Imperial dis/continuum: spaces of death, terror surplus, and Black geopolitics of peace in Colombia

The assassination of Haitian President Jovenal Moïse on July 7, 2021, revealed an intricate international enterprise, with the participation of mercenaries from at least four countries. The Colombian nationals under investigation for supposedly participating in the sinister operation were former members of the national army who fought the U.S.-backed war on drugs, and at least one of them was previously a member of a special unit investigated for crimes against humanity. How may we draw connections between the enduring violability of bodies in Colombia's long war and imperial violence elsewhere? Although this article is focused on Colombia, by placing the magnicide in relation to everyday racialized practices of security in the region, the article underscores and goes beyond activists’ outcries that not only are cops, soldiers, militias, and self-deputized individuals “just” violence workers whose practices render the territorial and legal borders of policing as fictions, but also their increasing confluence reveals a much broader imperial strategy of outsourcing and democratizing violence to uphold global and domestic statecraft. It is argued that domestic Pax Colombiana meets Pax Americana in the ever-expanding foundational violence that increasingly drags bodies (youth killed in the U.S.-sponsored war on drugs, displacements by the Colombian armed conflict, or nameless victims of Colombian-exported mercenaries around the world) into the global plantation's spaces of death. How do Black activists envision peace midts an imperial continuum of violence?