A Day in Carmen’s Life: Community and Feminist Economies in the FARC-EP Reincorporation Process

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Agua Bonita (Caquetá, Colombia), this article explores how female ex-guerrilla fighters, and particularly Carmen, a local leader, shape economic assemblages that intertwine the domestic, the communal, and the political. Through their practices—which range from agricultural work, producing essences, and hosting visitors to managing cooperation projects and participating in political and feminist networks—the challenges and tensions of transitioning to a life without weapons become evident. Drawing on theorists such as J. K. Gibson-Graham and Verónica Gago, the diverse and contradictory forms of community and baroque economies are analyzed in a specific case; economies that, far from being pure, are characterized by mutual contamination, complementarity, and contradiction. Queering capitalism and pluralizing neoliberalism are ways of complicating classical analytical frameworks and denaturalizing the economy as an exclusive domain of the market, integrating social reproduction, interdependence, and the sustainability of life as the core of analysis.