School of Social and Political Science

Description

In 1998, Yaneth Valderrama, a farmer from the municipality of Solita in Caquetá (Southern Colombia), was four months pregnant when, in the aftermath of a military operation of aerial glyphosate spraying to eradicate coca fields, she suffered a miscarriage and died a few months later. Despite the continued use of glyphosate in the Colombian War on Drugs, twenty years later, her case remains the only instance of state-led toxic reproductive violence that reached a legal court. The reproductive life stories of women inhabiting coca-farming regions and their experiences of reproductive violence, remain untold. In this presentation, I follow the whispers of the stories of reproductive losses that unfold within the geographies of the Colombian conflict, and ask why and how they have been silenced. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Bajo Cauca region, I engage with the reproductive struggles experienced by women inhabiting the Cauca river basin to reconceptualise the notion of “reproductive justice” in conversation with indigenous and campesino ontologies. By arguing that reproduction consists of a more-than-human labour and investigating the role that the Cauca river plays in sustaining life amidst violence, I aim to uncover the centrality of land rights and territorial peace for reproductive justice.