Dispossession and The Memory of the Earth: Land Dispossession in Nueva Colonia

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FA and the Truth Commission analysed the mechanisms of land dispossession in Nueva Colonia, in the region of Urabá Antioqueño, that have led to the dispossession of campesinos, and the transfer of their land to companies for commercial monocrop banana cultivation.

The region, on Colombia’s northwestern Caribbean coast, is the heartland of the country’s banana industry. Urabá is known for extreme political violence, which has gripped the region since the 1980s. Massacres and paramilitary groups have driven away thousands, who left behind their homes and agricultural land.

The project shows how dispossession occurred in the shadow of armed repression, massacres, and terror spread by private paramilitary forces, serving local and international banana producers under the protection of the Colombian military. It exposes how these producers benefited from the dispossession of campesinos.

Reconstruction of a campesino farm in Coquitos, Urabá, Antioquia for the project based on the methodology of situated testimony using the Unreal Engine platform. Detail of farm from 1989. (Forensic Architecture and The Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, 2021)

Using testimonies, archival material, aerial and satellite analysis we reconstructed three sites of paramilitary massacres of banana workers, union members, and campesinos, in the village of Coquitos, and the banana plantations of Honduras and La Negra.

The site of the Coquitos massacre has been lost to coastal erosion, accelerated by the loss of native mangroves that once protected the shoreline and the conversion of the landscape for large-scale banana monoculture. The site is now 300 meters from the shoreline under the sea.

The buildings on the sites of the massacres of Honduras and La Negra have been erased and are partially buried by banana cultivation.

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Together with campesinos who witnessed these violent incidents and the wider transformation of the region, we digitally reconstructed a hundred square kilometres of lost and threatened landscape.

To do so we used an interviewing technique designed by FA, known as ‘Situated Testimony’, in which 3D models provide a navigable immersive environment through which witnesses could ‘walk’. As they experience the region at multiple scales and temporalities, we reconstructed not only places that were lost, but also their farms which they have struggled to hold on to.

Reconstruction of a campesino farm in Coquitos, Urabá, Antioquia based on the methodology of situated testimony, using the Unreal Engine platform. Detail from of the house from 2020. (Forensic Architecture and The Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, 2021)

We interwove these interviews with environmental simulations and biological studies, archival materials, videos, aerial images, and satellite images analysed by remote sensing scientists. We interviewed a judge who investigated the massacres, and who was forced into exile after identifying the former paramilitaries who committed the massacre, and Yair Klein, a former Israeli military officer who trained them.

3D reconstructions through situated testimony along with aerial and remote sensing analysis show how agricultural canal systems of banana businesses and other environmental elements were used by landowners to flood the fields of campesinos, and contribute to the destruction of their fields, and eventual dispossession.

Film still from the video 'Coquitos'. Ángel Montalbo describes the effects of saltwater flooding in plantain crops. (Forensic Architecture and The Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, 2021)

Uniquely, we analysed hundreds of pages of financial and property data from 1955 to the present. Using network analysis software, this research exposes the complex ways in which national and international banana companies, banks, trust funds and state institutions engaged in property transactions that masked the actual accumulation of land.

Based on a leak exposing the dealings of Chiquita Brands (a US registered company, and formerly the infamous United Fruit Company which operated across the Caribbean areas of Colombia), we show how the company has been involved in sponsoring paramilitarism in Nueva Colonia and facilitated the land dispossession of campesinos in this region.

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