ABSTRACT
In 1990 the Movimiento Campesino de Cajibío (MCC) or Small Farmers’ Movement of Cajibío, Colombia, emerged as a collective organization that united various rural communities of Cajibío in a commitment to develop alternatives and strategies against multinational incursion and its accompanying state and paramilitary violence. Through a series of collective mass mobilizations and decision-making caucuses, the MCC designed a Plan de Vida Digna (Plan of Life with Dignity) to oppose and respond to what they considered the “plan of death” that for centuries the Colombian state and its armed actors, in collusion with U.S. economic and military interests, have imposed upon rural communities. Steeped in the principles of liberation theology and nonviolent direct action, the campesino movement chose the tree of life as its symbol for alternatives to capitalist globalization—specifically, alternatives more aligned with traditional campesino values and modes of production.
