Expertos y seguidores. Poder nominador del presidente, burocracia y capacidad del estado Colombiano, 2002-2010

Politólogo (a)Pregrad

What are natural parks for? Knowledge and power in the Alto fragua-indi wasi natural park in Colombia

Object/context: Natural parks are usually presented as the most important state-led strategy to promote the environmental conservation of a particular area. However, scarce anthropological and political science literature on this topic suggests that natural parks contribute to consolidate state power as well. This article explains how natural parks achieve said goal by studying the declaration and the initial years of the Alto Fragua-Indi Wasi Natural Park (located in Caquetá, Colombia). Methodology: The data for this study was gathered from official documents, historical archives and at least twenty in-depth interviews with state officials and social leaders. Conclusions: The article argues three central points. First, natural parks favor state power because they tend to make population and territories more legible. Second, there are six types of state legibility (convergent, denied, agreed, imposed, stopped and indifferent), which correspond to the historical moment and the social actors that relate to the state. Third, state legibility in the Alto Fragua-Indi Wasi Natural Park increased as the result of a political process characterized by the convergence of state and social interests. Contribution: The article provides conceptual and empirical tools to illustrate how natural parks strengthen the state and make state-society relations more complex. In general terms, this research paper is an invitation to study problems related to the state’s environmental and territorial planning from the optic of political science. © 2019 Universidad de los Andes, Bogota Colombia. All rights reserved

Contando el conteo: mi experiencia como jurado de votación

Al llegar a Corferias, un agente de policía me pidió la cédula y la prueba de que había sido citado para ser jurado de votación. Así fuimos llegando los seis que habíamos sido elegidos de forma aleatoria y con quienes compartiría todo mi domingo. Abrimos el material a las 7 am, lo organizamos y nos dividimos las tareas según el lugar donde nos habíamos sentado al llegar. A las 8 de la mañana sonó el himno nacional: la señal que dio comienzo a las votaciones

The Political Economy Of Amazon Deforestation: Subnational Development And The Uneven Reach Of The Colombian State

The recent peace process between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has prompted radical changes in the country’s Amazon region. A decrease in violence has been accompanied by an increase in deforestation, suggesting that good things do not always come together. My dissertation studies the political economy of Amazon deforestation through a cross-disciplinary analysis linking studies of modern state formation with tropical deforestation. As such, it offers an empirically grounded explanation for differential levels of deforestation in the Colombian Amazon. Employing a mixed-methods research strategy, I reviewed historical archives on regional development, interviewed more than ninety local leaders in the region, and produced an original geodatabase on cumulative forest loss. This empirical strategy allowed me to measure Amazonian deforestation since the 1970s and systematically compare Caquetá and Putumayo, which are the two most similar departments with different levels of cumulative deforestation. Based on this research design, this dissertation suggests that an explanation of different levels of cumulative deforestation needs to seriously consider both the degree and the type of territorial integration. Cumulative deforestation and territorial integration tend to be high in departments like Caquetá and Putumayo, which transitioned from extractive economies to agrarian colonization in the first decades of the twentieth century. Both cases were economically and politically similar until the mid-1950s, when their economic and political incorporation trajectories and corresponding levels of deforestation began to diverge as a result of the different integration strategies promoted by the Colombian state between 1948 and 1982 during the ‘developmental era’. Cumulative deforestation in Caquetá (compared to Putumayo) tends to be higher because both the state and market forces succeeded in establishing an integration trajectory based on the farming of livestock. This research has the potential to improve our understanding on the geopolitical drivers of Amazon deforestation. Contemporary explanations that emphasize the withdrawal of the FARC are incomplete insofar as they fail to recognize that the guerilla organization used to be very influential in both departments and that deforestation in post-conflict Colombia has not increased equally. My dissertation also illustrates the necessity of avoiding the geographical determinism characteristic of much recent political science research and recognizing that geographical phenomena can sometimes be endogenous to the discipline’s most important variables of interest. An increasing interest in environmental issues has the potential to compel scholars and policy makers to better understand exactly how geography matters, both socially and politically

Contando el conteo: mi experiencia como jurado de votación

Al llegar a Corferias, un agente de policía me pidió la cédula y la prueba de que había sido citado para ser jurado de votación. Así fuimos llegando los seis que habíamos sido elegidos de forma aleatoria y con quienes compartiría todo mi domingo. Abrimos el material a las 7 am, lo organizamos y nos dividimos las tareas según el lugar donde nos habíamos sentado al llegar. A las 8 de la mañana sonó el himno nacional: la señal que dio comienzo a las votaciones

LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DEL ESTADO LOCAL EN COLOMBIA

La violencia ocurrida después de que las FARC entregaran las armas en varias regiones del país es una prueba de que la construcción de paz no solo depende de la implementación de los acuerdos de paz, sino también del fortalecimiento del Estado local, lo cual, a su turno, debe reconocer las particularidades de las regiones que han sido gravemente afectadas por el conflicto armado. De esto no se sigue necesariamente que cada municipio o vereda deba tener una estrategia diferente y única. El objetivo de este artículo es, con base en el estudio detallado de cinco municipios, proponer herramientas de tipo teórico que faciliten encontrar un balance entre una ley universal que desestima las singularidades del contexto local y una normatividad local poco atenta a las exigencias de coherencia general del Estado.Violence that has occurred after the FARC laid down their weapons in several regions of the country demonstrates that peace building depends not only on the implementation of the peace accords, but also on increasing the capacity of the state at the local level. There is an important academic and social agreement about the necessity to recognize the particular characteristics of regions that have been afflicted by the armed conflict. However, this agreement does not imply that each municipality or village needs to have a totally different and unique strategy. In this context, based on the systematic study of five municipalities, the aim of this article is to propose some theoretical tools to find a balance between a universal law that disregards the particular characteristics of local contexts and a local law that discounts the centralizing features of any state

Panel 2: Environmental Crimes and Eco-trafficking

What are the social, political and criminal implications of massive deforestation of the Amazon and the growth in environmental crimes

Panel 2: Crímenes ambientales y ecotráfico

¿Cuáles son las implicaciones sociales, políticas y criminales de la deforestación masiva del Amazonas y el crecimiento de los crímenes ambientales