¡Por el agua, por el Territorio! Análisis del Proceso de Resistencia campesina en Tasco (Boyacá)

Peasant struggles in Colombia are as diverse in time and space as the peasantry itself. Their historical transformations speak to the changes taking place in the country's social, economic, and political structures. In recent decades, and in line with the so-called eco-territorial shift experienced in Latin America, Colombian peasant collective actions have shifted their focus from access to land to giving greater space to previously under-represented cultural and environmental dimensions. This transformation has been greatly influenced by the strengthening of ethnic organizational processes, such as those carried out with Indigenous peoples, in which the unique relationship they have with land and nature is asserted as a unifying axis.

In this sense, environmental issues and the dispute with extractive models, which generate highly visible effects of transformation and pollution of nature, have been inserted into the agendas of peasant struggles. The positioning of the environmental issue, not as a residual issue but as a unifying axis, has also generated several transformations in the dynamics of resistance: in the subjects involved in the struggles, in the repertoires, in the networks, in the discourses themselves, and, undoubtedly, in the territorial proposals.

The research that gave rise to this book arose from an immersion in this context. The entry point was the peasant organizations that were beginning to gain greater visibility in Boyacá since 2011 and played a significant role in the 2013 agrarian strike. In the provinces of Sugamuxi and Tequendama, in particular, conflicts with companies in the mining and energy sector, whose main milestone was the construction of the Acero Paz del Río steel mill in the mid-20th century, had fueled resistance actions. These conflicts, however, are only the tip of the iceberg in a long process of territorial configuration that is underpinned by the country's structural inequalities regarding peasant participation in territorial planning.

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