarrollo, progreso e igualdad. No logró romper las barreras de la naturaleza ni de la pobreza. Por el contrario, la Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta ha estado en una crisis crónica, la cual tuvo su punto más álgido en la década de 1990 con un sostenido deterioro ecológico y con la ejecución de cinco masacres y múltiples desplazamientos forzados. El paisaje hídrico se convierte en una herramienta útil para rastrear todos los procesos que están conectados al control del agua como un recurso cómo un proceso no puede ser separado del otro. En el contexto del conflicto armado colombiano, esta tesis intenta brindar nuevos elementos para discutir cómo las desigualdades de largo plazo también deben ser leídas a través de despojos de agua. Por último, también suscribo esta tesis en el contexto latinoamericano a través de las demandas del movimiento de Justicia Hídrica, para buscar más elementos para la búsqueda de mayor distribución de derechos a través del reconocimiento.
Palabras claves: paisaje hídrico, modernización, Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, conflicto armado colombiano, historia ambiental
5 Content Abstract ... 3 Resumen ... 4 List of figures ... 6 Acknowledgements ... 8 Introduction ... 10 Theoretical reflections... 18 Methodology ... 23
What is the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta? ... 25
A short tale of a long war ... 34
Part A. Context and the CGSM from the state ... 36
Chapter 1: The water and the people ... 37
The water people ... 37
Going bananas ... 41
Chapter 2: Overlapping projects and ambiguity. ... 47
Land for the landless and water for all ... 48
Conservation for the mangrove and water for the few ... 56
Section B. The CGSM waterscape in the local scale ... 63
Chapter 3: Increasing production and infrastructure ... 64
To live in water by creating land ... 64
The agrarian reform and the Bonanza Marimbera ... 69
Chapter 4: Violence and water ... 76
Agrarian counter-reform and anti-squating palms ... 76
Death fishes, growing palms ... 82
Conclusion ... 89
Bibliography ... 95
Annex I. General timeline ... 101
6 List of figures
Aerial photographs
AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH 1 THE CIÉNAGA IN 1967. IN THE UPPER PART CAN BE SEEN THE OCEAN, THEN THE ISLAND OF SALAMANCA DIVIDING IT FROM THE CIÉNAGA, IN THE SOUTH. SOME BROOKS AND WATER STREAMS CAN BE IDENTIFIED GOING DOWN OF THE SIERRA
NEVADA DE SANTA MARTA AT THE RIGHT. SOURCE: ARCHIVES INVEMAR. 33
AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH 2 THE CIÉNAGA DE PAJARALES IN 1954. HERE ARE LOCATED TWO OF
THE THREE STILT TOWNS. SOURCE: ARCHIVE INVEMAR 39
AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH 3 THE PICTUREFROM 1975 SHOWS THE ESTUARY LAGOON TO THE LEFT, THE PLAYONES IN THE MIDDLE AND THE CROPPING AREA IN THE RIGHT. SOURCE:
ARCHIVE INVEMAR. 72
AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH 4 THE TRONCAL DEL CARIBE IN THE MID 70'S. IT IS CLEAR HOW COMMUNITIES ORGANIZED THEMSELVES AROUND THE HIGHWAY, IN THE ISLA DE
SALAMANCA. ITS CONSTRUCTION FACILITATED THE SETTLEMENT PROCESS. 75
Illustrations
ILUSTRATION 1 LA MALDITA CIRCUNSTANCIA DEL AGUA POR TODAS PARTES. SANDRA
RAMOS. ENGRAVING. 2003 11
ILUSTRATION 2 THE SIERRA NEVADA DE SANTA MARTA FROM THE COASTAL LAGOON.
SOURCE: OWN. 42
ILUSTRATION 3 PHOTOGRAPHS TO ILLUSTRATE HOW DEVELOPMENT WAS MADE: DREDGES AND MODERN ENGINEERS. SOURCE: ARCHIVO GENERAL DE LA NACIÓN, SECCIÓN REPÚBLICA, FONDO MINISTERIO DE
OBRAS PÚBLICAS. REALIZACIONES EN OBRAS PÚBLICAS NACIONALES N´°5. 51
ILUSTRATION 4 CHIVO CABEZÓN (NOTARIUS BONILLAI) IN CHARGE OF SEWAGE IN THE ESTUARY LAGOON AND ALSO ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SOURCES OF FOOD. SOURCE;
HTTP://WWW.ELECONOMISTA.NET/GETATTACHMENT/C993A0A2-6FFB-40AC-B01B-DB0D0CDCAF72?WIDTH=640&HEIGHT=AUTO 65
ILUSTRATION 5 PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE FISHERMEN COMMUNITIES IN 1966. IN THE PICTURE ON THE LEFT SHOWS A CORRAL METHOD AND THE PICTURE ON THE RIGHT A FAMILY 67
Maps
MAP 1 CGSM LOCATION. SOURCE: NATIONAL NATURAL PARKS 14
MAP 2 POLITICAL DIVISIONS AROUND THE CGSM. SOURCE: BLOG FUNDACIÓN MAGDALENA.
HTTP://FUNDACIONMAGDALENA.BLOGSPOT.NL/2011/05/MAPA-DE-FUNDACION.HTML 28
MAP 3 THE WATERSCAPE OF THE CIÉNAGA GRANDE DE SANTA MARTA. SOURCE: VILARDY
AND GONZÁLEZ, REPENSANDO LA CIÉNAGA, 21. 29
MAP 4 THE HIGHWAYS CONSTRUCTED BY THE MINISTRY OF PUBLIC WORKS IN 1957 WITH DETAIL TO THE TRONCAL DEL CARIBE, ACCOMPANIED BY THE TEXT TO COMMUNICATE IS TO GOVERN. SOURCE: ARCHIVO GENERAL DE LA NACIÓN, SECCIÓN REPÚBLICA, FONDO MINISTERIO DE OBRAS PÚBLICAS.
REALIZACIONES EN OBRAS PÚBLICAS NACIONALES N´°5. 51
MAP 5 ZONIFICATION FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF INFRASTRUCTURE. SOURCE: INDERENA.
RÉGIMEN DE LAS AGUAS, 40. 54
MAP 6 SOCIAL CARTOGRAPHY ELABORATED BY FISHERMEN FROM NUEVA VENECIA. THE
7 Tables
TABLE 1 SUMMARY OF THE INSTITUTES RELATED TO THE MANAGEMENT OF THE CGSM 53
TABLE 2 CONSERVATIONAL AREAS IN THE CGSM. SOURCE: VILARDY AND GONZÁLEZ,
REPENSANDO LA CIÉNAGA, 86 62
TABLE 3 VIOLENT ACTS COMMITED IN THE CGSM BETWEEN 1990-2009. SOURCE: CENTRO NACIONAL DE MEMORIA HISTÓRICA. MUJERES Y GUERRA: VÍCTIMAS Y RESISTENTES EN
EL CARIBE COLOMBIANO. BOGOTÁ; CNMH, 2011. 86
TABLE 4 MUNICIPALITIES AND RELATION TO OTHER BODIES OF WATER AND ZONES. SOURCE:
8
Acknowledgements
I want to thank in the first place to the Nederlandse organisatie voor internationalisering in onderwijs -NUFFIC- for financing this research through their Netherlands Fellowship Programmes (NFP). I also want to thank the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation –CEDLA- for promoting my application to the fellowship and for giving me support through all the stages of my master studies.
This thesis and all my works are the reflection of the never ending love and support I receive from my mom, dad and sister. They have been the ones giving me wings to fly, back-up for my projects and the confidence to fulfil everything I have aimed for. For giving me inspiration from social and natural sciences and having the commitment to review all the ideas produced in the craziness of my mind, thank you.
I especially want to thank the Prof. Dr. Michiel Baud, not only for directing this thesis but for also being supportive, understanding, and for having the patience of organizing my ideas to make out of my initial thoughts a coherent project.
During fieldwork I had the support of an endless list of amazing fellow costeños, who opened up their agendas and their stories to me. I want to make a special acknowledgement to Amed Gutiérrez, who guided me through the waters of Nueva Venecia, always with a good story and a smile on his face. This acknowledgement extents to all the fishermen, who were willing to make time for another “ingeniera” coming from far away.
I am beyond grateful with the support from Parques Nacionales de Colombia, especially Alejandro Bastidas and Dayana Carreño, for facilitating the resources of the institution for this researcher to approach the wonders of the Ciénaga. In the INVEMAR, Efraín Viloria and Katherinne Ontiveros opened the doors for me to access the research center and all the valuable archives, maps and photographs I found there. To Jessica González in the Archivo General de la Nación, all my love. This thesis could have not been achieved without the support of Judith Ballesteros and Ángela Rodríguez for all their networks in Santa Marta. To them, thanks again. To Alejandro Camargo, for making this possible, a big hug. For all his comments, my sincerest acknowledgements to Juan Pablo Hidalgo.
9 To all of those back at home who never doubted I could make it and were always sending me their support in the shape of e-mails and phone calls, my endless gratitude. They show how academia is not the work of an individual, but the product of a collective effort. To Mónica Conde for designing the cover of the thesis and visiting me, a special acknowledgment. I must mention the amazing group of people who navigated with me in the streams of socio/environmental studies. First of them, Stefania Gallini, who I admire and respect enormously. To the Socioculturales Complejos, thanks for making me believe that there is a project to be constructed in Colombia as an alternative to development. To Catalina Quiroga and Stefan Ortiz, thanks for the Skype calls and all the inspiration.
Here in The Netherlands I had the support and care of many people, especially Livia Clemente, who saved this thesis more than once. My CMP fellow students became the most wonderful company to discover all the joys of studying Latin America from the Netherlands, a twist of latinidad in the amazing Amsterdam. To Bente, for all her help. To Robbert, thanks for guiding my way back into loving this thesis.
At last, but not least, I want to thank my library companions, always making it exciting to adopt a routine. Thanks to them, I may have an answer when someone asks me about capoeira, culture, subnational identity or ontologies. Or maybe not. I hope somehow they still like water.
10
Introduction
“The damned circumstance of water everywhere… the people descend with decision in enormous amounts of manure, feeling how water is surrounding them everywhere, lower, lower, and the sea chopping on their backs; the people remains next to its beast in the time to depart.”1
Fragment of the poem La Isla en Peso from the Cuban author Virgilio Piñera
This thesis studies the evolution of the waterscape in the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, a region located in the Caribbean part of Colombia, between 1950 and 2010. In there, space is dominated by water, which conquers the realm of the visual. For this reason, one of my main sources of inspiration came from a piece of art located in the Cuban National Museum of Fine Arts. It is an engraving of the Cuban artist Sandra Ramos (Illustration 1). In there, she uses the first sentence of the poem La Isla en Peso from the also Cuban author Virgilio Piñera: “La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes”, which could be roughly translated into “The damned circumstance of water everywhere”. The drawing is a self-portrait of the artist, where she represents her body in a position that makes it look like the map of Cuba. All around her body, the Caribbean Sea is portrayed in a mixture of blue and black, framed by a pattern figure. When I encountered this artwork I had already started my fieldwork for this thesis and selected water as my object of interest. However, to talk about water as damned was shocking for me, since it was somehow idealized in my mind. With her art, Sandra Ramos gave me a hint of what I was to confirm in the process of this research: the relationship between humans and water must not be taken for granted and should be problematized.
And then, there is the circumstance of water everywhere. The main characteristic of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta (CGSM from now onwards) are the interconnections by water between different ecosystems and human settlements that are related to a coastal lagoon of 450 km2. This lagoon is the ciénaga,2 an estuary body of water that is in the transition between sea and land. The extension of the lagoon is so big that once inside of it,
1 This and all of the translations were made by the author. The original text in Spanish says:
“La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes… un pueblo desciende resuelto en enormes postas de abono, sintiendo cómo el agua lo rodea por todas partes,
más abajo, más abajo, y el mar picando en sus espaldas;
un pueblo permanece junto a su bestia en la hora de partir…” Virgilio Piñera, La isla en peso (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2000), 29.
11 the only point of reference is the massive mountain appearing in the East, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. While I was in Nueva Venecia, one of the towns that are constructed in the middle of the coastal lagoon, I could not help but remember the text from the engraving.
Ilustration 1 La maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes. Sandra Ramos. Engraving. 2003
The CGSM is important for many reasons and to very different actors. To start with, it is home to the people of eleven towns. Human settlements in the area have occupied the region since pre-colonial times. It also connects two of the biggest coastal cities in the Caribbean region in Colombia, Santa Marta and Barranquilla. For its biodiversity, it is nowadays protected at national and international level. It is connected through mangrove forests with the salty waters of the Salamanca Golf in the Caribbean Sea. It also gives form to the alluvial plane that is recognized as the “Zona Bananera”, where major volumes of export crops are produced. A complex network of actors are currently interacting at different levels with the Ciénaga, since it represents a biodiversity hotspot, a route between two big cities, a source for fishing industry, the daily environment for its inhabitants, a point of interest of agro-industry
12 and the location for several other processes. All of these interactions are connected by the abovementioned common element: water. 3
The many interests from many actors on this location has made it the center of many conflicts, with social and ecological consequences. For example, during the first two weeks of August in 2016, the CGSM was head of several newspapers in Colombia after thousands of fishes appeared dead on its surface. According to one of these articles,4 almost 20 tons of fishes died in 2016, affecting severely the economy of the fishermen of the region and the quality of the water. The massive death of fish is only one of the many symptoms of the ecological deterioration of the CGSM.
At the same time, some of the inhabitants from the towns in the coastal lagoon are in a process of returning to their homes. As it will be explained in this thesis, the region was one of the most affected by the Colombian internal armed conflict. This conflict started in 1958 and it continues until now, even though a peace alternative is being debated through agreements between the different actors. In the past decades, several armed groups entered the region and changed the dynamics of the CGSM causing five massacres, selective murders and countless traumatic displacements. From fishermen villages and small parcels for self-sustainment, new dynamics took place when agro-industrial expansion, infrastructure developments, technological advances and drug trafficking entered the region. The armed groups played an important role in the changes introduced in the management and distribution of water, particularly diminishing in the case of fishermen and peasants communities. In order to explain this phenomenon, it is important to take into account historical processes taking place in the area, which will be done throughout the thesis.
In 2016, the Colombian government signed peace with one of the guerrillas FARC-EP. The process continues for the ELN guerrilla. After the conclusion of the Peace Agreements it is worth to think about the possibilities of creating a more balanced access and distribution of water in the CGSM. Especially after the scenario of violence is redesigned and overlapping discourses continue developing in the region: social investment, infrastructure and conservation. Investment plans have already been announced, such as one of the national
3 This information is based on: Sandra Vilardy and J.A. González, (Eds.). Repensando la Ciénaga: Nuevas
miradas y estrategias para la sostenibilidad en la Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. (Santa Marta: Universidad
del Magdalena y Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2011). 4
Medio Ambiente, “La Ciénaga de los Peces Muertos”, Semana web, last modified December 11, 2016, http://sostenibilidad.semana.com/medio-ambiente/articulo/cienaga-grande-de-santa-marta-la-cienaga-de-los-peces-muertos/36134
13 government in which more than fifteen million dollars (US$ 15.000.000) will be engaged in the conservation of water streams in the CGSM. Paradoxically, at the same time the government itself is considering the possibilities of expanding highways in the region,5 affecting those same water streams. Researching the environmental history helps understanding the challenges that the CGSM will face. In this case, it is useful because it sheds light in the diverse ways in which the differentiated access to water can be related to the occurrence of such painful events as the massacres and displacements. To avoid the repetition of violent events, the historical conditions that have taken place in the region and the way in which water plays a key role on the configuration of the territory and local life must be recognized.
To achieve that objective I would like to insert this thesis in the debate of what are the causes and consequences of the deep social inequalities that take place in Colombia. It is not my intention to answer the question of what are the causes of this phenomenon. I will rather contribute to the debate by bringing elements that can help see the problematics from the perspective of the 21st century. One of the things I learned during my history studies was that historical research says as much about the time when it was produced than about the time it is researching. Since water is being one of the most conflictive resources in the re-setting of the power struggles after the Peace Agreements, it is valuable to reconsider the role of water in the violent conflict.6
However, the extensive literature on the Colombian armed conflict has debated long about how the violent events in the country have their roots in the unsolved “land” or “agrarian” problem. According to this position, as the violence researcher Alejandro Reyes says, the country has failed systematically in solving “the problem of the unjust distribution of the land and its’ main consequence, the violent uproot of the peasantry and the concentration of the property in the hand of drug dealers and war lords”.7
Through this unjust distribution and violent consequences, around 10 million hectares have been dispossessed from small peasants
5
Tatiana Pardo Ibarra. “El Plan Para Recuperar la Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta”, El Espectador, last modified March 1, 2017, http://www.elespectador.com/print/669769
6 The conflicts around water in Colombia in the context of the peace agreements with the FARC-EP have been
discussed in: Gina Spigarelli, “Water rights and the peace process in Colombia”, Open Democracy, last modified March 1, 2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/gina-spigarelli/water-rights-and-peace-process-in-colombia
14 to big land owners.8 In this line of argumentation, some other natural resources have been overlooked when researching the conflict. I am not claiming that the literature in has not recognized that this dispossession entailed more than taking away land from the peasants. For example, in the document from the National Commission for Repair and Reconciliation (Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación), they conceptualize that “from a wide perspective of what land is, the dispossession can be defined as the interruption of the material relationships that fulfil the role of satisfying basic needs and human relationships are potentialized”.9
Map 1 CGSM Location. Source: National Natural Parks
In this thesis I argue that it is also fundamental to understand the specific role of water in the configuration of such dispossession process and I join the increasing production of literature that tries to open this debate in the context of the Colombian conflict.10 As it will be
8 The numbers around this problem variate a lot, according to the source. For this discussion: IEPRI, CNRR, El
despojo de tierras y territorios. Una aproximación conceptual (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia,
2009), 21. 9
Ibid., 28.
10 Diana Ojeda et al., “Paisajes del despojo cotidiano: acaparamiento de tierra y agua en Montes de María,
Colombia”, Revista de Ciencias Sociales 54, (2015): 107-119.
Diana Ojeda, “Descarbonización y despojo: desigualdades socioambientales y las geografías del cambio climático”, in Desigualdades socioambientales en América Latina, ed. Barbara Göbel et al. (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2014).
Catalina Quiroga, “Ya perdimos la tierra, ahora tenemos que luchar por el agua. Agua y poder en el municipio de Maríalabaja, Montes de María” (master’s thesis, Universidad de los Andes, 2016).
Alejandro Camargo, “La historia política de los humedales colombianos”, Semana, last modified March 1, 2017 www.academia.edu/7315358/La_historia_pol%C3%ADtica_de_los_humedales_colombianos
15 described further on, the concept of waterscape allows to understand such problems by analyzing the power relations around water. I find this is an interesting approach for this study, given the centrality of water in the development of the conflict in the CGSM.
Using the analytical framework of environmental history, this research aims to answer the question “which processes have affected the configuration of the waterscape of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta between 1950 and 2010?”
The period of study is selected because it responds to several processes occurring in the local, regional and national context that I find crucial to understand the dynamics around water. Two processes are the main definers of the timeframe. The first one is the implementation of a set of measures during the fifties aimed to make Colombia a developed country. The second one is the progressive escalation of the armed conflict until the first decade of the 21st century. As the empirical chapters will show, both were the main drivers of the dynamics resulting in a chronic crisis in the CGSM. Even if I make references to processes occurring before 1950, the analysis focuses in the period afterwards. Those references to the 19th century or the first half of the 20th century have the intention of setting the ground to understand the specific dynamics that took form afterwards with modernity and violence as drivers.
The thesis is structured in this Introduction, four empirical chapters (organized in two sections), and Conclusions. In the Introduction I present the reasons to study this case, the theoretical framework and the methodology. In here I make clarity of what I understand by modernity, waterscape, environmental history and violence. The methodology describes the complexity of finding sources to do historical research of both human and non-human agents. Afterwards I describe my object of study by inserting it in the debate of scale. By doing so, the reader grasps the complexity of the region in terms of ecological and social aspects. It also shows how water is the main connector in the region. At last, I include a sub-chapter that describes briefly the context of the Colombian internal war. As I said previously, the armed conflict is not the central debate on this thesis. However, throughout the empirical chapters I will make references to the conflict and the actors that have been involved in it. For that reason I think it is important to introduce them at the beginning of the study.
16 The empirical chapters are organized in two sections. The first one (chapters 1 and 2) describes the specific background and context of the region and the institutional evolution of the state entities that affected governance in the CGSM. The second one (chapters 3 and 4) focuses in the evolution of the waterscape between 1950 and 2010. As for the chronological sequence of the chapters, in the first section I cover from the 19th century antecedents until the institutional transformation in the 1991 constitutional reform. In this section I show how the image of progress that was linked to modernity discourse was projected into agro-businesses and not fishermen and created overlapping and contradicting projects. The second section narrates chronologically the events that transformed the waterscape in the main period of interest of this thesis. In here I describe how specifically processes of power struggles around water and infrastructure came hand in hand with violence. Both sections run throughout the same periods of time, but in order to understand the nuances of the events at the local scale in the CGSM, it is important to understand first the institutional arrangements that gave them form. This is why, even if the events in different sections run parallel in time I analyze them in different chapters. For more clarity, in the Annex I a timeline shows the major events affecting the CGSM.
Chapter 1, The water and the people, focuses on the antecedents that set the ground for the processes occurring in the main period of interest. It explains the particularity of the human settlements in the different scales of the system, starting by the fishermen and their traditional uses of water. It also explores the booming economies based on the plantation of banana crops. I argue that the construction of the irrigation systems for banana plantations since the 19th century in the rivers of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta was the beginning to the modernity driven projects in the region. This chapter shows how different overlapping projects were developed in the area before the adaptation of the modernity discourse at a state level in the 50’s. The abundancy of biodiversity, the proximity to major ports and the fertility of the soils made the CGSM’s terrains attractive for cattle and agriculture. For that reason, the control over water was object of concern. It also points out how the idea of progress and productivity was associated with agro-industrial activities more than artisanal and small scale production. The chapter finishes highlighting the ways in which the waterscape reflected the power inequalities in the access of water before the implementation of the 1950 measures from the central government.
17 The national and institutional efforts to modernize the region are the main topic of chapter 2,
Overlapping projects and ambiguity. After understanding the complexity of the CGSM and
the socio environmental context, this chapter approaches the research question in the scale of the national state, starting at the 50’s and going until the 00’s. It shows how modernity took form in a set of state projects and policies. However, those projects and policies created different and overlapping discourses around the agrarian problem, infrastructure and conservation, which created ambiguity in the state. Such ambiguity permitted the existence of illegality within legality and the continuation of the conflicts, reflected mainly in the legislation around agrarian reform, ciénagas and conservation. Those conflicts perpetuated the poverty and inequality within the region and triggered major ecological degradation. The objective of this chapter is to prove how at the national scale, during the timeframe of this research, the measures taken by the government around water management created room for the continuation of the violence instead of solving the conflict.
Chapter 3, Increasing production and infrastructure, focuses in the specific ways I identified modernity was interpreted in the CGSM in between the 50’s and the 70’s, especially through infrastructure. I start describing the conditions of the fishermen villages located in the lagoon. I continue explaining how the national policies and infrastructures attracted more people to the region. I explain how these new process of settlement changed the conceptions around water and were affected by the power relations between big land owners and the peasants and fishermen. The chapter shows how the population and the biomes were under the pressure of responding to the demand for increased production. I focus especially in the relationship between infrastructure and technological advances (nylon, highways, dikes, polders, box culverts, etc.) and the transformation of the local dynamics towards water. This reflected in processes like fishing, hunting, construction, demographic dynamics, health, entertainment and violence. In this chapter I show how the discourse of modernity faced a complex and dynamic reality and how it generated overlapping and contradicting processes.
The empirical chapters finish with chapter 4, Violence and water. In here I explain how controlling water flows and water infrastructure became central in the development of the armed conflict in the CGSM. The booming economy of Barranquilla and drug trafficking in the Zona Bananera took place in the context of the agrarian reform and the expansion of leftist movements in the country. These processes attracted the armed groups to the CGSM and were determinant in the development of violent events in the region and in the power
18 relationships towards water control, creating again overlapping projects for the region. These contradicting projects used violence as a manifestation of the unequal power relationships around water. I argue that using violence entailed dispossession, scarcity, pollution, and differentiated access to water. The chapter ends with the recapitulation of how these problematics are linked with the massacres occurring in the area and discuss the re-adaptation processes afterwards.
In the Conclusion I discuss my findings and how the study reflects the theory. I also make some inputs on how this research debates with methodological discussions. I close highlighting the importance of studying water in the peace building process that is now taking place in the country and how it should be read in the broader Latin American context.
As my main argument I claim that the processes that have affected the configuration of the waterscape in the CGSM were driven by the discourse of modernity. In the national context, the State promoted a policy for augmenting the productivity to reduce poverty and therefore achieve progress. Applied to the social and ecological context of the Colombian Caribbean coast, a series of ambiguous and contradicting projects were conceived around the CGSM. One example of these was the continuation of the traditional lifestyles based on artisanal fishing and biomes conservation versus the expansion of extractive and agro-industrial ways of production; another example is the use of the zone for the agrarian reform versus the agrarian counter-reform. The control over the water flows and dynamics was fundamental for the development of these projects. In that sense, the waterscape becomes a reflection of the power relations, where the construction of infrastructure and the use of violence were the main manifestations of unequal power relationships. As a result, the CGSM has been in a chronic crisis where, opposite of what the modernity driven discourses expected, the inequalities and poverty are perpetuated.
Theoretical reflections
Studying the role of water on the landscape to understand the development of social relations in the CGSM, inscribes this work in the theoretical discussion that reconsiders the dualism between society and nature which has dominated modernity.11 In the words of the
11 About the división between nature and society, read: B. Latour, We have never been modern (Cambridge,
19 environmental historian Stefania Gallini, the challenges of the present environmental crisis “demand the proper comprehension of the relation between society and nature in new and different forms other than those prevailing up to modern times, heir of the scientific rationalism and the industrial revolution”.12 Within the discipline of history, those demands created the necessity of new narratives. This entails going beyond human processes to research the past, for example taking into account the setting and the climatic and biological dynamics in which events have happened. This is how environmental history has emerged, and it is understood as the study of mutual relationships between society and nature across the time.13 This thesis is inscribed within the basis and guidelines of the environmental history movement.
For the hypothesis of this thesis I use modernity as the main discourse transforming the waterscape of the CGSM. It is, then, fundamental to understand what I mean by modernity and how to problematize it. The expert in urban studies Maria Kaika has developed in her book City of Flows a conceptualization of modernity that fits into the processes I encountered in my study.14 Classically understood as a period of time, modernity has mutated into an analytical category to analyze challenges created by the technological innovations of the latest centuries. In Kaika’s words, modernity is:
“a programmatic vision for social change and progress, linked to industrialization and capitalist expansion, and in effect as an ideology for human emancipation…i.e., the historical geographical process that started with industrialization and urbanization and aimed at taming and controlling nature through technology, human labor, and capital investment”.15
However, once applied to reality, modernity does not achieve the promises of progress, emancipation from nature or more equal distribution of wealth. For that, once applied this “vision” in the setting of the real world, with complex human and ecological realities, society rather goes through a process of modernization. Modernity then is different than
Modernization, but is its cause. Modernization is defined by Kaika as “a transient process of creative destruction whereby any planned change is mutated inevitably at the moment of its
realization, via its interaction with material, cultural, social, economic, and political processes
12 Stefania Gallini, “Sembrando Semillas,” in Semillas de Historia Ambiental, ed. Stefania Gallini (Bogotá:
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2015), 15-35, 23. 13
John R. McNeill,“Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History”, History and Theory 42, no. 4 (2003): 5–43.
14 Maria Kaika, City of flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City, (New York/London: Psychology Press, 2005).
20 in place”.16
Modernization, then, will be understood in this study as the consequences of applying the discourse of modernity to the reality. In that sense, I use the concept of modernization to explain how the discourses of modernity failed to achieve the human emancipation from nature when used in the CGSM, especially focusing in the construction of infrastructure.
Since I use the concept of violence to describe the context in which this process of failed modernity is set, and also as one of the most prominent manifestation of the unequal power relationships around water, it is important to understand what I mean by it. Elsa Blair, expert in violence studies, tried to come up with a concept of violence that describes the exact phenomenon that takes place in Colombia.17 Her main conclusion is that it is not possible to come up with one unique concept, and that Colombian researchers have focus in describing how this violence occurs, more than explaining what it is. She suggests that instead of trying to define it, the efforts in academic research must go in “trying to untangle the violence in the use that we have given to the concept”.18
For this reason, since I use it to make reference to the group of acts that go from massacres, dispossession, murder and fear, I will follow the concept developed by Charles Tilly of collective violence: “a social interaction that immediately inflicts physical damage on persons and/or objects, involves at least two perpetrators of the damage, and results in part from coordination among the persons who perform the damaging acts”.19
But I do not only want to insert this research in the discussion of modernity, infrastructure and violence. I also take position in the different ways in which studying the interactions between humans and non-humans can be done. The environmental researcher Vladimir Sánchez has elaborated a historiographic essay in which he makes a classification of the diverse ways in which environmental history has evolved, especially in the United States and the Latin American contexts. 20 Following his classification, I locate this thesis in the current that Sánchez identifies as hybrid. Hybrid environmental histories are those with the central idea claiming that “neither nature nor the society can be separated at any historic instant of
16 Ibid., 5. Italics from original.
17
Elsa Blair Trujillo, “Aproximación teórica al concepto de violencia: avatares de una definición”, Polít. cult. 32 (2009). Last modified November 18, 2017,
http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0188-77422009000200002&lng=es&nrm=iso 18 Ibid.
19
Charles Tilly, The politics of collective violence. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.
20 Vladimir Sánchez, “La Naturaleza en la Historia. Tendencias y Cambios en la Historia Ambiental” in
21 mankind … So, it is appropriate to state that the society and nature are not related in a hierarchical way, but in a certain symmetrical, horizontal way”.21
This current gives an active role to non-human agents, which is contrasted by Sánchez with other kind of environmental history in which nature becomes mainly a backstage for human action.
Within this conception, some theories and methodologies developed from other disciplines gain relevance in the historical research. One of them is the concept of landscapes, originated in geography, which are defined as “spaces in permanent transformation and renewal, built by interactions between cultural practices and ecosystemic processes which give meaning to them”.22
By not understanding social relations as abstracts, but occurring and affected by space, this concept provides environmental history with tools to track the past actions of non-human agents. However, the main category I will use in this sense is the concept of waterscape. Emerging from landscape studies and political ecology, waterscapes highlight how water becomes the object of dispute that is critical in the historical evolution of the CGSM. Erik Swyngedouw formulated the concept in 1999 to problematize the hybrid character of the water in the space, as it cannot be understood as completely social nor completely natural. For his research about water in Spain, he found that “not a single form of social change can be understood without simultaneously addressing and understanding the transformations of and in the hydrological process”,23 and I argue the same can be said about the CGSM. This concept becomes useful for environmental history since “it brings into focus the geographical situatedness of these relations and provides ample scope for detailed empirical observation, using rich ethnographies and detailed case studies”.24
In short, it is defined by the water researcher Diana López as “a constructed landscape that continuously changes and transforms by sustaining a complex assemble of institutional frameworks, discursive practices, technical choices and struggles over meanings that usually surpass a fixed scale”, all driven by water.25
Following these conceptualizations, understanding water as a hybrid that runs through different social and natural scales but can still be situated in space are the most attractive features of using waterscape to analyze the process of modernity
21 Ibid., 47.
22 Susana Barrera Lobatón and J. Monroy Hernández, Perspectivas Sobre el Paisaje (Bogotá: Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, 2014), 35.
23 Erik Swyngedouw, "Modernity and hybridity: nature, regeneracionismo, and the production of the Spanish
waterscape, 1890–1930." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (1999): 444.
24 Timothy Karpouzoglou and Sumit Vij. "Waterscape: a perspective for understanding the contested geography
of water." Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 4, no. 3 (2017): 2.
25 Diana Marcela López Rivera, Contested Urban Waterscapes: Water, Power and Urban fragmentation in
22 in the CGSM. However, it is important to understand that even within these scales differences may be found. For that reason I also follow the argument from the environmental researcher Fabio de Castro who warns about the risk of studying the institutions in charge of natural resources management as monolithic institutions.26 In this case, nor the state, agri-businesses nor the local communities act like fixed entities. The nuances of their composition will be revealed throughout the analysis of the processes.
The other attractive of using the waterscape concept for this research is that it allows to understand how inequalities are created and re-enforced through water, especially useful in the conflictive context of the CGSM. In their study about water governance in Peru, the researchers Jessica Budds and Leonith Hinojosa argue that waterscapes become the materialization of “the social relations, power and policy structures related to water control, influencing…the visible results of accessing or being excluded to hydric resources and the transformations of life, sustains and landscapes”.27 In that sense, “weaving into analyses questions around water access and control, especially in the Global South, means that how water services are managed and organized are not purely based on technical water reform agendas; they are deeply politicized and inherently contested”.28 For this research, this means that the access or exclusion from different actors are reflected on the waterscape across time. Therefore studying it is useful to understand the complex relations that have led to violent events in the region, with the extinction of livelihoods and the ecosystems themselves.
Since one of the main motivations for this research is to contribute to the construction of peace, I follow the concepts and motivations of the Water Justice Movement. As formulated by Margreet Zwarteveen and Rutgerd Boelens, it is the application of the ideals of the environmental justice movement to water struggles. For them, achieving justice requires to combine the complex and paradoxical process of demanding a more widespread socio-economical distribution as well as a better cultural and political recognition. These authors sustain that “understanding water justice requires creative analyses that link geo-hydrological and climatological insights into water availability patterns with understandings of the socio-technical and legal-cultural determinants of how available water flows are accessed and
26 Fábio de Castro, “Local politics of floodplain tenure in the Amazon”, International Journal of the Commons
10 (2016), 1. 27
Jessica Budds, and Leonith Hinojosa, “Restructuring and Rescaling Water Governance in Mining Contexts: the Co-Production of Waterscapes in Perú,” Water Altern 5 (2012): 119-137, 5.
23 allocated”.29
This research attempts to contribute to the construction of water justice by understanding complex link that determine water availability patterns.
All the above mentioned concepts are reflected in the structure of the thesis. I do not only use the chronological development of events to separate the analysis into chapters. I also explain first the social and ecological context, to understand the realities that the incoming discourses faced and how non-human agents were active in the configuration of the dynamics. Then, I explain how I interpret the modernity discourse affected the processes in the CGSM by identifying it in the group of projects and laws created by the state that started in the 50’s and continued until nowadays. The waterscape is reflected in the overlapping projects and developments in the CGSM and how they can be traced through water, revealing the unequal power relationships that found their expression in violence. The role of all the actors at different scales is described in detail, to understand them in their heterogeneity.
Methodology
Within this subchapter I will describe the different sources I collected and my position as a researcher. An adequate comprehension of these inequities implicates that, in historical research, the process of digging in the past must go beyond the official sources. It should dialogue with sources and informers horizontally, “with the purpose that conceptualizations become linked to territoriality processes as well as to the generation of knowledge based on local contexts, focused on actions”. 30
Amid this conception, academia should go beyond the simple role of informer and create pluralism in knowledge that, eventually, can be re-constructed by local actors. To achieve this goal, during fieldwork my activities focused on obtaining two types of sources: from archives or libraries and from participative observation. My archival work included geographical research, especially maps and aerial photography. From those visual sources I collected evidence on the changes in the waterscape of the CGSM, such as reduction of water areas, disappearing of rivers and water streams, augmentation of the agricultural frontier, population increase, among others. Maps and reports from biological and institutional points of view were collected to show how the State
29 Margreet Zwarteveen and Rutgerd Boelens, "Defining, researching and struggling for water justice: Some
conceptual building blocks for research and action", Water International 39.2 (2014): 144.
30 Stefan Ortiz, Catalina Quiroga and Ricardo de la Pava. Pensando la Agroecología desde Abajo: Paisajes
24 and certain actors with power, such as engineers and politicians represented the Ciénaga and its surroundings. Several decisions were made based on such appreciations, so it is important to understand them. I also collected several scripts and reports from biologist, geographers, engineers, etc., who tried to go further in understanding how the ecosystems works and how communities were interacting with it. With some reports dating from 1953, this information would be used to narrate how the Ciénaga and its inhabitants were living then and how that has evolved during the time period of interest. The other kind of archival information I collected came from personal and private archives from the people who inhabits the towns there. Composed mainly by private pictures and pamphlets or newspapers, these documents help me understand how the dialogue between the authorities (whether academic or from the official institutions) and the people from the region has taken place in the past.
Moving to Santa Marta and going to the towns in the CGSM, permitted me to interact not only with inhabitants of the region, but also experts and people in charge of monitoring the ecosystem. There are also sensorial and visual experiences that only can be appreciated in the region itself i. e., there is no way of understand the power that water has over the life of people in the stilt31 towns until my freedom of movement was restricted by water. It is almost impossible to go out of the house to anywhere without a canoe or any other type of boat. Doing fieldwork also helped me to understand how resistance and resilience work for locals, while I got stuck in the highway that goes through the Ciénaga for more than three hours. The local inhabitants were demanding that the electricity company did not cut the service, so they decided to block the highway. Thousands of passengers and merchandise (including alive cattle) had to wait and get a sense of the injustice of how poorly public services are in those towns.
Interviews and focal groups provided with the point of view of the inhabitants about the history of water and people in the Ciénaga. Violence was a topic that came not only in their narratives but also on the maps the fishermen draw for me in social cartography exercises. Even if it was still painful and hard to deal with, it strengthen the engagement to my research object. I had to show the respect and importance the topic deserved. For security reasons I will not use the name of any of my interviewees. In total, I collected more than 200 aerial photographs, 50 maps, 20 interviews, 15 reports and 20 interviews.
31
From now onwards when I make reference to stilt towns I am making reference to the pueblos palafíticos de la CGSM: Nueva Venecia, Buenavista and Bocas de Aracataca. These towns are particular because of the construction of their houses over wood structures within water, known as palafitos.
25 Being from Santa Marta and having an acknowledged institutions supporting me (CEDLA and the University of Amsterdam) facilitated a lot my fieldwork. It also granted me access to workers of the palm and the banana industry, the academic community and locals. The contrast between these different views on what the Ciénaga is and what it represents to the different actors is what I value the most of what I got from doing fieldwork.
About the use of maps and aerial photographs for historical research I follow the position of Gallini et al. when they say that “maps, pictures, photographs, drawings, illustration….are instruments used by society to relate culturally and materially with their context, and in that sense they are telling tracers of the historical transformation of this relationship”.32 For this reason, in this research I will use maps and aerial photographs not only as illustrations of the processes I am describing, but also as one of the tools that different actors used to modernize the CGSM. By showing how the region was interpreted and re-interpreted, especially in the fragmenting of the maps in sections and zones, I can reflect the overlapping views over the region. For this, this sources also show how “gradually the political-administrative management was built in the modern territory”.33
It is important to say that I also take part on this process of overlapping views over the region when I use the concept of waterscape to analyze it and use maps to locate it. It is for that reason that I will like to make clarity of what exactly I mean when I refer to the CGSM.
What is the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta?
After reviewing part of the extensive literature on the CGSM, I noticed that much of it has difficulty defining the region. The same happens when it is asked to the people living there. It could be a coastal lagoon, a village, a region or a home, depending on the actor. In order to understand what it is, first I will elaborate in the problem of perspective and how the Ciénaga cannot be considered as a fixed unity. With this I highlight the discussion on perception and scale in environmental history. Some additional information on the formation, climate, location and biology of the CGSM will be described in order to make clear to the reader the
32 Stefania Gallini, Sofía de la Rosa and Rigoberto Abello. "Historia ambiental. Hojas de ruta", in Hojas de ruta.
Guías para el estudio socioecológico de la alta montaña en Colombia, ed. Paula Ungar (Bogotá: Instituto de
Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt., 2015), 52. 33 Ibid, 53.
26 complexity and special conditions of the Ciénaga and make a point about the importance of both temperature and water have in this place.34
Being from the Caribbean, immediately when I arrive there my accent changes, and my interactions with people are less rigid, more fluid and more direct. In the northern part of continental Colombia, this Caribbean attitude transforms into a constant mamadera de gallo, people trying to make jokes out of every situation.35 Going back to the Caribbean to do fieldwork for this thesis, I noticed people also use this mamadera de gallo to stress class differences, but without so much confrontation. One clear example occurred when I was having a conversation with some fishermen in Nueva Venecia, one of the three stilt towns in the CGSM. We were talking about the weather, complaining about the high temperatures, since in that moment it was 43°C.36 The conversation went on and I said that I considered weather in Santa Marta, the city where I was born and lived during my childhood, more pleasant that in Barranquilla, the biggest and most important city of the region. One of the fishermen told me I was crazy, that in Barranquilla there were much more trees than in Santa Marta and therefore it had more wind. I told him he was crazy, and the discussion went on until he asked me where I used to live in Santa Marta. I replied I lived in El Rodadero, an upper middle class neighborhood, in a two story house with balconies, located two streets away from the ocean. He then told me that the weather is not the same for rich than it is for poor, after daring me to go to Pescaito at noon anyday. That is a low class fishermen neighborhood in Santa Marta, where he had to move after the massacre that took place in Nueva Venecia in the year 2000.
Much further from the ocean, with no urban trees, Pescaito indeed provides a different climatic experience of Santa Marta than El Rodadero. We continued talking, and then all the fishermen started calling me pechichona, which would translate to something similar to spoiled. It was clear they held me in respect, but draw the line stating that I had it way easier in life than they did, even if we lived in the same city. To reflect about these urban inequalities, also made me think about how subjective my appreciation of the Ciénaga weather was. During my entire childhood I crossed the Ciénaga every weekend from Santa
34 A detailed account on the ecological conditions of the CGSM in: J. Garay, et al. Los manglares de la
ecorregión cíenaga grande de Santa Marta: pasado presente y futuro, (Bogotá. Instituto de Investigaciones
Marinas y Costeras, 2004). 35
To understand more about the inhabitants of the Colombian Caribbean Coast, Orlando Fals Borda. Historia
doble de la Costa. "Mompox y Loba, 4 vols (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1979).
27 Marta to Barranquilla, to visit family. I always did it in my dad’s car, with the wind coming through the windows and seated in comfortable chairs. In my memory it was a hot but windy place, completely bearable. That was a very different experience from what I had to face during fieldwork. The CGSM is hot, really hot. My hat, giant bottle of water, sun screen and cotton clothes equipment proved useless against dehydration and fever. Humidity sticks to the skin and the air in such a way that it feels like constantly breathing the steam coming out of a cup of tea. For the people living to the south side of the Troncal del Caribe, the highway connecting Santa Marta and Barranquilla, the ocean breeze becomes a powerless wind that barely moves the garbage on the floor. Electricity becomes a must, in order to keep fans on in every house, but the regional company in charge of providing the service has not managed to keep it continuously running, as mentioned before. The temperature becomes one of the most striking sensations of being in the Ciénaga.
And then there is the circumstance of water. It is, as in the poem at the beginning of the thesis, everywhere. And it is not only one type of water. Taking the Troncal del Caribe from Santa Marta to Barranquilla, the most evident one is the ocean, to the north, strong and vigorous compared to the mixed water ciénagas or estuaries in the south. The estuaries are “partially enclosed bodies of water along coastlines where fresh water and salt water meet and mix”.37
No rain, no pipes, but big blue tanks in the entrance of every house, waiting for the truck to come and fill them out with water coming from the supply system from the municipality of Ciénaga, Magdalena. Small ponds can be seen here and there, among islands of garbage, filled with still, smelly water. Some billboards doing propaganda for the government announce the construction and maintenance of some spouts, and publicizing the fulfilling of campaign promises. Continuing the route, just before arriving to Barranquilla, modern infrastructure rises over the brown, steady waters from the Magdalena River, the biggest and most important one in Colombia. Barranquilla is where the river comes to encounter the ocean, and leave within it all the sediments and waste it picked up along the way. From such abundance comes fish and fishermen, houses and inhabitants, businesses and restaurants, but no fresh water for human consumption. And as I went deeper and deeper in trying to understand how it came to be that way, I could not help but wonder who were these people living there and why did they decide to establish themselves in such harsh and watery
37 For the United States Environmental protection Agency estuaries are also “transition zone between oceans
and continents. An estuary has a free connection with the ocean. Fresh water input from land sources (usually rivers) dilutes the estuary's salt content”. United States Environmental protection Agency, “Estuarine Science,”
University of Rhode Island Office of Marine Programs, last modified October 03, 2017,
28 conditions. I figured that, in order to understand that process, I had to step back, not only in time, as every historian does, but also in scale.
Map 2 Political divisions around the CGSM. Source: Blog Fundación Magdalena. http://fundacionmagdalena.blogspot.nl/2011/05/mapa-de-fundacion.html
Sandra Vilardy is a biologist that has become one of the recognizable faces nowadays defending the CGSM.38 She suggests it should be regarded as an ecoregion, a territorial concept seeking to include “those systems interacting ecologically with the Ciénaga in such a way that are determining for its existence in the long term”.39
In her book Repensando la
Ciénaga, she presents ecoregion in opposition to other territorial concepts like coastal lagoon
and delta-estuary complex, which have been used by academics, politicians and inhabitants to govern the area. The three concepts are approaches to a complex reality, and whereas coastal lagoon and delta-estuary complex attempt to use categories with scientific background from biology and geology to establish limits to the Ciénaga, ecoregion also takes into account the social organizations and institutions to understand its functioning and limits. In this case, the ecoregion includes seven eco-districts: coastal lagoon, mangrove plain, floodplain, coastal plain, marine area, salt pans and dunes. It also includes eleven towns with their jurisdictions, one National parks, one RAMSAR40 protected area, one Sanctuary of flora and fauna, one zone of exclusive reserve, one area of importance for birds and one Biosphere reserve (Map
38 During the multiple debates that are taking place now in the press and in academia, Vilardy has become the
reference to protect the environment. For more information: Julio Carrizosa Umaña, “Sandra Vilardy, la protectora de Ciénaga Grande”, El Espectador, last modified October 03, 2017,
https://www.elespectador.com/noticias/medio-ambiente/sandra-vilardy-protectora-de-cienaga-grande-articulo-603643
39
Vilardy and González, Repensando la Ciénaga, 21.
40 “The Convention on Wetlands, called the Ramsar Convention, is the intergovernmental treaty that provides
29 3). Vilardy manages to go further in the comprehension of the realities of the territory and she is emphatic in saying that how a society approaches a region has an impact on the governance of such region. As J. Christopher Brown and Mark Purcell argue in their study about the Brazilian Amazon, there is nothing inherent about scale, and therefore it should be analyzed.41
Map 3 The waterscape of the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta. Source: Vilardy and González, Repensando la Ciénaga, 21.
In the case of Vilardy’s approach, even if she is using social and natural elements to delimitate the CGSM, she does not focus on the power struggles that configure the region. In this thesis I will use her delimitation of the CGSM, however I do not consider it under the denomination of ecoregion, but I claim it should be rather read as a waterscape. Her delimitation says that:
“The common element between the components of the ecoregion is water, including all the different shapes it can appear in the system (surface water: fresh water, estuary water, salty water and groundwater). It is composed by the adjacent marine area (Gulf of Salamanca), the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta, the ciénagas and spouts of the Salamanca Island and the Ciénaga de Pajarales, the alluvial plains of the Zona Bananera and the floodplain between the Magdalena River to the Ciénaga del Cerro de San Antonio”.42
The benefits of using this delimitation is that it helps me to consider the dialogue between the ecosystemic and social arrangements that are modified by the power relationships around water. By this, I mean that the CGSM is not only the coastal lagoon identified as the “Ciénaga Grande”, but also the places that are connected to it by water: the east part connected to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and all its rivers; the
41
Christopher Brown and Mark Purcell, “There’s nothing inherent about scale: political ecology, the local trap, and the politics of development in the Brazilian Amazon”, Geoforum 36 (2005), 607.
30 ciénagas and playones in the south area; the sea in the north; and last the Magdalena River in the west. But, since I want to focus on the power relations that surround that are embedded in the water, ecoregion is not the adequate denomination for it (Annex II. Municipalities around the CGSM and their relation to other bodies of water)
However, I do understand that the concepts of ecosystems, regions, areas, territory, ecoregion or in that case, any attempt to create limits falls short, depending the gaze under it is regarded. In the CGSM case, the waterscape does not include the highly urbanized Andes, where “eighty per cent of the Colombian population, including the cities of Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and Barranquilla are located in the Magdalena [River] watershed”.43
Since 1973 the scientific community has studied the impact of the Magdalena River in the CGSM, when it was published an article associating extreme high water levels from the Magdalena River with the disappearance of the oyster Crassostrea rhizophorae from the Ciénaga.44 For the people, the connection is evident, since in most of my interviews the inhabitants told me their families moved from the west to la Ciénaga through the complex canal network that communicated the river with the coastal lagoon. What I want to highlight is that the concept of waterscape does not fit all the interconnections occurring with the CGSM, and for example, it does not include the cities creating sewage waters affecting it through the Magdalena River. Being that one of the major attractions of environmental history as a discipline is to select scales that are not only determined by social institutions, but also natural boundaries like river flows, mountain systems and others, the CGSM is a perfect example on how these boundaries are also complex in their interconnections and are not fixed in time.45
Time, therefore, is also an important variable in the understanding of the Ciénaga. Going back to before the quaternary, in the location where today the CGSM is found, there was the delta of the Magdalena River. The basin was created after a movement in the tectonic plates that gave origin to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the gradual relocation of the river to the West. Sea levels changes, sediments and clogging of paleocauces where the processes
43 John B. R. Agard and Angela, Cropper, “Caribbean Sea ecosystem assessment (CARSEA)”, Caribbean
Marine Studies, Special Edition (2007): 2.
44
Reinhard Kaufmann and Frank Hevert, "El régimen fluviométrico del río Magdalena y su importancia para la Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta." Mitt. Inst. Colombo-Alemán Invest. Cient7, no. 121. (1973).
45 On scale being one of the main innovations of environmental history: Stefania Gallini, “Historia, Ambiente,
Política: El Camino de La Historia Ambiental En América Latina”, Nómadas 30 (2009): 92–102.
McNeill, “Observations on the Nature”. In the aforementioned article of Brown and Purcell, “There’s nothing”, they also analyze the scale problem for Political Ecology, proving how essential it is to question and argument the use of a specific scale while doing socio/environmental research.
