View the platform: https://despojo-uraba.forensic-architecture.org/

Forensic Architecture and the Truth Commission analysed the mechanisms of land dispossession in Nueva Colonia, in the region of Urabá Antioqueño, that have led to the dispossession of campesinos, and the transfer of their land to companies for commercial monocrop banana cultivation.

The region, on Colombia’s northwestern Caribbean coast, is the heartland of the country’s banana industry. Urabá is known for extreme political violence, which has gripped the region since the 1980s. Massacres and paramilitary groups have driven away thousands, who left behind their homes and agricultural land.

The project shows how dispossession occurred in the shadow of armed repression, massacres, and terror spread by private paramilitary forces, serving local and international banana producers under the protection of the Colombian military. It exposes how these producers benefited from the dispossession of campesinos.