By Diana Ojeda

The last decade in Colombia has been marked by a massive counter-agrarian reform, forcibly displacing 4 million people from an estimated 5.3 million hectares of land. The land grab stands in close relation to paramilitarism, illegal crop production and high-end corruption. While war-related dynamics of dispossession are widely recognized as causes of land grabbing, the logics of exclusion and expropriation behind “greener” projects (agro-fuel production and ecotourism) are obscured under discourses of conservation, climate change mitigation and sustainable development. The case of ecotourism development in Tayrona National Park, on the northern coast of Colombia, epitomizes the greening of the global land grab. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with community members who live and work at the park, I examine the case within the shifting resource politics in the area. Following the criminalization, exclusion and forced eviction of community members, I trace the problematic couplings of conservation, tourism and land grabbing. Ecotourism serves as a powerful mechanism of accumulation by dispossession that evidences not just the workings of global capital, but also the green pretexts that produce class-, race- and gender-marked subjects as expropriable, disposable beings.