Oil Palm in Tumaco, Colombia, as a geopolitical issue

Abstract

The article proposes to consider the threat of illegal armed groups and crops for illicit use as a strategy of some Colombian State institutions to hide other rivalries regarding the territory, its use and its exploitation in Tumaco. In other words, the production and distribution of drugs has had a deterministic role in the explanations of rivalries in that municipality, overshadowing other phenomena that have the same relevance for its habitants, such as the presence of palm oil companies. Based on critical geopolitics and the fieldwork carried out in 2018, the text presents a series of arguments that link oil palm monocultures with dis-placement and the presence of armed groups. The overlap between legal and illegal elements reveals tensions on territory appropriation, in whose epicenter are the representatives of the Afro-descendant and local indigenous communities.