The intersection of race,class,and ethnicity in agrarian inequalities,identities,and the social resistance of peasants in Colombia

Introduction

The analysis of land rights is an important topic in the study of inequalities related to rural issues. Historically, the issues of land distribution and land uses have been central concerns for societies, and controversies over land have been key elements in the mobilization of peasants and indigenous groups. Land distribution issues have gained importance in recent decades in response to multicultural policies that governments have adopted granting land rights based on ethno-adscriptions. These policies intend to benefit historically discriminated groups, such as indigenous and Afro-descent populations (Van Cott, 2000).

Some scholars have studied the expansion of land rights by analyzing the risks of emphasizing ethnicity rather than race as a means to expand rights. For example, Law 70 of 1993 provided territorial rights to Afro-descendants in Colombia (Ng’weno, 2007; Restrepo, 2011). An ethnic orientation changes the focus from the study of race to the analysis of ethnicity (Ng’weno, 2007). However, as previous studies have suggested, social class tensions relate to racial inequalities and the social struggles of indigenous and Afro-descent populations (Latorre, 2014; Urrea and Hurtado, 2002; Wade, 1987) and a focus on ethnicity neglects the role of social class in these processes.

This study demonstrates the value of discussing and integrating the analysis of agrarian transformations and the study of recent trends, such as multiculturalism and the expansion of land rights based on ethno-adscriptions. Exploring those topics, it demonstrates the importance of bringing social class into the discussion of the effects of multicultural policies on identity. Here, race is defined as a product of social hierarchies created during European colonization (Wade, 2000) that is relational because it historically emerged from the relationships among several groups. Race differs from ethnicity because ethnicity emerged later as a categorization intended to identify minority groups in societies (Ng’weno, 2007; Wade, 2000). Ethnicity, in the context of territorial rights, emerged in relational processes such as global environmental conflicts, local claims to land rights, and governmental development policies. Regarding social class, this categorization is relational because social classes are the invisible, complex structural outcomes of social relations constructed in given social contexts that exist at ‘contradictory locations within class relations’ (Wright, 1979). In other words, social class is ambiguous because people can simultaneously embody characteristics of two or more social classes.

The two primary questions that are addressed in this study are:

To address these questions, I analyzed the Colombian case. Colombia has one of the highest levels of inequality in the world with respect to income, land ownership, and racial disparities. The Gini coefficient of property rights was 0.84 in 2000 (Rodríguez and Cepeda, 2011), which increased to 0.86 in 2009 (United Nations Development Program, 2011: 197). ¹ At least since 1948, Colombia has suffered from the effects of armed conflict between the state, guerrillas, and paramilitary groups. The origin of this protracted conflict was social unrest regarding unequal land ownership (Reyes, 2009). This study specifically focuses on Colombia’s lower Atrato region (see the map in Figure A1 in the Appendix), located at its border with Panamá, which is close to Urabá, the region of banana production and exportation. The area is primarily inhabited by peasants of African descent (Afro-descendants) and mestizos. These two groups gained territorial rights with the enactment of Law 70 of 1993. However, since 1997, their lands have been violently seized by paramilitaries and agro-entrepreneurs pursuing the spread of oil palm. Focusing on the lower Atrato, this study analyzed three social processes: (1) the evolution of economic activities and inequalities related to capitalistic exploitation and accumulation, (2) land rights based on ethnicity, and (3) the evolution of social resistance.

This study’s methodology was qualitative face-to-face interviews conducted between 2011 and 2012 during multi-site fieldwork visits to Quibdó, Curbaradó, Apartadó, Turbo, Bogotá, and Washington, DC. The analysis draws on 73 semi-structured interviews with key actors, including forcibly displaced persons, members of social organizations, NGOs, public functionaries, social activists, church officials, and academics. Fifteen displaced persons were interviewed about their living situations, economic activities, land titling, the situation of their lands, and their involvement in social organizations, before and after their displacement. In addition, organizational leaders working to protect territorial rights were interviewed, including three leaders of AFRODES (Association of Afro-descendant Displaced Populations), and five public events were attended with regional leaders. The focus was on organizations such as OCABA, labor unions, AFRODES, and Humanitarian and Biodiversity Zones, to analyze the evolving array of responses to agrarian transformations. All of the interviews were confidential and all of the presented quotations are anonymous to protect the identities of the subjects. The interview data were complemented with a critical appraisal of secondary sources, including published biographies of leaders (e.g., Córdoba, 2012), and statistical data on land ownership and agribusiness.

This study’s central argument is that social class and race were conceptually conflated before the enactment of multicultural policies and, after those policies were institutionalized, social class and race became intertwined with the concept of ethnicity. Those entanglements therefore exist in social inequalities, institutionalized and individual identities, and in the area’s social resistance to the agrarian transformations. The Colombian government’s emphasis on ethnicity has restructured the country’s social inequalities and social resistance by reshaping people’s rights based on territorial rights.

Resisting communities deploy their institutionalized ethnic-based rights to oppose the power that has been exerted through violent primitive accumulation and forced displacement. Yet, ethnic-based rights also challenge the identities of the beneficiaries of those rights and the resisting communities counterbalance these contradictory and divisive effects through solidarity practices among the different racial groups. An example of these practices is the social mobilization that conjoins mestizos and Afro-descendants against primitive accumulation.

Literature on the agrarian transformations and the communalization of land rights

This review examines the literature on the agrarian question and peasant studies, focusing on the analysis of race and ethnicity and their relationships to land rights, development, and environmental issues. Other related perspectives, such as identity politics and political ecology, are examined regarding the ways that the issues of agrarian transformations of communal land rights have been studied. The extant literature lacks a consensus regarding the relationship between agrarian transformations and the expansion of communal land rights based on ethnicity.

First, development studies and rural development analyses have focused on the so-called agrarian question from the perspectives of peasant studies and agrarian change (Bernstein and Byres, 2001; Kautsky, 1988 [1899]). Peasant studies emerged after the Second World War as a challenge to the classical Marxist perspective through the study of non-European regions (Chayanov, 1966; Moore, 1966; Wolf, 1966). However, contemporary analyses have criticized their essentialism in the definition of so-called peasantness (Araghi, 1995; Vanhaute, 2012). Examples of this debate are found in the notion of depeasantization, which considers the transformation of peasants into capitalist farmers and wageworkers (Kautsky, 1988 [1899]) and, more recently, in the examination of the diverse survival activities of peasants in a context of neoliberalism (Van der Ploeg, 2009).

After the 1970s, rural studies changed focus from peasantry to the so-called agrarian change and the analysis of diverse processes, such as the environmental conditions of agriculture, technological changes, patterns of globalization, division of labor, modes of production, the role of culture, labor markets, demography, migration, and class differentiation (Bernstein and Byres, 2001: 37). Scholars examined the relationship between social class and ethnicity relative to the segmentation of labor markets in the South African plantation economy (Ewert and Hamman, 1996) and the ethnic divisions in the agricultural proletariat of Dominican Republic sugar plantations (Baud, 1992). Additionally, the intersections among labor struggles, ethnic divisions, caste, tribal status, and violence in India were studied (Mies, 1976: 472).

Three major approaches emerged in the field of peasant studies to oppose classical Marxist class analysis of peasant movements: (1) subaltern studies, (2) everyday forms of resistance, and (3) New Social Movements. The subaltern studies’ approach aimed to write history from the perspectives of so-called subalterns’ (i.e., peasants or workers) opposition to elites and discourses (Guha, 1974). The everyday forms of resistance and the weapons of the weak perspective (Scott, 1985) claimed that peasants and other culturally and socially subordinated groups adopt covert ways to resist inequalities, hierarchies, and oppressions, in the past during the colonial plantation period and in recent agrarian transformations. Recently, covert resistance has transformed into open oppositional politics and organization in the context of increasing democratization in Ecuador (Korovkin, 2000). Research on New Social Movements analyzed the relationship between peasant studies and ethnicity (Slater, 1985). In contrast to classical Marxist class analysis, the New Social Movements approach expanded the identification of social agents to include representatives of gender, identity, environmental, or religious categories as well as of social classes (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987).

The perspectives of subaltern studies, everyday forms of resistance, and New Social Movements have been criticized by classical Marxists for losing sight of the importance of social class and risking a loss of ideological positions in social struggles (Brass, 1991, 1997, 2007). For example, Veltmeyer (1997) criticized the postmodern approaches by pointing out the role of social class in the case of the Mexican Zapatismo. Veltmeyer (1997: 151–152) argued that indigenous and peasant communities live in areas that are marginalized by the state’s discrimination and that the state exerts socio-political and cultural exclusion from mainstream society on those communities. Moreover, marginalized communities have been integrated into societies by means of a long-term process of primitive accumulation in which the people have been converted into landless workers, or super-exploited proletariat. From this perspective, the indigenous people and peasants who have benefited from the different modalities of landholding are perceived as a unified social class brought together by their shared experiences with primitive accumulation (Veltmeyer, 1997: 152, 158).

To Veltmeyer (1997), the production of inequalities has a long history. However, for Laclau and Mouffe (1987), the expansion of neoliberalism produced new ways to oppress and subordinate individuals and groups that shattered the idea that social class is a singular social identity of political representation coexistent with a democratic revolution (1987: 262). Politics still relates to social class, but new demands make claims on minority rights and on ethnic and gender differences (Giarracca, 2002). The postmodernist scholars (Laclau and Mouffe, 1987: 262) and some critics (Veltmeyer, 1997: 156) somewhat agree on the identification of trends that characterize the recent peasant movements. Specifically, each accepts the heterogeneity of the social sectors that participate in agrarian struggles (i.e., landless peasants, poor urban sectors, indigenous people, middle-income rural entrepreneurs, and Northern consumers). Moreover, they recognize the integration of urban and rural social movements; the independence from political parties and electoral competition; the merging of class demands with new demands over ecology, gender, ethnic, and minority rights; and that organization and responses occur on the local level.

Recent studies on communal land rights have emerged from these debates. These studies are from the agrarian question’s perspective (Breton, 2008; Mafeje, 2003), the identity politics perspective (Asher, 2009; Escobar, 2008; Ng’weno, 2007), and the political ecology approach (Gerber and Veuthey, 2010; Latorre, 2014). From the perspective of the agrarian question, the expansion of ethnic-based land rights is instrumental for neoliberalism. Historically, the so-called indigenous identity was believed to be an obstacle to modernization; however, the contemporary ethno-development approach embraces a reductionist view of indigeneity as a supposed comparative advantage in neoliberal globalization (Breton, 2008: 610). Past struggles over land rights focused on social class mobilization; now, struggles crystallize around demands for indigenous rights, cultural autonomy, and cultural difference. Through institutionalized collective rights, neoliberalism seeks to deactivate opposition to land redistribution through a model of development for the indigenous communities (Breton, 2008). The multilateral organizations imposed a simplified concept of communal lands (Mafeje, 2003).

Influenced by the subaltern studies, the identity politics approach focuses on the emergence of social mobilization that transcends social class identities. Territorial rights are a tool in the fight against the Afro-descendants’ and indigenous peoples’ historical inequalities. Collective rights emerged in the relational processes among states, experts, communities, and environmental activists (Escobar, 2008) in which local communities may not necessarily be seen as the victims of development (Asher, 2009) because local identities emerge from the interplay of those multiple actors. Moreover, ethno-territorial rights have been criticized because, although ethnic identification benefits the people that fit into the defined identity categories, others, such as urban Afro-descent populations, are excluded (Ng’weno, 2007; Urrea and Hurtado, 2002). The communal land rights of Afro-descendants are the result of the state’s institutionalization of indigenous peoples’ identities, which was used to determine the people’s relationship to the land to grant land rights (Costa, 2012; Hooker, 2005; Ng’weno, 2007; Wade, 2000).

The political ecology approach, which sometimes overlaps with some identity politics approaches (Escobar, 2008), analyzes the expansion of ethnic-based rights in relation to environmental policies and struggles. It specifically addresses the relationship of environmental policies to local struggles against dispossession resulting from the expansion of extractivism (e.g., plantations). Communities resist by ‘greening the agrarian question’ and by articulating multiple claims over environmental sustainability, democracy, and citizenship (Gerber and Veuthey, 2010: 456). Social class, race, and ethnicity are entangled with respect to land rights, such as in communities’ struggles over mangroves in Ecuador (Latorre, 2014).

This process of ‘greening the agrarian question’ is identified in the transformations of the nature of struggles for land and agrarian reform in Latin America. The disappearance of land reforms (Kay, 2006) accompanies the increasing power of landowners, financial capital, and transnational corporations. However, it also comprises the growing role of social movements, such as La Via Campesina, that demand agrarian reform and demand land and territory (Rosset, 2013: 721). Peasant movements have increased their collaborations with non-peasant peoples, which have changed their discourses by incorporating demands over food sovereignty, healthy food, environmental conservation, and agrarian reform into their platforms (Rosset, 2013: 735).

Ethnic-based territorial rights and new peasant demands for lands and territory have produced diverse forms of territorial organization, such as the collective territories of black communities, indigenous resguardos, and Zonas de Reserva Campesina in Colombia (United Nations Development Program, 2011). Other examples are Territorios Indígena Originario Campesinos in Bolivia (Fundación Tierra, 2011), Circunscripciones Territoriales Indígenas, Afro-Ecuatorianas, and Montubias in Ecuador (Breton, 2008; Latorre, 2014). Territory is a stake and a discursive element of resistance that these groups use when aligning demands by class, race, ethnicity, gender, or the environment.

The political ecology perspective intersects with agrarian studies that analyze resistance against neoliberalism. New challenges to neoliberalism articulate identities by gender, indigeneity, environmental rights, and they are characterized as supposedly collective because the effects of neoliberalism are supposedly communal and involve overlapping inequalities, such as class, gender, race, ethnicity, and the environment (Moyo et al., 2012: 189). Thus, the effects of primitive accumulation may overlap the effects of land inequalities, including gender inequalities in peasant and indigenous communities (Urioste, 2004).

This review of the literature demonstrates that class, race, and ethnicity intersect with agrarian transformations and peasant mobilizations. Overall, these studies lack consensus about the roles they play in agrarian transformations and there is a divergence between classical Marxism (Brass, 1991, 1997) and other views focused on race and ethnicity (Escobar, 2008; Ng’weno, 2007). However, some studies found that class, race, and ethnicity intersected in past agrarian transformations (Baud, 1992; Ewert and Hamman, 1996; Mies, 1976) as well as in more recent conversions (Latorre, 2014; Moyo et al., 2012; Veltmeyer, 1997). In a context of neoliberalism, social class analysis remains relevant, although its value primarily lies in its interaction with race, gender, ethnicity, and the environment.

Furthermore, analytical challenges are evident from this review because the problem of recognizing local conflicts is related to the institutional creation of ethnic-based identities constructed to grant land rights. Veltmeyer’s (1997) analysis of the unified class created by integrating the indigenous and peasant communities considers neither the challenges faced by governments and communities nor the production of intra-class or intra-community conflicts that the application of ethnic-based land rights policies creates. Furthermore, land rights based on ethno-adscriptions have neglected the deficits of land redistribution to benefit the peasants in Latin America (Breton, 2008). A broader perspective on land rights considers the heterogeneous forms of individual and collective property rights to benefit diverse social groups structured by class, race, ethnicity, and gender. This approach potentially responds to the intersection of inequalities.

The Colombian case: Social inequalities, identity politics, and social resistance

From the time when Colombia’s colonial lands were concentrated in the hands of a few landowners, the colonos (peasants) have been expanding the agricultural frontier and they have continually faced displacement (Fajardo, 1994; Reyes, 2009). Throughout the 20th century, conservative elites blocked all attempts to introduce agrarian reforms (Fajardo, 1994; Kay, 2006). Moreover, indigenous lands were violently seized during the colonial period. The Spanish brought in Africans as slave labor in the mines and the descendants of those Africans resisted oppression, gained their freedom in the mid-19th century, and then populated regions, such as the Pacific coast, including the lower Atrato. The Criollo (persons of pure European ancestry born in Spanish America) elites constructed a version of white superiority that subordinated the indigenous and Afro-descent groups. Racism persists in Colombia because of the colonial biological conception of race (Ng’weno, 2007) and, in this historical context, social class, race, and ethnicity became conflated in regions such as the lower Atrato.

Race and social class before Law 70 of 1993

Throughout most of the 20th century, the agricultural frontier expanded because of state policies and violence (Reyes, 2009). In some regions, social groups (e.g., peasants and indigenous populations) clashed. The relationships among these groups have been and continue to be complex and they include racial and social class identifications that pre-date the enactment of multicultural policies (Urrea and Hurtado, 2002; Wade, 1987).

The lower Atrato was a colonized region settled by Afro-descendants and mestizo peasants in the 1940s and 1950s (Comunidades de Autodeterminación, Vida y Dignidad, 2002). The settlers sought refuge from La Violencia (the violence between liberals and conservatives) (Uribe, 1992). Tropical forests and waterscapes, connected by a network of rivers, are the primary means of transportation. Racial relations historically existed among the Afro-descent peasants from Chocó, mestizo peasants termed chilapos, some paisas (white people) from the hinterlands, and the indigenous communities. Racial identification in this context is based on community membership, physical appearance (skin color), geographical origin, and specific productive practices (Ruiz-Serna, 2006).

The major agrarian transformations in the lower Atrato were the expansion of gathering and plantation economies at the beginning of the 20th century, booms in the timber economy, and expansion of the banana export agribusiness in Urabá in the 1960s. Until recently, the primary regional economy has been timber (Leal and Restrepo, 2003). In the interviews, the displaced persons explained how their families engaged in economic pluri-activity, including timber exploitation by contracting sawyers to extract lumber to sell or by renting forest parcels to harvest. They also engaged in small-scale agriculture (e.g., rice, plantain, and cassava), animal husbandry, small-scale livestock, fishing, and food gathering (Anonymous displaced persons, 2011, personal interviews). In some cases, from Wright’s (1979: 39) perspective, the peasants were in ‘contradictory locations within social class relations.’

During the Cold War (1947–1991), social class struggles mirrored global peasant struggles for agrarian reforms (Zamosc, 1992). However, the lower Atrato Afro-descent peasants were barely visible to the government, which chose to believe that the land they occupied was vacant as defined by Law 2 of 1959. In the 1970s and 1980s, peasants and indigenous groups demanded land rights and the peasants and workers fought against the agro-industries’ labor exploitation. Companies, such as Maderas del Darien, extracted timber and gained political importance during a period of neoliberalism. In the 1980s, the lower Atrato peasants, supported by the church, opposed this company and the concessions it received from the state because the company posed threats to ecosystems and land rights. The peasants created OCABA (Peasant Organization of Lower Atrato) to resist it and other logging companies (Restrepo, 2011). As one of its founders explained,

[OCABA’s] mission was to work on problems of the communities. We were very clear that timber companies did not invest in communities and this was a process of generating unity . . . Gradually, in Riosucio, protests emerged . . . [OCABA] defended the banner of all the struggles and needs of communities, and managed to unite the people of lower Atrato to call for the attention of the government. (Marino Córdoba, in Córdoba, 2012: 214–215)

OCABA based its mobilization on social class and racial differences because its creators were Afro-descendants and mestizo peasants (Restrepo, 2011: 56). The peasants were concerned about their land and they demanded agrarian reforms and areas of common use such as ‘communal forests’ (Restrepo, 2010: 80–82). The official identification of those areas as ‘collective territories’ had its genesis in these struggles and demands.

However, social class relations played a key part in these struggles because peasants worked in the Urabá banana plantations. The banana industry expanded during the neoliberalism period by increasing Colombia’s direct foreign investment. Similar to Ecuador (Breton, 2008: 609), agrarian transformations shifted to new territories where agro-export (e.g., banana and oil palm) industries expanded in a context of strained labor relations involving trading companies and multinational corporations such as Chiquita Brands. The banana workers mobilized in labor unions to demand land and better working conditions. Many Afro-descendant peasants working on the plantations were leaders of these unions. A member of OCABA stated,

[In] 1989, I went to Urabá where I worked until 1991 on a banana plantation. Due to my experience in community and political work, I managed to join Sintrainagro [National Union of Workers of the Agricultural Industry] in Apartadó. In Urabá I also began to have contact with the Communist Party . . . The directors of the Party gave me the responsibility to work as an obrero patronal. The obreros patronales represent the union in the farms. [In that position], I organized a recovery of lands in the village of Churidó. The land belonged to banana farmers, but we recovered those lands and gave them to families who had nowhere to live. (Marino Córdoba, in Córdoba, 2012: 215)

This organizing process reveals the complex inequalities present in Chocó and Urabá before the 1990s. Peasants settled on land that was seized by the state and sometimes were positioned within ‘contradictory locations within class relations’ (Wright, 1979: 39). They opposed primitive accumulation, land concentration, and labor exploitation. Inequalities emerged or became evident through the social relations among settlers, small landholders, and timber companies or among workers, trading companies, and multinational corporations. Power was key to the ultimate structuration of inequalities because paramilitary groups arose by 1989 to fight the guerrillas, labor unions, and leftist parties and to facilitate banana production by coercion. As Wade (1987) contends, those inequalities, which included elements of social class and race, facilitated social resistance.

Race, social class, and ethnicity after Law 70

Afro-descendants’ institutionalized status changed with the new Constitution of 1991, Transitory Article 55 (AT-55), and Law 70 of 1993, which delineated the collective territories of the Afro-descent communities. Law 70 was enacted in the context of neoliberal globalization that aimed to modernize regions and the populations considered backward by the government. The Pacific region was identified as rich in biodiversity and a strategic location for global interaction. The 1992 governmental plan, Proyecto Biopacífico, aimed to protect the area’s biodiversity.

At that time, the local ‘ethnic groups drew on global discourses about “rights-based development” and “community-based conservation” ’ (Asher, 2009: 6) to pressure the state to grant land titles. The state sought to achieve developmental and environmental sustainability through collective titling. Law 70 was intended to protect the cultural practices of Afro-descent communities and it forbade industrial exploitation by prioritizing conservation efforts and small-scale exploitation. Land rights provided citizenship opportunities to the benefited communities (Ng’weno, 2007).

Institutions, such as Colombian Institute of Rural Development (INCODER), were established to promote development and conservation by recognizing territorial rights. Until 2006, these institutions benefited about 60,418 families in Colombia with 149 collective titles that covered 5,128,830 ha (García and Jaramillo, 2008: 16). In the lower Atrato, the titles covering Riosucio and Carmen del Darién currently comprise almost 636,292 ha (Herrera, 2012: 19–28). In addition, there are REDD+ projects ² in Riosucio (Anonymous displaced person, 2011, personal interview).

The effects of Law 70 of 1993

Three main processes can be analyzed to assess the effects of Law 70 on the entanglements among social class, race, and ethnicity: (1) primitive accumulation, (2) challenges to reading race and ethnicity, and (3) social resistance.

Conclusion

This study has analyzed agrarian transformations by examining the intersection of social class, race, and ethnicity to contribute to recent literature on inequalities and agrarian change. It has argued on behalf of the importance of bringing social class back into the analysis of contemporary agrarian transformations as an interdependent factor relative to race and ethnicity. In various regions of the world, multicultural policies have expanded land rights based on ethnicity and the effects of these policies have transformed inequalities, identities, and forms of resistance.

From the analysis of the expansion of ethnic-based land rights in the lower Atrato region of Colombia and the social resistance associated with agrarian transformations, it is reasonable to conclude that ethnic identities influence the entanglements of social class and race in two ways. First, ethnic identities offer opportunities for social mobilization to oppose power by reframing social class and racial struggles. The consciousness of racial oppression guides social activists’ goals such that collective rights based on ethnicity may emerge in complex processes involving global environmental activists, social class struggles, and communities’ demands for land rights. With respect to social resistance, ethnic-based rights provide legal tools with which violence and primitive accumulation may be resisted. In the lower Atrato, groups evidently mobilized their ethnicity to oppose institutionalized power and claim their land rights (Moyo et al., 2012) and peasants ‘greened’ the protest, following trends in other countries (Gerber and Veuthey, 2010; Latorre, 2014).

Second, this study has considered the relevant challenges of applying multicultural policies. Ethnicity may influence social class struggles through the exclusion of individuals whose identities do not fit institutionalized included ethnic identities. Excluded persons, as well as the persons that fit into the included groups, are influenced by capitalistic domination and by the new collective identities that mobilize to struggle for social class demands. This may lead, in turn, to social inequality, particularly when ethnic communities are in contexts of extreme violence and corporate or governmental interests manipulate the outcomes. Despite the imposed divisiveness, communities tend to solve conflicts regarding identity through solidarity practices related to public statements. For example, local organizations of Afro-descendants have publicly recognized the land rights of the mestizo peasants. Moreover, the mestizo and Afro-descendant peasants have worked together to mobilize opposition to primitive accumulation.

The outcomes of ethnic-based policies are complex, which deepen in contexts of extreme violence. Inequalities, identities, and social resistance, in places such as the lower Atrato, have responded to agrarian transformations by constructing and evolving multiple roles and identities for peasants, such as small landowner, plantation laborer, unionist, Afro-descendant, leader of ethno-territorial organization, and, after the violent primitive accumulation, as forcibly displaced person or leader. In the lower Atrato, the identities and roles of groups that were in contradictory locations within class relations (Wright, 1979) were transformed by the expansion of ethnic rights. The ethnic-based rights influenced the individuals and organizations in those ambiguous locations. Violence broke out and halted the land rights of all the inhabitants of the region prompting the communities to deploy their ethnic-based and territorial rights to recover their lands. However, during that process, challenges emerged that defined the beneficiaries of those rights based on their ethnic identities. Those challenges increase when elites with corporate interests aim to control the lands and manipulate the discussion.

The analysis revealed that debates on the delineations, meanings, and utility of social categories relevant to agrarian transformations are open. These debates necessarily involve the methodological challenge of explaining social relations in inequalities among social class, race, and ethnicity, chiefly in rural settings. By recognizing the inherent challenges in these debates, this study turned the focus on the value of bringing social class back into the analysis of the evolution of local communities and their conflicts over resources in the context of agrarian transformations.

The origins of social inequalities are found in capitalism’s reproduction of inequalities, against which communities resist by using new rights based on ethnic identities. However, new inequalities emerge in the application of multicultural policies. Ethnicity, distinct from race, is a key factor in contemporary conflicts over lands and natural resources. Accounting for the entanglements of class, race, and ethnicity in our efforts to understand social relations offers an alternative and expanded foundation on which future research on inequalities and agrarian transformations can build.