He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Governing the Excluded: Rural Livelihoods Beyond Coca in Colombia's Peace Laboratory, and reported the following:
A reader who opened Governing the Excluded to page 99 would find herself transported to a government meeting in Briceño, a small village in the mountains of Colombia. The meeting centers on a crop substitution program, negotiated as part of a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, that promised to provide farmers with goods to replace their coca (the plant that’s used to make cocaine) with legal crops:Visit Alex Diamond's website.In a July 2019 public meeting in Briceño to evaluate two years of the substitution program, I get my first in-person look at the new Duque-installed national director of the substitution program, Hernando Londoño. Eduardo is one local leader chosen to speak on behalf of the community. “Our whole economy was illicit,” he says. “And when you were telling us to pull out our coca, you promised productive projects in the first year. But now you’re telling us to wait. We don’t have resources to buy fertilizer, there’s no economy, there’s no work for the youth. So when will the projects arrive?”Beginning with this vignette would give the reader a reasonably good idea of the rest of the book, as well as the value of its ethnographic approach. By ethnography, what I mean is that while this is a book about drug economies, a landmark peace process, and capitalist development, its analysis is rooted in the stories I tell about the lives of Briceño’s farmers, stories I witnessed and collected over three years total of living in the village. This lets me show how for Eduardo (a pseudonym), growing coca lifted his family out of poverty—but also exposed them to terrible levels of violence. It shows how, in voluntarily pulling out their coca and joining the substitution program, he and his neighbors put their faith in the state, providing the basis for state authority to take hold in an area that had long been under guerrilla control. But it also shows the tremendous frustrations produced in local engagements with the state, which not only failed to deliver promised resources, but shifted blame to the farmers themselves. And finally, putting local experiences in historical context allows me to show how they speak to broader shifts: the changes in rural economies that explain why smallholding farmers like Eduardo across the world cannot simply make a living by growing legal crops without turning for help to armed groups or the state.
After listening to more than an hour of complaints about state incumplimiento [broken promises], Londoño responds… “Briceño received $14 million in little over a year. But you’re saying the economy stopped because coca ended. Of course.” His voice drips with sarcasm. “But you should know there are no other municipalities in Colombia that have received this level of investment. And their economies haven’t been destroyed. With this reflection, you realize that you are privileged.... You need a change in attitude. A change in mentality. We need a substitution of people who are dedicated to licit crops.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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