Protecting the Mountain, Stripping the Peasant. Tensions by Territorial Planning in Viotá (Cundinamarca, Colombia)

Abstract

This article addresses the territorial conflict between peasant communities of coffee farmers in Viotá (Cundinamarca, Colombia) and the Colombian state as a result of land management and rural territorial planning decisions. In Colombia, the institutional territorial planning finds great difficulties of implementation due to the ignorance of the forms of life and the local ordinances that occur in it. Through ethnographical stories, tours, and interviews with the peasants, it is evident how the disagreement between the institutional forms of land management and the practices and senses of their communities turn into territorial conflicts that modify the forms in which they relate to the inhabited space, breaking into great challenges for its organization, creating movements around the autonomous management of the territory, its defense and that of peasant life forms.