“¡El Pueblo no se rinde, Carajo!” (The People Will Never Give Up, Dammit!):
A Case Study of the Buenaventura Civic Movement’s
Contributions to Insurgent Planning
By
Vanessa Toro Barragán
B.A., Biology
B.A., Environmental Studies
Southwestern University
Georgetown, Texas (2012)
Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master in City Planning
at the
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
May 2020
© 2020 Vanessa Toro Barragán. All Rights Reserved
The author here by grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to
distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in
whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created.
Author_______________________________________________________________________
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
May 18, 2020
Certified by __________________________________________________________________
Dayna Cunningham, Lecturer
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Executive Director, MIT CoLab
Thesis Supervisor
Accepted by__________________________________________________________________
Professor of the Practice, Ceasar McDowell
Chair, MCP Committee
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
“¡El Pueblo no se rinde, Carajo!” (The People Will Never Give Up, Dammit!):
A Case Study of the Buenaventura Civic Movement’s
Contributions to Insurgent Planning
by Vanessa Toro Barragán
Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 18, 2020, in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in City Planning
ABSTRACT
For ethnic minorities in Latin America and throughout the Global South, an
expansion of citizenship rights, such as constitutional recognition of ethnic groups, has
been undermined by State-sanctioned neoliberal policies, political corruption, and violent
occupation of territories. State-led planning within these contexts is characterized by the
use of centralized planning models that execute megaprojects which continue to represent
dominant economic and political interests at the expense of ethnic communities,
oftentimes, touting inclusive planning practices. In these instances, insurgent planning
practices, collective actions from below, challenge the neoliberal mechanism of dominance
through inclusion, with alternative forms of city-making.
In Buenaventura, Colombia, a port city which is part of the constitutionally
recognized Afro-Colombian and Indigenous ethnic-territory, 67% of the population cannot
meet its basic needs for housing, water, sanitation, food, healthcare and/or education. This
high rate of unmet basic needs sits in stark contradiction to the wealth flowing through its
port economy, which brought in 1.7 billion USD in national custom revenues in 2016 and
manages 30% of the nation’s exports. In 2017, El Movimiento Cívico de Buenaventura para
Vivir con Dignidad y Paz en el Territorio (Buenaventura Civic Movement to Live with
Dignity and Peace in the Territory) emerged as a multisectoral coalition to address
structural inequality and violence. The movement successfully organized a 22-day civic
strike to close the commercial activity of nation's third-largest port. An estimated 25% of
bonaverenses, people of Buenaventura, participated either by blockading, marching or
negotiating with the government. In an agreement to end the strike, the movement created
an autonomous fund to finance a 10-year comprehensive development plan and secured
500 million USD of initial financing.
Through interviews with movement leaders, social media, historical context, and
analysis of the legal agreements, I describe three mechanisms of civic governance that the
movement offers for an insurgent planning practice. The first is multisector solidarity that
is built by a process of collective learning. The second mechanism looks at the committee
structure of the Movimiento Cívico, in which thematic committees are established to
manage the priorities of the city. The third, is the legal framework that creates a mixedmanagement board of directors, with Movimiento Cívico representatives and the State, for
the autonomous fund and the 10-year comprehensive development plan. These
mechanisms, formas propias de gobernanza (our own ways of governance), contest the
relationship with the State and aim to restore a cosmovision (worldview) that reflects the
ethnic-territory.
Thesis Supervisor: Dayna Cunningham, Lecturer and Executive Director, MIT CoLab
Reader: Alyssa Bryson, Senior Consultant at Public Equity Group
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis holds many imprints of those whom I am grateful to know as my family, friends,
and colleagues. As I conclude this chapter of my life, I think of my own personal growth over
the last two-years and feel an abundance of blessings from all those whose life path has
crossed with mine, your impact will be with me forever.
I hold deep gratitude to the people of Pacific Territory of Colombia each of whom
reconnected me to the power of agency and the practice of belonging that cultivates it. For
each conversation was a connection to the ancestors, lighting a path forward.
To my mother, Edda Constanza, and my father, Francisco, who immigrated to the US from
Colombia with myself and my sister, modeling for us an act of courage against uncertainty.
To my sisters, Paula and Sarah, and my cousin, Daniela, for your love, present in the laughter
and joy we share, which nurtures me.
To Dayna for your teaching and practice which every day pushes the boundaries of what is
possible, for your mentorship, and for cultivating the CoLab family that has been a home for
me at DUSP.
To Aly, for accompanying me in this journey and making it possible for me to find strength
in vulnerability.
To the CoLab team, Milady for welcoming me to Buenaventura as a friend and for the wisdom
you radiate, and to Kathe, Shey, Juan, and Toni, for bringing your whole selves to the practice
of social transformation.
To Gary, who listened to me in my hardest moments with compassion and shared with me a
love of Texas BBQ as we talk about our own immigrant experience.
To Nati, Dani y Dani, and Diego, Mechi and Jess, for creating a space of curiosity where we
could support eachother emotionally and intellectually in this journey at DUSP.
To my roommates, Dani, Mora, Fio and LuisMi whose friendship during this quarantine has
given me hope in moments fear.
To my undergraduate foundation, my professors, MelJohn, Dr. Burks, Dr. Hob-O, whose
teaching and guidance unveiled for me language to the emotions and passions I held.
And last, to Risita, my pup, who teaches me patience and playfulness.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FIGURES, IMAGES, AND TABLES ................................................................................................................... 5
MOTIVATION .......................................................................................................................................................... 6
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................... 14
RESEARCH METHODS........................................................................................................................ 16
CASE BACKGROUND .......................................................................................................................... 17
A Brief History of The Colombian Pacific.............................................................................................. 17
Defending the Territory............................................................................................................................. 20
La Toma de la Guerra al Puerto (The Occupation of the Port by War) ..................................... 22
CHAPTER 2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK .............................................................................................. 26
THE TURN TOWARDS CIVIL SOCIETY ..................................................................................................... 27
SEEING FROM THE SOUTH ..................................................................................................................... 30
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR INSURGENT PLANNING ...................................................................... 32
KNOWLEDGE WITHIN INSURGENT PRACTICE........................................................................................ 33
EPISTEMOLOGIES OF THE SOUTH.......................................................................................................... 34
CHAPTER 3 FORMAS PROPIAS DE GOBERNANZA FROM THE MOVIMIENTO CÍVICO ... 38
CIVIC GOVERNANCE AS MULTISECTOR SOLIDARITY ............................................................................... 40
CIVIC GOVERNANCE AS MESAS TEMATICAS .......................................................................................... 47
CIVIC GOVERNANCE AS A LEGAL STRUCTURE FOR MIXED-MANAGEMENT .................................... 58
CHAPTER 4 CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE MOVIMIENTO CÍVICO TO INSURGENT
PLANNING .............................................................................................................................................................. 67
REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................................................... 73
APPENDIX ............................................................................................................................................................... 76
APPENDIX A: INTERVIEWS .......................................................................................................................76
APPENDIX B: LIST OF SIGNATORIES TO THE PARO CÍVICO 2017 ...........................................................78
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FIGURES, IMAGES, AND TABLES
Figure 1 Organizations who signed on to the Paro Civico 2017 demands.................................. 39
Image 1 Fotograph by El Murcy, Quíbdo, Colombia ......................................................................... 11
Image 2 Recreation of the cultural practice of molienda ............................................................... 12
Image 3 First International congress of artisanal and ancestral beverages of the Colombian
Pacific, 2019............................................................................................................................................... 12
Image 4 Youth from Jóvenes Creadores del Chocó ......................................................................... 13
Image 5: Paro Cívico 2017...................................................................................................................... 50
Image 6: Re-enaction of the ESMAD confrontation during Paro Cívico 2017........................... 52
Image 7 Direct broadcasting of Paro Civico 2017 negotiations .................................................... 60
Table 1 Legislative Agreements Resulting from Paro Cívico 2017 ................................................ 66
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MOTIVATION
“Yo creo que el Paro Cívico marcó la historia de Buenaventura en dos. Muchos
tomamos conciencia. Hay personas que no sentíamos ese amor por
Buenaventura. Yo vivo en zona rural, no sentía tanto el peso de que es vivir en
un barrio donde no hay agua... No lo he vivido, pero es mi dolor porque es mi
gente. Hay que dar a conocer que tenemos ese sentimiento por transformación.
Unos se llevan todo lo que nosotros producimos. No somos solo un contenedor,
un puerto, somos un pueblo de negros. Tenemos que demostrar que existimos.
Como Afros pudimos decir que existimos. No somos solo folclor, también somos
mente, personas que crean, que pueden dar otro punto de vista y mostrarle al
mundo entero que los negros también podemos.”
“I think that the Paro Civico marked a split in Buenaventura’s history. Many
of us became aware. There are those of us who didn’t feel the love for
Buenaventura. I live in a rural area, and I didn’t feel the burden of not living
with water in an urban neighborhood… I haven’t lived it but it’s my pain
because it’s my people. We acknowledge that we are sensing a
transformation. There are people who are taking all that we produce here.
We aren’t just a container, a port, we are a black community. We have to
show that we exist. As Afros, we were able to say that we exist. We aren’t only
folklore, we are also thinkers, people who create, who can contribute
another point of view and show the entire world that as black communities
we are capable.”
Yerardi Balanta
Territorial Innovation Lab, June 2019
In June 2019 I accompanied the MIT Community Innovator’s Lab (CoLab) team in
Buenaventura, Colombia for the final workshop of the Laboratorio de Innovacion
Territorial-LIT (Territorial Innovation Lab) in the Colombian Pacific. CoLab has been
partnering with social and civic leaders in the Pacific Region of Colombia since 2014. Over
these years, leaders have worked together to elevate transformative practices for the
region, guided by the pillars of economic democracy, prototyping for innovation, selfdetermination, youth leadership, and connecting the Pacific’s Afro-descendent region to a
larger structure of liberation for Africans and those of the African Diaspora. For LIT,
CoLab’s local coordinators recruited youth leaders in Quibdó and Buenaventura placing
emerging leaders at the center of innovation and the future vision for the Pacific and
strengthening their collective leadership capacity through a 12-month program. The
curriculum is dynamic and leads to a collaboration to prototype socio-economic initiatives
and ideate how to set these initiatives into action. Though CoLab is based in Cambridge,
6
Massachusetts, the team includes two local coordinators that live in Buenaventura and
Quibdó, Milady Garces and Kathe Gil, and two national coordinators, Natalia Mosquero and
Juan Constain Ramos, based in Bogotá. They describe CoLab’s partnership as, “It’s not
CoLab in the Pacific, Its CoLab with the Pacific”.
In the intimate workshop in Buenaventura, the local coordinators opened up a
discussion on how they wanted to proceed with their prototypes after the program.
Through key characteristics of the program design, Theory U (Scharmer, 2018) and Asset
Based Community Development, and the facilitation expertise of the coordinators, they
allowed for the leaders to put forth their experiences and vision to inform what they
wanted the future engagement to look like. During the discussion, one particular comment
really sat with me. It started with the leaders discussing a tension about whether or not to
continue with their prototypes and how feasible this was in the context of accessing startup resources and balancing this project with securing a livelihood. Some talked about
owning their leadership in the region by committing to seeing the prototype launch,
knowing that they are the ones who live there and whose kids will grow up in the
community and that ultimately, they will be the ones who change their reality. This then
expanded to discussing MIT CoLab’s role in solidarity. MIT CoLab with the Pacific to them
meant linking their ideas to technical assistance or easier access to funding sources. These
comments resonated with a quote that professor Lily Song at the Harvard Graduate School
of Design mentioned when she came to our Intro to Planning: Gateway class during my
first semester of graduate school. Lily spoke about her experience as a former organizer
and now, working within an institution to leverage resources and power for communities. I
finally felt that my values aligned to my purpose within the planning discipline at MIT and
with CoLab I was experiencing this in action.
I came into City Planning after a number of years in labor and community
organizing myself. My organizing experiences started in earnest in 2015 when I moved to
Sacramento, California to become a union organizer with the Service Employees
International Union – United Healthcare Worker’s West (SEIU-UHW). At SEIU-UHW I was
part of a team of organizers, meeting non-union private hospital workers across California,
recruiting influential leaders, and developing their capacity to organize their co-workers
and win a union election. There is a wide range of union organizing strategies and union
organizing is different across sectors and states in the US, but there is an underlying model
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that I was trained under known as the Alinsky model, influenced by the work of Saul David
Aliksy, a communist activist and political theorist who wrote Rules for Radicals, a guidebook
for community organizing. He started organizing with Industrial Areas Foundation and
influenced Fred Ross, a community organizer, who recruited Cesar Chavez and ultimately
had a profound impact in founding United Farm Workers (UFW) with Dolores Huerta.
Another organizer, Marshall Gantz, worked with UFW and went on to devise President
Obama’s successful grassroots organizing political strategy. This strategy and Alisky’s
legacy are not without critique, while neither is the union movement throughout the
United States. From this one model, other forms and knowledge have deepened the
practices of mobilizing and building power.
Organizing put to action the frustrations and hopes that I have felt with the world
we live in now. One of my most memorable campaigns was a 2016 organizing drive at
Pomona Valley Hospital for 1,200 service and technical workers. This was the largest
campaign to take place nationally and we spent over 8 months organizing. My day to day
involved meeting with workers and carrying out a one-on-one, a very thoughtful
organizing conversation about the worker’s most important issue on the job, tying these
concerns to how it affected them, their families, or their patients, and getting honest about
why things remained the same year after year. For example, many workers make only a few
dollars above minimum wage despite their licenses or years of experience; many are kept
just below full-time to limit their eligibility for benefits or they pay incredible sums of
money for healthcare despite being healthcare workers; many work back-to-back 12 to 16hour shifts to make ends meet, and; many departments are understaffed and workers are
asked to make difficult decisions about patient care in these situations.
This honesty often meant that a one-on-one was an emotional conversation, driving
so many of the feelings of anger, frustration, and indignation to the forefront, leading to a
call to action: “Are you willing to join your co-workers in building a union?” As the
campaign became stronger, I was only a successful organizer if I was able to recruit
influential workers, people in the hospital that others looked up to, to the union organizing
committee and if I was able to facilitate meetings for this committee to act collectively to
mobilize their coworkers. I would support leaders as they started to have honest one-onones with their coworkers, organize house meetings, and collect union drive cards from all
the workers willing to support. Leaders are the first to go public with their campaign in the
8
face of their employer, and ultimately, the campaign depends largely on how strong this
group is. This is because when the hospital’s CEO and HR become aware that a union
organizing campaign is taking place at the workplace, a campaign of bribes and threats
begins. The strongest strategy to win a union organizing campaign is to recruit influential
leaders that are trusted by their coworkers to walk them through the apathy, confusion,
fear, and division that begins when their employer finds out workers are organizing. Often
times, a campaign never gets to a vote because there aren’t enough leaders recruited. A
victory is glorious, but it’s also only the beginning, to win a great contract, the phase of
contract negotiation requires the same if not more leadership capacity and mobilization.
A reality became clear to me, organizing workers in a capitalist economy is a
psychological battle between courage and fear, between faith and cynicism, between hope
or apathy. This meant that my role was to build strong relationships based on trust and
build hope with leaders so that as they too guided their coworkers. I built very close and
meaningful relationships with many healthcare workers, certified nursing assistants,
environmental service techs, surgical techs, respiratory techs, and many other types of
hospital jobs that are so often under looked as the critical backbone of healthcare. Pomona
Valley Hospital workers won their union vote on January 21, 2016, but their employer filed
with the National Labor Relations Board to include many hospital workers throughout their
hospital that our team had not organized because they are not traditionally considered
under the classification of technical workers. To date, this tactic by their employer has
delayed the certification of the vote, and they are not yet union members. Today, as I write
this thesis, many of these healthcare workers are on the frontline of the COVID19
pandemic in California.
After three years organizing with SEIU-UHW, I yearned to apply the skills that I had
learned in mobilizing workers and building power within the workplace to communitylevel concerns. I started to work for an environmental justice organization in Sacramento
where I met an incredible community leader, Naia, in South Sacramento who was
organizing her family and neighbors to clean up a creek that was gated off from the
community. This small project to clean the creak turned into a multi-ethnic coalition of
neighbors to remove the gates from a 1-mile section of the creek and create a multipurpose greenway. When I started at this organization, I became aware that this was a
longer-term battle, not like the hyper-speed organizing drive like in the union world. I
9
started to engage with other organizers around the Asset Based Community Development
(ABCD) model to not only use mobilization as in the union world to win campaigns but to
leverage assets at a community level, to shift access to opportunities, resources, and
ultimately, community development. One of the biggest assets that exist in the community
is culture and values of collective action, of coming together during times of difficulty to
resist and to share joy. In my own personal experience, this is a value that transcends the
labor-based organizing model that I had learned to apply. The ties workers have in the
workplace are ties that go beyond the workplace. Often times during labor organizing I
noticed this in how interconnected families and friends are in the healthcare industry.
Many of the Filipino and Latino healthcare workers, for example, have saving mechanisms
with family and friends to help them save so they can invest in their kids’ education,
purchase a car or a home. A union provides dignity to earn your livelihood, it builds leaders
at the workplace who often push for political change, and the future of labor organizing
must continue to engage beyond the workplace and into communities.
At DUSP, I have been able to continue to deepen my understanding and tools for
how to catalyze social transformation through my relationship with CoLab and the
Colombian Pacific. In addition to being linked to a team of organizers, CoLab’s work links
me to my homeland of Colombia which I left in my childhood when my family immigrated
to the US. In that same trip during the summer of June 2019, after six years of building
community trust, CoLab began a crystalizing a partnership with the Movimiento Cívico, a
civic movement of a multitude of sectors and interest groups because leaders of LIT who
are part of the movement initiated a first meeting. Since then, the Movimiento Cívico has
invited CoLab staff to provide support in ongoing negotiations with the national
government in territorial planning processes. The importance of this movement to the
Colombian Pacific is the basis of this thesis and their promise for the future of
Buenaventura can be summed up in their ability to organize and execute a civic strike that
in 2017 shut down the port in Buenaventura for 22 days and resulted in an agreement with
the national government of a development plan to address what the Movimiento Cívico
states as “problemas de fondo y no de forma”, problems that are systemic, not superficial.
Milady Garces, CoLab local coordinator in Buenaventura and one of the organizers of
Destila Patrimonio, a collective of viche makers, named the Movimiento Cívico’s work in a
team meeting that summer as “formas propias de gobernanza” (our own forms of
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governance). This brought me to the central question I aim to explore in this thesis: what
can social movements, organizers, and planners learn from the forms of governance that
the Pacific’s Movimiento Cívico is building? As I try to answer this question, I am reminded
of the pictures that CoLab’s Pacific team brought to an All Staff team meeting when we
were prompted to bring a picture of a social movement. Natalia Mosquero brought a
picture from the Quibdó based photographer, El Murcy, of people from Quíbdo lifting a
tree together (Image 1). Milady Garces brought a few of her work, highlighting the Viche
production, an ancestral drink, from the cultivation of sugar cane to the fermentation and
bottling of the alcohol (Image 2) and a picture of their political work with the regional
government, Department of Valle del Cauca, which led to the creation of an ordinance
recognizing viche as cultural heritage for the region (Image 3). Kathe Gil brought a picture
of her work with Jóvenes Creadores del Chocó, which utilizes art and culture with youth to
heal from violence and to strengthen community assets (Image 4). These pictures highlight
the team’s daily practice of connection between the land’s resources and the cultural
traditions, relational ways of being, that describe the ethnic-territorial identity and sustain
the struggle to defend it.
Image 1 Fotograph by El Murcy, Quíbdo, Colombia
Source: El Murcy
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Image 2 Recreation of the cultural practice of molienda, a stage in the process of distillation and
production of viche done with a traditional trapiche “Mata 4” with the Community of Triana, rural
zone of the Alto y Medio Dagua, Buenaventura, and members of the collective of viche makers
named Destila Patrimonio
Source: Milady Garces Arboleda, 2019
Image 3 First International congress of artisanal and ancestral beverages of the Colombian Pacific,
2019. From left to right, Milady Garces Arboleda, Director of Destila Patrimonio; Veneranda Ruiz,
pioneer in the transformation of artisanal beverages; Dilian Francisca Toro, Governor of the
Department of Valle del Cauca; Rosmilad Quiñones, Director of the Association of Traditional
Midwives of the Pacific; Edid Consuelo Bravo, Secretary of Culture for the Department of Valle del
Cauca
Source: Secretaria Cultural del Valle del Cauca, 2019
12
Image 4 Youth from Jóvenes Creadores del Chocó, a community-based organization led by Kathe Gil,
perform the play “Desde la Orilla”
Source: Kathe Gil 2019
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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
“Jóvenes y adultos el mismo compás
ancianos y niños gritando ¡no más!
la gente en la calle saliendo a marchar
no nos detendrán
ni a bate ni a gas
el pueblo se cansó,
ya está demostrado,
a la indiferencia le hemos ganado
El Pacifico arroje, ya no he esta callado,
no estamos exigiendo más que lo ganado.
Y esta es otra historia para contar, como
la de David y Goliat
el gigante no se mató,
se le hizo arrodillar
Ya no más, ya no más.”
David Paredes
“Por el Pacífico junto vamos a luchar
el pueblo no sé rinde
porque somos más
los buenos somos más”
Mia Josef (del barrio inc)
“Youth and adults following
the same compass,
Elders and kids yelling ‘enough’!
People on the street going out to march.
They won’t stop us,
not with batons or gas.
The people are tired,
you already know
we have won against indifference.
A forgotten Pacific will not stay quiet,
we are not asking for more than what
we’ve already won.
This is a different story being told,
like the one of David and Goliath,
the giant, not killed,
brought to his knees.
Enough is enough.”
David Paredes
United we fight for the Pacific,
the people will never give up.
Because we are more,
on the side of good, we are more.
Mia Josef (del barrio inc)
Excerpts from the song ‘’Buenaventura no se rinde’’, Buenaventura won’t give up,
written by various artists, May 29, 2017
Throughout history, manifestations by civil society and social movements emerge
and influence change in how nation-states approach the project of economic and social
development. In Latin America, the 1970s saw a rise in Marxist influenced socialist and
communist left-wing grassroots organizations, often drawing from strong labor union
leaders, and ultimately led to powerful political parties, some which became heads of states
and others which remained peripheral movements. By the 1990s, in response to system
exclusion from both social movements and State influenced economic and social
development, Latin America experienced a surge in ethnic-based movements, their tactic
focused on influencing constitutional reform to recognize ethnic rights. Countries such as
Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Colombia formally shifted away
14
from recognizing blanket citizenship rights and towards acknowledging specific rights of
ethnic minorities (Negretto, 2009).
In Colombia, Law 70 of 1993, for Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities
granted collective titling rights, the results of which opened an avenue to formally
recognize ethnic-based territorial communities and their aspirations for autonomy over
their territory. This important milestone towards territorial autonomy was undermined by
a State-led shift towards neoliberal economic policies in the 1990s that involved
privatization of public infrastructure and the execution of megaprojects. Coupled with
political corruption and the arrival of illegal armed actors, this enabled violent actors in the
2000s to control the Pacific territory for economic interests through terror (Buenaventura:
Un puerto sin comunidad, 2015). As a result, starting in the 2000s, thousands of rural AfroColombian and Indigenous communities were massacred and displaced through terror,
leading to increased urbanization in the major cities of the Colombian Pacific, including
Quibdó, Tumaco, and Buenaventura, a major port which connects the nation’s economy to
the foreign trade market. In Buenaventura, neoliberal policies privatized the port and water
operators and State-centered planning has focused on financing port and commercerelated megaprojects. A long history of structural violence and racial discrimination results
in staggering 66.53% percent of the population living with unmet basic needs (Vida
Piedrahita, 2020).
On May 16, 2017, at 5:00 am, la hora cero (zero hour) of the Paro Cívico para Vivir con
Dignidad y Paz en el Territorio (Civic Strike to Live with Dignity and Peace in the Territory)
in Buenaventura, Colombia struck. Eleven points throughout the city became sites of civil
disobedience seeking to disrupt the flow of wealth from the nation’s most important Pacific
port, Buenaventura, to the nation’s interior, the Andean region of political and economic
hegemony. El Comité del Paro Cívico, the Civic Strike Committee, sent a manifesto of
grievances to incumbent president Juan Manuel Santos signed by 80 organizations and
announced an indefinite civic strike until the national government declared an economic,
social, and ecological state of emergency for Buenaventura. The 22-day civic strike and
negotiations with the national government resulted in a multi-faceted agreement outlining
the creation of an autonomous fund to finance a 10-year comprehensive development plan
as well as 500 million USD for priority public works. As an organizational body, the
Movimiento Cívico represents a coalition of multisector organizations that gained
15
legitimacy to represent the interests of the community-at-large from the demonstrated
support throughout 22-days of enacting a strike in Buenaventura. The events of the Paro
Cívico perdured, now three years later, the Movimiento Cívico, continues strengthening
civil society’s role in the city. In a conversation between CoLab and Movimiento Civico
leaders, the vision for the movement was stated as creating a civic society to “govern
governance and the market” (C. Cunningham, personal communication, June 2019).
This thesis looks at how the movement strategized its mobilization, negotiation
demands, and political agreements and asks, what are the forms of civic governance that
are built by the Movimiento Cívico of Buenaventura in the struggle for ethnic territorial
autonomy? How do these forms contest the relationship between the national government
and the pueblo, the people, over governance of the ethnic-territory? How do these forms of
civic governance show relational ways of being and worldviews of the Colombian Pacific’s
ethnic-territory?
RESEARCH METHODS
The theoretical frameworks I employ in this analysis are twofold: on the one hand,
the theory of radical and insurgent planning which positions collective action from below
within the context of the Global South. I discuss the utility of this theory and complement
it with emergent social theory, epistemologies of the South, to link insurgent planning
practice of the Movimiento Cívico as forms of civic governance that contest the Colombian
national government’s occupation of the territory, socially, economically, and ontologically.
The case study methodology is supported by a historical analysis of the economic
development models employed in Latin America through a political economy lens, outlining
the ways in which the Colombian Pacific is marginalized on a racial and ethnic basis from
the economic and political power concentrated within the capital of Colombia, Bogotá. In
addition, the case study methodology required documentation of the movement informed
by interviews with leaders, participants, and allies of the Movimiento Cívico conducted
during January 2019 (Appendix A). These interviews are rich in content and reflect the
collective memories of those leaders of the Movimiento Cívico that I was able to interview,
but are limited in that, as this thesis will show, this movement is deeper than its leaders
and thereby captures only a small amount of those embodied by the Movimiento Cívico. All
participants gave written consent to the interview and all interviews were transcribed and
16
translated by the author. Limitations by MIT’s institutional policies due to the travel safety
restrictions for the region of the Colombian Pacific left a small window of two weeks to
interview leaders. During this time period, two of the most active female leaders of the
executive committee were unable to meet. There are also no interviews with Indigenous
Nation leaders, a perspective that merits an even more in-depth understanding of the
indigenous rights movements of the region outside the scope of this thesis. Nonetheless, to
include these voices and others not officially interviewed, interview accounts are
complemented by news articles and posts from the Movimiento Cívico social media
account, local news media, and transcripts from a CoLab LIT session in which youth
leaders of Buenaventura discussed their reflections of the Paro Cívico. Finally, official
records of decrees and laws as a result of the agreement with the government were
analyzed.
This introductory chapter continues with a historical overview of the Colombian
Pacific and the port of Buenaventura through a political economy lens and is followed by an
account of the foundational ethnic-territorial social movement, Proceso de Comunidades
Negras (PCN; Process of Black Communities) of the Colombian Pacific. Chapter two
provides the theoretical approach of insurgent planning and its turn towards the Global
South and political ontology. Chapter three provides the case study, emphasizing the
mechanisms of civic governance, formas propias de gobernanza (our own ways of
governance) produced by the Movimiento Cívico and chapter four summarizes the
Movimiento Cívico’s contribution to insurgent planning.
CASE BACKGROUND
A Brief History of The Colombian Pacific
The Colombian Pacific is an ethnic-territory of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous
communities whose cosmovisión, worldview, is sourced from a web of relationships to each
other and to the more-than-human natural world, a deeply relational ontology. Nationally,
Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities makeup 11% and 4% of the nation’s
population, respectively (Censo General 2005, n.d.). In 1991, the Republic of Colombia
formally recognized itself as a multi-ethnic society as a result of a constitutional reform
that brought expanded citizenship rights to ethnic communities. Between the 1990s2000s, a majority of the Afro-Colombian communities residing in the Colombian Pacific
17
were rural communities, yet, violent displacement starting in the 2000s accelerated
migration to urban centers such as Quibdó, Tumaco, and Buenaventura. Both in this rural
and urban context, the region marks some of the highest national rates of unmet basic
needs and poverty. This is not an accident. This section outlines the major waves that
characterize the formation of structural systems of racial and ethnic inequality and
oppression that are at play in Buenaventura and its relationship to the ethnic-territory of
the Colombian Pacific.
It’s important to situate the history of ethnic-communities in Colombia in a conflict
which began at the establishment of the Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of
indigenous communities in the Americas during colonization. Since then, a system of
extraction of natural resources and labor from these ethnic communities at the coast and
peripheries of the nation supports a dominant white-mestizo1 elite at the interior of the
country. Indigenous communities inhabited the Pacific region of Colombia for at least a
millennium prior to the brutal and violent settlement of the Spanish which took place
between the 15th and 19th centuries. Colonial economies in this region manifested as the
extraction of gold through mining, later, agricultural production of commodities such as
rubber, bananas, and sugar cane, both of which extracted labor from enslaved Indigenous
and African populations (Escobar, 2008). Settlements of indigenous communities in
encomiendas 2 and enslaved Africans in mining enclaves engaged in acts of liberation,
leading to networks of rural ethnic communities who established ways of life in the humid
rainforest region of the Colombian Pacific. This led to the emergence of kinship between
river-based inter-ethnic communities whose cosmovisión, worldview, is characterized by a
relationship with the natural world, examples of which can be seen in the ancestral
agricultural, hunting, fishing, and mining cultural practices of the territory of the
Colombian Pacific (Buenaventura: Un puerto sin comunidad, 2015; Escobar, 2008).
Meanwhile, settlement patterns in the nation followed a racialized logic, in which
Spaniards and criollos 3 settled the Andean highlands of the country with mild
temperatures, building cities and capitals of the white elites, controlling at a distance the
1
Descendants of white Europeans and American Indians
Institutions implemented by Spanish conquistadors to control indigenous labor
3
A person of Spanish descent born in the Americas during colonization
2
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production of natural resources and exploiting labor at key strategic points of control in
the lowlands of the Pacific, such as the fluvial port of Buenaventura.
At the turn of the 20th century, Buenaventura was a modest fluvial port, connected
to the mining economy via its rivers and to Cali by railroad, yet the entirety of the nation’s
global imports and exports were managed by the Caribbean ports. By 1920s, given
Buenaventura’s geographic importance, Buenaventura’s businessmen and politicians
pushed forth a series of construction projects to open the nation’s trade to the Pacific
Ocean. By the 1940s then, a commercial class of foreigners from England, Germany, the
United States, Syria, Lebanon, and China began to settle at the port-city, building lavish
accommodations, while a rural migration of Afro-Colombians and Indigenous populations
seeking job opportunities moved and built modest housing; a settlement pattern of socioeconomic stratification and an extractive economy characterizes this port-city. Even still,
the majority of Afro-Colombian communities remained in the rural regions of the Pacific.
Escobar (2008) notes the permeation of colonial logic in early nation-building in the
Americas, tying it to the continuation of the project of ‘modernity’, where the conquest of
capital and labor in the Pacific of Colombia is justified as the way to achieve national
progress.
For the Colombian Pacific, the mid-20th century brought more frequent and
powerful waves of extractive commodity-based economies to the rural regions including
multinational and national corporations and State government policies to extract and
export rubber, tagua, cacao, and mining, as well as investments in railroad and roads.
During this time, a national decision is made to invest in the modernization of the maritime
port in Buenaventura to support the commodity economy of the region. To manage this
effort, a State-run port enterprise, Puertos de Colombia is erected. The effect of this
between the 1960s-1990s was a modest middle class in Buenaventura that was able to enter
into the political arena of local administration as well as management jobs in the public
enterprise and access higher educational opportunities, yet, the majority of the territory
experienced the absence of public services from the State (Buenaventura: Un puerto sin
comunidad, 2015).
The post-WWII trajectory increasingly accelerates the occupation of the territory
when a push towards globalization leads the Colombian State to turn its eye towards the
Pacific region, looking to generate and accelerate development as a matter of national
19
importance. Escobar describes this as a process to “replace the previous dynamic of Afroindigenous colonization and limited, externally driven exploitation of resources with the
modern imaginary of accelerated economic growth, intensification of natural resource
extraction, development enclaves, urbanization, and so forth” (Escobar, 2008, p. 163). By
1983, this materialized as the first State-led plan for development, Plan for the Integral
Development of the Pacific Coast, which opened the Colombian Pacific to 250 million USD
for infrastructure in roads and modern technologies, with funding from international banks
and technical assistance of international development organizations. The vision was for the
Pacific to be the ocean of the 21st century, turning over the page of the Atlantic routes to a
new frontier of development.
As the Colombian Pacific became the object of national development, the economic
logic of neoliberalism, which supports privatization and deregulation of private and public
services, generated a series of megaprojects with the goal of driving competition and
foreign investment. In Buenaventura, first the port was privatized with the creation of
Sociedad Portuaria in 1993. Likewise, water and sewage services were granted to
Hidropacifico, through a program of loans which placed the local government in long-term
debt. An immense number of projects have been formulated, including the expansion of a
fifth port operator Terminal de Contenedores de Buenaventura (TCBUEN), a highway
expansion known as Vía Interna-Alterna, a boardwalk redevelopment project known as
Malecón Bahía de la Cruz, a national development plan to improve port logistics under
Programa Nuevas Cuidades (New Cities Program), an internationally funded plan titled
Emblematic Cities, and numerous other investments. Echeverría (2015), Zeiderman (2016),
and (Buenaventura: Un puerto sin comunidad, 2015; Jenss, 2020; Zeiderman, 2016) have
linked the expansion of megaprojects in rural and urban areas to the structural racism
experienced as displacement and violence in the territory through political, economic, and
extra-legal means.
Defending the Territory
In the Colombian Pacific, territory and ethnic identity are intertwined. A cultural
practice of burying a newborn’s umbilical cord under the roots of a tree to provide them
strength in life also means that people are physically connected to the land. The saying,
“acá nacimos, acá crecimos, acá hemos conocido que es el mundo” (here we are born, here we
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grow up, and here we have known what the world is) reflects the cosmovisión of the ethnic
territorial identity (Escobar, 2016). The appropriation of an ethnic territorial identity for
Afro-Colombian communities emerged around the 1990s, after three decades of grassroots
organizing of rural Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities, in partnership with
ecclesiastic communities influenced by liberation theology. By the 1990s, through three
decades of organizing, 135 organizations representing the above interests coalesced as the
Coordinadora Nacional de Comunidades Negras (CNCN; National Coordination of Black
Communities) and representative social leaders arrived at the Constitution’s National
Assembly (ANC) in Bogota to demand that recognition of ethnic territorial rights be
included in the reformed constitution of Colombia in 1991 (Castelblanco, 2000). The ANC
was assembled after a popular vote in 1990 to reform the constitution and maintained
representation of political party representatives, including the M-19 and communist
groups as well as indigenous communities. Meanwhile, Afro-Colombian communities were
not offered representation in the assembly despite their request. The CNCN employed a
strategy of alliance with indigenous leaders and mobilizations that included sit ins in public
buildings, civic protests, lobbying, and international calls for attention, and a telegram
campaign that resulted in tens of thousands of messages from all over the nation sent to
the ANC. CNCN ultimately received support from the left-wing political parties such as M19 4 and Union Patriótica (UP) 5 that were advocating for regional autonomy within the
reform. On the last day of the assembly, the civil protests, mobilizations, and alliance
resulted in the inclusion of Articulo Transitorio 55 (Transitory Article 55) in the reformed
constitution. This charged congress with a special commission to recognize black
communities in “tierras baldías”, at the time considered unoccupied public lands legally
owned by the State, of the rural riverine watershed in the Colombian Pacific. This also
included the acknowledgement of their historical importance, traditional practices, and the
right to collective property. As a result, a commission is established and over two years, 12
representatives from comunidades negras negotiate the law with the national government.
Castelblanco (2000) note that the process was challenging; including at first for the
national government representatives the realization of how large the actual population of
M-19 a left-wing nationalist guerilla organization movement established in 1970
the Union Patriotica (UP) was founded in 1985 as a political party representing the interests of the
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revoluationary Armed Forces of Colombia; FARC)
members which fall in ideological line of democratic socialism and boliviarism.
4
5
21
rural black communities living in tierra baldias, and second, a realization that the request
to recognize territorial rights went beyond some of the urban black movements for civil
rights which were focused primarily on anti-racism and discrimination and not on the
concept of autonomy of ethnic-territories. The CNCN gives way to the Proceso de
Comunidades Negras (PCN) and passage of Ley 70, 1993, which formalizes the intentions of
Transitory Article 55 into law and sets a milestone for ethnic territorial recognition of AfroColombian communities in Colombia and Latin America.
The impact of this law is multifold: first, the politicization of the black identity led to
the recognition of an ontology linking black communities and territory which upholds
values and forms of life born out of the experience of the African diaspora yet uniquely
defined by the conditions of the Pacific’s ecosystem of rivers and humid tropical forest. The
second, forms of inclusion in the national political arena, including establishing for the
first time two seats for representatives of black communities in the national congress, as
well as special commissions for black communities with the Ministry of the Interior as well
as in the environmental, education, financial, and national planning ministries of the State.
At the local level, forms of autonomy that existed in the rural communities were given a
pathway to become formalized in the relationship with the State through the collective
land titling process that would be governed by local councils, consejos comunitarios,
Thirdly, the grassroots organizing that was employed for this milestone had strengthen the
political capacity of black communities through a regional identity and collective
organizing process and opened the possibilities for influencing how development in the
territory should take place from the vision of ethnic territories.
La Toma de la Guerra al Puerto (The Occupation of the Port by War)
“Procesos sociales de base” or grassroots organizing, is a form of life for the people of
the Pacific, yet, beginning in 1999, a peak of violence victimized civilians and systematically
disrupted the fabric of this network. A report published by the National Center for
Historical Memory (CNHM), “Buenaventura, a Port without Community”, documents the
emergence of illegally armed forces and their acts of violence against civilians. The peak of
violence emerged with the occupation of the right-wing paramilitary group, Autodefensas
Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), which rivaled the
existing presence of the left-wing Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC;
22
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), during the years of 2000-2004. This engendered
a conflict that bled into violence against civilians in a territory where the State had little
physical military presence and where impunity was the defacto rule of law as the State
failed to acknowledge or address victim’s complaints. Meanwhile, the focal point of the
conflict revolved around control of the international and intranational trading
infrastructure and economy. Illegal armed actors financed their activities through the
illegal drug and arm trade economies and made deals with the country’s corporations and
political elites to guarantee their ability to export commerce, relying on the nation’s
privatized ports to export commodity agricultural products, coffee and sugar, as well as
supply the growing global demand for natural gas, hydrocarbon, minerals such as gold and
iron, and oil. As such, CNHM argue, illegally armed groups become defacto private
operators of public services, both terrestrial and water transportation routes, but also
funneling water and waste management services to those able to pay the extortion fees
(Valbuena, 2012). The result, a geography of violence in which the community ties were
critically severed while political clientelism, corruption, and bribery thrived (Buenaventura:
Un puerto sin comunidad, 2015).
In 2004, under an accord between President Álvaro Uribe and the AUC signed two
years earlier, the AUC underwent demobilization of its Pacific occupation. Demobilization,
is a complex process to demilitarize guerilla groups, and success requires intentional
programs and policies for the integration of para-military soldiers into civil society. Rather
than alleviate the violence, demobilization in this context left a vacuum of formerly
controlled zones that was filled by a new configuration of illegally armed forces, some of
which included former militants of the AUC who refused to demilitarize, and led to the
formation of local gangs, such as Los Rastrojos, and opened up the FARC’s access to
territorial control. By 2005, the urban core of Buenaventura was under “la toma de la
guerra al puerto” (the occupation of the port by war), experienced by civilians as invisible
frontiers within neighborhoods, massacres, shoot outs in the streets, and bombings
(Buenaventura: Un puerto sin comunidad, 2015). The response of the national government
by President Alvaro Uribe in 2008 was militarization of the city, a strategy which utilized
National Police to occupy the city and incentivized their efforts to recruit civilians as
informants, escalating retaliation and further recruitment of youth into armed conflict.
From 2005 to 2013, authors note a “geography of terror” was the primary logic within the
23
territory. Illegally armed groups began to split and claim space within the urban and periurban cores. No longer just Los Rastrojos, other local bands of narcoparamilitaries such as
La Empresa and Los Urabeños emerged.
The National Center for Historical Memory and Marin et al. (2019) note how the
systematization of violence in Buenaventura disrupted a strong network of grassroots
movements and the political and leadership capacity amassed by them within the last
decades of organizing. One salient example of the disruption was the immediate effect of
the violence on collective titling processes. The victory for afro-descendent and
indigenous communities in 1991 for collective titling of the territory meant that previously
considered tierras baldías could now be governed by consejos comunitarios, a process that
formalized in the eyes of the State the previously unrecognized kinship-based form of
governance that existed in the rural regions of the Colombian Pacific. In 2000, in the city of
Buenaventura, 21 consejos comunitarios were awaiting titling rights when a series of 18
massacres were carried out by paramilitaries, causing communities to flee their lands in
terror by the time titling rights were ready to be finalized (Buenaventura: Un puerto sin
comunidad, 2015).
Whereas the second half of the 20th century saw grassroots movements demanding
ethnic recognition and territorial rights, the start of the 21st century necessitated a
reconstruction of capacities and shifted priorities to a defense of human rights, which also
sought solidarity amongst national and international organizations, academics, and other
activist groups to visibilize an otherwise unrecognized humanitarian crisis 6. Specifically,
during 2005-2019 initiatives emerged to meet the needs of victims of violence and
displacement in an urban context, demand the recognition of human rights for youth and
women, and the use of art and cultural practices for collective healing spaces (Jaramillo
Marín et al., 2019). Marin et al. (2019) speak to a paradox of two processes occurring during
this time period, geographies of violence and processes of re-existence. Geographies of
violence as the use of violence by economic, illegal armed forces, and state actors to define
a social order, political logic, and daily life that results in de-territorializing the ethnic
communities of the Pacific both physically from their territory through displacement and
6
Coalitions with international actors emerged including, Human Rights and Washington Office on
Latin America, African Americans civil rights organizations in the US, labor unions in the US, the
African American caucus in the US Congress, for example within the United States, particularly
during the negotiations of the US and Colombian Free Trade Agreement.
24
mentally from their cultural practices, sense of belonging and community. Practices of reexistence refers to the range of actions undertaken by people within the territory,
collectively, to contest and restructure this reality in ways that affirm the right to life and
in particular, reconstruct the ties between people, culture, and territory. The Movimiento
Cívico, arises amidst this context as an multisector coalition of grassroots organizations,
including those that aren’t registered as formal entities but are continuously being formed
and re-formed depending on the context, and formal organizations, such as the labor
unions, ethnic organizations recognized by the State, and religious entities, that constitute
a legacy of organizing processes and a fight to re-exist in defense of the territory in the
Pacific.
A Key Contradiction
The gains of PCN in 1993 through Law 70, colloquially refered to as the black
communities law, expanded citizenship rights and began a process of local governance of
the territory based on ethnic territorial values. This advancement was arrested by the
expansion of the civil war intertwined with neoliberal projects designed to protect national
economic interests and simultaneous State-absenteeism in the wellbeing of ethnic
communities and their autonomy. As a result, Buenaventura is a city of wealth extraction,
for example, in 2016 the port commerce generated 1.7 billion USD in tariffs, contributing to
30% of national exports and 40% of national imports while 67% of residents are unable to
meet their basic needs (Vida Piedrahita, 2020). The Movimiento Cívico, deeply rooted in
the social and political grassroots organizing in defense of the territory, its autonomy,
identity, and way of life transpires in this context to continue the struggle.
25
CHAPTER 2 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
WHAT DOES CIVIL SOCIETY DO IN THE FACE OF STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY AND
VIOLENCE?
As the history of the Colombian Pacific demonstrates, grassroots organizing
movements such as the Movimiento Cívico, simultaneously struggle against oppressive
institutions while drawing from their own ways of life, formas propias, of living in the
territory to generate the future. Formas propias, is a concept utilized often in
conversations with people from the Colombian Pacific, including in documents from the
PCN, but notably, Milady Garces and Kathe Gil, Co-Lab’s local coordinators in the region
were the first to draw my attention to this concept. Formas propias refers to the many
relational ways of being in the world and is applied to many themes, education, innovation,
and in this thesis, governance. True to its relational form, formas propias is not an insular
or essentialist notion, rather, it is an affirmation that within the Colombian Pacific there
exists ways of life that contradict the logic imposed by a dominant world. I further draw
from insurgent planning as a theorical framework from which to position social movements
and their actors as integral experts in planning for social transformation, particularly for
communities who face structural inequality and violence. In this conceptual framework, I
review the foundational theory proposed by John Friedman on radical planning’s proposal
to situate civil society within the planning discipline. I link this shift to the insurgent
practice, which situates radical planning in practices of the Global South making a
distinction between inclusive and substantive citizenship and outline the set of principles
proposed by the scholarship. The utility of this theory rests on the critical urgency that our
world is facing today, a historicized embeddedness in structures of inequality and violence,
and the consciousness that civil society living and organizing within these struggles is
distinctly positioned to advance innovative solutions to these complex problems. It follows
then, that looking to social movements is a shift in what we consider valid knowledge and
whom we consider experts in the field of planning; it also proposes emerging out of
structures of inequality and violence by looking precisely to those living within these
contexts. As such, it draws from the theory of epistemologies of the South to consider how
knowledge from relational worldviews in worlds like that of the Colombian Pacific can
support the possibility of a different world. Arturo Escobar frames this as an
26
epistemological shift, one in which we move “…out of the epistemic space of Western social
theory and into the epistemic configurations associated with the multiple relational
ontologies of worlds in struggle. It is in these spaces that we might find more compelling
answers to the strong questions posed by the current conjuncture of modern problems
with insufficient modern solutions…” (Escobar, 2018, p. 68). To look toward compelling
answers, chapter 3 presents the forms of governance emergent from the Movimiento
Cívico’s work and chapter 4 consider its contributions to the growing body of insurgent
planning practices.
THE TURN TOWARDS CIVIL SOCIETY
Planning, John Friedman argues, is “the art of linking knowledge to action in a recursive
process of social learning” (1987, p. 4). This definition, first proposed in his book Planning in
the Public Domain in 1987, applies broadly to the two major traditions of planning which he
categorized as social guidance and social transformation. Generally, social guidance can be
thought of as a State-led endeavor in which rational decision making relies on neutral
scientific and technical knowledge, ultimately upholding existing systems, while social
transformation focuses on “political practices of system transformation” (Friedmann, 1987,
p. 38). Friedman argues that in recent history, planning as social guidance has emerged
from the Keynesian economic school of thought that appealed to scientific knowledge for
practices of social reform and policy analysis where State-led intervention addresses the
externalities of a capitalist economic system. Planning for social transformation, Friedman
suggests, consists of two branches, one of which is social learning. This branch proposes
the planning profession can engage in social transformation by utilizing multiple forms of
knowledge, from various stakeholders, to develop an action, evaluate, learn from the
outcomes, and adjust the course of an intervention. It draws on the scholarship of John
Dewey, who rejects a positivist view of one-truth and suggests instead that valid
knowledge is generated from practical experience, a learn by doing approach that allows
one to experiment and test a hypothesis. In this approach, reason is not rejected, rather,
reason emerges from deliberation between stakeholders. Dewey’s work is concerned with
this framework for the political sphere, specifically the quality of democracy, arguing that
democracy depends on civic society in dialogue with public concerns (Friedmann, 1987).
Social learning also draws from the German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, who considers
27
reason as the result of communication between people, or communicative rationality.
Instead of one objective reality produced by laws of the universe, a reality is constructed by
deliberation between subjects and context, and its validity is established through discourse
and experimentation, similar to pragmatism (Healey, 1992, p. 151). However, Habermas
specifically considers multiple forms of reasoning, including, scientific rationality, morality,
and culture, to be equally valid if decided upon by deliberation and this allows societies to
be able to generate collective agreements for how to live together amongst differences
(Healey, 1992). Ultimately, this validated knowledge results in an action that aims for social
transformation. Within this scholarship, the planner’s role is to act as a neutral mediator
for various stakeholders to reach consensus through communicative acts of reasoning.
This branch of planning has led to various process-based forms of planning such as
advocacy planning, participatory planning, and communicative planning. A salient critique
of these approaches is that, while arguing that equitable outcomes can result from
consensus between stakeholders, it assumes a context where conflict is only about
difference, instead of about the power that marginalized groups are allowed to exert in a
consensus deliberation because of their difference. As a result, particularly in contexts of
structural violence and inequality, methods like advocacy, participatory, and
communicative planning have been criticized for driving the rise of new non-governmental
actors such as NGOS to partner with the State or international organizations, as mediators
between these institutional forms and civil society. Rather than lead to social
transformation, Shrestha and Aranya (2015) suggest, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) and other mediators are co-opted by the neoliberal state. Thus, while social
learning pushes the planning profession away from rational comprehensive models,
offering a process of deliberation as valid knowledge to inform action for social
transformation, planning must still contend with how, in a context of structural inequality
and violence, equitable outcomes can be achieved. A closer look at the role of civil society
provides promising pathways.
Radical planning, the second branch of planning for social transformation, “departs
from all the others by asserting the primacy of direct collective action from
below’’(Friedmann, 1987, p. 83). This branch draws from the intellectual traditions of
utopianism, social anarchism, and historical materialism, taking as their parting point a
critique of the existing systems of oppression which leads to struggle, as evidenced by
28
citizen-led mobilizations, violent and non-violent, towards the goal of transforming these
systems by collective action from below. Friedman acknowledges that the revolutionary
social movements that emerged from utopianism, social anarchism, and Marxism, have
experienced limited success in establishing long-lasting or democratic alternatives,
nonetheless arguing that it is only radical planning that “can stand up to the dominant
order” (1987, p. 308).
What then is the theory and practice of future radical planning? Friedman outlines
that radical planning must take the route towards “the re-centering of political power in
civil society, mobilizing from below the countervailing actions of citizens, and recovering
the energies for a political community that will transform both the state and corporate
economy from within” (Friedmann, 1987, p. 314). In this framework, the household is the
mode of production of life and the nucleus of civil society. From this unit, the collective
production of material goods and non-material needs occurs. This contrasts sharply with
existing neoliberal economic models that focus on the individualistic unit of consumption
as well as with State-led models as the unit of concerted action. For households to be in
control of their means of production, they require access to “the bases of social power- the
information, knowledge, skills, organization, tools of production, and time and space”
(Friedmann, 1987, p. 326). To succeed in control of the means of production is both a shift
towards self-reliance, in which societies undertake the provision of goods and services and
a shift towards political communities, in which households undertake the role of
governance. Friedman, however, does not argue for the state to become obsolete nor for a
complete dissolution of capitalism, instead suggests that the radical planning practice leads
to their power being “redistributed among smaller political units…rendered more
accountable to the people” (Friedmann, 1987, p. 327). A shift towards political communities
necessitates that the people engage in processes of deliberation where, drawing from the
Habermassean foundation of social learning, knowledge of radical practice evolves and
shifts in its effectiveness against struggle (Friedmann, 1987, 2011).
Rather optimistically, Friedman suggests that in so-called Third-world cities, the
urgency to meet people’s basic needs requires that a radical planning practice be State-led
to quickly mobilize households to this end. To be sure, the struggles of social movements
emerging from ethnic, peasant and working-class, feminist and LGBTQI, religious groups,
and other minority majorities throughout the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America
29
and the violent repression often faced by their governments, contradict this possibility.
How then does civic society in the Global South plan engage in radical planning? What are
the key principles that can inform the theory of change?
SEEING FROM THE SOUTH
Clearly the radical planning practice that Friedman describes is informed by
Western intellectual traditions, even so, making a claim to its pertinence for the struggles
across geographical and intellectual boundaries and challenging rational models of
knowledge as bound to a project of dominance. Since first proposing radical planning as
mediation of knowledge to action for social transformation, scholars across the Global
South have been expanding on the theory of radical planning with case studies of collective
action from below and rooted in the experience of the Global South (Beard, 2003; Miraftab,
2009; Shrestha & Aranya, 2015; Watson, 2009, 2016). The move to ‘Seeing from the South’, is
not just a geographical shift, it implies challenging radical planning on two fronts. The first,
an extension of the critique of the positivist model of knowledge to the epistemological and
ontological hegemonic use of Western world models, noting the importance of the local
context while at the same time a relational, global view. The second, problematizing the
assumption of universal citizenship in order to reach concensus in Habermasean
approaches; in cases of the Global South, as will be explained, universal citizenship rights
don’t result in substantive citizenship. Substantive citizenship is built through insurgent
practices and the following section will explore the turn to the Global South through the
concept of insurgent planning.
The distinction that comes from positioning theory from the Global South, Miraftab
(2009) propounds, is that States in these contexts are post- (and presently) colonial
governments that have been embroiled in a globalizing economic project of neoliberalism.
Miraftab (2009) states “insurgent movement and oppositional practices described in this
article, as historicized reveal their political and cultural roots to be in political formations
that resisted the inequalities produced by colonialism, apartheid- and now, neoliberalism”
(p 44). Within this reality, the strategy of the post-colonial state’s and international
organizations to maintain State control is to co-opt inclusive practices, such as community
participation or the move towards decentralization. For example, decentralization and
participatory community practices can extend the reach of State control when public
30
entities such as local government or international funded partnerships between organized
civil society (e.g. non-profits and community-based partners) and the State are generated
without the goal of substantial material redistribution or substantial citizenship. They
argue that this relationship ultimately sustains the status quo by stabilizing state-society
relations. Critically, they also note that this is not a transformational practice because
“symbolic inclusion does not necessarily entail material re-distribution” (Miraftab 2009, p.
34). Nonetheless, Miraftab’s case study takes the conviction that social movements can
take advantage of the invented opened spaces of State-sanctioned participation as well as
create their own, invited spaces. A key example Miraftab mentions is a housing antieviction struggle in which legal and extra-legal tactics were utilized, she describes this as:
“they took their housing struggle to the court, they also brought the courts and its inherent
limitations out to the street” (2009, p. 38). Miraftab implores the reader to not consider
these binaries as reality, but instead to look towards ways in which the State bifurcates
inclusion, and many other concepts such as economies and housing (e.g. formal and
informal economies) to legitimize a state-sanctioned form of civic participation and
denounce the other as an extra-legal and illegitimate form.
By now it should be clear that the link between planning and politics and economics
is very much integrated. This is why planning as a formal practice cannot separate itself
form the notion and implications of operating from the nation-State and under a globalized
neoliberal economy. It is also why radical planning must consider what is the form of
citizenship and politics that pertains to its practice. Miraftab (2009) notes social
transformation should work towards substantive material redistribution and substantive
citizenship (akin to the earlier principles of self-reliance and self-governance). Here,
Miraftab (2009) draws from Friedman’s later writings (2002), Sandercock (1998) and
Holston (1997)’s scholarship to make a distinction between legalized rights gained by State
citizenship and a form of citizenship that is constructed from below, through a practice of
insurgency. Substantive citizenship then is not a gained by legitimacy but from becoming,
‘’It rather grows under the skin of the city, that is as an invisible city, through the insurgent
practices of marginalized communities- be it disenfranchised immigrants, racialized, and
gendered minorities of the industrialized world; or the squatter citizens of the global
South” (Miraftab 2009, p. 40). In this framework, insurgent citizenship is non-essentialist,
temporary instead in its formation, tactics, and discourse, and by opening up spaces of
31
democracy, it also moves towards self-reliance; insurgent planning practice, it follows,
strives for this form of substantive citizenship. To sum up, insurgent planning practice, is
then a “form of active participation in social movements or, as we may call them,
communities of political discourse and practice, that aim at either, or both, the defense of
existing democratic principles and rights and the claiming of new rights that, if enacted,
would lead to an expansion of the spaces of democracy, regardless of where these
struggles take place” (2002, p. 77). The case study for this thesis, the Movimiento Cívico of
Buenaventura, situates itself as an insurgent planning practice, and the goal of this thesis is
to show how the movement is creating forms of civic governance from below that are
expanding substantive citizenship and material redistribution.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR INSURGENT PLANNING
Presented as a set of principles, and not as a set of rules, insurgent planning scholarship
outlines the following as part of its practice:
1.
Enacted by specific groups whose life chances are collectively at risk in
particular circumstances,
2. Offers a critical analysis and understanding of the structural forces that deny
the fundamental right to human flourishing and full political participation
3. Strategizes simultaneously at multiple scales (micro-local to global),
4. Diverse practices of insurgent citizens are articulated through loosely
networked, temporary sodalities (solidarity groups)
5. Aims simultaneously at a number of different problems
6. Engages State and State-like formations
(Friedmann, 2002, pp. 83–84; Shrestha & Aranya, 2015)
Once situated in the Global South, Miraftab contributes a set of additional principles:
7. Counter- hegemonic: destabilizes normalized relations of dominance;
exposes the rift between inclusion and redistribution
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8. Imaginative: recognizes that other forms of cities and planning is not only
possible but necessary
9. Transgressive in time, place and action: it transgresses binaries that are set
up with Western logic such as invited/invented spaces of citizenship
practice, informal/formal, developed/undeveloped
(Miraftab, 2009, p. 46)
KNOWLEDGE WITHIN INSURGENT PRACTICE
Having laid out the groundwork for insurgent planning practice and its intersection
with an emerging theory of the Global South, I now consider the role of knowledge within
the practice. Watson (2016), in their theorizing for a Global South suggests a practice of
“situated knowledge”, meaning that a critical understanding of historical processes that
shape the socio-political contexts of the Global South such as colonialism, imperialism,
post-colonialism, and neoliberalism. As such, Watson says that a southern turn in planning
requires a “local, in-depth understanding”, which conflicts with Habermasean models of
planning due to their qualifying assumption that power imbalance such as those between
the State and social movements can be neutralized with discourse during negotiation
(Watson, 2016, p. 37). Nonetheless, some radical planning scholarship by Beard (2003),
attempts to look at processes of building knowledge within radical practice. Beard asks:
how do communities learn to practice radical planning? Beard presents a case study of an
informal settlement in an authoritative state context, Indonesia, to elucidate how radical
planning can begin from non-radical acts that build a community’s social learning over
time. In this case study, state-directed planning first allows the community to engage with
state programs, build a skill set that allowed them to move towards community-based
planning, and later strategize covert actions towards more controversial ends of radical
planning. Beard argues that this is the process of social learning is one in which the
community is experiencing both the power and limitations of collective agency. Over time,
when the State’s power is weakened by an economic and political crisis, it is this social
learning which allows them to undertake radical planning actions through a protest to
demand political reform. Thus, social learning, as Beard describes it, is a process of
cumulative acts over years of building political capacity that strengthens collective agency
and opens avenues for broader politicization.
33
Sandercock (1998), in Towards Cosmopolis, also draws lessons from insurgent
planning examples of ethnic, labor, and civil rights, and social movements in the U.S.
Looking at how knowledge is produced, Sandercock notes “the importance of popular
education and social learning”, typically taking place when social movements build political
capacity by teaching the historical socio-political contexts that generate structural
inequality and a second learning node in a learn-by-doing democratic, inclusive process.
Notably, Sandercock draws from communicative action as one of methods that can support
coalition building for social movements to “find common ground” (Sandercock, 1998, p.
158). As such, communicative acts of knowledge, she argues, can inform how social
movements themselves operate, suggesting that perhaps this type of process can be
appropriate within the spaces of collective action from below. Nonetheless, Shrestha and
Aranya (2015) remind us that “there are vested interest even among members within these
grass-roots organizations co-opting the whole social mobilization process to suit their own
means. The term ‘collective action by the poor’ in many ways indicates that these groups
are a homogenous composition, whereas in many cases the intra-group power structures
are one of the main reasons for exclusion of the vulnerable within the group” (2015, p. 438).
Considering that there remain gaps in how insurgent practices overcome differences in
power, both within and in their struggle for inclusion with institutional actors, looking to
the production of knowledge within insurgent practices remains an opportunity to inform
the transition to a new world. While many of these experiences are understood within the
local context, as a collective they make up the majority of human experience in both the
Global North and Global South. Therefore, accepting Friedman’s definition of radical
planning as mediating knowledge to action for social transformation, I consider how
insurgent planning practice can draw from epistemologies of the South, a relational
ontology framework that draws from vast experiences of territorial struggles in the Global
South.
EPISTEMOLOGIES OF THE SOUTH
We concluded the last section considering how social learning, a process of
generating knowledge for action, is conceived within insurgent planning practice. The
Movimiento Cívico, which emerges from the long-term struggle for ethnic-territorial rights
in the Colombian Pacific is a form of insurgent planning practice that contributes to
34
expanding and deepening the notion of each of the principles of insurgent practice laid out
by Friedman and Miraftab. Under the principle of transgressive actions, we consider that
insurgent practices transgress the Western logic of binaries, such as in the example
presented by the anti-displacement movement that utilized invited and invented spaces to
gain substantive citizenship. Epistemologies of the South, a relational ontology framework
builds on the concept of transgression, suggesting that the struggle of movements in
defense of territory are not only struggles simply about control over capital or resources.
Instead, epistemologies of the South suggest that at their core, these struggles are about
multiple ontologies, or cosmovisiones, or worldviews struggling to exist outside the
Western one. Epistemologies of the South suggests that “the world is made up of multiple
worlds, multiple ontologies or reals that are far from being exhausted by the Eurocentric
experience or being reducible to it” (Escobar, 2018, p. 67).
Epistemologies of the South has its intellectual roots the disciplines of anthropology
and sociology, namely, the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos in Brazil and Arturo
Escobar’s work in the Colombian Pacific with PCN. To understand this framework, Escobar
considers that ontology has three modes of operation, the first is our assumptions of how
we perceive ourselves as beings and our relationships; the second speaks to how those
assumptions influence the way we act in the world and the third, how we connect these
actions to the stories we manifest about our world, for example, narratives and
mythologies that arise from these. In a Western ontology, a strong set of dualisms coat our
assumptions of being and relationships. For example, the self is seen as an individualist
experience, and what is considered valid is limited to positivist rationality. Escobar 2018
notes, “the problem is not that dualisms exist”, rather, “the problem is with the ways in
which such divides are treated culturally, particularly the hierarchies established between
two parts of each binary, and the social, ecological, and political consequences of such
hierarchies”, such as those seen in contexts of colonialism (Escobar, 2018, p. 94). Escobar
notes that this struggle can be seen as a political ontological concept where implicit in the
project of hegemony is ontological worlds to be conquered, those worlds and knowledge
that don’t conform to the Western assumptions of beings and relationships.
This is a particularly important shift when considering how struggle is articulated
from previous frameworks, for example, political economy in which a Marxist lens poses
that a proletariat and bourgeoisie class struggle over the means of production. Political
35
ontology suggests that struggle framed in this context limits our understanding to a world
that is organized primarily by capital, and expands this window with a framework for
struggle that is at its core, about ontologies of people and their relationship to others, to
non-human nature, to emotion, or to spirituality, to offer a few examples. Relational
ontologies characterize the worldviews from communities at the crux of territorial
struggles, and in the Colombian Pacific, this worldview shapes the concept of ethnicterritory. PCN, in collaboration with academics such as Escobar, has been working
towards strengthening the practice of social transformation that is ultimately a fight for a
worldview that is shaped with and from the territory of the Colombian Pacific. A poignant
example, mentioned in chapter 1 captures this complexity: “acá nacimos, acá crecimos, acá
hemos conocido que es el mundo” (here we are born, here we grow, here we have known
what is the world”, an inter-relationality that considers that we exist in relation to
eachother, both the human and the more-than human world (Escobar, 2016). AfroColombian and Indigenous communities of the Colombian Pacific embody worldviews
captured by the above quote, but that are under incomplete occupation, or struggle. In the
Colombian Pacific, a region rich with grassroots organizing, a fight for territory is a fight to
restore the values that ethnic territories espouse from their worldview as these practices
and relationships are eroded by the extractive economies, discrimination, and violence.
PCN and other territorial struggles have captured these worldviews as part of their
struggle, generating theory from their daily practices. Here, the concept of Ubuntu, I am
because we are, and el Buen Vivir, an Andean indigenous philosophy that embodies an
alternative to development have become part of discourse of the alternative worlds that
not only necessary, but possible. Epistemologies of the South within this thesis’s
conceptual framework looks to position the formas propias de gobernanza generated from
the Movimiento Cívico within an insurgent planning practice in which civic governance
contests a relationship with the State that leaves little room for the relational worldview of
the Colombian Pacific ethnic-territory.
Summary
The shift in the planning tradition to radical planning marked the discipline’s selfreflection on its implication in pushing a hegemonic world order that has particularly
delineated inequalities, situating civil society engaged in social movements as acts of
36
alternative visions to development. Insurgent planning practices posited a shift towards
the Global South, considering complex socio-economic and political histories and the
struggle for substantive citizenship. However, insurgent planning practices from the Global
South also retake the task of positioning multiple forms of knowledge, in the form of life
experiences, cultures, and ultimately, worldviews, into conversation with a political reality
that is based in a practice of governance, for which the role of civic society becomes ever
more principal. The task is not a utopian ideal, rather it proposes that civil society be
equipped with the power, tools and methodology to not only work through difference, but
to recover relational ways of being in the world. As the field of planning broadens to
consider civil society’s struggle with State-sanctioned models of development as forms of
planning for social transformation, these actions can show the way towards creating
alternatives to the present world.
37
CHAPTER 3 FORMAS PROPIAS DE GOBERNANZA FROM THE
MOVIMIENTO CÍVICO
“Seguimos con la visión de que si no nos mantenemos unidos nos pueden
romper fácilmente. Y lo que nos tiene que mover es el amor al servicio al
territorio y estas generaciones y no al dinero. No la riqueza mala vida, ni la
riqueza rápida.”
“We continue with the vision that if we don’t remain united, they will be able
to break us easily. And that what has to motivate us is our love in the service
of the territory and generations to come and not money. Not the evil of
greed or rapid creation of wealth.”
Henry Hercillo Tobar Otero, Leader of the Executive Committee of the
Movimiento Cívico
As chapter one sought to elucidate, Buenaventura’s community assets include a rich
network of social and civic leadership and a cultural ethnic identity that is tied to a
relational worldview. To defend the latter, activism has been cultivated over decades of
struggle – nos ha tocado luchar por todo (we have always had to fight for everything). The
rise of the Movimiento Cívico then is perhaps not singular under this historical lens, but it
does mark a turning point in the city’s history where these assets were leveraged to
construct a broad-based civic coalition seeking to attack the symptoms of violence and
poverty in Buenaventura at the root of their causes: the structure of governance in the
territory. Henry Tobar, leader of the Movimiento Civico referred to their vision for the
structure of governance in the territory as building a “civic society that governs
governance and the market” (C. Cunningham, personal communication, June 2019). This
chapter outlines three mechanisms of civic governance that are designed by the
Movimiento Cívico and illustrates how these forms of governance are part of an insurgent
planning practice that strengthen critical consciousness, awareness of the struggle and
value of ethnic-territorial identity, and allow the Movimiento Cívico to legally access a
means for material re-distribution.
38
Figure 1 Organizations who signed on to the Paro Civico 2017 demands
Legend demonstrates the multisector coalition that makes up the Movimiento Cívico
39
CIVIC GOVERNANCE AS MULTISECTOR SOLIDARITY
Social learning allows individual interests to be put in service of the collective
The Movimiento Cívico para Vivir con Dignidad y Paz en el Territorio, Civic Movement
to Live with Dignity and Peace in the territory, arose as a confluence of various groups,
formal and informal, and social processes that constitute civil society in Buenaventura.
Organizationally, it is composed of a general assembly, which is made up of individuals
representing their grassroots and community-based organizations and independent
individuals. The general assembly meets monthly at the local church or the local public
universities and anyone from the community is allowed to attend these meetings, whether
or not they are an official member of the Movimiento Cívico. Official membership refers to a
process of building trust and a commitment to the work. One can register their grassroots
organization as part of the coalition through a pact referred to as “Solidaridad Social” (Social
solidarity; Resolución N001, 2018). The organizations that make up this coalition represent
the following sectors of civic society: “ associations, foundations, guilds, indigenous
cabildos 7, consejos comunitarios, juntas administradoras locales 8, alliances, committees,
movements, corporations, societies, centers, networks, labor unions, secretariats, and
others which are similar” (Resolución N001, 2018). The general assembly of the Movimiento
Cívico is estimated to include around 300 people and over 100 organizations of the sort
mentioned above. The movement has structured itself into eight thematic committees as
working groups for the eight demands that were made to the government on the day of the
Paro Cívico and a ninth, a Comité Ejecutivo del Movimiento Cívico, executive committee,
which represents the movement at meetings and leads the execution of the agreements with
the government. The members of the movement and leaders of the Comité Ejecutivo have all
been involved in social and civic struggles for the Colombian Pacific throughout their life,
many leaders are part of two or three grassroots organizations at a time, and these
Cabildos are a public special entity, whose members are elected and recognized as representatives
of an indigenous community, with a traditional sociopolitical governance structure, whose function
serves to legally represent the community and exercise authority over activities that apply to laws,
production activities and customs, and local laws.
8 Juntas administratoras locales are voluntary civic organizations that oversee matters at the
comunas and corregimientos (urban and rural city districts, respectively) of a city designed as
“Special District”; they elect representatives and procure resources for community development
projects through donations.
7
40
experiences provide valuable lessons from their life’s work. Forming this multisector
coalition required creating a civic space where civic society could leverage these
experiences to plan for collective action from below.
Around 2014, members of the then titled, Comité del Paro Cívico de Buenaventura para
Vivir con Dignidad y Paz en el Territorio (Committee for the Civic Strike of Buenaventura to
Live with Dignity and Peace in the Territory), known as the Comité del Paro Cívico, began
their organizing process. Henry Tobar, leader of the Comité Ejecutivo, brought to the
movement his experience in organizing transportation workers as a union organizer. He
began to reach out to the union and labor sector to recruit social leaders into the Comité del
Paro Cívico. Within a context of violence where trust is eroded by terror, building a civic
movement requires rebuilding trust in the community. Tobar mentioned that they recruited
leaders from across communities and sectors that could be trusted because of their life’s
work and conviction. Weekly meetings were held regularly, though there wasn’t a
requirement to attend and Gersain Diaz Osorio, leader of the Comité Ejecutivo, expressed
that its likely 200 or so people have participated in these meetings at one point or another.
Benjamin Mosquera Rodriguez, leader of the Comité Ejecutivo, notes that to understand the
Movimiento Cívico one has to understand the history of grassroots movements in the
Colombian Pacific:
“La lucha que se concreta el 6 de junio 2017, es una lucha ha venido hace más de
20 años desde los territorios, desde los procesos…. Pero entonces vale la pena
resaltar que gran parte del éxito [del Paro Cívico] es que logra conectar a todas
las dinámicas organizativas que de una manera están gestando movilizaciones
sociales en el territorio. Algunas con experiencias de trabajo comunitario, otras
con experiencias de trabajo sindical, otras con experiencia de
obreros...artesanales, trabajo gremios. La gran virtud de esta movilización es
que logro juntar todas las expresiones organizativas sin importar su vocación.
Y no necesariamente están todas en la misma línea en términos de política,
muchas están, como le comento, por ejemplo, el gremio de transportadores, que
solo luchan por los derechos de los transportadores, pero también tenemos
otras organizaciones que fueron como las que fueron el pilar para que el
Movimiento estuviera. Por ejemplo, el PCN, que es el Proceso de Comunidades
Negras, tiene más de 30 años en lucha y toda su experiencia, toda su
acumulación, y todo su capital político y social lo puso al frente del
Movimiento. Igual paso con la pastoral social, igual paso con las comunidades
indígenas a través del guardo del cabildo, la ACIVA 9, que es parte del
ACIVA RP (Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Valle del Cauca Región Pacífico): Association of
Indigenous Cabildos of the Valle del Cauca, Pacific Region
9
41
Movimiento. Entonces, hay unas estructuras muy sólidas de organizaciones que
ya venía trabajando en las comunidades hace más de 20 o 30 años. Y que, por
su experiencia por su capacidad instalada, su visión del futuro, las pusieron en
función del Movimiento. Entonces logró que conectara otras organizaciones
con ella por una solidez en materia de planteamiento y la visión política del
Movimiento.”
“The fight that took place on June 6th, 2017, is a struggle of more than 20
years ago from the territory, from its grassroots processes… But it’s worth
noting that a large part of the success is that we managed to connect all the
organizational dynamics that are generating social mobilizations in the
territory. Some with experiences in community work, others with experience
in unions, others with experience with workers, artisans, or collectives. The
great virtue of this mobilization is that we were able to unite these
organizational expressions regardless of their individual vocation. And they
are not necessarily all on the same page in terms of politics, many are… for
example, the union of transport workers only fights for transportation
workers; but, we have other organizations that were a pillar for the existence
of the movement, for example, the PCN, which as more than 30 years in the
struggle and all its experience, what its accumulated, all its political and
social capital was put at the behest of the movement. The same happened
with the pastoral social, the same with indigenous communities through
ACIVA, they’re part of the movement. So, we have very solid structures, that
have been working in communities and that have been building for 20-30
years. And all their experience, their installed capacity, their vision of the
future, they put them in the function of the movement. So, we managed to
connect organizations in solidarity for the strategy and political vision of the
movement.”
(B. Mosquera Rodriguez, personal communication, January 27, 2020)
Multiple interviews echo Mosquera Rodriguez’s sentiment, noting unity as one of the
factors that led to a successful mobilization on May 16, 2017, and in untangling the substance
of unity, they describe a process of collective learning. As the Comité del Paro Cívico met,
members started to piece together key lessons, leveraging experiential knowledge from all
the grassroots processes for a strategy that could make a 2017 strike different from the
previous major ones in 1964, 1998, and 2014 which led to agreements with the national
government but a reality of broken promises. This was a strategy to be built, looking precisely
towards the past struggles of all the sectors to inform the future of a united front. “El
gobierno fue nuestro maestro” (The government was our teacher) is how the Padre Jhon Reina,
leader of the Comité Ejecutivo, describes the learning process (P. J. Reina, personal
communication, January 23, 2020). Leaders who were recruited brought to the movement
42
lived experience of participating in past demonstrations and negotiations, and this
experiential knowledge was shared before the general assembly, developing their local
leadership to be ready to engage with the national government.
One of the recent sources of learning came from the fight of El Comité por la
Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (The Committee in Defense of Water and Life) for the
provision of water and sewage services against the private company, Hidropacifico, and the
local government of Buenaventura (Comité por la defensa del agua y la vida, n.d.). Gersain
Diaz Osorio, a leader in the Comité Ejecutivo who contributes to the communications
strategy, notes that this committee, organized in 2009, is “la madre, el punto organizativo
de origen de lo que conocemos como el Movimiento del Paro Cívico” (“the mother, the
organizing origin of what we now know as the civic strike movement”) (G. Osorio Diaz,
personal communication, January 28, 2020). Narcilo Rosero and Humberto Hurtado,
lifelong organizers and present-day leaders of the Comité Ejecutivo, belong to this lineage
of struggle for the right to water and sanitation (Gallego, 2018). Humberto Hurtado’s
activist lineage also goes back to the PCN, which at the time was actively fighting for
recognition and reparations of violence done by illegally armed groups in the territory.
Rosero, who participated in the 1998 civic strike of Buenaventura, where the right to water
had also been a salient demand during negotiations with the national government,
contributed his experience to this learning process. Diaz Osorio recalls Rosero telling his
story of the 1998 civic strike, executed by a public workers union but which grew in force
with 45 organizations joining the strike over six days. To end the strike, an agreement was
reached with various representatives of the national government making promises to pay
back-wages for the public workers who had started the strike and set up a committee that
would explore an Emergency Plan for Buenaventura with a commitment of 223,288 million
pesos. The movement’s leaders reflected on this experience:
“El año 1998, en otro paro que fue menos estructurado, duró cuatro días y en el
que cometieron el error y lo identificaron ellos para este paro del 2017. De que
habían hecho una lista con más de 60 puntos porque fruto del cansancio y de
protestas y de insatisfacción porque no les pagaban a los trabajadores del
municipio bloquearon el puente del piñal que era la única vía de salida en su
época. Entonces, claro, la gente se entusiasmó porque pues vieron que estaban
representando la dignidad del pueblo y la gente fue llegando, pero como era
espontáneo cada persona iba llegando llevando su problemita. Entonces ‘vea en
mi calle no hay pavimentación, en mi barrio no hay un puesto de salud’ y
43
fueron poniendo allí unas peticiones para presentarlas al gobierno con quien
interactuaron en el momento, que era más que el gobierno nacional la
gobernación. Trajeron al gobernador de la época y tuvieron una experiencia de
negociación que no fue exitosa. Ellos recuerdan mucho… que el gobernador
decía ‘intentaré solucionar, procuraré tal cosa’. Entonces habían tenido un
antecedente en esa negociación en la que se hicieron acuerdos, pero luego no se
cumplieron.’’
“In the year, 1998, in another civic strike that was less structured… they
made a mistake, and they identified it for this civic strike in 2017. They had
made a list with over 60 petitions as a result of protests and dissatisfaction
that municipal workers were not getting paid and they blocked the bridge El
Piñal, which was the only exit then, and of course, other people got
motivated because national government’s representatives came. And the
community and people started to spontaneously come, seeing that the
dignity of the city was on the line and each person bringing forth their
concern, ‘Look there’s no pavement in my neighborhood, there’s no clinic for
health care’, and they were putting their petitions in front of the government
to be addressed. And it wasn’t the national government, it was negotiations
with the regional governor. And they had a negotiation experience that was
not successful, where the Governor at the time, they remember, would say
‘I’ll try to fix that, I’ll work on obtaining that request’; so in the end, in that
previous negotiation they had made agreements that were not carried out”.
(G. Osorio Diaz, personal communication, January 28, 2020)
This was a negotiation experience with the regional government for which there were no
mechanisms agreed upon to ensure their demands would be met, but importantly, it also
shows how the leaders from the movement reflected on their political acumen, on how to
engage with the government. A list of petitions motivated by the enthusiasm of collective
action of the strike sparked civil society to engage with the protest, but the movement
recognized that mobilization and demonstration only get the national government to the
negotiation table in the interest of resuming state-control. To realize material
redistribution, the movement would need a mechanism for civic society to hold the
national government in compliance and accountability of agreements.
It would not be until 2014, until La Gran Marcha, The Great March, when another
opportunity was drawn to negotiate with the national government. In 2014, a coalition of
organizations including El Comité del Agua, PCN, ACODIARPE10, labor unions, and the
Diocese of Buenaventura united under the goal of executing a peaceful march that would
Associacion Colombiana de Industriales y Armadores Pequeros de Buenaventura, Association of
Industrial Fishermen and Shipowners of Buenaventura
10
44
bring attention to the violence and unmet basic needs in the territory. The full name of the
event was La Marcha para Enterrar la Violencia y Vivir con Paz en el Territorio (The March
to Bury Violence and Live in Peace in the Territory). To be sure, this was not the first march
against violence. Gersain Diaz Osorio reminds us that marches and demonstrations of
various demands which brought around 500 to 2,000 people were a common phenomenon.
Padre Jhon Reina, an organizer of the march on behalf of the Diocese of Buenaventura,
recalls that the organizing committee had hoped for 5,000 people to turn out. On February
19, 2014, La Gran Marcha took place, starting at 8 am and to the surprise the Comité de la
Marcha, of the organizing committee, and the rest of the nation, 25,000-60,000 11 civilians
marched, moving along a trajectory of stops where violence had left indelible marks. The
march stopped at each place to grieve the deeds, using white as a symbol of peace and
centering youth through art including rap, hip-hop, salsa choke 12, and poetry. Ringing
through the streets was the call “solo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (only the community saves
the community)(Buenaventura Marcha Para Enterrar y Ponerle Fin a La Ola de Violencia,
n.d.). Alongside the much-needed collective act of healing and denouncing the structural
violence, the organizers of the march produced a list of demands directed at the national,
regional and local governments calling for an immediate state emergency and release of
funds to secure public services for the hospital, water and sanitation infrastructure, and
procedural justice for crimes against humanity in the territory. On March 8, 2014, in
response to unprecedented and unexpected numbers of bonaverenses, people of
Buenaventura, marching, the national government sent a delegation of public officials to
meet with the leaders of the march.
“El 8 de marzo aquí está el presidente con todos sus ministros y cada cosa.
Entonces nos pusieron en mesas y mesas y nosotros perdidos ahí en eso. Y
nosotros no sabíamos al final como responder porque no estábamos
preparados.”
“On March 8th the President and his ministries were here and they put us all
in working groups and we were lost. In the end we didn’t know how to
respond because we were not prepared. ”
(P. J. Reina, personal communication, January 23, 2020)
There are no official counts of the total number of people, some interviewees mentioned 20,000
while others mentioned 60,000.
12 Salsa choke is a style of salsa that originates in the 2000s from the Pacific of Colombia.
11
45
Negotiations with the national government were fraught with confusion over the process,
given that the working group structure setup seemed instead to separate and diffuse the
united voice of the Comíte de la Marcha. Nonetheless, an agreement was reached for an
independent fund, “Fondo para el Desarrollo del Plan Todos Somos PAZcifico” (Fund for the
development of the Plan: We are all Peace in the Pacific). The fund and plan would be
managed by the national government’s National Entity for Risk and Disaster Management
and Ministries of Housing and Public Credit. For the fund and plan, the Santos
administration committed to an investment of 400 million USD to be allocated for
infrastructure projects in water and sanitation, energy, and transportation via fluvial
water-ways (Plan todos somos PAZcífico, 2015). The management structure, set up by the
national government, to execute Plan Todos Somos PAZcifico was exclusively made up of
national-level public servants, only one of which was from the Colombian Pacific region,
Luis Gilberto Murillo, who served as its executive director and who would later be a part of
the negotiation on the side of the national government during the Paro Cívico of 2017.
Reflecting on the 2014 negotiation, Padre Jhon Reina states:
“Nosotros decíamos, por más que el gobierno nacional lo aplique [Plan
PAZcifico], eso no va a funcionar. Dentro de eso que estábamos haciendo del
manifiesto nosotros le estamos diciendo al gobierno que nosotros queríamos
que nos declararan una emergencia social y ecológica y económica para
Buenaventura por todos los problemas que teníamos y que los problemas eran
de fondo y no de forma.”
“We said, even if the national government follows through [with Plan
Pazcifico], this will not change anything. Within everything that our
manifesto evoked, we were telling the national government that we wanted a
social, ecological, and economic state of emergency to be declared for
Buenaventura. Because our problems are more than the symptoms, they are
structural issues.”
(P. J. Reina, personal communication, January 23, 2020)
The strategy behind calling for a declaration of national emergency addresses the severity
of the violence and conditions of life facing the Pacific. Declaring a national emergency
legally allows the national government to disburse funds immediately, rather than utilize a
lengthy bureaucratic process by which projects and spending have to be cleared by the
national government. Today, leaders recall that only 80 million USD of the pledged 400
46
million USD was allocated for projects in Buenaventura; other funds were pledged to public
projects in the Colombian Pacific, to Quibdó and Tumaco, yet, the disbursement of this
funding for any city lagged over the following months and then, years. The agreement was
one that lacked meaningful inclusion in decision-making processes and methods by which
civil society could hold the national government accountable. This experience created a
valuable lesson: the Movimiento Cívico would need to consider how to structure itself in
the negotiations with the government in 2017 in a manner that would shift governance of
the territory.
Knowledge production as a form of civic governance is the foundation of the
Movimiento Cívico. It results from an intentional process of tapping into the social and
political capital of mobilizations. Individually, they all generate important social and
political capital, and their impact is amplified when individual assets are leveraged for
collective interest. Civic governance, in the case of the movement, requires a disciplined
and rigorous process of organizing in which unity goes beyond gathering critical mass;
instead, the strength of unity comes from a practice of pooling individual strengths in the
service of the collective. The next two examples of civic governance further demonstrate
how the movement builds upon this foundation to restructure state-controlled
governance, effectively tackling problemas de fondo (structural change).
CIVIC GOVERNANCE AS MESAS TEMATICAS
Autonomous thematic committees generate the basis for a comprehensive view of
development priorities
The Movimiento Cívico’s eight mesas temáticas, thematic committees, address the key
priority needs of Buenaventura and are a form of civic governance designed specifically for
civic society to formulate a concerted development plan. In this section, we will dive into
how these thematic committees operated during the 22 days of negotiation during the Paro
Cívico as well as their function post-negotiation, situating this structure as invented spaces
that aim for substantive citizenship.
In a commemorative march for La Gran Marcha in February 2016, leaflets were
handed out saying “Buenaventura no aguanta mas, preparate para el paro!” (Buenaventura
won’t take it anymore. Prepare yourself for the strike!). By 2017, right after the May 1st,
international worker’s day, the Comité del Paro Cívico definitively announced May 16th as la
47
hora zero, t-0. They issued statements to the community, such as, “Súmate al Paro!” (Join the
Strike!) and “Mucha atención! El Paro Cívico comienza, pero es indefinido, por lo tanto, es
bueno que usted se aprovisione de productos no perecederos” (Attention! The Civic Strike
begins but will be indefinite, we recommend that you stock up on non-perishables) as part
of an information and mobilization strategy. Gersain Diaz Osorio mentions that the
supermarkets were selling more rice, potatoes, and other nonperishables, indicative of the
movement’s measured planning but also the community’s preparedness in support of a Paro
Cívico.
An official letter was sent to Juan Manuel Santos, incumbent President of the
Republic, formally signed by nearly 80 organizations, a great part of them are labor unions
related to the port’s commercial activity, but also the neighborhood and community action
committees, ethnic groups, and youth and women’s rights groups (Appendix A). The letter
decried “decades of denouncing, mobilizing, and negotiating with the national government”
with the same outcomes of “constant incompliance”(Comite del Paro Civico, 2017). It also
notes the importance of the port to the nation’s economy, citing “5.47 billion of pesos in
tariff income raised [in Buenaventura], making up 27% of the national total” and demanding
that under article 215 of the National Constitution, the State declare an economic, social,
and ecological emergency (Comite del Paro Civico, 2017). They further present eight “lineas
gruesas”, central priorities, and called for negotiations for each of the following:
1.
Health: health services of low, medium and high standards and in
traditional medicine, including coverage, prevention and attention
2. Environment: recovery and conservation of rivers and other strategic
ecosystems in status of degradation
3. Education: coverage, quality, and adequacy of the basic, secondary level,
technical and higher education
4. Human Rights: strengthen and promote cultural, recreational, and
physical activities
5. Water and Sewage: water management and infrastructure including
public and community-based management
6. Justice and Reparation: access to justice and reparation for victims on an
individual and collective level
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7. Territory and Housing: the ordering of the territory and the urban habitat
for better livelihoods conditions and the collective well-being including
reparation and new housing for families
8. Employment and Productivity: foster the local and regional production
and other economic measures that provide employment with dignity and
income for the families in need
(Emisión en directo de TeleMar Buenaventura, n.d.; Patiño & Moreno, n.d.)
On May 16, 2017, the civic strike began at 5 am with 11 strategic points blocked off.
Indigenous leaders and consejos comunitarios in the rural areas blocked alternate highways,
labor did not show up to man the ports nor to drive the 18-wheelers with freight from
Buga, Cali, and Bogotá to and from the port, and local businesses closed. Blockades were
made of people locking arms and chants, song, dance, and prayer were part of the march
along the streets. Each day a new cry of resistance was announced. The flag of
Buenaventura, the colors gold for its mineral-rich gold and green for its nature, were flown
all throughout the streets (Redacción de El País, 2017)
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Image 5: Paro Cívico 2017
Source: Comite del Paro Civico Facebook
On the 3rd day, the national government arrived to initiate a dialogue but
immediately rejected the possibility for declaring a state of economic, ecological, and social
emergency, stating that this would not be approved by congress because the situation in
Buenaventura was not an emergency like that of a natural disaster (e.g. a flood) and thus
not defensible by law. On the 4th day, Buenaventura’s Mayor, Eliecer Arboleda Torres, aired
a message to the city asking the leaders of the Paro Cívico to lift the blockades in exchange
for continued negotiation with the national government. His request was not met, and
later, he resorted to a plea that blamed the strike for limiting people’s economic
opportunity, specifically referring to informal workers, rebuscadores, those that collect
trash and recycling. Mayor Torres, in public statement says, “la gente quiere es trabajar y
estoy seguro que este paro no va a durar” (people want to work and I'm sure that this strike
won’t last) (Habla el Alcalde Distrital ante negativa de Levantar Bloqueos, n.d.; Patiño &
50
Moreno, n.d.). Mayor Torres gravely underestimated what people wanted. Henry Tobar
reflects on this as a critical moment that led to more people joining the strike:
“... el alcalde de turno estaba en contra de este proceso porque estaba a favor de
las clases políticas corruptas. Lo que hizo fue enervar los ánimos de la
comunidad con cosas que hizo… se indignaron y se vincularon.”
“The incumbent Mayor was against this process because he was in favor of
the corrupt political class. What he did was incite the community’s
motivation with the things he did… they became indignant and they joined.”
(H. H. Tobar Otero, personal communication, January 21, 2020)
On this same 4th day, the State responded by sending the national police riot control
unit, Escuadron Movil Antidisturbios (ESMAD), citing the danger that paramilitary groups
would get involved and attempting to remove people from the critical blockade at the
Puente Piñal, initiating a standoff between civilians and a military unit. Soon after,
disturbances broke out in the commercial center and at major grocery chains, intensifying
the military repression. ESMAD responded with tear gas, bullets, and arrests. Leaders of
the Movimiento Cívico felt that they could no longer guarantee a pacific, non-violent civic
strike, and fearing bloodshed, decided to call off day 5 of the Paro Cívico. Yet, on day 5,
youth and youth-led organizations did not heed the Paro Cívico’s leaders and instead
flooded the streets again with non-violent protest and chanting what would become the
motto of the strike, “¡El Pueblo no se rinde, Carajo!” (The people don’t give up, dammit!)(E. S.
Solarte, personal communication, January 24, 2020). As Manos Visibles, a non-profit social
organization, notes in their documentation of the Paro Cívico, this was a moment where “El
pueblo se habia tomado el paro” (The people had taken over the strike)(Patiño & Moreno,
n.d.). The leaders acknowledge day 5 as a day that was outside of anything they had
planned, “Ya se volvió tema de ciudad no solo los organizadores” (it was now a thing of the
city not just the organizers) (H. H. Tobar Otero, personal communication, January 21, 2020).
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Image 6: Re-enaction of the ESMAD confrontation during Paro Cívico 2017
Source: (Buenaventura No Se Rinde, 2017)
It wasn’t until the 8th day that the government sent a negotiation delegation of the
Minister of Housing, Vice Ministers of Water and the Interior, and the Director of the Plan
Pazcifico and FINDETER. Both the State and the Comité del Paro Cívico agreed to live
coverage of the negotiations by the local new station, TeleMar. Half a million bonaverenses
living in the territory and countless others living in other Colombian cities such as Quibdó,
Tumaco, Popayán, Cali, Medellín, Bogotá, or internationally, joined in solidarity with
Buenaventura and the Colombian Pacific through social media using the hashtag
#ElPuebloNoSeRindeCarajo. They rallied via social media to show support and drew a
spotlight on the Colombian government at a time when the nation had recently signed the
Peace Deal, bringing an expectation of peace in the territory.
This was the moment of negotiation that the movement had been working towards.
Rather than allow the national government to set the order of negotiation and the
priorities, the movement came prepared. Over the past two years of organizing and
preparation, the general assembly had worked together to list out all the individual
grievances and to pull together “lineas gruesas”, central priorities. The eight demands
presented to the national government are common threads that affect everyone in
Buenaventura, and within the Movimiento Cívico, they align with eight thematic
committees.
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By day 11th, negotiations had stalled around the point of funding, the government
refusing to declare the emergency which would allow it to distribute immediate funds and
the Movimiento Cívico firm in its conviction that the levels of corruption, violence, poverty
and unmet basic needs required an emergency response from the national government.
Minister of the Environment, Luis Gilberto Murillo, also the former Director of Plan
PAZcifico, suggested on behalf of the State to utilize the private autonomous fund from the
Plan PAZcifico to generate a special account to fund the implementation of any agreements
negotiated and to allow for a council of directors made up of the gubernatorial actors and
by the community (Patiño & Moreno, n.d.). The Comité del Paro Cívico decided to discuss
this as an option and return with an answer. The next day, both parties agreed to begin
negotiations around an autonomous fund to be directed by both government and the
community.
Rather than allow the government to determine the priorities, the Comité del Paro
Cívico employed its structure, 8 mesas temáticas, thematic committees and brought 300
persons into the negotiation process to reach an accord. Alongside the eight central
themes, an additional committee dedicated to researching the possibilities with regards to
the autonomous fund and a tenth table for human rights given the continued military
repression of ESMAD were created. Each committee worked to develop solutions, not just
demands, and presented these as proposals during negotiation with their national
government Ministry counterpart. These thematic agreements were then negotiated as a
whole at the level of the Comité Ejecutivo and national government. As an example,
Harrington Valencia Riveros describes how the education committee functioned:
“Estructuramos un pliego de soluciones en educación con 34 propuestas,
articuladas en torno a ocho ejes temáticos que alcanzaban en ese entonces un
monto cercano a los 200 millones de pesos en educación. Entonces ahí
proponíamos mecanismos de política pública a nivel de educación, en temas de
infraestructura educativa, temas de calidad de pertenencia, temas de
cobertura… de educación superior… Y al final consolidamos un alta de 8
puntos, acordamos que el pliego que presentamos hace parte integral del
acuerdo.”
“We structured a list of solutions with 34 proposals, articulated against eight
central points that, in that instance, reached 200 million Colombian pesos
[~70,000 USD] for education. There we proposed mechanisms for public
policy at the level of education, topics such as education infrastructure, both
53
in terms of quality and pertinence, topics of coverage…of higher education…
and at the end, we consolidated these into eight central points and we
agreed with the national government that the list of solutions would be an
integral part of the final agreement.”
(H. Valencia Riveros, personal communication, January 23, 2020)
Some thematic committees had moved faster in reaching agreements than others, for
example, the Committee for Employment and Productivity, which pooled together so many
different labor groups and interests were one of the groups with prolonged deliberations.
By day 20th, State-sanctioned violence against demonstrators continued, diminished food
and other resources were becoming harder to manage, within Buenaventura but also
regionally, as smaller communities in the Pacific depend on the port for provisions and
therefore also saw their resources diminished. The pressure to reach an agreement was
mounting.
On day 22, June 6th, at 9 am the representatives of the national government and the
Comité del Paro Cívico signed an agreement that contained two central parts. First, an
Autonomous Fund that would last 10 years to finance a Plan Estrategico de Desarrollo
Integral del Distrito de Buenaventura (PEIDB; Special Strategic and Comprehensive
Development Plan for Buenaventura). The PIEDB will need to align with other national,
regional, and district-level planning, but will also pool its proposals for development from
the matrix of solutions and ongoing work of the eight thematic committees. A second part
of the agreement was a set of solutions from these matrix proposals that with allocated
funds, reaching an initial investment of 1.5 billion Colombian pesos, the equivalent of nearly
half a billion USD, from the national government (Gobierno Nacional y Comité Ejecutivo del
Paro Cívico firmaron acuerdo para levantar el paro, 2017).
Over the 22 days of civic strike, an estimated that 25% to 50% of Buenaventura
participated in the strike, the exact figure is unknown, taking back their territory from the
hands of illegally armed actors, corrupt politicians, and extractive economic interests. The
strike cost the port and export-based multinationals $230,000 million Colombian Pesos an estimated 77 million USD (Vargas, 2017). In a session with LIT participants, the youth
leaders reflected and discussed what the impact of the strike was:
“Se restableció la confianza. Hoy en términos de referentes inmediatos, ya no es
Santos, Uribe... Ahora hablan de Humberto, Victor Vidal. La sociedad civil es el
54
pilar fundamental del estado de derecho 13. El Paro evidencia la confianza en la
sociedad civil. A partir de ahí, el impacto es que restablece el constituyente
primario.”
“We restored confidence. Today, in terms of our immediate references we
aren’t looking to Santos or Uribe… Today we are talking about Humberto and
Victor Vidal. Civil society is the pillar of a social state under the rule of law. El
Paro is evidence of the confidence in civil society. From now on, the impact
is that we restored the primary constituent.”
The 22-days of the civic strike brought together civil society, both the organized groups
that worked on the planning, executions, and negotiation as one united Movimiento Cívico,
and those who mobilized daily on the streets in defense of the territory on the day of la
hora zero and for subsequent days, effectively de-authorizing the State’s governance and
placing in its stead governance from civic society. The structural problems of the territory
were understood under these terms: restoring civic society’s governance of the territory.
The eight thematic committees function as a form of insurgent practice, a practice of
concerted, comprehensive planning from below in which proposals for public services from
health, to water, to education emerge to contest their counterparts at the level of formal
State-led planning. Importantly, this structure continues three years after the Paro Cívico,
Harrington Valencia Riveros notes, “Las mesas han venido funcionando como una
institucionalidad social” (The tables have been functioning like social institutions) (personal
communication, January 23, 2020). In setting up social institutions that will manage the
public works and priorities of the territory, the thematic committees can make proposals
towards the comprehensive development plan (PEIDB) which has a 10-year reach and goes
beyond any political office term or any previous plans proposed by the government. The
PEIDB framework proposed by the movement is considered distinct in that it is a plan to
close the gap between the national average for basic needs and the reality in Buenaventura,
and it is realistic in that improvements for Buenaventura will require a long-term civicinfrastructure to manage projects and a long-term source of financing that doesn’t ebb and
flow with the will of incumbent politicians. In a context of structural inequality and
violence, the Movimiento Cívico has generated social institutions, pooling together social
In Colombia’s Constitution of 1991, article 1 states that “Colombia is a social state under the rule of
law, organized in the form of a unitary republic, decentralized, with autonomy of its territorial units,
democratic, participatory, and pluralistic, based on the respect of human dignity, the work and
solidarity of the individuals who belong to it, and the prevalence of the general interest’’
13
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and political capacity from civic society, and has pooled these resources to generate a
concerted process of comprehensive development from below.
Harrington Valencia Riveros, who participates as part of the education committee,
describes the thematic committees as social institutions, each with 3-levels of operation.
The first level as, “espacios autónomos”, autonomous spaces, at the community level, then a
smaller technical team that is in communication with the Ministry of Education at the
national government level, and a mixed team, that pools together the members of the
Movimiento Cívico, national government, and local government (H. Valencia Riveros,
personal communication, January 23, 2020). The thematic committees, in essence,
generate a space for the community to make decisions around priorities that address the
public infrastructure needs in the city; technical teams utilize resources from academics,
volunteers, allies of the movement with technical capacity, and movement leaders
themselves to take proposals from ideation and prioritization phases to implementation
phase; and the discussion with the national government is a space that functions to
operationalize financially and legally what has already been discussed and agreed upon at
the community level.
“Se alcanzó un nivel de maduración ideológica política del pueblo que se
expresó en la movilización tan enorme, en el respaldo social popular tan
enorme, y sobre todo en el nivel político y técnico de la dirigencia del Paro
Cívico y sus mesas de trabajo en la interlocución política y técnica con el
gobierno nacional.”
“We reached a level of political and ideological maturity as a community,
which expressed itself in the mobilization so large and backed the
movement, and above all, at the political and technical level of the leadership
of the Paro Cívico and its thematic committees in a political and technical
dialogue with the national government.”
(H. Valencia Riveros, personal communication, January 23, 2020)
Comparing this with how the negotiation process went in 2014, an organizational structure
around the eight development priorities grew out of political and ideological maturity. The
Movimiento Cívico’s goal isn’t to just reach a deal, they have a long-term vision for civil
society to govern governance and the market.
“Yo creo que él paro de Buenaventura, en eso fue supremamente exitoso. Que
logró reunir a gran parte de sus mejores intelectuales académicos pero
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intelectuales de base también, que se dispusieron para aportar en ese proceso,
un proceso que ya va para tres años y todavía tiene un voluntariado fuerte en
las mesas…mucha gente con mucha capacidad y con mucha formación. Eso
también es un aprendizaje muy importante, supremamente importante, porque
fuimos capaces de mostrarle al gobierno nacional que un lugar como
Buenaventura tenía condiciones para interactuar de tú a tú con los
funcionarios del gobierno cómo pares académicos y eso fue un elemento muy
significativo, de mucho valor. De los grandes aprendizajes, ¿cómo lograr que los
principales activos intelectuales de un pueblo puedan articularse en una cosa
como esta? Porque necesitábamos gente con capacidad, conceptual y técnica
para poder defender los derechos de la comunidad en los diferentes temas que
son amplios.”
“I think that the strike of Buenaventura… managed to bring together a large
part of its best intellectuals, academic and grassroots intellectuals, who set
out to contribute in this process, a process that is already three years old and
still has a lot of volunteer service. A lot of people with lots of capacity and
with a lot of preparation, that is also a very important lesson, supremely
important, because we were able to show the national government that a
place like Buenaventura has the conditions to interact one-to-one with
government officials as academic peers and in that moment it was very
significant, it has a lot of value. One of our greatest lessons, how to succeed
in bringing together the greatest intellectual assets of our community to
articulate something like this [Paro Cívico]. Because we needed people with
aptitudes, conceptual and technical, to be able to defend the rights of the
community in all its different topics, which are vast.”
(H. Valencia Riveros, personal communication, January 23, 2020)
Valencia Riveros notes that the movement was successful in tapping into the
consciousness and capacity of the community and in sharpening their strategy for social
transformation. The thematic committees are set up as foils to their State counterparts, to
employ both the conceptual framework, referring to the knowledge of the culture and
philosophical grounding behind the proposals, and the technical framework to accomplish
them. For example, the Committee for Education’s 34 projects each require project
management, but these projects are conceptually grounded in a model of education that
the movement refers to as, etno-education, elaborated as education “que permita adecuar el
sistema educativo a las condiciones particulares del territorio, especialmente a las
expresiones culturales de las comunidades locales” (ethnic education that allows for the
educational system to be adequate for the particular conditions of the territory,
specifically, the cultural expressions of the local community) (H. Valencia Riveros, personal
communication, January 23, 2020). Governance of the territory, after all, requires that
57
future generations of the ethnic-territory of the Colombian Pacific have the knowledge
which prepares them conceptually, technically, and politically for participation in civic
society.
To summarize this example of civic governance, the work that comes from the
thematic committees has multiple trajectories, one of which is the inclusion of proposals
from each committee into the PIEBD, however, this work is also set up to be plugged into
other formal planning directives including the National Development Plan for Ivan Duque’s
administration, the District’s Development Plan under Victor Vidal’s administration, and
the upcoming Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (POT; a land-use plan executed every 12years by the Department of National Planning). The thematic committees provide the
structure for civic governance to source from within the territory community assets and
knowledge, develop proposals and link these to development projects at the State-level.
CIVIC GOVERNANCE AS A LEGAL STRUCTURE FOR MIXED-MANAGEMENT
Mixed-management, national government and civil society, structure to oversee an
autonomous fund
That a civic strike, an act of civil disobedience, or protest result in an agreement
that promises millions of pesos of investments for the development of the Colombian
Pacific is not a new story- but there are key differences between those times and the
agreement that occurred as a result of the Paro Cívico of 2017. To mark this distinction, a
closer look at how the movement inserts civic governance in its agreements is necessary.
In this final section, an analysis of the agreement reached on June 6th highlights aspects of
the legal framework where the Movimiento Cívico strengthens civil society’s role in
governance over the territory.
Paro Cívico 2017 Agreement
Recall, on June 6, 2017, a two-part agreement was reached between the Movimiento
Cívico and the national government to end the 22-day strike. The first part of this
agreement is a Matrix of Public Work Priorities, which includes investments in public
works and priorities as negotiated by each working group with an allocated 1.5 billion
Colombian pesos (approximately half a million USD). The second part is the creation of an
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autonomous fund to oversee the financing and development of a 10-year special
development plan for Buenaventura (PIEDB). The overarching goals of this plan are
stipulated within the agreement:
•
Guarantee access to public health care from basic to emergency
services
•
100% coverage and access to potable water and sewage
•
100% coverage and access to education
•
Reduce unemployment to 1-digit percent through local economic and
food sovereignty. This includes reactivation of ancestral economic
activities such as fishing, sustainable forestry, artisanal
manufacturing, ancestral mining, local commerce, local agriculture,
and creation of a port zone and road infrastructure connected to the
interior of the Colombian Pacific
•
Overcome the housing deficit in the urban and rural zones
Within this agreement, five projects from the Matrix of Public Work Priorities are specified
to receive immediate sources of financing: these include a small hospital unit, the first
phase of an urban sewage system and rural aqueduct system, the Intensive Care Unit for
the local hospital, a resource hub for the local-fishing sector, and a dock for cabotage. It is
important to remember that this agreement ended the civic strike, but it did not end the
movement’s strategy to ensure compliance from the national government.
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Image 7 Direct broadcasting of Paro Civico 2017 negotiations, Comite Ejecutivo Paro Civico’s Victor
Hugo Vidal (bottom) and Narcilo Rosero (top) speaking
Source: (Emisión en directo de TeleMar Buenaventura, n.d.)
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Decreto 1402 y 1812
To ensure compliance, soon after signing the agreement, a group of the Comité
Ejecutivo traveled to Bogota, the nation’s capital, to seek that the accords be legally
formalized. On August 2017, Decree 1402 was issued by the Juan Manuel Santos, incumbent
President of the Republic, to create the Commission for the Follow-up and Monitoring of
the Accords of the Civic Strike) (Comisión de Seguimiento al Acuerdo Del Paro Cívico de
Buenaventura Para Vivir Con Dignidad y Paz En El Territorio, 2017). Seguimiento,
compliance, has been a crucial part of maintaining the agreements alive. The decree legally
establishes a committee structure with voting power that includes a mix of government
and community officials. These include:
1.
Minister of Interior or a delegate
2. Minister of Health and Social Protection or a delegate
3. Minister of National Education or a delegate
4. Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development or a delegate
5. Minister of Housing, City and Territory, or a delegate
6. High Ranking Advisor to the President, or a delegate
7. Director of the Plan Todos Somos PAZcifico, or a delegate
8. Governor of the Valle del Cauca Department or a delegate
9. The Mayor of Buenaventura or a delegate
10. Seven representative of the Movimiento Cívico*
*The total number of community representatives first allotted was 1, this was
amended in November 2017 to include 7 community representatives from the
Movimiento Cívico.
The committee is tasked with directing the compliance of the agreements reached by the
Paro Cívico, informing citizens and promoting civic and community participation in the
process, creating an ad hoc committee to study the structural problems of the city and
agreeing on metrics by which to measure the compliance of agreements. These meetings
take place in Bogota, Cali, and Buenaventura, depending on the situation, and they have
become an extension of negotiation talks, an ongoing process of engaging with the highest
officials of the nation to hold them accountable to the agreement. As a result of the work of
this committee, by November 2018, the Nation’s Congress signs Law 1872 titled “Fund for
the Development of the Special District of Buenaventura and Efforts to Promote the
61
Comprehensive Development of Buenaventura Delegated as a Special, Industrial,
Biodiverse, and Eco-touristic District”, which cements the legal framework for an
autonomous fund to finance the development plan.
Ley 1872 de 2017: FONBUENAVENTURA
The fund, known as FONBUENVENTURA, is to be managed by a Board of Directors made
up of Movimiento Cívico representatives and government officials, under the following
governance structure:
1.
Minister of Housing and Public Credit
2. Minister of Housing, City and Territory
3. Minister of the Interior
4. Director of the National Planning Department
5. Three members designed by the President of the Nation
6. Governor of the Valle del Cauca Department
7. The Mayor of Buenaventura
8. Five elected representatives of the Movimiento Cívico
The five representatives of the Movimiento Cívico are to be elected through democratic
mediums, guaranteeing the participation of representatives from indigenous and black
communities, as well as the Juntas de Acción Communal in Buenaventura. The Movimiento
Cívico developed its own framework internally, Resolution N001, to outline how elections
would take place. First, to run as a representative requires a nomination and each of the
five persons elected must be members of the Moviemiento Cívico who, if elected, will also
serve on the Comité Ejecutivo of the movement. Votes are allocated as 1 vote for every
organization that is a member of the Movimiento Cívico, 1 vote to every thematic
committees, and 1 vote for a group of 10 individuals who are independents and thus are not
part of a member organization (Resolución N001, 2018). Elections for the fund took place
one year after the Paro Cívico, on June 18, 2018. Given that one of the most complex issues
facing Buenaventura includes political corruption that has diverted public infrastructure
funds towards illicit economic activity and personal gain, the insertion of representatives
of the Movimiento Cívico is a mechanism for compliance of the agreement and
62
accountability over the political system. The vision of the Movimiento Cívico is to continue
strengthening this oversight of government, Henry Tobar remarks:
“El tema integral porque hemos mirado nuestra historia y los antecedentes y
hemos aprendido de los antecedentes... Los gobernantes de turno han
gobernado de tal manera que pareciera que no quisieran la tierra, el
territorio, y a sus habitantes. Han permitido la corrupción y todo lo demás.
De nada nos sirve que el gobierno nacional continúe enviando recursos
cuando se dilatan, no se invierten como se aprueban. A la par con eso,
fortalecer e informar la gente en mecanismos de control social, veeduría
ciudadana, vigilancia de los servicios públicos y todo lo demás. El tema de
gobernanza para que vigilen que esos recursos se inviertan correctamente.
Igualmente, de que se formen para participar en los espacios de toma de
decisiones como los consejos, las juntas, las comisiones donde hay
representantes elegidos y también designados por sus organizaciones que
representan, pero que lleguen personas idóneas a tomar esas decisiones, que
los recursos se inviertan bien y que se direccionen las políticas públicas en
cada sector para que se puedan beneficiar, impactar de una forma
significativa a la población objeto de beneficio.”
“It’s a holistic concept because we have looked at our history and what has
happened before and we have learned from those moments of the past.
Incumbent politicians have governed in a way that appears as if they don’t
love the land, the territory, and our people. They have allowed corruption
and all else. It does us no good for the national government to continue to
send resources when they are postponed and not invested as they are
approved. At the same time, we need to inform people of mechanisms for
oversight, a citizen’s watchdog approach, to oversee public services and
everything else. This is topic of governance, so that they can oversee that
resources are invested correctly, but also, that they can prepare themselves
to be able to participate in the spaces of decision-making like the consejos
[comunitarios], juntas, and commissions where they are elected to represent
or appointed by their organizations so that we can have the best people in
these positions to make the decisions about how to invest resources and to
create public policy that will benefit and impact in a significant way the
people it is meant to benefit.”
(H. H. Tobar Otero, personal communication, January 21, 2020)
The movement’s focus beyond the insertion of community participation into formal, legal
spaces of participation comes from an awareness that State-sanctioned spaces of inclusion
often extend State-control, furthering corruption and pursuit of individual interests. The
community-level of participation in the board of directors for FONBUENAVENTURA is a
legal framework that allows the movement to oversee financing for the 10-year
63
development plan, but, it is part of a larger framework the movement is pursuing to build
civic participation such that community members are prepared to serve the public interest
and hold government accountable beyond the 10-year development plan.
As a last point, it is also fundamental to consider that while the community
participation in the board of directors of FONBUENAVENTRA is a significant legal inclusion
in development, the movement is working within and beyond the legal agreement to
extend the meaning of community participation in development. Law 1812 of 2018
articulates that the plan, known as the Plan Integral Especial de Desarrollo para
Buenaventura (PIEDB), will be generated with the appropriate technical help of the nation’s
ministers and the National Planning Department and with successful community
participation, including community, economic and institutional stakeholders. Article 7
denotes that the board of directors will vote on the budget of the plan and approve it by
majority vote. It tasks the board of directors with the implementation of the plan for 10
years with the primary objective of closing the gap of inequality between the region and
the interior of the nation. In interviews with the leaders, many pointed to the thematic
committees’ framework as the ongoing form of community participation that will
recommend projects and priorities of the PIEDB. Benjamin Mosquera Rodriguez, one of the
members elected to the fund notes its inextricable tie to the future development and
ultimately, governance of Buenaventura:
“Somos 14 personas que vamos a estar en la junta directiva de ese fondo
donde se van a discutir los proyectos que van a dinamizar el desarrollo de
ese plan y que tengan impacto real en la transformación de la vida de la gente
de nuestro territorio… Creemos que ese plan de desarrollo, que tiene una
dinámica muy particular que es la que realmente va cambiar el sistema de
gobernar en el territorio, y es que va a ser un plan de desarrollo construido
con toda la comunidad de Buenaventura”
“We are 14 people who will make up the board of directors for the fund
where we will discuss the projects that will materialize the development plan
and that will have a real impact in the transformation of life for people of our
territory… We believe that the development plan, which has a very particular
dynamic, is what will truly change the governance system of our territory,
and that is that it will be a plan for development constructed with all of
Buenaventura’s community”
(B. Mosquera Rodriguez, personal communication, January 27, 2020)
64
The movement is skilled in its social and political capacity, operating within the legal
framework of the State to create spaces for inclusion that is tied to material redistribution
and the oversight of funds to this end. As such, the legal mechanisms of citizen
participation demonstrate the movement’s own way, forma propia, of operationalizing
substantial citizenship inclusion, yet, substantial citizenship does not stop at the level of
State-sanctioned spaces. Instead, the strategy within the legal framework is fluid, entirely
tied to an insurgent citizenship practice that builds civic governance through its thematic
committees to manage the public infrastructure needs of the territory and mechanisms to
continue strengthening civic society’s role governance over the territory.
65
Table 1 Legislative Agreements Resulting from Paro Cívico 2017
Legislation
Paro Cívico Acuerdo:
Declaración de Compromiso de
Fondo Autónomo
Y Obras Prioritarias
Civic Strike Agreement:
Declaration of Compromise
for Autonomous Fund and
Matrix of Priority Public
Works
Issued: June 6, 2017
Decreto 1402 de 2017: Comisión
de Seguimiento
Financing
Initial pledge of tariff-based
financing and an initial credit
line of 76 million USD for a
total commitment of 1.5 billion
pesos
(~500 million USD)
Fund will continue
procurement of financing for
10-year development plan
NA
Issued: August 2017
NA
Issued: November 2017
Law 1872 of 2017
Issued: December 2017
Establishes metrics for
compliance with accord
Establishes a Commission
with 1 representative* of the
Movimiento Cívico to oversee
compliance of Paro Cívico
agreements
Decree 1402 of 2017:
Comission for Compliance
Decree 1812 of 2017
Governance
Set up an ad hoc committee in
charge of drafting a law for
the autonomous fund and 10year development plan
Establishes
FONBUENAVENTURA
and
assigns sources of financing
including:
1. National, regional, and
district Budgets
2. Credit from national banks
and
international
organizations
3. Donations
4. Grants,
international
cooperation
5. Tariffs
*Expands community
participation on the
commission for compliance by
increasing 1 representative of
the Movimiento Cívico to 7
Establishes
a
board
of
directors that includes 5
elected representatives of the
Movimiento Cívico and 8
government officials. This
board will elect and oversee
the fund’s executive director.
66
CHAPTER 4 CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE MOVIMIENTO
CÍVICO TO INSURGENT PLANNING
“En menos de tres años suceden dos cosas extraordinarias: Un Paro Cívico que
le cambia la lógica, la dinámica, la autoestima de un pueblo y pone a un país
entero a ver hacia acá, de manera positiva. Y en menos de tres años, un pueblo
logra elegir popularmente, popularmente a su nuevo alcalde.
Eso solo pasa en Buenaventura porque Dios vive aquí.”
“In less than three years, two extraordinary events have occurred: a Paro
Cívico that changes the logic, the dynamic, the self-esteem of a people and
puts an entire country to look towards us, in a positive way. And in less than
3 years, un pueblo are successful in electing by popular vote, popular vote, a
new mayor. This can only happen in Buenaventura, because God lives here.”
Mayor Victor Hugo Vidal Piedrahíta Vidal,
leader of the Comité Ejecutivo of the Paro Cívico 2017,
Inauguration Speech January 1, 2020 14
The forms of civic governance embodied by the Movimiento Cívico are insurgent
planning practices that link knowledge to collective action from below for social
transformation, a transformation towards a long-term vision for a territory that reflects
the worldviews of its people. As an insurgent planning practice, the movement recognizes
the State-sanctioned spaces from previous negotiations can remain invited spaces, where
participation in decision-making is limited and results in promises made and not fulfilled.
As a result, the process of collective learning and sourcing knowledge from the cultural
identity of the ethnic territory is accompanied by a political strategy that builds power
within the nation-state. The movement does this by generating invented spaces, for
example, the thematic committees which are reliant on a mobilized civic society as part of
the mechanisms that confront authority and create alternatives to the dominant models.
Nonetheless, as Miraftab (2009) notes, “these two sorts of spaces stand in a mutually
constituted, interacting relationship, not a binary one. They are not mutually exclusive, nor
is either necessarily affiliated with a fixed set of individuals or groups or with a particular
kind of civil society”(Miraftab, 2009, p. 39). This is also true for the Movimiento Cívico’s
forms of civic governance where the thematic committees transgress the notion of
14
Benlínea, “Victor Hugo Vidal se posesionó como Alcalde distrital de Buenaventura.”
67
invented or invited, in fact, this is their strength. They are able to engage civic society in a
planning process as much as they are structures that can access formal spaces by
informing the negotiation with the national government or the legal planning mechanisms
with the national government. The movement is skilled at functioning and operating within
its alternative practice yet, utilizing these methodologies to build power that destabilizes
the State’s governance of the territory. Another example can be seen in the method of civil
disobedience, the prolonged broad-based civic strike made possible by the daily practice of
taking care of eachother: Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities held the front-line
of the terrestrial transportation routes while community members brought food, music,
and resources to sustain the barricade. This practice, sustained for 22 days put pressure on
the financial interests of the elite, an invented space utilized to draw the national
government’s delegates to the port city in order to address the demands of the ethnic
territory. This contributed to setting the table at the negotiation with the national
government with the power of civic society as leverage to make the vision of planning from
the vision of the territory a more attainable possibility. Nonetheless, the negotiations are a
place of struggle for autonomy, including material re-distribution and substantive
citizenship. Since agreements reached in this space can dissipate into promises that aren’t
realized once actors leave the negotiation table, the movement’s strategy towards
autonomy necessitates strengthening the role of civic society not only within mobilizations
and negotiations, but in political accountability and legalization of agreements. As such, the
eight thematic committees are invented spaces, foils to their state-counterparts, that
gather community-level visions and strategies for development. These however, can only
access financing and operationalization in a mixed-management approach with the
national, regional, and local government. Therefore, the movement pursues legal
mechanisms and within these legal frameworks institutes accountability measures that
allow it to access decision-making and economic power. This is the example of the board
of directors for FONBUEANVENTURA, which is tasked with the 10-year development plan
and its financing. The plan itself is sourced from invented spaces but the movement fought
for and won a seat at the level of formal, legal structures to ensure that the latter can be
realized. As the struggle continues, the movement has built stronger measures for civil
society to govern governance and the market, and this can further be witnessed by the
civic movement’s most recent move towards a political campaign.
68
In summer of 2019, Victor Vidal, one of the most visible leaders during the negotiations
with the national government was nominated by the general assembly of the Movimiento
Cívico to run for mayor and so ensued a strategy for political mobilization. In October 2019,
the people of Buenaventura elected Vidal as their mayor, accessing another formal
structure of government. As leaders indicated in our interviews, their choice to enter local
politics became clear after struggling to get the Mayor Eliecer Arboleda Torres and his
administration to collaborate with the movement in order for the Paro Cívico agreements
to materialize. Having a movement’s own delegate in the Mayoral seat could be a step
towards tackling the political corruption that limits financing from reaching public
infrastructure projects as well as lead towards smoother cooperation and alignment
between the national, regional, local government, and the Movimiento Cívico. Furthermore,
in the FONBUENAVENTURA, the mayor holds a seat that will now add another voice of the
movement to the decision-making and financing process for the PIEBD. Ultimately, for the
Movimiento Cívico, formas propias de gobernanza are counterhegemonic, transgressive,
and epistemologically grounded practices that emerge from a civic society that embodies
and restores the values and identity of the ethnic-territory.
FUTURE RESEARCH
In this final closing, I offer thoughts on future research that can continue to inform
the theory of social transformation from the Western epistemology towards a world of
many worlds, or pluriverse (Escobar, 2018). The first question that future research should
look to is the debate within planning discipline on outcome versus process, namely, how
does an insurgent planning practice lead to different outcomes? The second question,
which is interrelated asks how do formas propias, our own ways, relate to a conceptual
framework for self-determination?
Within insurgent planning practice, as Beard (2003) and Sandercock (1998), quote,
social change is a process of “A thousand tiny empowerments.” In Beard’s research, a
community overcomes the fear of an authoritative government and picks up the skills and
experience to organize against a powerful repressive force, contributing an example of a
radical planning process that begins with seemingly insignificant acts that over time build
up a sense of collective agency. Sandercock points towards communicative acts of
69
rationality as processes of collective learning that can create tiny empowerments,
providing examples such as popular education mechanisms that allow diverse coalitions of
groups to both develop and understanding of the structural forces of oppression as well as
allow groups to build solidarity across differences within their group. Insurgent planning
practices of the Movimiento Cívico are built upon a community asset, a network of
grassroots processes grounded in ethnic-territorial identity, to weave a comprehensive
understanding of “problemas de fondo”, structural and systemic problems. Drawing from
decades of government promises never realized, the movement drew lessons from a
thousand tiny empowerments, concluding with the need for a comprehensive strategy, and
organized a multisector coalition where each of civic society’s sectors leveraged their
social and political capital on behalf of the collective.
“Los que están aquí no van a representar un sector sino van a representar a
una cuidad.’’
“Those who are part of the movement aren’t going to represent one sector,
they are going to represent a city.”
(H. H. Tobar Otero, personal communication, January 21, 2020)
Henry Tobar’s reflections speaks to the creation of a collective consciousness, a shift from
thinking from the individualistic model of self-interest, the logic that occupies the
territory, and towards a restoration of the collective values that come from ancestral and
traditional practices of the ethnic territory. This was evident when we explored the
possibilities for what types of programs were being proposed from the thematic table of
employment and productivity. Before answering with specifics, Tobar began with a link to
consciousness which he links to a shift in how government manages public resources, and
ultimately, to how that strengthens the cultural practices of the territory.
"Tenemos que quitarnos ese INRI, ese estigma de que somos corruptos, de que
somos perezosos, de que no somos inteligentes, de que no somos capaces. Por
eso, el poder político que direcciona las políticas tienen que llevar a nuevas
personas que en realidad pongan el recurso público al servicio de la comunidad
y desde ahí impulsar ese desarrollo económico. Y articularse al tema del bien
común, el tema del cooperativismo, de la minga, de la mano cambiada, esas
cosas tradicionales que teníamos, volverlas a recuperar."
70
“We have to remove that INRI, that stigmatization, the stigma that we are
corrupt, that we are lazy, that we aren’t intelligent, that we aren’t capable.
That is why a political power that creates political policy needs to have
people that actually service the public, the community, and from there we
can push for economic development. And we will do so from the common
good, with the theme of cooperation, of la minga, of those traditional things
which we had, to restore them.”
(H. H. Tobar Otero, personal communication, January 21, 2020)
La minga is an ancestral practice with roots in the indigenous traditions of the Colombian
Pacific and originally referred to tending to the land collectively; today it also refers to
working through challenges via cooperation. Recovering cooperation and la minga is to
restore “Esas cosas tradicionales que teniamos”, that we used to have, which recalls the
political ontological nature of struggle and can be considered as a simultaneously
decolonizing and regenerative practice. Cultural and identity-based practices, formas
propias, counteract what Escobar (2017) posits as an occupation of territory done by “ a
particular ontology, that of individuals, expert knowledge, markets, and the economy”
(Escobar, 2018, p. 68). As people are displaced, conflicted with trauma, and living in a
context of inequality, the link to belonging to the territory and to eachother is severed, as
is the ability to see one’s self as an agent of different possibilities. The existence of formas
propias suggests that a complete ontological, political, and economic occupation of the
territory is incomplete. Yet, the reality of struggle remains in insurgent planning practices
and self-determination, the ability for the ethnic-territory to make decisions over their
destiny, remains an incomplete practice. Thus, insurgent practices are a pathway towards
the long-term goal of autodeterminación or self-determination. In this pathway, the
alternatives proposed by the Movimiento Cívico are grounded in a practice of building
solidarity that restores the collective identity of ethnic territory and contributes to
building collective agency. Here, the Movimiento Civíco contributes an example of creating
a civic governance that recaptures ethnic-territorial values of cooperation, the common
good, or as it said in the Colombian Pacific, la minga. Insurgent planning practices are
based on agency, practices that contradict the imposed structures by tapping into
individual and collective agency that generates alternatives. As we point towards a
conceptual framework for self-determination beyond the oppositional practices of
insurgent planning, I believe that formas propias de gobernanza, must continue to build
71
political and economic power across the Global South. “A thousand tiny empowerments”,
the billions of insurgent planning practices across the Global South have the ability to lead
to different outcomes if these processes don’t operate in isolation from eachother. Given
the global interconnectedness of structures of inequality and violence, tiny empowerments
offer necessary alternative practices built on agency that have the radical potential for
different outcomes when they too are interconnected.
To conclude, I leave you with a vision from Harrington Valencia Riveros, of the world we
know is not only needed, but possible.
“Yo sueño con que en algún día seamos capaces de poder concretar
condiciones que … le permitan a la gente gozar de manera plena de esos
recursos, pero también con que seamos capaces de fortalecer un proyecto de
vida colectivo que hemos venido concertando ya. Y poder, en esa situación,
fortalecer el Movimiento Cívico, fortalecer la reinicio social y comunitaria en
torno a ese proyecto de vida colectivo… Y ese proyecto de vida colectivo se va
concretar en lo que es el Plan Desarrollo Especial para Buenaventura a 10 años,
esperamos que haya un proceso de retroalimentación muy amplio qué
posibilita una participación efectiva de las diferentes comunidades, sectores
gremios, organizaciones, civiles, comunitarias, étnicas de tal suerte que se
constituye ese plan con un proyecto que logre consensuar las diferentes
miradas que se tienen en el territorio... y sobre todo que seamos capaces de
conducir nuestro propio destino. Hemos dados un paso importante pero
todavía falta consolidar ese proceso.”
“I dream that one day we will be able to solidify conditions for us that will
permit people to fully enjoy our resources but that we will also have the
capacity to strengthen our collective life project, the one we have been
working towards. And to be able to, in that situation, strengthen the
Movimiento Cívico, strengthen social and community participation to
support our collective life project. This project will come to fruition through
the Comprehensive Development Plan for Buenaventura [PIEBD] in the
length of ten years. We hope that there is a strong mechanism for feedback
and participation from different communities, business sectors, civic
organizations, community organizations, ethnic communities, so that we can
come together from our differences, under concensus, to constitute a
collective plan for the territory…. And above all, that we are capable of
driving our own destiny. We have taken an important step, but we are still
consolidating this process.”
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APPENDIX
Appendix A: Interviews
Brayan Montaño Payan
Líder de la Organización Pro y Paz
Integrante del Movimiento Cívico
Leader of a grassroots organization, Pro y Paz
Member of the Movimiento Cívico on behalf of his organization
Benjamin Mosquera
Rodríguez
Líder del Comité Ejecutivo
Miembro de la Mesa de Educación
Representante del Movimiento Cívico en FONBUENVENATURA
Leader on the Comité Ejecutivo
Member of the Table for Education
Representative on behalf of Movimiento Cívico for
FONBUENAVENTURA
Edwin Steven Solarte Cuero
Integrante del Movimiento Cívico y Mesa de Productividad y
Empleo
Participante del MIT CoLab Laboratorio de
Innovacion Territorial
Member of the Movimiento Cívico and Table for Productivity and
Employment
Participant of MIT CoLab Territorial Innovation Lab
Gersain Diaz Osorio
Comunicaciones del Comité Ejecutivo
Communications for the Comité Ejecutivo
Harrington Valencia Riveros
Integrante del Movimiento Cívico y en la Mesa de Educacion
Member of the Movimiento Cívico and Table for Education
Henry Hercilio Tobar Otero
Líder del Comité Ejecutivo
Miembro de la Mesa de Educación
Representante del Movimiento Cívico en FONBUENVENATURA
Leader on the Comité Ejecutivo
Member of the Table for Education
Representative on behalf of Movimiento Cívico for
FONBUENAVENTURA
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Jhon Fredy Medina Montaño
Integrante del Movimiento Cívico
Participante del MIT CoLab Laboratorio de Innovación Territorial
Member of the Movimiento Cívico
Participant of MIT CoLab Territorial Innovation Lab
Lino Herminsul Tobar Otero
Participante en la Mesa de Productividad y Empleo durante
negociaciones
Director de la Secretaria de Recursos Humanos en la
Administración de Victor Vidal
Participant in the Table for Productivity and Employment during
negotiations
Director of the Department of Human Resources for the
Administration of Victor Vidal
Padre John Reina Ramírez
Líder del Comité Ejecutivo
Leader on the Comité Ejecutivo
Yolanda Echevarría Gomez
Secretaria Técnica del Comité Ejecutivo
Technical Secretary for the Comité Ejecutivo
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Appendix B: List of Signatories to the Paro Cívico 2017
Source: (Comité del Paro Cívico, 2017)
Asociación de Transportadores Marítimo y Fluvial del Pacífico
Comité Del Agua Y La Vida.
Pastoral Social De La Diócesis De Buenaventura.
Pastoral Afro
Asociación de Comerciantes Unidos de Buenaventura
Asociación Colombiana de Industriales y Armadores Pesqueros
Asociación Nacional de Pescadores Artesanales.
Sindicato de Trabajadores del Municipio de Buenaventura
Proceso de Comunidades Negras
Sindicato Unitario de Trabajadores de la Educación del Valle (Sutev)
Sindicato de Trabajadores del Hospital Luis Ablanque de La Plata
Universidad del Pacífico
Central Unitaria de Trabajadores
Sindicato de Trabajadores de Buenaventura Medio Ambiente
Sindicato de Hidropacífico
Palenque Regional El Congal
Madres Comunitarias
Sindicato de Trabajadores de Energia Electrica de Colombia
Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Transporte Terrestre
Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Las Universidades de Colombia
Subdiretiva Valle
Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de Las Universidades de Colombia
Subdiretiva Del Pacífico
Asociación Nacional de Trabajadores de Hospitales y Clínicas
Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores del Transporte
Asociación de Volqueteros
Asociación de Paleros
Ciudadela San Antonio
Asociación Nacional de Profesores Universitarios de Colombia
Juntas de Acción Comunal de La Comuna 7
Ediles de La Localidad 1
Ediles de La Localidad 2
FUNDESCODES
Barrio Nueva Colombia
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Citronela
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de La Caucana.
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Córdoba
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Alto y Medio Dagua
Cabildo Indígena Nasakiwe
Corporación para el Mejoramiento de La Calidad Educativa de Los Colegios
Privados de Buenaventura
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Junta de Acción Comunal del Barrio El Capricho
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras del Calima
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Yurumangui
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Raposo
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Mayorquin
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de la Gloria
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Naya
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Cajambre
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras de Malaga
Asociación de Terrenos Ganados al Mar
Comité Interorganizacional
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras Guaimia
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras Agua Clara
Consejo Comunitario de Comunidades Negras Mayor de Anchicaya
Asociación de Juntas de Acción Comunal
Juntas Administradoras Locales
Sindicato de Etnoeducadores
Asociación de Técnicos y Tecnólogos de Tránsito y Transporte
Asociación de Agentes de Transito
Juntas de Acción Comunal de La Comuna 5
Ecomadera
Asociación Gremial Financiera Colombiana En Buenaventura
Junta De Acción Comunal Barrio El Capricho
79
Vanessa Toro Barragan