Infrastructural Violence in Sugar Plantations in Southwest Colombia
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9604-8361
Abstract / Resumen / Resumo
This article analyzes sugar landscapes as manifestations of infrastructural violence in Candelaria, a key hub of the sugar industry in Valle del Cauca, southwest Colombia. Infrastructural violence refers to socio-technical systems that shape agrarian change while reinforcing systemic and historical racial exclusion, causing harm and disrupting the cultural, ecological, and social fabric of life. I argue that this form of violence reproduces plantation logic, that is, an organizational model rooted in colonial hierarchies that sustain unequal power relations and racialized exploitation. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, archival research, and interviews, I trace how the sugarcane industry retains its colonial logic in contemporary plantations. Control-grabbing (land and water appropriation, leasing, contract farming), toxic dispossession, and mobility regimes together shape landscapes that impose multiple forms of violence on Afro-Colombian and camp-esinx populations. This study contributes to Latin American agrarian and geographical debates by explicitly naming these dynamics as violence and by emphasizing the historical continuity of plantation systems within agro-industrial extractivism.
Recommended Citation
Arias Solano, Lorena
(2026)
"Infrastructural Violence in Sugar Plantations in Southwest Colombia,"
Journal of Latin American Geography
25(1): 100-131.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.2026.a992794
Available at:
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/15/article/992794
