Terras indígenas e etnodesenvolvimento na Colômbia : uma análise dos projetos agropecuários implantados na área indígena Guasimal, 1996-2018

Abstract

Colombian indigenous people, since the arrival of Europeans in 1499, have experienced ethnic conflicts, usually violent, against the colonizers and landowners after Colombia‟s independence from Spain. With the origin of the concept of ethnodevelopment, which incorporates the notion of social justice and the right of traditional people to use and own land, the struggle for the respect and appreciation of the ways of life of various ethnic groups has won new support. As a result, indigenous people in Colombia have sought to coordinate their fight in the political arena in order to meet their needs, and have made both advances and retreats when it comes to approving laws and decrees. Using the concepts of development and ethnodevelopment, in this Master‟s thesis, I seek to analyze the implementation and the results of the livestock rearing and lemon cultivation projects on Guasimal Indigenous Land, with funding from the RED-WFP-UNDP Indigenous Credit Program. The guiding question of this study was how livestock and lemon cultivation projects on Guasimal Indigenous Land contributed to the social and economic development of the Pijao people. My hypothesis is that, within the strategy of sustainable development, the projects sought use natural resources to satisfy basic needs of the community while integrating and adapting to economic and political changes at the national level. I used a mixed-methods approach, using both qualitative and quantitative methods in a Concomitant Transformative Strategy research design. As a result, I analyzed documents belonging to entities involved with the execution and operation of the projects. In the field, I conducted semistructured interviews with members of the Pijao community. In the end, these projects guaranteed employment and income, satisfying some of the basic needs of the community by improving the education services and availability of food of the Pijao people on Guasimal Indigenous Land. The current challenge of the Guasimal community is to maintain these projects in such a way that they continue generating profits, thereby incentivizing families to stay on indigenous land, as well as encouraging younger generations to follow older generations in the search for greater socioeconomic development for the Pijao people.