Colombian utopia and anti-utopia: Remembering and reconsidering the FARC's Zona de Despeje, 1998–2002

Utopian futurism is not often discussed as a motivating factor behind social science research, and in this article Colombian linguist Felix Manuel Burgos and US anthropologist Les W. Field take up that motivation in re-assessing one period in the history of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Founded in 1964 and impelled by events that exploded in 1948, FARC's history offers a window into a movement marked by a deeply dystopian trauma at its very start. In this article, with their utopian imaginations to one side, Burgos and Field dialogically consider the period of the Zona de Despeje (the demilitarized zone FARC dominated from 1998 to 2002), animated by the memory narratives of Félix Manuel Burgos who lived in that zone as a primary school-teacher during those years. Through their dialogue, they consider the idea of “anti-utopia” as potentially descriptive of the ZDD, specifically, as well as the FARC's overall historical character.