(Infra)Structural violence. State and Water Supply in the Port City of Buenaventura, Colombia.

This paper examines the interweaving and overlapping of the phenomena of violence and water infrastructures in the port city of Buenaventura, in southwestern Colombia. This city is marked by high rates of violence, poverty and inequality. Further, the infrastructure systems for the allocation of public goods such as water and electricity are highly precarious. By addressing the ways in which the state deprives larger parts of the population from water as a public good, this paper argues that the Colombian state inflicts ‘infrastructural violence’ on the marginalized population of Buenaventura. At the same time, it analyzes the ways in which everyday crime threatens and alters the improvised material practices deployed by the population to store water. Furthermore, this thesis scrutinizes the mechanisms used by social movements and ‘ordinary people’ to cope with ‘infrastructural violence’. Based on extensive fieldwork material gathered between 2018 and 2020, this research contributes research on infrastructure, urban poverty, and violence.

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