Securing the port against the Black poor in Buenaventura, Colombia

In May 2017, the community of Buenaventura, Colombia's main port and the city with the largest Afrodescendant population, went on a general strike. By scrutinising this event, this article reveals some shades of the entanglements of race, class, political subjectivity, security, capitalist deve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCity (London, England) Vol. 26; no. 5-6; pp. 1045 - 1062
Main Author Cortes-Nieto, Johanna del Pilar
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 02.11.2022
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Buenaventura
Capitalism
Cities
Coercion
Colombia
Colonialism
Criminality
development
Discourse analysis
General strike
Insecurity
Law
Local population
Population
port
precarity
Race
racial capitalism
Regulation
resistance
Security
Strikes
Subjectivity
Violence
Colombia
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Summary:In May 2017, the community of Buenaventura, Colombia's main port and the city with the largest Afrodescendant population, went on a general strike. By scrutinising this event, this article reveals some shades of the entanglements of race, class, political subjectivity, security, capitalist development and histories of colonialism that structure the racial dynamics of space. Relying upon discourse analysis of policy papers, legal regulations and secondary sources, coupled with informal interviews and direct observation, it is argued that violence and coercion have been central techniques for harnessing the local poor population in accordance with the needs of the port as the emblem of capitalist development. The article pays particular attention to how law is implicated in the violence deployed in the city-port either as a legitimising factor or as discursive formation which portrays the local population as dangerous and thereby as a security threat to the port. This narrative about the insecurity of the poor, created and recreated by the law, reinforces the image of the Black population as undeserving poor, while at the same time legitimising the coercive interventions that have characterised the control of criminality and social mobilisation in the city-port. However, the strike allows us to see that precarity and violence have resulted in a politically active population and sophisticated levels of mobilisation which have managed to stop capitalist development, at least for a while.
ISSN:1360-4813
1470-3629
DOI:10.1080/13604813.2022.2126222