Unpacking the Technopolitics of Privatization in Colombia: The Agrarian Bank and the Transformation of Citizen-State Relations, 1930-2010

julián gómez-delgado, the new school for social research

Together with national attempts elsewhere, the Colombian State created multiple state-owned enterprises in the early and mid-twentieth century that mediated the experience of citizenship. Like no other, the Caja de Crédito Agrario or Agrarian Bank (1933-1999) nurtured a distinctive socio-technical experience connecting citizens to the state through a vast range of artifacts, technological devices, and infrastructures—like local branches and credit cards. This presentation draws on oral history interviews and archival research that I have conducted to explore the changing technopolitics of statecraft in Colombia by charting the role of iconic public institutions as they transformed from state-owned entities in the 1930s–40s through their incremental privatization starting in the 1970s. The presentation will focus on the Agrarian Bank or “Caja,” a company that “reached even where the Catholic priest did not,” as one ex-worker told me. I will provide insights into the material and immaterial promises, the acts of formal and informal sabotage, and the expressions of nostalgia from multiple actors –including public sector workers to politicians, social movement members, and subaltern users – who reacted, adapted, and contested the incremental dismantling of this infrastructure and who resignified the process of ruination that resulted from it. In this presentation, I will explore competing views of what constitutes "the public" and how privatization was a contested and partial process, which contrasts with narratives that present it as a sudden or abrupt change. Moreover, I wish to show how the interactions between citizens and public infrastructures led to the uneven construction of citizenship, involving contradictions and fractures along class and racial divisions. This presentation examines public banking to understand how infrastructures are created and dismantled and how citizen-state relations change in the context of neoliberal transformation. As such, this project contributes to the conference's interest in exploring patterns of inclusion/exclusion.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 49. Comparative and Historical State Formation