Cacao: A Path of Everyday Resistance and the Pursuit of Peace

Abstract

Cacao crops are not only a form of subsistence and agricultural project but also connect the way of life and resistance in conflict scenarios. San José de Apartadó, Colombia, and its local population have suffered from the consequences of long-term armed conflict, which left hundreds of victims of forced displacement and disappeared, leaving a territory disconnected from its population and its interactions with agriculture and peace. The 2016 Peace Agreement between the FARC-EP and the Colombian government reopened a history of resistance among peasants, who have cultivated their lands to live and build peace by recognizing patterns of violence in the search for missing persons. Today, the armed conflict has not ended; there is a repeated presence of other armed groups in Urabá, a factor that involves the possibility for local populations to live in peace. Favorably, the institutions have begun to take action to continue with the efforts of the Peace Agreement. The creation of the Search Unit for Missing Persons (UBPD) has helped the families to continue searching for the disappeared and recognize the ways of life and practices of the territory, where cacao crops are a central form of life and social organization.

1. Introduction

Colombia and various regions have exemplified how agriculture, particularly cacao crops, can foster peace and transform violence in areas affected by armed conflicts. In these regions, agriculture, connected to rural areas and land for production, has been a recurring source of territorial disputes involving various legal and illegal economies. San José de Apartadó, located in the northwest region of Urabá, is a referent of social leadership and resistance to powerful ways of violence deployed by armed actors and civilian groups. The cacao crops cultivated in this region have the characteristics of ensuing the central economy of thousands of families and, therefore, a form of resistance and strength to continue searching for their lost family members and relatives, aiming to reduce the impacts of a common framework of the Colombian armed conflict: the enforced disappearance. Special acknowledgment should be given to the social organization CACAOVIVE in San José de Apartadó, with whom I had the invaluable opportunity to conduct my bachelor’s degree thesis in political science and emphasize peace research and conflict resolution in the region as a case study in 2020 and 2021. Through this research, I had the privilege of meeting various social leaders who dedicate themselves tirelessly to the pursuit of peace in the region¹ [1].

The enforced disappearance of civilians in the conflict and in San José de Apartadó was common during the armed conflict. Its use was aimed to eliminate the others, taking their humanity away from them, and ruining prebuilt social systems based on the relationships in communities with its territories and, therefore, their ways of life, practices, and knowledge. For the National Centre for Historical Memory (CNMH), more than 60,000 people have disappeared between 1970 and 2015, contrasting with the Registry of Victims (RUV), a State Registry to know how many people have the status of victims. They may need assistance for reparation and Truth—who aims that between 1978 and 2020, at least 178.000 were victims of this type of violence. Although these statistics may be suffering sub-registry omissions due to labels of murders and kidnappings—related forms of violence—they show how big numbers are and the challenges to finding them inside the armed conflict and the still presence of armed groups in the region.

The use of violence, including enforced disappearance, has been a prominent and widely acknowledged issue, which was extensively discussed during the peace negotiations held in La Habana, Cuba. These negotiations ultimately led to signing the 2016 Peace Agreements between the Colombian State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) guerrilla group. The primary objective of these agreements was to address historical conflicts rooted in territorial and social issues. Furthermore, one of the highlights has been the creation of The Colombian Integrated System of Truth, Justice, Reparation, and Non-Repetition (SIVJRNR in Spanish), in which the victims are central key players in peacebuilding alongside new policy frameworks and bodies such as the Truth Commission (CEV in Spanish), the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP in Spanish) and the Search Unit for Missing Persons (UBPD in Spanish). The last have developed different strategies to strengthen confidence between individuals, collective actors, and the State to search, find, prospect, and identify missed persons, victims of enforced disappearance during the armed conflict.

With pedagogical tools, the Unit started approaching different collective and individual actors. Many social organizations stated social objectives in specific territories with differential characteristics and armed conflict impacts, just as in San José de Apartadó and the Urabá region in Colombia. In this region, the Unit implemented the Creative Knowledge Circles (Círculos de Saberes Creativos in Spanish), a dissimilar methodology to the judicial system. This approach aimed to listen to the victims in a horizontal relationship, acknowledging the knowledge and practices they have.

This research endeavors to establish a connection between social leadership, which centers around developing the local economy through cacao crops, and peacebuilding over the search for missing people due to the armed conflict. A particular emphasis is placed on the utilization of Creative Knowledge-Circles to strengthen the outcomes of dialog between different stakeholders. The objective is to contribute to the search for missing persons while concurrently promoting the establishment of sustainable cacao-based agriculture as a more equitable approach to foster local economies.

2. Theoretical framework: Everyday resistance and searching for missing people

The exercise of social leadership in a place fully affected by violence implies the use of categorical variables to analyze how the search for missing people and the use of cacao crops allow a new understanding with the case study based on qualitative methodologies as a guiding example. First, the resistance to violence can be addressed with an everyday resistance approach. Second, the search for missing people constitutes a category of analysis that can be connected to different types of organizations. Third, the connection between both categories could influence the agricultural choices of a specific population in a territory, as the relationship with State bodies and institutions.

Resistance to violence has been studied in social sciences as a tool to understand everyday violence management. Scott [2] defined everyday resistance as a process in which resist means to start organizing from small actions and a discursive tool over a specific time, space, and with different social relationships. Since violence can be considered a state of power [2, 3, 4], society can decide to change that statement of violence in everyday contexts. Therefore, a historically related power practice can be reactive to a homogeneous and noncontingent context, the reason behind its intersectional dimension to consider different types of power and changes [4]. How resistance can arise after violence disclaimed collective visions to invisible ones, the same that starts to change since the first invisible and individual stage that is open to establishing a new political subject.

Purposes of resistance distinguish between purposes of violence since it is not singular and unique in its patterns and identities. For authors like Butler [5] and Mbembe [6], violence follows patterns of affecting individuals and collectives due to an interest in affecting the humanity of others and making invisible race, gender, and cultural differences. The body is at the mercy of social and environmental modes that allow the use of war, in which death is justified and approved toward some subjects. Therefore, the use of violence and resistance to it allows the creation of new spheres of recognition and concession to other existing epistemologies that have been disrupted by different uses of power. This recognition of everyday resistance to contexts marked by armed conflicts allows the recognition of specific uses of violence in which social efforts to resist will be held.

Since forced disappearance has been shared in some armed conflicts, the theory helps the Colombian case analysis. This kind of violence consists of repression methods that break social and individual senses of identity and practices [7]. According to the classical framework created by Galtung [8], this violence can be defined as direct violence (visible) and addressed within a structure with cultural conditions to legitime the use of violence [9]. But the effect of the forced disappearance affects not just the missed ones and victims but also the ones who stay and start looking for them, victims too. Thus, as Casado [10] expresses, the interest in searching for the lost defines the search as a bioprocess of who is being searched for and who is searching for them.

A subject who decides to search has become a political actor with a differentiated identity. Since it is also a victim of forced disappearance and has faced the process of invisiblization of the pattern of violence, the remembering process deeply suffers and puts the searcher in a complex process of recognizing their identity and practices [9, 11]. Anonymity begins to fade from the moment an individual begins to search, a process that continually has challenges, as organizing a search group is a complicated second step due to the breakdown of social networks and the impacts on identity left by violence and enforced disappearance.

The missed ones have affected left a space of uncertainty in the daily lives of their families, neighbors, and known people. Therefore, authors like Delacroix [12], analyzing the case of Perú and Robledo [13] in Mexico, have stated the significant impacts on everyday life with an absence of meaning that leads to a new performance of stories that connect with others who are living the same on rebuilding step process. Since the impacts left a catastrophe on social networks [13], it connects a reduced interpersonal network that becomes a powerful tool to remember the missing to act alongside and on them [12]. These purposes and processes may be accompanied by institutional efforts [10]. Then, the establishment of new public policies toward the search for missed people states new practices to manage the absence of institutions or stigmatization and revictimization of the victims. That guides the collective subject that Jelin [14] mentions, with an agency built on interpersonal relations that can work or demand institutions to start, continue, or improve the search for missing people. All these efforts need to be recognized as an everyday process as they improve the achievements to change structural violence and seek conflict resolutions and peacebuilding.

3. Context over the study case

3.1 Cacao crops in Colombia: A more visible economy

In Colombia, at least three cacao crops can be planted in the country. Under official statistics [15], more than 65.000 families live in 422 municipalities and 27 departments where this agriculture has been deployed. In terms of production, more than 188.000 Ha in 2020, where 64.000 tons were produced. Also, each producer produces at least 3 Ha of cacao crops in the median. The regions with the most cacao production are those that the armed conflict has deeply impacted. In the last decade, cacao production expansion mainly took place in remote, low-connected, and low-density areas such as the Choco, Amazon foothills, and Magdalena Medio. Notably, these areas have also been highly impacted by the internal armed conflict [16]. In this sense, the entry of more extractivist multinationals represents a great vital and territorial threat to the entire country and especially to the Gulf of Urabá region [17]. Therefore, cacao yield had a spatial and temporal trend characterized by an increase in regions that were previously impacted by the conflict, such as Urabá, creating instability while impacting smallholders’ likelihood to receive training, credits, and their capacity to produce permanent crops (see Figures 1–3) [16].

Figure 1.

Location of Urabá region in the Department of Antioquia and San José de Apartadó. Source: Movimiento regional por la Tierra [17].

Figure 2.

Municipal production trends (cacao production). Source: Grow Colombia [16].

Figure 3.

Violent actions per 100.000 habitants during the Colombian armed conflict for the 2000–2018 period. Source: Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (CNMH) (2018) cited in Grow Colombia [16].

3.2 San José de Apartadó: A history of violence and hope

San José de Apartadó has been living a story of violence and resistance. Since the 1970s, civilian organization based on the creation of banana agrarian unions formed in the 1960s, and the guerrillas’ support increased violence with forced displacement, the first massacres of civilians, and the forced disappearance of people during the armed conflict with the Colombian army [18]. Years later, a systemic way of repression was deployed to dismantle and affect a region where the political party of Unión Patriótica (UP) – part of the Peace Treaty Agreements between the State and the guerrilla of the FARC-EP in 1984 – had enormous support since they used to guide a new political agenda based on social leaderships. Although it had high pikes in the decade of 1980, the next decade came up with new enforcement in violence levels and the entry of paramilitary groups to the region [19, 20]. The Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) paramilitary group, one of the biggest ones, perpetrated more massacres and was a crucial factor in the increase of missing people due to the armed violence and the social control deployed by armed groups. From 1994 onwards, just in San José de Apartadó, the number of cases of disappearance increased without a notable decrease until 2004, with more than 100 cases per year. The municipality remains in the first five cities in the Department of Antioquia with more cases of enforced disappearance.

As a form of resistance to violence, in 1997, a group of more than 300 families created the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó (CPSJA). It became a neutral place where no armed group could enter its territory. Therefore, they had to deal with all armed groups at different times, facing a continuum of violence and stigmatization of all armed groups, including guerrillas, paramilitaries, and national armed forces [21, 22, 23, 24]. After the 2005 massacre against the Peace Community, the demobilization of the AUC dismantled the Paramilitary Central Bloc in Urabá (BEC) as a result of negotiations between the AUC and the central government that ended in the Santa Fé de Ralito Agreements of 2003. Although an agreement was reached, the paramilitary groups did not disappear and were transformed into more decentralized armed groups, as were the criminal gangs [19, 20]. A decrease in violence was apparent and visible but far from ending. However, the transformation of the armed conflict led to new armed groups that remain predominant to the present day as the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC), which reflects the aggravated context against the settlers and the general fragmentation of trust with the Colombian State [17, 23]. However, the Peace Agreements of 2016 opened a new window of opportunity to build peace on the territorial level alongside civil society. The creation of the SIVJRNR influenced the creation of the Search Unit for Missing Persons (UBPD). This humanitarian and extrajudicial entity has operated autonomously and independently from the traditional judicial bodies.

In the case of agriculture and cacao production, most producers are individuals who, together with cooperatives, cultivate the land with cacao crops and other plantations (for their own use, e.g., corn, banana, avocado and mandioca/cassava). In the last decades, there was a change from banana to cacao production as the primary plantation since the first one raised price problems, and a new market of exportation created the input for the organizations to think and design new strategies [17]. Thanks to Peace Accords, the figure of the cooperatives became an excellent opportunity to transform social leadership, not only in the organizational and political view but also in the economic model. It influenced a new recognition by the State and the territory and its legitimate practices, such as cocoa cultivation and production.

3.3 Creative knowledge circles strategy

Implementing different policies after the Peace Agreements of 2016 has changed how the State searches for missing people due to the armed conflict. Under the new policy frameworks, the primary mission is to fulfill victims’ rights to reparation, access to truth and justice, and guarantees for non-repetition. These agendas serve as guiding principles for the institutions established because of the 2016 Peace Agreements and build upon the foundation laid by the Law 1448 of 2011, which aimed to recognize the armed conflict and address reparations to the victims. Then, the role of the UBPD has been searching for people who may be victims of enforced disappearance and to differentiate its actions from those carried out by existing institutions such as the Attorney General’s Office. Its approach consists of five steps in searching for missing people: search, location, recovery, identification, and dignified return. These steps follow the interest of working with participation, information, and prospecting since the need to add voices and stories of victims is crucial to have a human searching and bring all the experiences of professionals to prospect, recover, and identify identities, aiming to a humanitarian and extrajudicial perspectives [1].

The creative knowledge circles mentioned above can be defined as an innovative way involving the active participation of victims and groups who have experienced disappearances. With a safe and inclusive space, all individuals can share their stories and connect the experiences of violence and resistance (on an individual or collective level) and the ongoing efforts to locate missing persons. In those spaces, the UBPD plays a crucial role in facilitating the participation of all involved parties and ensuring their voices are heard. The institution guarantees its support by collecting and managing information to initiate the process of locating potential sites of violent incidents or places where information on missing individuals may be available. Furthermore, the UBPD utilizes genetic identification techniques to identify living persons separated from their families due to violence. This whole process is therefore an effort that over time, requires the gradual establishment of trust and rapport between the individuals. As trust is built, progress can be made in gathering and assessing the information related to the missing individuals and the violent episodes they experienced.

4. Analysis: How cacao crops can be a good tool to build peace and help the UNBPD efforts to find missing people in San José de Apartadó

The decision of communities in San José de Apartadó to focus on cacao cultivation as their primary agricultural product stems from their aspiration for better and more equitable local economies, intending to resist the violence prevalent in the region. The cultivation of cacao has emerged as one of the most significant economic activities for local families, influencing their resistance against not only the armed conflict and the recruitment of young people (due to a lack of preventative policies) but also the cultivation of illicit crops such as marijuana and coca, which directly undermines community peacebuilding efforts.

The social leaders of the CACAOVIVE organization assert that the fertile land in the region can support the cultivation of various crops. However, cacao remains the predominant choice due to several factors. First, cacao is a resilient crop that does not easily succumb to damage or diseases. It is also relatively cost-effective to cultivate, even without fair pricing mechanisms in the market [1, 16, 17].

Regarding pricing, the leaders argue that multinational companies often offer a reasonable and fair price for the crop during the cacao-growing season. However, this is not the case during off-season periods when the farmers’ demand and prices are less favorable. Despite this challenge, the communities continue to prioritize cacao cultivation as it represents their primary source of income and a means to sustain their livelihoods amidst the prevailing socioeconomic circumstances. By focusing on cacao cultivation, the San José de Apartadó communities aim to create economic opportunities that provide for their immediate needs and contribute to their resilience and resistance against the violence and illicit economies that undermine peacebuilding efforts in the region.

After resisting decades of violence, the communities decided to organize themselves. Within a story of colonization over the territory and enforced displacement from armed actors and multinationals of banana cultivation since the 1970s, cultivating the land became a way of resistance [18, 21]. Since the physical and psychosocial problems have been extreme, the interest in sitting with the community and deciding on creating social organizations and cooperatives implies the first step in everyday resistance. They could reveal positions and interests to recognize the impacts of the armed conflict and work to transform them [3]. Then, the everyday resistance started from the individual’s perspective but had deep transformations to recognize marginalized people [6] and build toward cultural differences that connect to the territory and the cultivation of cacao [5]. These efforts also connect with an institutional framework after creating cooperatives and the interest to work alongside public institutions on common challenges.

Therefore, the efforts of cooperatives and social organizations may include working alongside institutions and new bodies such as the UBPD. Implementing the creative circles’ strategy has been crucial in this regard due to the recognition of the history of resistance of families searching for missing persons without legal assistance. The answer to understanding the change of collaborative work among actors is related to building trust among the parties, including members of the same community and territory. After a long and sustained stigmatization by most state institutions toward victims throughout the country, coupled with a lack of policies that address the needs of this population, the entry of institutions such as the UBDP has transformed how the search is understood as humane with the requirement of having all the knowledge and practices of civil society, becoming a horizontal hierarchy when it comes to dialog and as a starting point for locating them.

In the Circles of Knowledge, the story of production of cacao has played a crucial role, providing insights that guide families in San José de Apartadó. This implies that families of missing persons participate alongside individuals who are not involved in the search. Consequently, this connection aligns with the bioprocess defined by Casado [10], where the shared interest in searching for missing persons brings together both victims and non-victims, affected by both structural and cultural violence [8]. Therefore, the Circles seek to promote the exchange of knowledge and practices among participants with participation methodological tools. An open exchange with other actors may arise when there is a transparent image of the resistance with discursive rhetoric [3]. Through a transformative know-how process [25], the fact that the UBPD promotes these spaces strengthens the recognition based on the community’s differences from other actors and the rich set of practices they deploy, including the search and the cultivation of cacao.

Creating new stories to transform social networks has been an ongoing and arduous effort undertaken by social organizations. Since the enforced missing can be defined as a catastrophe [13], the absence of the people alters how processes may be conducted in the community. The organizations have been working on different spheres over time, dividing tasks and activities related to the booster of conditions to cultivate the land with cacao crops, and also addressing human rights matters by communicating to authorities and more NGOs about risk levels that social leaders and the civil population face due to the presence of armed groups and the stigmatization that may arise between judicial institutions, the national army and the civil organizations. That creates a collective subject that is organized and ready to continue without institutional support [14] but with an everyday resistance approach [4]. The claim for a total memory without more blood has been a statement for civil organizations, such as the cooperatives and local participation bodies.

Moreover, it is crucial to consider the perspective of the UBPD workers, who recognize the importance of adopting an active listening approach while participating in spaces like Creative Circles. Through this exchange of knowledge, two aspects arise. First, understanding the complex social context is characterized by visibly armed conflicts that persist. Second, they become aware of communities’ relentless efforts in searching for missing people and their organized approach, which connects the agricultural way of life and the decision to cultivate cacao crops as a way of resistance means of resistance against an unstable market and the lack of supportive programs from the State for small-scale producers to improve their crop systems. After the paramount cause of searching for the missing people, they unveil the strength and knowledge within these communities, who are determined to persist and resist through their way of life. Therefore, cacao production is a sign of resistance to unequal markets in the territory, systemic violence, and a State that has failed to provide adequate assistance for developing local economies and supporting peacebuilding.

Consequently, the development of pedagogical tools around the Circles of Knowledge has recognized the power of resistance through a territorial and communitarian organization. A new type of organization improves the recognition level by the State and its bodies of the historical violence that has affected the territory and population, as is the case of San José de Apartadó and the Urabá region in Colombia. Second, it has stated that social leaders are developing, with their possibilities and available resources, an integrative system of action that is co-guided by human rights advocacy and the establishment of sustainable economies that allow them to create a community atmosphere through more spaces of participation.

5. Conclusions

It has been seen around this research that searching for missing people in San José de Apartadó is an organizational process that has been active in the last decades after experiencing the profound impacts of violence left in the territory and the communities. Despite the lack of public policies that could create new public management approaches to create better cultivation facilities and spaces for education, the communities organized through social organizations and cooperatives have led the image of a reborn resistance to the reconstruction of the social fabric. The entrance of the UBPD has been a clear signal of how State bodies can reconnect with citizens after a long-stigmatized relationship due to the armed conflict. Their entrance means a reconstruction of confidence and allows the institutions to support already designed community tasks to search for the missing and establish local economies based on cacao production.

Nonetheless, the challenges to building peace remain in Urabá and other regions of Colombia. The 2016 Peace Agreements do not mean the violence has been decreasing, nor by the new government of Gustavo Petro, a progressist who is willing to negotiate with all the armed groups, creating the so-named “Total Peace”, a way full of challenges and step backs, a situation that shows how the civil organizations remain resisting to live in peace on its territories. In general, the resistance, shown as an everyday task in connection to the cultivation of the land, will remain a key factor of peacebuilding from a bottom-up approach. The replication of development models that maintain the violence and armed conflict characteristics may create new conflicts, which is the reason behind the importance of spaces like the UBPD ones, in which the exchange of knowledge can create a better understanding of the territory and the possibilities of cultivating cacao crops as a territorial peace tool.

The research on cacao crops and everyday resistance has significant potential. It can significantly benefit from interdisciplinary approaches since the possibilities are enormous, and the interest in having more sustainable economies, energy transition platforms, and the protection of the environment can be a clear advantage. Bringing in perspectives from diverse disciplines, such as agriculture, environmental sciences, economics, social sciences, and sustainability, would be relevant for efforts to move toward more sustainable crops and production, ensuring equitable access to assistance and markets at the national and international level. Listening to the leaders of San José de Apartadó has been a crucial experience for redesigning policies and creating better results in peacebuilding and violence transformation processes.

Acknowledgments

I want to sincerely thank the following individuals and organizations for their invaluable contributions and stories of resistance: Néstor, Luis, Leonel, Fredy, and all the people from San José de Apartadó. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the whole CACAOVIVE organization for its leadership and defense of human rights. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Juan Daniel Cruz, for their guidance and friendship. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to my dear friends and research teammates, Juan Esteban Uribe and Sebastián Osorio, who, together with Juan Daniel, have supported and collaborated to our journey in peace research and decolonial peace.

Cooperativa CACAOVIVE: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100081035856701&locale=hi_IN