About humanitarianism and the political subject in Montes De María

Abstract

Based on ethnographic description, context analysis and a review of the evolution of the conflict, we examine the case of the township of San José del Peñón in the municipality of San Juan Nepomuceno, and show how humanitarian interventions have weakened community organization by generating political and economic dependence that accentuates the breakdown of territorial, political and social cohesion in the midst of systematic violence against the population. These entities start from a conception of victim that is consistent with their processes and therefore their humanitarian intervention, instead of generating processes of social empowerment and political subjectivation, end up favoring relations of power, conflict and submission that negatively affect the coexistence of these communities in their territories. A phenomenological approach to reality allows us a descriptive approach to the practices and reactions of communities to the intervention processes of external agents. In the conclusions we propose the need to rethink the role of humanitarian assistance in order to recognize and strengthen community organizations, their trajectory, their territorial agendas and their autonomy as an accompaniment route that allows them to recognize themselves autonomously as political, individual and collective subjects and, especially, as protagonists of their history and their future.