At a recent Latin American Institute event, UC Irvine professor Alexander Huezo described how Afro-Colombian communities on Colombia's Pacific coast experience and resist environmental violence.

By Victoria Salcedo

UCLA International Institute, May 29, 2025 — Alexander Huezo (UCLA M.A. 2009) returned to campus to present findings from his forthcoming book, “Visions of Global Environmental Justice: Comunidades Negras and the War on Drugs in Colombia” (UC Press, 2025). 

 Huezo is an assistant professor of global and international studies at UC Irvine. The event was cosponsored by the Latin American Institute and the history department of UCLA.

The author delivered an image-rich presentation, drawn primarily from the book’s first chapter, which uses visual storytelling to explore how Afro-Colombian communities on Colombia’s Pacific coast experience and resist environmental violence. Each chapter of the book begins with a full-page illustration, created in collaboration with a Colombian artist who is now co-authoring a Spanish graphic novel with Huezo.

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and community narratives, Huezo argued that environmental justice begins not by addressing harm, but understanding the worldviews of those most affected.
 
Aerial fumigation and its consequences

Huezo’s research focuses on the impacts of a U.S.-backed strategy known as aerial eradication: the spraying of glyphosate, a chemical linked to cancer and biodiversity loss, over rural Colombia to destroy coca crops. “Aerial eradication… has been a U.S. ‘war-on-drugs’ strategy in Latin America since the marijuana boom of the 1970s,” he explained. “Colombia is the only country where [this type of spraying] has been conducted recently.”
 
Glyphosate, the key ingredients in the weed killer Roundup, has been widely condemned for its toxic effects on ecosystems and human health. However, “there’s a set of things that are happening outside of the physical body,” Huezo emphasized, referring to how people became spiritually unwell in the aftermath of fumigation. 

Conducted in phases in the region over decades, the spraying campaign peaked in 2015 and was briefly suspended before resuming from 2020 to 2022. Huezo’s fieldwork in southwestern Colombia coincided with this period, allowing him to document firsthand how indiscriminate the spraying could be. 

“The spray can drift off the wind, in effect, [reaching far more land] than was initially targeted.” Farmers often had no warning or say about the spraying. “Having your food crop sprayed without your permission under the premise that you were harvesting coca leaves” became a tragic reality for many.
 
Huezo also detailed the lasting trauma among farmers whose land was sprayed unjustly. In a return visit years later, the same farmers described how cartels moved in, bought land from the poorest and began cultivating coca. Locals, under threat of violence, remained silent.

“They look for the weakest, least wise person in the community,” one said. “They offer them money to rent the land, and then start taking our land.”

Alexander Huezo (UCI). (Photo: UC Irvine)

Erasure and exposure
 
Huezo criticized the cartographic practices that accompany glyphosate spraying. Drug policy maps highlight zones of production while omitting human presence. “One of the first things that you’ll notice is that the map doesn’t show people,” he said. “That practice of ‘invisibilization’ is something that I’ve been able to document.”
 
Maps that highlight drug production while omitting human life create a dangerous political fiction — one that justifies military intervention while denying community presence and history. “The war on drugs,” argued the social scientist, “is carried out… in a way that’s explained in hindsight” through narratives that erase both people and place.
 
Huezo also traced the historical and geographic movement of coca cultivation. U.S.-backed eradication efforts in Bolivia and Peru displaced coca into southern and then southwestern Colombia, he explained.

This shift pushed coca production into regions that are not only physically remote but culturally distinct. “Most of the folks in the highlands are mestizo… whereas [the Pacific coast] is mostly Afro-descendant and Indigenous.” These communities have long legacies of resistance to slavery and state violence. 
 
The Colombian and U.S. governments frame drug cultivation as the root cause of violence and poverty, but Huezo urged the audience to look deeper. “We know that’s not true… there’s decades of conflict that have been happening… the real problem is the [political] structures. It’s not the drug,” he said.
 
Visions from above, visions from below
 
Huezo’s book title, “Visions of Global Environmental Justice,” has a layered meaning. “Visions in this case can be understood as … competing visions between communities and states,” he said. On one hand, there are the technical “visions” of surveillance, eradication and mapping imposed by governments. On the other, there are “visions” as understood by Afro-Colombian communities: experiences conveyed through dreams, myths and ancestral knowledge.
 
Huezo recounted how his interest in these “visions” began during his M.A. research in Cali, where he investigated a rise in supernatural stories among displaced communities. These stories often featured spirits, tricksters and ghostly figures, whom he deliberately referred to as ‘visions’ rather than myths or legends.

“The term ‘visions’ removes the stigma,” he said, noting that words like “myths” often suggest disbelief. “You’re receiving a message from the spiritual world through your dreams,” one community member told him.
 
As Huezo’s research progressed, he noticed something striking: in areas where aerial fumigation, ecological destruction and cartel violence intensified, stories of visions disappeared. “You don’t hear about them anymore,” he observed, prompting a central question of his book: What does the appearance of coca have to do with the disappearance of the supernatural?
 
The UCI scholar explained that visions serve as more than folklore — they are tools of cultural memory and community regulation. “Visions literally create a narrative framework for the book,” he said.

“They allow me an avenue to talk about the biopolitics and the necropolitics of the war on drugs [that is, the contamination of the land and the killing of residents], and it also allows the space to address the global and more-than-human dimensions of environmental racism and justice.”

Whose vision matters?
 
In closing, Huezo asked the audience to reconsider what counts as legitimate environmental knowledge. The way in which the state understands the environment does not align with the way the community understands it, he explained, arguing for researchers and governments to understand the ways in which local communities interpret what is  happening to them. 
 
The researcher delivered a call to action for scholars and policymakers. “What are the visions that we are seeing? Who is being seen, and who isn't?” he asked. The answer, suggested the scholar, will determine the future of environmental justice not only in Colombia, but across the globe.

Published: Thursday, May 29, 2025