Compensating for Development at the In-between and Edges of Extractive Capitalism: Socionature and Cultural Erasure in the Northeast Caribbean Colombian Coal Mining Region

In northeast Caribbean Colombia, Indigenous Wayúu, Afro-Colombian, campesinos and fishing communities struggle against the socio-environmental impacts of multinational operated legal coal mining operations. This dissertation questions how the multinational coal mining industry has been able to cause direct, structural and cultural violence against human and nonhuman nature over the last thirty-five years. The systemic character of the longer material history of capitalism, war, violence and US military intervention in Colombia is connected to and continues in the 21st century in the name of development. The central argument put forth is that multinational coal mining corporations in Colombia, like extractive industries more broadly, increasingly use compensation programs to address the negative impacts of mining. The evidence for the argument was obtained through 15 months of field research conducted between 2018-2019 in the three Departments of Cesar, La Guajira, and Magdalena, using ethnographic, feminist and empirical research methods from the theoretical perspective of material ecofeminist political economy and a material historical approach. I find that compensation projects obfuscate the direct, structural and cultural violence of coal mining by diverting community-based legal and resistance strategies, dividing impacted communities, and distracting public attention away from the direct and structural violence enacted upon human and nonhuman nature. The programs provide just enough compensation to satisfy legal requirements at the same time they silence opposition, quell resistance and perpetuate environmental racism among Afro-Colombian, Indigenous Wayúu, fisher and campesina communities. The augmenting of compensation projects into carbon pricing platforms and REDD+ projects serves to magnify the power and accumulation of multinational corporations and capitalist governments. The dissertation concludes that multinational corporate and state-backed compensation projects that are offered as measurable and purportedly equitable steps to remedy are incommensurable with the violence caused by development projects such as mining because they undermine community unity and autonomy, and they reinforce a social power imbalance that perpetuates and expands direct, structural and cultural violence against human and nonhuman nature leading to socionature and cultural erasure.