ABSTRACT
The introduction of Law 70 of 1993 undeniably granted certain powers of autonomy and collective ownership to black collectivities in the territories of the Colombian Pacific basin. Nonetheless, different developmental interventions, both legal and illegal, undermine local understandings and uses of the territory in order to impose a Western/capitalist conception of land use. The chapter argues that the Colombian Pacific basin is the scenario of an uneven dispute between two social ontologies: the black and the modern/Western. The transformation of black social ontology can be attributed in particular to the coloniality of being, a mechanism that problematizes non-Western sociocultures and eliminates their accompanying social ontologies. As a universalizing process, developmentalism seeks to transform black sociocultures and eliminate the black social ontology in order to reproduce and expand the modern world-system. In doing so, developmentalism resorts to violence and deterritorialization as one of its mechanisms of expansion. The main purpose of this chapter is to analyse the unequal differentiation of social ontologies and sociocultures, its colonial framework, and the mechanisms and effects of the imposition of a univocal vision of the world in the northern Colombian Pacific basin.
