How Far Can Sars-Cov-2 Go? Tracing The Peasant Páramo Through Covid-19

By Santiago Martínez-Medina (Instituto Humboldt), Hanne Cottyn (IGDC, University of York) and Ana María Garrido (Instituto Humboldt)

"They said in Sumapaz, due to the work and management
that the peasants have done, according to their condition
No cases have been presented and this is a great blessing
Sumapáz what a great lesson ! " [1]

Wilson Rey Moreno, the Ranger at heart  [ 2 ]

Covid-19 territorializes the human world

Covid-19, the disease resulting from infection with the Sars-Cov-2 virus, does not respect borders. From human to human, from saliva droplet to saliva droplet, Sars-Cov-2 spreads across the planet with devastating efficiency. It arrived in Colombia by air, by European tourists and Colombians fleeing the European epidemic, primarily from Italy and Spain. The Sars-Cov-2-human-airplane assemblage allowed Covid19 to establish itself in the country. At the same time, Colombian authorities discussed the best way to stop it at its borders. When they finally decided to close them, there were already cases in Bogotá, the country’s capital, that could not be traced to travelers from the countries that were the focus of the infection. The pandemic was already, according to many experts, irrepressible.

In the world of Covid-19, person-to-person contact has become a dangerous issue. Like other infectious diseases, Covid-19 has made the social a body of infection (Beigi 2019). The unprecedented quarantine keeping a population of millions of healthy people in lockdown lasted almost six months in Colombia. Unable to meet the rapid expansion of Sars-Cov-2 with laboratory tests and control measures, people have had to slow down and limit their movements. As a contagion phenomenon, Covid-19 thus indicates its territorializing nature in the speed and scope of its expansion (Deleuze and Guattari 2004). In just a few months, Sars-Cov-2, through its association with human bodies, has made the world that humans make its territory.

Sars-Cov-2 found in Bogotá more than seven million people with whom to associate. Therefore, the city’s response has been mostly focused on social distancing and face masks while increasing its responsive capacity in Intensive Care Units and clinical laboratories. With an average of 30 to 35% of the country’s daily new positive cases in recent months, Bogotá has been the most seriously affected area in Colombia. Eight months after the first cases were identified, Covid-19 has spread to 19 of the city’s 20 districts. The only district where there have to date been no cases of the disease, is the Sumapaz district.

The Covid-19-free world of the páramo of Sumapaz

Sumapaz is a vast rural district located south of Bogotá, which includes part of the Sumapaz páramo, the largest ecosystem of this type in the world. With only about 5,600 inhabitants, Sumapaz is the largest and least populated district of Bogota. Its relative isolation and low population density could explain the absence of cases. However, isolation and population have a unique character in Sumapaz, particularly concerning the páramo. Páramo is more than a descriptor of altitudinal, biophysical, and landscape characteristics (as an Andean high mountain ecosystem, generally above 3000 m.a.s.l.). Páramo is also, for the local peasants, their territory, resulting from decades of peasant struggle, first in the long Colombian armed political conflict, and now in with national environmental authorities. According to the local peasants, Sumapaz is not only páramo in a “natural” sense (De la Cadena 2019) but also a particular way of living and organising.

The people of the páramo, united by strong historical and political ties, have tried to stop the pandemic. To understand their attempts, we need to go back to the first decades of the 20th century and trace the origin of their organization, particularly their struggles for land against the landowners, who at that time declared themselves owners of the entire páramo. We also need to know that people moved to Sumapaz, expelled from other areas of the country by political and economic violence, and sought a chance at life in the high mountains. This close collaborative bond of the people of the páramo was later consolidated through the many cycles of political violence in Colombia. By the end of the 20th century, Sumapaz was, in fact, a territory of military operations, first by the FARC guerrillas and later by the Colombian Army. In recent decades, another type of conflict has arisen, this time with the environmental authorities over attempts to regulate peasant activities (mainly farming and cattle ranching) in the name of conserving the páramo as a strategic ecosystem, a " water factory", particularly for the city of Bogotá. Thus, by the time Sars-Cov-2 arrived in the country, peasants had many decades of organizational experience with consolidated structures, such as the Sumapaz Agricultural Workers Union, the de facto Peasant Reserve Zone of Sumapaz, the Association of community action boards-Asojuntas-, agricultural producer organizations, and peasant women organizations.

A rural network of care

The response of peasant organizations to Covid-19 was immediate. Care, especially for older peasants, was prioritized. Strict mobility and permanence rules were quickly put in place. Checkpoints were organized along access roads, controlled by the peasants themselves, who take turns guarding them. Women’s organizations established ways to keep peasants warm and fed at checkpoints, despite the cold and long distances. The movement of food and goods to and from the city was organized, taking special care to maintain ties with relatives who lived in Bogotá, sending them food from the páramo. A whole network of care was launched with the aim of containing the disease [3]. For months, to enter or leave Sumapaz, one needed a permit from one of the Campesino boards. " The rule we set, "Don Gerardo tells us, " is that if I go to Bogotá, I have to return on the same day. Otherwise, I have to stay there, and I cannot return. You cannot be traveling here and there". Ultimately these various measures paid off. As Don Gerardo continues, " There are people who say: well, and will that checkpoint stop the virus ? I say that maybe it won’t stop the virus, but it will stop the person bringing it and that is enough".

The peasants of Sumapaz can be thought as a territorialization force, in a Deleuzian sense (1981), as they produce páramo as home (Bonta and Protevi 2004). Their history of struggle makes the páramo something different. One of us, walking the páramo with Don Jacinto, asked him what the páramo meant for him: " autonomy, "he replied, telling how, when he is on his farm, he does not depend on the State and its institutions, but only on the páramo, his labour and his neighbors. Faced by Covid-19, the peasants responded by organising as they have always responded to defending their common affairs.

We began this piece with a fragment of a song by the singer-songwriter Wilson Rey Moreno, el llanero de corazón. We can now ask what lessons Sumapaz teach us. The song continues as follows :

Newspapers and magazines highlighted the issue

The work of the peasants and their organization

To prevent pandemic and infection.

We are countryside doctors, with hats and shoes

In solidarity with the cause, people with generous hearts

Ay Sumapaz, what a great lesson !

My Sumapaz, only admiration !

The limits of a borderless phenomenon

In his proposal for the series “Topology as Method”, Khashayar Beigi (2019) asked: How far can a virus go? Like him, we ask: how far can Sars-Cov-2 go, in particular when it moves towards the Sumapaz páramo? Global maps of infection rates present Sars-Cov-2 as a borderless phenomenon, appearing to spread across countries, regions, and cities. The absence of cases in Sumapaz challenges this conception, showing how the spread of the virus varies, inviting us to think about the spaces of Covid-19 with a sensitivity that is attentive to connections, folds, inflections, and contractions, instead of the more usual spatial relationships of distance and position (Rose and Wylie 2006; Wylie 2006). Sars-Cov-2 going up the páramo has found a limit to its spread in Sumapaz, one that it has not found when it moved to more" remote "and" distant "areas of the country, such as large regions of the Amazon or the Pacific coast of the country.

How could this limit to the spread of Sars-Cov-2 emerge? We follow Deleuze’s (1981) conceptualization of the limit as " the limit of its action and not the outline of its figure, "to learn about Sars-Cov-2 and the peasant páramo. " Things, "Deleuze continues, " have no other limit than the limit of their power or action. The thing is, therefore, power [puissance] and not form". We already know that Sars-Cov-2 can go as far as its association with human bodies allows it to go. This conclusion is not a contribution at all. The quarantine shows that we have learned this lesson from pandemics in the past. What the Sumapaz peasants teach us is that for Sars-Cov-2 not to spread to the páramo, a contrary territorialization is necessary that can stop the occupation of the territory by the virus. This counter-territorialization force emerges as the product of the peasant organizations’ particular enaction of páramo as a landscape of autonomy. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, we see peasant organization in action and all the work that is needed to sustain the Sumapaz páramo as a place without cases of Covid-19. A virus-free páramo is nothing but the fluctuating result, in tension, of all the peasant organization practices working towards that goal. Checkpoints are not a limit in the sense of line, but an external expression of the peasant organization sustained for the power of the peasants working together. As the song says, Sumapaz’s lesson is " the work of the peasant and their organization, "which becomes a body with the páramo, in such a way that it can be protected from infection.

The extension of the Covid-19 pandemic in Bogotá, and how it has not infected Sumapaz, can be seen as a figuration of the Sumapaz páramo as enacted by the peasants. Páramo, as a landscape of autonomy, is a reverse figure of Covid-19’s extension across Bogotá. Almost as if it were a bioindicator that becomes a socioindicator, the limits of Sars-Cov-2 point to the extension of a type of human action based on care and autonomy, beyond the State and its institutions (many times even against them), in a country that has failed to contain the virus. Sumapaz peasants’ great lesson reveals what their organizations can do in the face of occupation forces. An important lesson not only for those interested in the geographical epidemiology of Covid-19, but also for the representatives of other territorialization forces, for instance, science and the State, and their occupation practices currently articulated in the name of conservation.

Postscript : We wrote this text before December 2020. At the end of the year, the disease’s first cases were registered in Sumapaz. According to official data, by January 14, 2021, the district reports 14 cases, all of them receiving care at home, no hospitalization required, and no deaths. According to the peasants with whom we have spoken, all these cases correspond to people arriving from Bogotá urban districts, particularly government officials. Even with these 14 cases, the district’s epidemiological results are remarkable: the neighboring district, Usme, registers to date 18,266 cases, and the city already exceeds five hundred thousand. Now the peasant organization has another priority : to ensure that the containment measures be fulfilled and that no more cases are presented. The risk is enormous. The relative isolation from Bogotá can now play against the peasants since hospitals for potential severe cases are only found in the city’s urban area. Despite this, the peasant leaders of Sumapaz are confident that they will be able to resist this new threat, just when the country faces the second peak of the pandemic.

This blog is developed as part of the project “Integrating ecological and cultural histories to inform sustainable and equitable futures for the Colombian páramos” (Natural Environment Research Council - UK), coordinated by the University of York and developed together with Instituto Humboldt and other partners.

 

 

NOTES

[ 1 ]  They said that in Sumapaz, because of the work and management / What the peasants have done, according to their condition / There have been no cases and this is a great blessing / Ay Sumapáz, what a great lesson!

[2] El llanero de corazón is the artist name of Wilson. A (mis)translation would be “cowboy from heart”, as Llanero refers to the people from los llanos orientales, the easter plains of Colombia, usually identified with a culture closely related to livestock. The music that Wilson plays is música llanera, and shows the cultural and social connections that the lowlands have with the páramo. For his music, see : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtuQIpa64xxMRK1kJ1WvcAA/featured

[3] The national press recorded the fact. To see some of these news consult : https://conexioncapital.co/asi-se-protegen-los-ciudadanos-de-la-localidad-de-sumapaz-del-coronavirus/ or https://www.cablenoticias.tv/salud/sumapaz-sin-covid-pero-en-alerta-porque-gran-parte-de-la-poblacion-es-de-alto-riesgo/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Beigi, Khashayar. 2019. “Vectoring”. In Topology as Method. Theorizing the Contemporary, a series edited by Stéphane Gros, Kamala Russell, and William F. Stafford. Cultural Anthropology https://culanth.org/fieldsights/vectoring

• Bonta, Mark and John Protevi. 2004. Deleuze and Geophilosophy. A Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press

• De la Cadena, Marisol. 2019. “Uncommoning Nature Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen”. In Anthropos and the Material : Anthropological Reflections on Emerging Political Formations, edited by Penny Harvey, Christian Krohn-Hansen, and Knut G. Nustad, 35-58. Durham ; London : Duke University Press.

• Deleuze, Gilles. 1981. “On Spinoza.” Cours Vincennes, Saint Denis, February 17. https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/38

• Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1980 [1987]. A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.

• Rose, Mitch y John Wylie. 2006. “Animating Landscape”. Environment and Planning D : Society and Space 24 : 475-479. https://doi.org/10.1068/d2404ed

• Wylie, John. 2006. “Depths and Folds : On Landscape and the Gazing Subject”. Environment and Planning D : Society and Space 24 : 519-535. https://doi.org/10.1068/d380t

This blog by Santiago Martínez-Medina (Instituto Humboldt), Hanne Cottyn (IGDC) and Ana María Garrido (Instituto Humboldt) was written for and originally published on CETRI and is republished here with permission.