Presentation short abstract

This research examines how campesinos navigate legal liminality, exclusion, and environmental governance in the Colombian Amazon. It shows how state narratives silence local knowledge, while campesino strategies of voice and silence shape more just, grounded visions for forest futures.

Presentation long abstract

In Colombia’s Amazon Forest Reserve, a powerful discourse circulates with bureaucratic certainty: campesinos should not own land in the forest. This moralized statement—echoed by the national government, the far right, and the progressive left—frames campesino presence as illegal, temporary, and environmentally destructive. Yet behind this narrative lies a long history of displacement, state-led colonization, and the systematic erasure of campesino Amazonian citizenship. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, focus groups, interviews, and participatory mapping, alongside a critical analysis of over fifty years of Colombian agrarian and environmental law and policy, this paper examines how the discourse of “no property in the reserve” operates as an infrastructure of inequality. It legitimizes the exclusion of campesinos who were ignored until the territory became valuable under neoliberal conservation agendas. This exclusion is reinforced by the silencing of campesino claims to belonging, care, and stewardship. This paper listens to stories rarely heard: those of campesinos navigating a moral and legal terrain where their very existence is framed as a problem. Though vocal and politically active, their voices are often muted by state narratives. At the same time, campesino silences function as strategies of endurance, protection, and refusal in a frontier where speaking out can bring danger or dispossession. By examining the intersections of legality, morality, and discourse, this work shows how protectionist narratives reinscribe colonial boundaries over who may inhabit, or claim, the forest, arguing that attending to these silences is essential for more just and plural forms of forest governance and peacebuilding.