Estefanía Ciro constructs ways of narrating violence through poetry and essays

The book Immaterial explosive devices captures the search of its author, the Colombian writer and sociologist Estefanía Ciro, to construct, from poetry and essays, “other ways of narrating violence, prohibitionism, the daily life of the markets,” and of cocaine and cannabis farmers.

The text, published this year by the independent label Corazón de Lobo, is composed of a collection of poems that contains the memory of the experience of the coca mobilization in 1996, one of the largest peasant mobilizations in Colombia, and a kind of obverse titled From the coca-growing lives of Caqueta: Ethnography as poetry, around that phenomenon.

In an interview, Ciro related that his primary work has been “the study of the cocaine and cannabis markets, the dynamics of violence in them and a critique of prohibitionism. In political terms, the bet is on regulation. If we do not generate sovereign, fair regulation that addresses asymmetries and reduces them, we are losing.”

The contributor to this newspaper stated that she wrote this text in 2019, and currently there is a much more blatant and violent use of anti-drug discourse, and countries have to put the issue of regulation on the agenda, since the discussion on drug policy and human rights is obscured.

The invitation to all is that “we find those contradictions that the market marks for us, because that is precisely where the prohibitionist policy is governed with the most success and cruelty.”

The poet pointed out that the objective of her most recent title “is to play with this other language, which can reach the aridity of the academy in a much broader way and which can also move other feelings, sensations and attentions.”

In a scenario where the US president, Donald Trump, “imposes stories of what should be felt, heard and seen,” other narratives must be rescued, such as those of Hipólito, a coca-growing boy who barely survived drowning; of Amanda, who died after being sprayed by glyphosate; of another woman who gave birth to her children on rubber fields where coca is dried, or of the same plant “and what the day-to-day life of its seed teaches us.”

Estefanía Ciro noted that the purpose of her book is “from intellectual decantation, to launch ideas that were kept with a lot of sadness and anger within me and that can be a reason to expand it and generate more voices to join the need for a change in drug policy in Latin America.”

The Juan Bosch winner of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for the promotion of Research in Social Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean 2018 stressed that the production of cocaine and cannabis must be understood as peasant activities. On the other hand, the narrative of drug trafficking encouraged by certain media proposes that it is “a black hole from which cocaine comes out and we don’t know what happens inside, and everything is bad there, narco-state, narco-guerrilla, narco-cultivator, narco-boatsas they say about fishing boats in the Caribbean.”

The above, the historian also continued, opaque “a number of phenomena and violence that we need to discuss and reveal; therefore, we must situate the experiences of the jungle, the coca, the plant that grows, that is cared for and supplies hunger to so many people, that provides opportunities for study and also fuels a scenario of very strong dispute, because there is enormous exploitation.

“These asymmetries and brutalities allow us to break that narrative narco. “The idea of ​​these explosive devices is to dynamite it.”

Recover life stories

The poems recover, said the author, the “cadence of the voices that narrate what I grew up listening to and found in my research. On the other hand, they were a way of supporting the notes and experiences of those lives that showed all the cruelties of drug policy, which could be evidenced in the daily life of the coca farmers of Caquetá (Colombia), and in general, men and women of the Amazon.”

He recalled that Caquetá, at least “for 40 years, has been the object of imperial geopolitical intervention. In the Amazon there have been extractivist cycles since the arrival of the Spanish: of the mine, the rubber, the wood, the skins, which are being built one on top of the other. The last were that of oil and that of the cocaine market.

“Its history is very emblematic in Latin America to understand the imperial anti-peasant counterinsurgency force and resource extraction. The epicenter of Plan Colombia was the Amazon, and three military bases with a United States presence were in Caquetá.”

Ciro mentioned that this plan was a reaction to the important mobilization in seven or eight departments of Colombia of more than “200,000 coca farmers in the context of aerial spraying with glyphosate and an enormous process of repression that spread in the 90s against the peasantry, at a time when the United States pushed for the narcotization of the agenda in Colombia.”

He evoked the poem “Coca walks, the earth trembles,” about how peasants remember when they were a collective: “we are thousands / the road is made of people (…) / You can’t imagine you the crowd / we looked like ants.”

Cocaine has around 24 million users and marijuana is the most consumed drug in the world with 220 million. Prohibitionism regulates it. These regulations are violent, unequal, asymmetrical, they make “the most privileged earn more. This is where the asymmetry of income and violence is built: those who earn the most money suffer the least and, on the contrary, the most vulnerable in the chain are those who are most oppressed by prohibitionism.”

The text was on sale at the 39th edition of the Guadalajara International Book Fair and can be purchased at the La Murciélaga, Polilla and La Libertad bookstores, in Mexico City, as well as at the Cafebrería Pessoa, in Querétaro, and on the Corazón de Lobo Editores Instagram page.