Exclusion through integration: Roadbuilding and colonización in Colombia's Eastern territories

The most recent Colombian civil conflict is widely understood to have its roots in longstanding land conflict that arose from unequal land distribution in the country. In a purported effort to pacify leftist peasant demands for land without angering landholding elites through meaningful land redistribution, starting in the 1950s the Colombian state intensified colonización programmes to settle the eastern territories. This article examines the entanglements of road construction and land politics during this period of colonización, considering the systematic establishment of penetration, transversal and local roads as technologies of land control. Analysing planning documents for one of the most significant highway projects from the period – the Marginal de la Selva – alongside influential research on land colonización, this article argues that the Marginal de la Selva extended patterns of uneven integration and exacerbated exclusion of Indigenous people from their land.