A Policy at the Edge of Life: Poppies, State and Peasant Life in Northeastern Nariño (Colombia)

Abstract

The article analyzes how farming families from Las Mesas (Nariño, Colombia) conceive of their territory as the paradise, recall the poppy boom as the fury of the poppy, and perceive the State as an absent and indifferent father. By means of a qualitative methodology that combines ethnographic and historical records and analysis, this article shows how these conceptions intertwine and create tensions amid productive, social, cultural, and political changes. The paradise is a recent narrative driven by activist groups and environmental associations that symbolizes an autonomous peasant life based on agrobiodiversity and solidarity; the fury of the poppy refers to the boom and crisis derived from the illicit economy and the spraying of glyphosate; and the absent father expresses the ambivalent relationship with a State marked by clientelism and intermittence, in contrast to which the experience of the peasant association Flor de Mayo El Paraíso asserts a new form of political agency. This politics at the edge of life is based on collective, modest, and situational actions; it seeks to revitalize knowledge, strengthen peasant identity, and promote associative enterprises as a response to slow violence and long-standing inequalities.