Defending Aquifers and Mountains: Popular Consultations and the Vertical Production of Space in Colombia

This article examines how the popular consultations held in Piedras (2013) and Cajamarca (2017) (central Colombia) against the Colosa gold mining project–a foreign extractive initiative – served as sites for the production of vertical territory. I argue that territorial defenders did not use these legal mechanisms to protect a predetermined space, but to actively produce it. To capture this dynamic, I introduce the concept of the vertical continuum: the understanding, developed through political struggle, that territory cannot be divided into surface, subsurface and aerial domains governed by distinct legal authorities. This challenged the Colombian state’s exclusive control over the subsoil and asserted that ordinary citizens should have a say in what happens across all layers of the territory they inhabit and defend. The article shows how defenders’ vertical conceptualization of regional space, organized around the mountain and the aquifer as its most visible materializations, acquired legal and political force through the consultation results, which reconfigured municipal authority and enabled the sustained halting of the Colosa project. The article also advances a reconceptualization of popular consultations as legal-political technologies with a spatializing force, placing them in dialogue with literatures on social movements, the production of space, and the vertical turn. Together, these arguments show how movements for territorial and water defense become key actors in producing the vertical and volumetric worlds they seek to defend.