¿Paz por medio de la coca? Ecologías decoloniales de construcción de paz y desarrollo rural en el Territorio de Convivencia y Paz de Lerma, Colombia

While illicit crops like the coca leaf can be vehicles of conflict and income for armed groups across the global south, this article reveals that coca has alternative uses based on its nutritional and cultural value. Drawing on the experience of the Territory of Conviviality and Peace of Lerma in Colombia, the country’s first community to receive state authorization to experiment with coca for non-alkaloid purposes, we ponder whether coca can be a catalyst for peace. Lerma has been a large coca producer for decades, and it has enveloped it in relationships of subordination and exploitation tied to illicit economies and armed conflict. Based on qualitative research over a six-year period, we analyze Lerma’s project to overcome capitalist logics driving peasant dispossession through Colombian history and intracommunity violence by diverging from production for the drug economy in favor of agroecological coca. In conjunction with other community-based programs, Lerma’s production of organic coca as part of its food sovereignty project suggests a process of decolonial peace at work, whereby the community breaks from oppressions tied to the rule of armed groups and capitalist markets. This reveals the ecological dimensions of peace, which requires community organizing and sustainable relations between humans and land.