This article explores the financial and geopolitical networks behind the independence of Gran Colombia. It shows that the failure to obtain official British government support for independence was compensated for by the development of a network of private individuals and partnerships that supplied large quantities of arms, equipment and men. A Colombian government document granting ‘Powers’ to London intermediaries was crucial to the construction of this network. We analyse who the key players were and how the network operated. By exploring the decisions and actions of merchants through the lens of risk, trust, credit and networks, we provide a fresh insight into the wider process of independence in Gran Colombia.

This article examines how people gathered and transmitted political information in Colombia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Existing scholarship has predominantly focused on the study of the press in Colombia and Latin America. However, few historians have explored other forms of information, such as telegrams, rumours and letters, or how Colombians combined these. By focusing on how various forms of information circulated through political, familial and commercial networks, this study offers a new dimension to our understanding of communications in Colombia. It argues that this was a period of increasing circulation of information due to social, political and economic change, as well as new links between oral and written practices. Thus, this article illuminates how Colombians circulated political information in a society of restricted literacy in post-colonial Latin America, offering new insights into politics, communications and the interplay between written and oral culture.

This article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.

This article maps the contentious forms of political life that emerge when multicultural rights and non-formal gold extraction coincide. Specifically, it shows how, in the Colombian department of Chocó, Afro-descendant community councils have produced a unique form of mining governance that, while depending for its legitimacy on everyday uses of Afro-Colombian legislation, consists of the organisation, taxation and policing of mining activities that are in tension with official notions of extractive and multicultural law. In exploring such ‘underground’ cultural politics, the article highlights the limits of state-centric analyses of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ and, accordingly, underscores the instrumental role that governed subjects play in the on-the-ground unfolding of multicultural governance regimes.

Observers have increasingly described the drug-related violence and corruption affecting Central America as the region's ‘Colombianisation’. This narrative is not just confused and misleading; it is dangerous. The Colombianisation discourse perpetuates ineffective and destructive anti-drug policies. It also obscures the circulations and connections that make the drug trade, the drug war and their associated economies of violence possible. We do, however, recognise one form of Colombianisation that actually is under way, but it is not the one imagined by security pundits. The real Colombianisation is a convergence of geopolitical and economic interests that have seized upon the geographical realignments of the drug trade to expand the same agroindustrial-military nexus in Central America that proved so ‘successful’ in Colombia.

This article offers an analysis of the transnational discursive construction processes informing Latin American security governance in the aftermath of 9/11. It demonstrates that the Global War on Terror provided an opportunity for external and aligned local knowledge producers in the security establishments throughout the Americas to reframe Latin America's security problems through the promotion of a militarised security epistemology, and derived policies, centred on the region's ‘convergent threats’. In tracing the discursive repercussions of this epistemic reframing, the article shows that, by tapping into these discourses, military bureaucracies throughout the Americas were able to overcome their previous institutional marginalisation vis-à-vis civilian agencies. This development contributed to the renaissance of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism discourses and policies in the region, allowing countries such as Colombia and Brazil to reposition themselves globally by exporting their military expertise for confronting post-9/11 threats beyond the region.

Nineteenth-century republicans across the political spectrum agreed: the Spanish monarchy produced ‘miserable Indians’. Abolishing tribute and privatising communal lands, known as resguardos in New Granada (roughly today's Panama and Colombia), would transform that wretched class into equal citizens. Drawing on late eighteenth-century privatisation efforts by the Spanish Crown, early republican leaders in Gran Colombia inaugurated an era seeking equal access to wealth from communal land for all indigenous community members. After Gran Colombia (the first Colombian Republic, 1819–30) dissolved into New Granada, Ecuador and Venezuela in 1830, New Granada's experiments with indigenous resguardo policies went further. By then, legislative efforts considered the needs of all resguardo members, including unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children. Complex laws, diverse ecological terrain and nuanced social realities required well-trained surveyors to ensure each eligible indigenous family received a fair share of land. Whereas indigenous communities in Pasto, Santa Marta and the Cauca river valley resorted to armed insurrection against liberal policies through the War of the Supremes (1839–42), those in the highlands near Bogotá did not. Instead, these republican indígenas – with their greater access to the levers of power housed in the national capital – chose to engage in the reforms of a decentralising state. This article reveals how contentious experiments seeking republican equality within indigenous resguardos as a path towards abolishing the institution were consistently stymied by efforts to ensure that indigenous community governance and communal landholding remained intact.

This article argues that the prepaid energy system put into operation in Medellín and across Colombia worked as an expression of ‘energopower’; that is, energy as a means to govern societies. The article uses press archives and company statements, official statistics and group interviews to show how energopower operates in Medellín along three lines: that Empresas Públicas de Medellín, the city's public utility company, encouraged disconnected and displaced people as new buyers of prepaid energy services instead of citizens entitled to those services; that the implementation of the prepaid energy system coincided with the vertiginous capitalisation that allowed the city to fund its ‘Social Urbanism’ and EPM to expand operations across Colombia and other countries in Latin America; and, that prepaid electricity as a tool of energopower subjugated displaced and disconnected populations to new forms of affordability that prompted barrio women to understand and oppose its disciplining methods of domination.

Traditional accounts of the 1948 Bogotazo – the riot in Bogotá, Colombia, sparked by the assassination of populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán – have overlooked the urban context that explains the extent of the destruction. Preparing to host the 1948 IX Pan-American Conference, Bogotá had undergone aggressive urban reforms that financially burdened and dispossessed residents. More than just a political figure, Gaitán was recognised as an urban advocate for the marginalised. They responded to his death by destroying reform projects and symbols of political authority. Informed by architectural journals, legislation and periodicals, this article shows that Bogotá’s elite and dispossessed alike inscribed their political projects onto the urban landscape.

Addressing the case of a community from rural Urabá, Colombia, this article focuses on the temporality of population displacement and asks: when does the ‘clock’ of displacement start? Drawing upon an in-depth ethnographic fieldwork it challenges the state driven narrative that displacement can be understood from the moment one leaves their residence and advances the argument that displacement is more than just physical relocation. By engaging with the broader social, political and economic context in which displacement occurred and bringing local voices to the fore, this article demonstrates how the experience of violence engendered a sense of displacement before residents actually left.

After the world food crisis of the early 1970s, food policies became a ‘national priority’ for Colombian development. Colombia was the first country to implement the multi-sectoral approach proposed by international organisations. However, in the past 30 years Colombian governments have presented nutrition as a minor health issue. During the recent world food crisis, the government insisted that Colombia was one of the most food-secure countries in the world. In seemingly similar circumstances, why was food policy made a priority in the 1970s and not in the new millennium? We address this question with the help of securitisation theory. We argue that in the 1970s, the government successfully securitised the food issue in the context of a reduction of external food aid and a failed land reform. Recent national governments (as opposed to some local governments) have had little interest in a securitising move since the related food sovereignty discourses threaten their free market policies.

Genomic research in Latin America has looked into the African, Amerindian and European ancestry of local populations. This article explores how indigeneity and blackness figure in genomic science in the light of previous and current representations of indigenous and Afro-descendent people. These categories have been cast as ‘other’ in Latin America, but they have occupied different locations in ‘structures of alterity’. I look briefly at these similarities and differences in the colonial and republican periods and in recent multiculturalist reforms. I look at the gendered sexual imagery surrounding each concept, before examining in detail how blackness and indigeneity figure in gendered ways in genomic science research on admixture and ancestry in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. I conclude that, in the context of multiculturalism, genomics works to re-centre imaginaries of the nation around the mestizo and mixture, while casting blackness and indigeneity, in sexualised and gendered ways, as different kinds of others.

In a context of continuing armed conflict, a comprehensive scheme of transitional justice has been developed in Colombia since 2005 through the Law of Justice and Peace, with the aim of achieving peace with one of the armed actors in the conflict, the paramilitary groups. The clear link between the demobilisation of illegal armed groups and the rights of the victims is the main feature of the Colombian process. This article provides a systematic review of the implementation of the law, focusing on the institutions, mechanisms and procedures put in place to fulfil its goals. Emphasis is given to the legal category of ‘victim’, victims' rights and victim reparation measures. By exploring how the scheme works in principle and in practice, we are able to assess the prospects for victims' rights in Colombia today.