The Rio Blanco ecological reserve and the Tierra Viva construction site. Photo by Juan Gabriel Arango

The 2003 changes to the POT were made behind the backs of the citizenry, according to a complaint filed with the Inspector General’s Office by citizens linked to Todos Somos Rio Blanco. These included amending the designation of the land adjacent to Rio Blanco from a rural area to a zone marked for urban development. At the time, this zone was listed as part of the Central Forest Reserve of Colombia. None of the requisite environmental studies necessary to petition for such a change of status were carried out prior to the disputed amendments.

Just a month prior to the fateful meeting of the municipal council, Felipe Calderón, the director of the firm behind Tierra Viva, appeared before the city’s Municipal Council representing the Colombian Chamber of Constructors (CAMACOL). Calderón stated his approval for the new criteria developed by the council for defining urban expansion as determined by population growth. He seemed to imply, additionally, that in the future it would be important to expand construction into sloped areas adjacent to the city in order to “stabilize” them — presumably to control for landslides, though the minutes from this meeting are not explicit on this account.

These are just some of the irregularities that activists mobilizing against the construction of Tierra Viva point to in their efforts to derail the project. They also allege conflicts of interest that suggest a conspiracy to use the POT for speculative purposes. These include the close links between the owner of the property where Tierra Viva is to be built, the administrative bodies responsible for overseeing the approval of city development projects and for managing the Rio Blanco reserve, and the developer.

Jorge Alberto Vélez Jaramillo is not only the owner of the property adjacent to the forest reserve, he is also a member of the board of directors of the firm behind Tierra Viva and he served in a management role in Aguas de Manizales at the time the disputed changes to the POT were made in 2003. Aguas de Manizales, the private firm that manages the city’s water services, would have had to approve the change in designation of the land adjacent to Rio Blanco. Velez Jaramillo is no stranger to corruption: in 2012, he was found guilty of embezzling public funds when he was administrator at Aguas de Manizales in 2002 and 2003, a conviction ratified by higher courts in 2017.

Additionally, documents filed in a regional court and with the Inspector General claim that the approval of construction adjacent to Rio Blanco violated national norms that specify the buffering role of zones adjacent to protected land. It is alleged that redactions were made retroactively to public documents produced by administrative bodies in Manizales eliminating references to this buffering role. This is just one of the many instances that suggests that approvals to construction plans and permits took place despite knowledge by the relevant decision-making bodies on the environmental impact of development next to Rio Blanco.

The original suit against Tierra Viva took the form of an accion popular (popular act) filed in district court in 2012 by three citizens, two of whom were later apparently convinced to dissociate themselves from the suit. It was around this time that the drafting of the Partial Plan of the project and the application for construction licenses took place.

Todos Somos Rio Blanco, which formed in 2017, would eventually step in to support the suit. The organization’s support has been crucial. Not only has it mustered technical, legal and academic knowledge, but just as importantly, it has raised public awareness of what is at stake in the battle over Rio Blanco. It has held protests in the city and in front of Manizales’s Palace of Justice and organized community discussions and academic forums. The group even managed to gather 12,000 signatures against the Tierra Viva project.

After years of inaction from regional judicial courts on various suits brought against the Tierra Viva project, and due to the lack of support from any local or regional public entities, members of Todos Somos Rio Blanco approached Colombia’s Inspector General in February of 2018 during an assembly in the nearby city of Armenia, asking him for a short audience.

The Inspector General of the Republic is a judicial control institution independent from the other branches of the state, and the Inspector General is voted in by the senate. The serving Inspector General, Fernando Carrillo Flórez, was a leader in the student movements that paved the way for the National Constituent Assembly of 1991.

Carrillo Florez took interest in the Rio Blanco case, delegating three sub-inspectors to work with the activists to gather evidence and information for a prospective investigation by the Inspector General’s office.

The complaint filed with the Inspector General makes note of the fact that the Territorial Planning Council, an institution designed to involve the public in the development of the POTs, is headed by a member of CAMACOL, the Chamber of Constructors. This has led to more clashes of interest, evident in the exact coincidence between the council’s proposals for the 2017 adjustments to the POT and those proposed by CAMACOL. These proposals sought to remove mechanisms for distributing surpluses from new development arising from changes to the POT among affected actors. In other words, the constructors were suggesting that developers reap the entirety of economic benefits arising from territorial changes made in the POT.

The developer’s response to the claims made by Todos Somos Rio Blanco have been cavalier. According to the builder, what is at stake here is a matter of investor confidence, the defense of property rights and the state’s respect for rights conferred in the form of construction permits. Thus far, the relevant administrative oversight institutions at the city and regional level have backed up the interests of the builder.

A Preliminary Victory

Colombia’s neoliberal economic framework has liberated powerful speculative forces. In a country that does not manufacture much of anything anymore and that relies on extractive industries and speculative construction for economic growth and urban development, the motivations to infiltrate the process of territorial planning for primitive accumulation of lands and ultimately for financial gain are powerful.

Nonetheless, the constitutional framework of 1991, which conferred positive rights relating to social services, territory, and conservation, has created a formal buffer that in a sense has the capacity to slow down these speculative forces. However, the institutional and normative frameworks for regional planning are crisscrossed by contradictory trends: the expansion of rights relating to territory, on the one hand, and the imperative to synchronize these with neoliberal development, on the other. The very institutions designed to conserve and defend the commons are open to instrumentalization for speculative ends, ends powered by the logics of neoliberal globalization.

In Manizales, a mobilized citizenry has been able to harness scientific studies, expertise in the law, social media strategists, and the expertise of biologists such as Juan Gabriel Arango, a social movement leader and head of a local NGO, Natural Seeds Alliance, who has been active in coordinating protests and suits against Tierra Viva. The strength of groups such as Todos Somos Rio Blanco stems from the capacity of people like Juan Gabriel to make the connection between the complex operations of glaciers and soils, the extractive logics of neoliberalism, speculative activity, administrative corruption and the devastation of the territorial commons.

Through these battles, people are beginning to see the commons as extending to soil, water, forests, housing, work and the very complex set of metabolic cycles and relations through which these are connected. These are complex forms of relationality that neoliberalism reduces to its one-dimensional logic: the self-realization of capital, which is the maximization of profit.

The power of the citizenry was evident in open meetings held by the municipal council in 2017 as part of the process of amending the POT. Two hundred citizens showed up to participate in the two-day open forum. In over 60 presentations, environmentalists, trade unionists, professors, students and other members of civil society, argued against the designation of the region adjacent to Rio Blanco as an urban expansion zone.

Juan Gabriel was among those speaking at the forum. He spoke about the rare bird and animal species that would leave the Rio Blanco should construction of Tierra Viva proceed. He finished his intervention by quoting Bertolt Brecht: “Who does not know the truth is a fool; who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal.”

This citizen mobilization was rewarded by the current council with the re-designation of the zone adjacent to Rio Blanco as rural area.

Ever since the first suit filed against the project in 2012, the construction company has continued operations as permits allowed, presumably in order to create more judicial grounds for defense of its acquired property and construction rights. In fact, they appear to have torn down existing forest to make way for at least one tower.

The mobilized citizenry kept a close eye on the developer’s actions, videotaping and photographing changes made to the area adjacent to Rio Blanco, and carrying out scientific studies of land stability, soil integrity, water quality and existing fauna and flora.

Finally, in 2019, Juan Gabriel and a group of lawyers in Bogotá brought a suit against the project. It resulted in an injunction against further construction activities on the site until all the suits brought against the project are decided.

Early this year, in response to the complaint filed with his office, Inspector General Florez opened investigations against various bureaucrats in Manizales, citing irregularities in changes made to the POT and in the approval of permits and plans linked to the Tierra Viva project. Additionally, Florez called on the local courts handling the suits against the project to accelerate proceedings.

The War Over the Commons

For the moment, the mobilized citizenry in Manizales seems to have won the battle of Rio Blanco. The speculative drives powered by the financialized logics of neoliberalism, however, continue accelerating and expanding their reach all over Colombia, Latin America and beyond, looking to accumulate lands that could yield lucrative returns in investment, either through speculative urban development, through mining, or through industrial export agriculture.

As the case of Rio Blanco shows, the long battles against the capitalist accumulation of land that resulted in the granting of substantive rights related to territory in 1991, have been partially displaced. These battles are now fought on several terrains, including institutions of governance and of urban and regional planning tasked with squaring two antagonistic interests: neoliberal development and the conservation of the territorial commons. This displacement of the conflict over territory to the administrative and planning realm hasn’t made capitalist primitive accumulation any less deadly. The battles over territory have instead taken on new forms. The mobilized citizenry is beginning to make use of the new planning and justice institutions to claim their territorial rights. However, the speculative logics of neoliberal development have made these same institutions instruments through which to accumulate urban and rural territory for resource extraction or speculation.

With the election of President Iván Duque in 2018 and the return of the hardline right-wing to power, the tempos of violent primitive accumulation are once again ratcheting up. The demobilization of the FARC and the move towards peace between this guerrilla organization and the Colombia government in a sense has only intensified this type of violence: the land restitution initiatives included in thepeace plan seem to have set off a scramble by the forces of extractivism and primitive accumulation to secure as much land as possible. According to the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz), 566 social movement and human rights leaders were assassinated between January 2016 and January 2019, with 252 of these murders taking place in 2018. Among the most affected by this violence are Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities on the frontlines of the battles against mining and ecological devastation.

So far, 2019 is turning out to be another bloody year for the front-line defenders of Colombia’s ecological commons, with Indepaz tracking a total of 80 murders of social movement leaders through the middle of June. Many of the affected communities inhabit rural zones far from major urban areas. They rely on far fewer allies and can draw on far fewer resources than the mobilized citizens of a formerly industrialized, coffee growing, university town like Manizales. Many of these community leaders are protecting ecologies just as vital as Rio Blanco or the Nevados — whose glaciers, crucial for climate and rain regulation in the Coffee Triangle region and beyond, are on the verge of disappearing as a result of climate change.

The structural marginality of these social movement leaders makes them easy pickings for shadowy speculative interests, whether they be unscrupulous regional political, commercial, and landowning elites willing to team up with criminal armed networks to eliminate obstacles to speculative profiteering in the form of local environmental or labor activists, or multinationals that can easily delegate such activities to local actors without leaving much of a paper trail.

These endangered community leaders can only partially rely on the normative framework set in place by the 1991 constitution to battle the forces of primitive accumulation driven by neoliberal financialization and extractivism. The very tools of territorial planning and oversight that exist in Colombia, after all, are crisscrossed by the contradictions that arise in the attempt to synchronize citizen control over the territorial commons with the imperatives of the neoliberal form of capitalist accumulation.