When Forests Run Amok: War and its Afterlives in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian Territories, Daniel Ruiz-Serna, 2023

Abstract

In the forests and rivers of Bajo Atrato, a multitude of abrasive presences now disrupt the proper rhythms of life and death. The spirits of those who were violently killed and whose bodies were not appropriately buried wander through the forest, as do wicked jaguars, drawn by the taste of human flesh. There are large logjams that resemble floating cemeteries of trees and prevent people from pursuing the very journeys that keep their rivers alive. It is not uncommon to encounter snakes capable of injecting into their victims' wounds a poison that pollutes the former villages and forests that warlords have transformed into oil-palm plantations, and it is known that the forest is peopled by evil beings who, after having been released by power ful shamans in their attempt to protect communities from the raids carried out by guerrilla and paramilitary armies, are now wreaking havoc, drowning people and devouring their noses and their fin gers. These are some of the wounds that irregular warfare has engraved upon the territories of Afro-Colombian, Emberá, and Wounaan peoples living in Bajo Atrato, a region located in Chocó, on the northwestern Colombian Pacific coast. Besides the most flagrant and immediate effects in terms of human rights violations and environmental degradation, war has also compromised the web of relations through which these peoples and myriad other-than-human sen-tient beings weave their lives together. War, as this book discusses, is seldom an exclusively human experience, and we must begin to take seriously the vio lence perpetrated against the animals, the spirits, and the other-than-human beings that forests and rivers harbor, as the communities of Bajo Atrato already do. How to bear witness to, and be accountable for, forest and river ecologies running amok and causing damage that cannot be easily tackled with the language of human rights or environmental degradation? This book approaches the question through an ethnographic investigation into the violent transformations that war has produced in the relations that Afro-Colombian and Indigenous peoples weave with their territories, including the relations they Introduction 2 Introduction cultivate with the other-than-human beings that make up forests and rivers. In our understanding of war and its afterlives in other-than-human worlds, what is the place that concepts such as human rights, trauma, reparation, and damage have? There is a form of vio lence perpetrated against Indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories that exceeds that which often is conceptualized as environmental damage (e.g., depletion of natu ral resources, pollution of ecosystems, transformation of land use, and loss of biodiversity). I call this vio lence ecological as it encompasses world-making relations between diff er ent kinds of sentient beings-including animals, spirits, rivers, and forests-that are all endowed with some degree of personhood and conscious intent. This ecological vio lence compels us to look attentively at other-than-human forms of suffering and at those worlds in which humans are not the only actors, worlds in which the allocation of events to either natu ral or cultural domains is no longer simple and neat. Who or what has been harmed, for instance, by the air strikes which infuriated the spirits that protect wild animals and who, following these attacks, de cided to keep game inaccessible to people? Is this harm locatable in the world itself, or does it reside within the so-called cultural repre sen ta tions that certain peoples have forged about nature? We must also consider the deaths of those who were never buried and whose pain, in the parlance of local communities, taints the land and thus accentuates people's strug gles to have successful harvests. Do these deaths express a form of collective trauma, or do they go beyond that, transforming the very qualities of places? These types of harm force us to reconsider what constitutes justice and what the material grounds of reparation might be, particularly because these collective and intersubjective experiences of war challenge assumptions regarding selfhood, bodies, the ele ments of life, the distinctiveness of humans, and, of course, the possibilities of reparation, recovery, and the regaining of agency in contexts of blatant vio lence. My aim is to move our understanding of vio lence, suffering, and justice out of the human rights framework and of modern multicultural dualisms (e.g., humans and the environment, subjects and objects, real ity and beliefs) and to bring it into a broader web of human and other-than-human relations that are emerging from, and making pos si ble, what communities in Bajo Atrato experience as a living territory. The spectacle that is so often associated with warfare (massacres, humanitarian crises, power dynamics among the actors involved) often receives more attention than its delayed and dispersed forms of devastation and how these affect ecologies emerging from human and other-than-human entanglements. These events through which this vio lence is made