REVISTA CONTROVERSIA

Forced Displacement by Extractivism: A Proposal for an Alternative Constitutional Interpretation in the Face of Environmental Injustice

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:05:32 -0500

This reflective article offers a critical analysis of how forced displacement, when perpetrated by corporate actors in the extractive sector, has been tolerated, downplayed in its severity, and even justified through misleading and euphemistic legal and judicial arguments. In the first part, we characterize some of the various discursive, legal, and administrative strategies that have managed to conceal and legitimize the severity of forced displacement caused by extractive industries. In the second part, we examine three cases in which the Constitutional Court has employed the categories of ‘development-induced displacement’ and displacement due to ‘environmental factors.’ While these concepts represent a step forward in jurisprudential terms, they can also dilute the responsibility of the involved actors, thus contributing to impunity and the climate injustice derived from extractivist practices. Therefore, this analysis proposes a framework for characterizing forced displacement linked to the extractivist model, one that strengthens the pursuit for environmental and community justice, as well as comprehensive reparation for affected communities.

Oil Extractivism, Environmental Degradation, and Community Resistance: The Defense of the Rosario and San Silvestre Wetlands in Barrancabermeja, Middle Magdalena Region of Colombia

Juan Camilo Delgado Gaona — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0500

At the beginning of the 20th century, Barrancabermeja was established as a municipality in the department of Santander in alignment with the imperial interests of the Standard Oil Company monopoly. It became the epicenter of oil extractivism in the Middle Magdalena region, marked by extensive and intensive exploitation of nature. The dispossession and environmental degradation inherent to extractivist practices gave rise to conflicts with community-based forms of organization and production, which responded through collective action in defense of their natural resources. This article aims to describe the environmental pressures exerted on the Rosario and San Silvestre wetlands in the municipality of Barrancabermeja, linked to oil extractivism, as well as the mechanisms of community resistance led by the Federation of Artisanal, Environmentalist, and Tourism Fishers of the Department of Santander (Fedepesan) in defense of these vital water bodies. Fedepesan’s collective struggle for environmental justice and the protection of their livelihoods unfolds within a broader context of escalating violence in the region, which also threatens the lives and safety of its members.

“The Palm Line”: The Role of the “Para-Entrepreneurial Sector” in the Agrarian Counter-Reform of the AUC

Mattia Fossati — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:52:12 -0500

This article aims to provide a documentary reconstruction of the alliance established between paramilitary groups and entrepreneurs interest to carry out new agro-industrial projects in conflict zones. Based on court reports issued by the Justice and Peace Tribunals and reports produced by the Truth Commission, this text will describe Vicente Castaño’s geopolitical vision of the conflict and his attempt to create large oil palm plantations in four geostrategic regions of Colombia. Using massacres and counterinsurgency operations to their advantage, paramilitaries expelled peasants from these territories and seized their lands. They then implemented a repopulation policy, bringing in workers from Córdoba and Urabá. This article will examine the methods of territorial conquest and land dispossession used by the paramilitary groups to increase their agroindustrial project, as well as analyze the socio-environmental impacts of these plantations and their repercussions on the current dynamics of the armed conflict.

Lessons from the residents of the Momposina Depression in responding to oil spills

María José Pulido Devia, Helena Catalina Rivera Cediel — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 10:58:56 -0500

This article addresses the relationship between Business and Human Rights through the case study of an oil spill that occurred on Mompox Island, Colombia. We reconstructed the information based on fieldwork, interviews with community leaders, and the study of legal documents. Reflecting on this information, and after a brief review of the field of Business and Human Rights, we argue, drawing on authors such as Laura Bernal and Carolina Bejarano, that given the limitations of the international regulatory framework, local communities have developed their own mechanisms of justiciability through bottom-up justice practices, making use of gender-sensitive approaches. In this way, the article illustrates: i) how reparations, beyond merely restoring things to their original state, address basic needs when violations occur in contexts of high vulnerability, poverty, or inequality, ii) the extent to which legal processes fail to draw on relevant sources of International Law to address such violations, and iii) how a gender-sensitive approach, beyond being transformative, must also respect the communities’ own proposals, visions, and initiatives.

Ecosystemic polycrisis, counter-narratives, and the shaping of subjectivities in defense of nature

Rubiela Rocío López Rodríguez — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 10:57:00 -0500

Exploring new forms of justice can establish restorative mechanisms that involve nature reciprocally. In this sense, ecological justice emerges as a reparative tool that goes beyond the conventional environmental justice realms. Its focus is directed towards shaping new subjectivities committed to the care and protection of life on Earth, encompassing all elements that sustain it. The purpose of this article is to establish the fundamental principles of ecological justice, highlight the discursive obstacles hindering immediate action against ecosystem devastation, and emphasize ethical elements and educational strategies, both in formal and popular education, that contribute to the formation of subjectivities oriented towards defending the rights of nature, ensuring its restitution, and preventing the repetition of crimes committed against the biosphere. This article is presented as part of the research work for the doctoral thesis of the Interinstitutional Doctorate in Education at the National Pedagogical University of Colombia.

Recovering land to recover everything: Subversive care and insurgent ecologies in interethnic and intercultural territories of Cajibío, Cauca

Moritz Tenthoff — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:49:54 -0500

In southwestern Colombia, in the municipality of Cajibío of the Cauca department, peasant communities together with Nasa and Misak indigenous communities have reclaimed land from Irish company Smurfit Westrock, as an exercise of subversive care. These practices of subversive care by the Territory of Interethnic and Intercultural Life of Cajibío (TEVIIC) are a materialization of insurgent ecologies, disputes to defend the reproduction and sustainability of life that seek to radically transform power relations in the territory. In a relational and tentacular world, the relationships we build and that may or may not exist are at the center of these territorial disputes.

Resilience in Question: Theoretical Contributions and Limits of a Dominant Concept in Risk Management

Efraim Parra, Hernando Uribe — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 11:38:20 -0500

Resilience has become a dominant framework in risk management and development policies, promoted as a universal capacity for adaptation to crises. This article questions such centrality by examining the ontological limits that constrain its applicability across diverse sociocultural contexts. It argues that resilience is grounded in a modern ontology that separates nature and culture, privileges linear temporality, and translates life into metrics of adaptation, thereby obscuring spiritual, historical, and relational dimensions. As an illustration, Indigenous experiences in Cauca, Colombia, introduce the notion of pervivencia, which frames continuity not as the absorption of impacts but as the defense of territorial, spiritual, and political ties that sustain collective life. Rather than proposing pervivencia as a replacement, the article highlights the need to recognize resilience as a situated and limited category, open to dialogue with other ontological horizons.

Anchicayá, between the remnants of the struggle and the resistance of a process

Ermy Sulay Arboleda Garcés — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:34:11 -0500

This essay reflects on the longstanding resistance of the Black communities of the Anchicayá River, who have not only fought for the enforcement of the constitutional rights that recognized them as an ethnic group in the 1990s, but who, since 2001, have also been engaged in a protracted legal battle against the Pacific Energy Company (EPSA). In July 2001, EPSA—with the acquiescence of the Colombian state—caused an environmental disaster that profoundly disrupted the lives of the people of Anchicayá, most of whom are rural farmers who, up to that point, had lived without access to public services due to persistent state neglect. The essay draws on legal documents, interviews with social leaders, pamphlets, songs, and poems created by the inhabitants of Anchicayá. It highlights the unwavering determination of the Black communities of Anchicayá to live with dignity on their ancestral lands and in harmony with the natural environment.