The Earth Shattered: Critical Analysis of the Constitutional Narrative on Development, Territory, and Prior Consultation

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to synthesize a critical examination of the relationship between the legal discourse of the development model, national policies on foreign direct investment, and the mining governance, with the demands of Colombian ethnic communities. Therefore, we will mention the Latin American literature that has boosted a critical approach to the development model promoted by the global North’s states and the multilateral agencies they precede. Subsequently, we will make a brief historical account of the correspondence between foreign mining extraction and the Western legal framework that we have inherited and embraced, which is established as the antecedent and background of a legal context that reflects the ineffectiveness of prior consultation to achieve an authentic intercultural dialogue. In this regard, we will demonstrate that the Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence around this mechanism has defended an official truth regime following the metaphor of economic development success and, thereby, has ignored the situated and peripheral knowledge-power of the indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant communities in Colombia. This practice has meant the absence of a profound reflection on the critical legal interculturality (or interlegality).