Three - ‘No tenemos armas pero tenemos dignidad’: learning from the civic strike in Buenaventura, Colombia

Summary

Introduction

From 16 May to 6 June 2017, the Colombian Pacific port city of Buenaventura bore witness to one of the country's most important social struggles of the 21st century. For 22 days, the majority Afro- Colombian and indigenous population engaged in a civic strike that paralysed the city, and with it the country's most important port: virtually all businesses were closed; all public transport suspended; up to 70 community roadblocks shut down traffic within the city, including halting the transit of more than 2,600 trucks that carry goods into and out of the city's port every day. The demands of the ‘Civic Strike to Live with Dignity in Buenaventura’ were centred upon improving living conditions through basic public services and infrastructure for the city's population, and increasing popular participation in decisions over the city's territory and environment that have been increasingly affected by corporate infrastructure projects and the expansion of the port. Participation in the strike snowballed, and within two days had effectively become a generalised, joy-filled uprising, involving people from all demographics and all neighbourhoods across the city and rural communities lining the main highway out of the city. In the days that followed, the population would come face to face with the brutal tactics of the Colombian state in its attempts to generate terror and quell the strike, and remain steadfast in the face of live bullets, tear gas and riot vans.

As sites of struggles for social transformations, and as spaces often characterised by alternative, oppositional norms and value practices, social movements produce unique types of knowledge, often overlooked by academia. Reflecting on social movement praxis, then, is an inherently useful undertaking. This chapter thus reflects on the Buenaventura strike. Both authors were members of the Buenaventura civic strike human rights monitoring committee, and witnessed at first hand everything from the state violence (including tear gas and use of live ammunition) to negotiations with government and meetings of the strike committee. In our reflections we use an approach developed by Mathers and Novelli (2007) specifically for the purpose of studying social movement ‘strategies and practices’. Rather than an intervention into the activist world from the standpoint of the academic world, the approach seeks to ‘transverse both worlds through the development of roles such as “activist-researcher”’ (Mathers and Novelli, 2007: 230).