Mining and social mobilization in Colombia: popular consultation and territory rights

Abstract

A look at the agenda of social mobilization in Colombia in the last ten years shows that the main issues of social conflict are linked to the struggles against the impact of the so-called locomotives of development, within the framework of historical mobilizations to the right to protest and for the access, coverage and quality of social services. It is an emerging and growing mobilization against the prevalent liberal and extractivist economic model and the questioned state response to social conflicts. This article addresses actors and agendas of the mobilizations against the "miningenergy locomotive" and in defense of the territory and explores the learning and expectations of the communities in rural and urban contexts that resist economic measures and claim the right to territory and a dignified life. Without ignoring the connections with the Latin American dynamics, the peculiarities of the Colombian case are highlighted, in relation to the challenges of a citizenship that rises over territorialized cultural and political aspects, that explores the path of institutional ways, such as popular consultations, projecting them as forms of contestatory action beyond non-legal resources, in the framework of organizational processes of subaltern sectors that invoke the participatory democracy enshrined in the 1991 Political Charter.