9

Prognosis past: the temporal

politics of disaster in Colombia
Austin Zeiderman London School of Economics and Political Science

In this paper, I explore a prognostic modality of environmental politics I call risk in retrospect. I do so by
examining conflicts that are not just over the ability of state science to know and govern the future, but
also its failure to have been able to do so in the past. I begin by discussing the 2009 earthquake that hit
the Italian city of L’Aquila and then turn to a similar case in Colombia, both of which reflect the
constitutive relationship between political authority and foresight. I then trace the strong historical
precedent for this type of political situation in Colombia by discussing a key cultural referent – Gabriel
Garcı́a Márquez’s 1981 book, Chronicle of a death foretold – as well as the convergence of two
catastrophic events during one week in November 1985 that were both seen, in their aftermath, as
‘tragedies foretold’. I conclude by considering what it would mean for prognosis to become the terrain
on which citizens engage in political relationships with the state.

This paper about Colombia begins in Italy, for Italy is home to a recent example of
the prognostic modality of environmental politics. The situation I refer to is the 2009
earthquake that hit the Italian city of L’Aquila and the judicial decision handed down
in 2012 to convict six scientists and one government official of manslaughter. They were
guilty, the court ruled, of failing to give adequate warning to residents about the risk
of an impending disaster – or, to paraphrase some of the more sensationalist media
headlines, of not being able to predict the future. This case is significant not only because
it may have far-reaching consequences for the politics of disaster risk management or
because it raises so many questions about the relationship between technical expertise,
political authority, and legal accountability. It is also worth mentioning here for its
ability to highlight the peculiar temporality of conflicts over the state’s responsibility
to know and govern the future, and its failure to have been able to do so in the past. In
other words, it reflects a prognostic modality of environmental politics we might call
risk in retrospect.
In early 2009, a series of small tremors was felt across the Abruzzo region east of
Rome. The public’s unease was heightened when a retired local laboratory technician
began issuing unofficial predictions, based on homemade monitoring devices, that a
major earthquake was imminent. The national risk commission then met in the city

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
164 Austin Zeiderman

of L’Aquila on 31 March to evaluate the situation, concluding that the recent swarm
of seismic activity only slightly increased the probability of a major event. In a press
conference, a government spokesman communicated that there was no danger and
that it was unnecessary to issue safety warnings or order evacuations. A week later,
a 6.3 magnitude quake devastated the city, killing 309 people. Seven members of the
risk commission were eventually taken to court by lawyers representing the victims’
families. In support of the seismologists and geologists standing trial, an international
coalition of more than 5,000 scientists issued an open letter to President Giorgio
Napolitano. Their letter highlighted the scientific consensus that seismologists cannot
predict when and where an earthquake will occur, and argued that the defendants
were being prosecuted for failing to do the impossible. This was the primary argument
put forth by the defence. But on 22 October 2012, the prosecution prevailed. Judge
Marco Billi ruled that the defendants had communicated ‘inexact, incomplete, and
contradictory’ information about the risk of a major earthquake; that they had lulled
the public into a false sense of security with a deceptively reassuring statement; and that
they had failed to give clear preparedness advice. The verdict: all seven were sentenced
to six years in prison and ordered to pay over $10 million for court costs and damages.
Around the time of this ruling, Colombia was suffering from one of the worst rainy
seasons on record. Amidst the deluge, President Juan Manuel Santos presided over the
twenty-fifth anniversary of another catastrophic event: a volcanic eruption in 1985 that
set off massive mudslides and buried the town of Armero, killing nearly 30,000 people.
In his commemorative address, he urged Colombians to apply lessons learned from
the earlier disaster to the current one in order to avoid falling into ‘victim syndrome’
(sı́ndrome del damnificado).1 Santos encouraged those affected by the recent storms to
adopt ‘an attitude of mutual collaboration and solidarity’ and to emulate the patience
and perseverance of the 13-year-old girl, Omayra Sánchez, whose tragic death had come
to symbolize the calamity. Moreover, he signalled that ‘among the lessons this great
tragedy left behind is the importance of foresight and doing everything possible to
prevent tragedies’. In the case of Armero, he recalled, ‘it may have been possible to
avoid many of the deaths . . . this is an important lesson . . . if only the warnings
had been heard’. Santos reminded his audience that the 1985 event had given birth to
Colombia’s national system of disaster prevention, which had since saved thousands of
lives. His comments demonstrated the degree to which the Armero tragedy continues to
underpin the state’s political, legal, and ethical responsibility to anticipate and prevent
potentially catastrophic events.
The Italian and Colombian cases both sit within the domain of prognostic politics, the
topic of this special issue, which draws our attention to the calculative techniques used
to predict environmental futures, and to the political significance of such predictions.
However, this paper focuses on natural disasters rather than natural resources – social
bads rather than social goods. Yet the temporal dynamic it highlights might be as
common to debates over declining water supplies as to those regarding rising sea
levels. For attempts to grasp both resource availability and environmental risk rely on
techniques for calculating the likelihood of different futures, and then bringing them
into the realm of individual or collective decision-making. Despite a wide range of
techniques of prediction and degrees of predictability, both resources and disasters
are situated in a common technocratic domain, within which political authority is
linked to the state’s responsibility to generate knowledge about the future and to govern
accordingly.2 As Reinhart Koselleck (2004) has argued, (rational) prognosis displaced

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Prognosis past 165

(religious) prophecy as the paradigmatic conception of futurity in the modern period

along with the secularization of political authority. That said, the L’Aquila disaster
in Italy and the Armero tragedy in Colombia suggest that prognostic politics is not
solely about the future, but often also about the past. Both cases illustrate a peculiar
temporality – at once prospective and retrospective – that often characterizes public
controversies in the aftermath of catastrophe.
The following analysis builds on long-term fieldwork in Colombia to illuminate a
prognostic modality of environmental politics: risk in retrospect. Over a twenty-month
period from August 2008 to April 2010, I conducted both ethnographic and archival
research in Bogotá on the emergence of disaster risk management as a technique
of urban planning and government (Zeiderman 2012; 2013). My specific focus was a
municipal housing programme actively relocating people from what in the early 2000s
had been designated zonas de alto riesgo, or ‘zones of high risk’. These were areas on the
periphery of the city deemed vulnerable to landslides and, in some cases, also to floods.
I returned for a one-month follow-up visit in January 2012, towards the end of what
would eventually amount to over a year of inordinately heavy rainfall, to find areas near
my fieldsites recovering from extensive inundation. I was interested in the government’s
response to the flooding as well as that of the people whose homes had been damaged by
it, and made a series of visits to the affected areas. These neighbourhoods were outside
my initial study area, so I had to rely on chance encounters with local residents who
responded to my inquiries, invited me into their homes, and agreed to be interviewed.
In order to reconstruct the events leading up to the floods, I supplemented interview
data by consulting media coverage from December 2010 to February 2012.3
In what follows, I draw on this material to examine conflicts over the ability of state
science to know and govern environmental futures and the failure to have done so in the
past. I begin by considering differing approaches to the politics of temporality, especially
in relation to a paradigmatic spatial configuration – the city – in which prognosis has
become a key idiom of political authority and responsibility. Having introduced the
problematic of risk in retrospect by way of the 2009 earthquake that hit the Italian city
of L’Aquila, I then turn to a more fine-grained analysis of a similar case in Colombia
that transpired during and after the worst rainy season in recorded history. I trace the
historical precedent for this type of situation in Colombia by discussing a key cultural
referent – Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez’s 1981 book, Chronicle of a death foretold – as well as
the convergence of two catastrophic events during one week in November 1985 that were
both seen, in their aftermath, as ‘tragedies foretold’. I conclude by considering what
it would mean for prognosis to become the terrain on which citizens, especially the
poor, engage in political relationships with the state. Ultimately, I argue that if political
authority is increasingly tied to the ability to generate knowledge about the future –
of resources, of disasters, and of many other social and environmental goods and bads
– our capacity to understand the strategic potential of prognosis is of pre-eminent
importance.

The politics of temporality in the city

The L’Aquila disaster in Italy and the Armero tragedy in Colombia both point to a
peculiar yet widespread modality of environmental politics that is at once prospective
and retrospective. This observation is inspired by historian of science and technology
Paul Edwards (2012), who has argued that the extent of two recent disasters – the
Fukushima nuclear fallout and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill – could not be known

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
166 Austin Zeiderman

except through already-existing computer simulations that could generate predictions

of what was likely to happen in these sorts of events. That is, since tracking the real-
time spread of the actual disasters was impossible, models designed previously to
simulate the potential release of toxic substances (radiation and oil) into the surrounding
environment became the authoritative record of what was happening (cf. Edwards 2012).
In other work, Edwards (2010) has shown how the science of global warming also relies
on computer models and simulations, and that without them there are no data with
which to predict how the world’s climate is likely to change. In the case of the two
recent disasters, however, he complicates the temporality of models and simulations by
showing how they enable scientists not only to foresee what will happen, but also to
assess what has already happened. This temporal reversal – seeing prediction as about
both the future and the past – is crucial to what I am emphasizing here.4
That disasters are often understood through non-linear temporalities should come
as no surprise to anthropologists, given the discipline’s long-standing interest in time
(Bear 2014; Geertz 1973; Gell 1996; Greenhouse 1996; Munn 1992; Rabinow 2008). What
may be more novel is the observation that temporality is explicitly political, such that
the state’s authority is often predicated on specific arrangements of time. Referring
to the ‘politics of temporality’ in the contemporary United States, Vincanne Adams,
Michelle Murphy, and Adele Clarke argue that future-orientated regimes of anticipation
increasingly define how ‘we think about, feel and address our contemporary problems’
(2009: 248). In their view, ‘anticipation is intensifying into a hegemonic formation’
that is motivating speculative logics of capital accumulation, spreading through our
institutions of government, and becoming an affective state that orientates individual
and collective behaviour. The sweeping phenomenon these scholars describe resonates
throughout other works of social theory, which highlight the political implications
of heightened anxiety about futurity and the subsequent proliferation of pre-emptive
actions (Cooper 2006; 2010; Martin 2007; Massumi 2009; 2010).
While much can be gained by theorizing temporal transformations on a grand scale,
or what Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding refer to as the ‘big stories of the future’
(2005: 14), they often lead to reductive denunciations of temporality as a domain of
hegemony and domination.5 Once we acknowledge Koselleck’s irrefutable point that
historical time ‘is bound up with social and political actions, with concretely acting
and suffering human beings and their institutions and organizations’ (2004: 2; cf.
2002), then it logically follows that all forms of temporality are suffused with and
constitutive of power (Greenhouse 1996). Yet while this ought to lead us to analyse
futurity and its uneven effects on certain bodies, spaces, and populations, it would be
a mistake to resort to automatic denunciations. For doing so would risk ascribing an
almost totalizing quality to the politics of time, and leave us devoid of resources for
thinking about the heterodox temporalities existing alongside and within dominant or
hegemonic formations.6 We need tools for analysing futurity as constitutive of both
political authority and political possibility.7
AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2010) understanding of ‘anticipatory urban politics’ is helpful
in this regard.8 Among the urban poor in Northern Jakarta, Simone finds people ‘reading
the anticipated manoeuvres of stronger actors and forces and assessing where there
might be a useful opportunity to become an obstacle or facilitator for the aspirations
of others’ (2010: 96).9 But the politics of anticipation is ‘not just a form of resistance
or simply a politics from below’.10 Anticipatory politics constitutes a future-orientated
‘game of transactions’ that brings differently positioned urban actors into contact with

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Prognosis past 167

each other, resulting in benefits and constraints for all (2010: 101). The future is neither
the exclusive domain of state planners and economic elites nor that of popular political
mobilizations – it is a horizon of strategic politics for diverse attempts to make and
remake the city in the present. Since the city is ‘not hinged, not anchored’ to any single
trajectory, Simone urges us to remember that ‘by definition [it] goes toward many
different futures at once’ (2010: 115).
Simone’s reflections suggest that temporality is mapped on to certain spatial
configurations, such that the city, we might say, is a key ‘chronotope of modern time’
(Bakhtin 1981; Bear 2014). In cities, the future is alongside us, upon us, all around us. The
past, of course, is present, too.11 But it is tempting to assume that (in some fundamental
way) the city is orientated temporally towards horizons of possibility, expectations of
change, and the anticipation of things to come. There is something misleading about
this assumption, however, since it is rather peculiar to cities belonging to the category
of the ‘modern’. One of the defining characteristics of modernity was a belief in the
progression of time towards a more efficient, more prosperous, and all-around better
future; in turn, this promise hinged on the growth and development of cities and the
domination of nature.12 The ‘modern city’ was considered the most advanced stage of
social evolution, historical progress, and cultural development against which all other
spatial forms were judged. And the destiny of places outside of Europe and North
America was presumed to be a perpetual game of catch-up with Paris, London, and
New York (Robinson 2004; Roy 2008).
These imagined futures came into question in the late twentieth century as
teleological, evolutionist, and developmental narratives of all kinds began to lose
credibility (Ferguson 2006: 176-93). Today, it is more common to foresee futures of crisis,
chaos, and catastrophe than to envision the emergence of ideal spaces and societies –
conceptual resources for imagining alternative possibilities appear to be in short supply.
Susan Buck-Morss (2000) famously attributed the ‘passing of mass utopia’, as she called
it, to the exhaustion of the collective dreams of historical progress previously shared by
East and West during the Cold War. With phrases like the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama
1992), the ‘death of progress’ (Levitas 1982), the ‘post-development era’ (Escobar 1992),
and ‘living in the end times’ (Žižek 2010), others have made similarly epochal claims
about the demise of the utopian imagination or of progressive thinking more broadly.
These proclamations no doubt over-reach, and yet the weakening of grand narratives
like ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ has made way for a radically different future –
one neither certain nor desirable, but rather filled with uncertainty and marked by a
rather grim sense of how history will unfold. Disaster, even apocalypse, looms large on
the horizon.13
The notion that we are now living ‘in the wake of utopia’, geographer David
Pinder (2005: 12) points out, has greatly influenced dominant thinking about urban
environments. In this context, inherited frameworks for urban planning and governance
have been undergoing significant transformations as concepts like ‘preparedness’,
‘resilience’, and ‘future-proofing’ have taken centre stage. Contemporary visions of
urban environmental futurity share the sense that the city is a space of menacing
uncertainty, imminent threat, and potential collapse. The logical response is the
rationality of security underpinned by techniques for managing risks – of natural
disaster and resource scarcity, but also of financial crisis, political violence, and disease
outbreak. These techniques are multiple, as they have been assembled in order to
govern different forms and degrees of uncertainty attached to diverse objects and

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
168 Austin Zeiderman

events – predicting the likelihood of an earthquake can be altogether different from

calculating the probability of a terrorist attack. Even when dealing with the same type
of object or event, different actors (e.g. fluvial geomorphologists, people living in a
floodplain, insurance companies) employ different forms of prediction that enable
different sorts of claims and sets of responsibilities.
As conventional assumptions about futurity are being thrown into doubt, we see
something akin to what Rosenberg and Harding call the ‘crisis of modern futurity’
(2005a: 4), here in a specifically urban environmental form. Novel regimes of futurity
are emerging in cities throughout the Global North and South, which generate new
forms of political, legal, and ethical responsibility tied to the imperative to predict and
mitigate future catastrophes (cf. Laidlaw 2013).14 Prognosis then becomes a terrain on
which citizens engage in political relationships with the state. This was true of the 2010-
11 flooding emergencies in Colombia, as well as of the 2009 earthquake in Italy. But
while both events involved the state’s failure to foresee environmental futures, there is a
difference between looking forward to potential disasters looming on the horizon and
looking backward to ones that have already occurred. As we will see, risk in retrospect is
a prognostic modality of environmental politics that sustains both political authority
and critique.

After the flood

From late 2010 to early 2012, Colombia was besieged by the worst rains on record.
Unusually high levels of precipitation were attributed both to La Niña, or the cyclical
cooling of the eastern Pacific Ocean that disrupts typical weather patterns, and to
the increased severity of meteorological events associated with climate change. The
resulting floods and landslides displaced hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed
homes throughout the country, severely impacted the economy, and took the lives of
several hundred citizens. Although rural areas in the north of the country and along the
Caribbean coast were hardest hit, urban areas, such as a suburb of Colombia’s second
largest city, Medellı́n, also witnessed grave tragedies. We could approach this situation
by examining the models used to generate rainfall predictions and flood risk maps
and their role in shaping the distribution of destruction and displacement. In temporal
terms, our analytical position would then be both retrospective and prospective: looking
back to the past to reveal the state’s failure to prevent future disasters. Instead, I would
like to draw attention to some of the conflicts that emerged during and after this period
of flooding, which themselves revolved around both hindsight and foresight. Focusing
on a specific flood event in the capital city, I will show how this temporal orientation
was the ground for both political authority and critique.
On Monday, 5 December 2011, Bogotá’s largest daily newspaper, El Tiempo, reported
that, following a forty-eight-hour deluge, the Bogotá River was nearly overflowing its
banks. Andrés González, the governor of Cundinamarca, the department that surrounds
Bogotá, cautioned that water levels had risen sharply and could soon cause flooding
downstream in the capital. These predictions came true the following afternoon.
Another rainstorm developed, and the canals draining aguas negras (wastewater) from
the city were blocked from conveying effluent to the Bogotá River, as they do under
normal circumstances, owing to the river’s abnormally high level. Instead of discharging
storm water and sewage, one of the drainage canals began to function as a reservoir,
collecting wastewater and distributing it laterally across residential neighbourhoods
in the peripheral locality of Bosa on Bogotá’s southwestern edge. Wastewater not only

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Prognosis past 169

rushed through the streets, but also percolated up through sewers and drains, and within
hours had risen to nearly a metre in height. Residents retreated to the second floor of
their homes until rescue workers arrived with inflatable boats to transport them to dry
land. Interim Mayor Clara López then declared an emergency and called on her staff to
identify where to discharge the Bogotá River’s excess flow while pleading with bogotanos
to limit water use immediately.15 These responses were effective though insufficient,
and the municipal water utility appealed to neighbouring countries to lend Bogotá a
high-capacity pump used normally for petroleum extraction.16 Aided by a respite of
dry, sunny weather, these measures eventually succeeded in reducing the river’s force
and draining the inundated neighbourhoods.
Mayor López then accompanied President Santos to El Recreo, one of the most
heavily affected areas, to begin the provision of humanitarian aid. López had already
agreed to provide tax relief as well as a rental subsidy of 550,000 pesos (US$300) to
those forced by the flooding to evacuate their homes.17 In addition, the municipal
water utility had guaranteed fifteen days of free delivery.18 Donning a red ‘Colombia
Humanitaria’ windbreaker, Santos announced that the national government would
provide an additional 1.5 million pesos (US$775) to each family adversely affected by the
flooding.19 The President estimated that more than 10,000 families would be eligible for
aid, but said this was contingent upon an official census of the victims.20 The Secretary
of Social Integration began compiling a registry by consulting the administrator of
each residential housing complex and other community leaders. Bogotá’s disaster-risk-
management agency (FOPAE) followed with house-by-house inspections to determine
the extent of property damage and the number of people affected. Although preliminary
estimates were as low as 5,000 victims, FOPAE soon announced that the flooding had
impacted over 45,000 people in total.21 Once the official census was complete, the
government issued a certificate of damages to each household, and the relief promised
by López and Santos could be disbursed.22
Long lines formed wherever aid was being handed out, and residents declared that
there was not enough for the number of families in need. Reports came back that
there was no systematic process for allocating assistance; that food rations were being
proportioned in an ad hoc manner.23 Meanwhile, rumours circulated of people with
false certificates arriving from elsewhere to steal from those in need. Others complained
of flaws in the census, claiming they had been wrongfully excluded. For several hours,
protesters blocked the Avenida Ciudad de Cali, a main thoroughfare in southwestern
Bogotá, citing unreasonable delays in the distribution of aid.24 Reporters from the news
magazine Semana visited the flood zone in January and found the neighbourhood rife
with accusations that the government had not made good on its promise to disburse
subsidies by Christmas.25 In response to the pressure, the Secretary of Government
ordered a review of the census, and FOPAE returned to verify their count. With media
reports and popular protests denouncing the government’s response as disorganized
and exclusionary, draining the city of flooding turned out to be less of a challenge than
providing aid to the victims.
The focus of public discontent soon shifted, however, as residents from the flooded
neighbourhoods began blaming the authorities for having ignored the fact that the
Bogotá River had overflowed its banks three times in recent years. They criticized the
state for permitting development in high-risk zones and demanded accountability from
the construction company that had knowingly built housing complexes in flood-prone
areas.26 A group of 150 protesters blocked a local transportation hub, Portal de las

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
170 Austin Zeiderman

Américas, drawing attention to the fact that the flooding had predominantly inundated
public housing. A resident framed the issue as follows: ‘These houses turned out to be a
scam (el paquete chileno): [the state] promised us development (valorización y vı́as) and
we ended up living in a gutter’.27 Shared among these critiques was the sense that the
state had failed to take the precautions necessary to protect people from a known threat.
That is, the government should have foreseen the disaster and, if unable to prevent it,
at least done more to mitigate its adverse effects.
As those affected by the flooding were making their voices heard, similar perspectives
circulated in the media. In the editorial page of El Tiempo, author and columnist Yolanda
Reyes cited a history of irresponsible housing policy:

I remember when Mayor Peñalosa invited ‘opinion leaders’ on a helicopter tour of the urban
developments of Metrovivienda [social housing] in Bosa. Journalists admired the bicycle routes,
the avenues, and the public spaces on the edge of what is now a sewer of aguas negras . . . Against
logic, [Metrovivienda] developed these urbanizations with the promise that risk mitigation would
happen later.28

Reyes also refuted President Santos’s constant references to La Niña by blaming the
government for not having taken preventive measures and for ignoring past flooding
experiences:

[T]hey know that what happened in Bogotá is not new, that it is not simply the consequence of
global climate change or the fault of ‘la maldita niña’, but rather of maldita improvisación [damned
improvisation]. If they consulted historical documents they would see that from Mosquera to San
Victorino [a large area of western Bogotá], there have been times when those who were sold on the
model homes in Bosa had to rely on the very same inflatable boats that are carrying them away today.

Emphasizing the error of uncontrolled growth of the urban periphery, Reyes asked:
‘Which public agencies approved those licences and allowed these developers to profit?
Was there any fine print that warned about the probability of flooding?’ She concluded
that protecting the urban poor from potential disasters is a central responsibility of the
state.
As Reyes’s op-ed makes clear, flooding in Bogotá was discussed publicly as more than
just a problem of housing policy and land-use planning; issues of prognosis were front
and centre. In an interview with Mayor López, El Tiempo asked explicitly whether the
emergency in Bosa could have been prevented. ‘It was foreseen’, she admitted, ‘and this
is why we built flood control channels, maintained the drainage systems, and dredged
the Bogotá River’.29 Looking ahead to the future, the media also initiated discussions
about how to ensure the same situation would not repeat itself during the next rainy
season. In another op-ed, the chief editor of El Tiempo, Ernesto Cortés Fierro, argued
that more anticipatory governance of ‘zones of high risk’ would be necessary: ‘[T]here
are a million and a half souls sitting on the bank of the river in permanent danger, and
rather than just asking ourselves what they are doing there, we have to respond to the
question, what are we going to do about it?’30 A range of infrastructural solutions were
considered, such as removing the sediment and debris that impeded drainage through
the system and widening the river to increase its conveyance capacity.31 When asked
whether Bogotá was prepared for more rain, Secretary of Government Antonio Navarro
Wolff assured the public that the administration would prioritize additional preventive
measures so the same problems would not return in the future.32

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Prognosis past 171

Hindsight and foresight

In January 2012, I visited the neighbourhoods that had been inundated by storm water
and sewage one month before. I rode the TransMilenio mass transit system from central
Bogotá to its southwestern terminus, the Portal de las Américas, which protesters had
brought to a standstill in the days after the flooding. As I transferred to a bus that ran
alongside one of the canals conveying wastewater to the outskirts of the city, I detected
the stench of raw sewage still floating in the air. Debris lay stranded along its edges and
hung from the bottom branches of squat trees lining its banks. I got off at a bakery and
spoke to a waitress who confirmed that I was getting close to the site of the floods. The
water level had risen a couple of feet in this part of the neighbourhood, she said, and the
bakery had been forced to close for days. She then indicated how to get to the area that
had been badly affected. ‘It’s pretty much all cleaned up by now’, she said, ‘but you’ll
find people who are still angry. They knew something like this was going to happen,
but nobody would listen’.
Following her advice, I continued in the direction of the Bogotá River and
found a number of residents willing to recount the story of the flooding. They
told me about the panic they felt as the waters rose all around them, the hardship
of cleaning up and drying out, and the government’s dysfunctional response. But
running through many of my conversations was also the sense that this was
an event that could have been predicted, and therefore prevented. Mobilizing
different forms of evidence – personal experience with past flooding events, periodic
monitoring of water levels in the Bogotá River and the condition of adjacent drainage
canals, the government’s own risk assessments and mitigation efforts – residents
claimed that the flooding was the result of prognostic failure on the part of the
state.
The majority of the buildings I passed on my visit were vivienda de interés social
(or social interest housing) constructed in the last ten to fifteen years. Although this
was the urban periphery in a geographical sense – I could see where the pavement
ended and the pasture began – it was no squatter settlement that had sprung up in
a flood zone because people had nowhere else to live. These housing complexes had
been officially planned and built with public funds. I stopped in a small convenience
store operating out of the front room of a two-storey townhouse and began chatting
with the woman behind the counter. When I asked about the flooding, she gestured to
the point on her leg up to where the water had risen. ‘You’ve done a good job getting
everything back into shape’, I remarked, noting the absence of visible damage. ‘Yeah,
but it hasn’t been easy. The government promised us three ayudas [disbursals of aid],
but we have only received one’. She then told me that people in the neighbourhood were
planning legal action against the state and the developer. ‘If you want to know more’,
she offered, ‘you should talk to Doña Lucia, the president of the housing complex. She
runs a supermercado on the next block’.
I did as she said, and found Doña Lucia in a shop similar to the one I had just
visited, except that it stocked fresh fruits and vegetables and had a small refrigerator
case for meat and dairy. At first, Doña Lucia seemed hesitant to talk about the flooding:
‘What exactly do you want to know?’ ‘I’m interested in the government’s response to the
emergency’, I answered, ‘and how the people who live here feel about it’. This caught her
attention, and she showed me the spot where President Santos addressed the residents
of the neighbourhood, promising each victim a subsidy of 1.5 million pesos. ‘Ever since
then’, she said shaking her head,

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
172 Austin Zeiderman

there has been major disorganization on the part of the government in fulfilling its promises. Four
days after Santos stood right outside my house, they came to conduct a census. This was necessary
since there were lots of gente deshonesta [dishonest people] trying to pass themselves off as victims.
But the census was completely disorganized. Some people were listed under the wrong identification
number, others were excluded altogether, and this made it difficult for those who needed help to get
it.

El desorden del estado, she called it. ‘The disorder of the state’.
‘Is that what the protests have been about?’, I asked. Doña Lucia responded with an
important clarification:
Well, there were some people who tried to falsify their identity in order to get themselves counted
by the census. They are not from here. But those demonstrating in the Portal de la Américas were
promised subsidies that never arrived. Many of the tomas [protests] have been organized by people
whose houses had flooded.

I then asked whether these demonstrations had made a difference. ‘They came back to
conduct another census’, she noted, ‘so I suppose we forced them to try to get it right.
But there are still many people who deserve assistance and have not gotten any help.
However, the main problem, as I see it, is that none of this should ever have happened
in the first place’.
Surprised by this abrupt change of direction, I asked Doña Lucia what she meant.
She gave me the following explanation:
We all knew this was going to happen. A group of us, maybe forty in total, got together back in
September to call attention to the risk of flooding in the area and to denounce the government for
not doing anything to prevent it. Look it up. It was on 8 September. City TV, Caracol, RCN, all the
networks came to cover the story. We told them they had to clean out all the debris in the canals before
the next heavy rain. Acueducto [the water utility] did a bit of clean-up, but in general the government
just ignored us. And as a result, they were not prepared in December when the weather got really
bad. We knew this was going to happen. They did too, but they didn’t do anything. They just waited,
and then opened the floodgates once it was already too late. They have to be more prepared. The olas
invernales [winter storms] are just going to get stronger and stronger every year. We’re worried! The
river is going to fill up again next time there are heavy rains. We’re always watching the sky.

After our conversation, I did indeed look the story up, as Doña Lucia had instructed
me to do. I started with the archive of El Tiempo, but found nothing indicating that
residents from Bosa had made a denuncia (denunciation) back in September about
the risk of flooding in their neighbourhood. I then looked through past editions of the
other major Bogotá newspaper, El Espectador, and found nothing there either. I checked
a few more media sources, but again came up empty. I was about to give up when I
came across a posting on the RCN Television website from 9 December 2011 with the
heading: ‘Flood in Bosa had been denounced three months ago’.33 Sure enough, what
Doña Lucia had said was true. And since I could find no record of the protest until after
the flooding had already occurred, it seemed that the warning had indeed fallen on deaf
ears.
The posting on the RCN website linked to a video clip that revealed a group of
demonstrators gathered in front of television cameras on the morning of 8 September
in Bosa (Fig. 1). Some were dressed formally in suit and tie while others were bundled
up with scarves and hoods to ward off the cold morning air. Men and women of all
ages faced the cameras with expressions conveying seriousness and conviction. The
newscaster explained that residents were worried that the area’s drainage system was
inadequate to withstand the coming winter rains. Aided by handwritten signs, they

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Prognosis past 173

Figure 1. Disaster warning, September 8, 2011. (Source: Noticias RCN.)

warned of a potential threat that could lead to grave consequences, and asked the
government to take immediate action (Fig. 2).

Exigimos que la Alcaldı́a Distrital solucione el problema del rı́o. ¡Evitemos una gran tragedia! We demand
that City Hall solve the problem of the river. Let’s avoid a huge tragedy!

El Consejo de Kasay de los Venados II presente . . . Ante el inminente riesgo de desbordamiento del rı́o
no queremos un gobierno distrital indiferente. The Administrative Council of Kasay de los Venados II
[housing complex] is present . . . in light of the imminent risk of the river overflowing, we don’t want
an indifferent city government.

The microphone was passed to a middle-aged man, who took on the responsibility of
speaking for the group:

Our worry is that we are staring in the face of an imminent flood (ante una inminente inundación)
throughout the neighbourhood of El Recreo, and therefore we are making an urgent call to the
Empresa Acueducto [water utility] to please dredge this river . . . this drainage canal . . . in an urgent
manner. And we call not just on Acueducto but also on the municipal government to help us, because
as soon as this area floods, all possible solutions are going to be unnecessary . . . they won’t do us any
good at all.

Reflecting the peculiar temporality of environmental politics that I am calling risk in

retrospect, the video clip then jumped ahead to footage of the December floods, driving
home the point that these pleas were not heard and the residents of Bosa were now
facing the consequences.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
174 Austin Zeiderman

Figure 2. The imminent risk, September 8, 2011. (Source: Noticias RCN.)

Tragedies foretold
Like the debate surrounding the culpability of the Italian earthquake scientists, the case
of flooding in Colombia involved not just the state’s responsibility to know and govern
the future, but also its failure to have done so in the past. This type of situation has strong
precedent in Colombia. A book by Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez, Chronicle of a death foretold
(Crónica de una muerte anunciada) (1981), is a key cultural referent that has been used
repeatedly, in Colombia and abroad, to give expression to tragedies that were foreseen
but not avoided. Though not his most celebrated work, its circulation was boosted by
the fact that Garcı́a Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature the year after
its publication. An allegorical tale based on historical events that took place in the early
1950s in a sleepy town near the Caribbean coast, the novel is frequently referenced in
ordinary conversation, but also by the media and politicians, to characterize undesirable
occurrences that were anticipated but not averted. While it would be an exaggeration to
say that the structure of Chronicle of a death foretold typifies a particularly Colombian
understanding of temporality, it nevertheless helps explain the prognostic modality
of environmental politics under examination here. And while this modality is not
uncommon, Garcı́a Márquez lent it both rhetorical form and moral authority such that
it would become readily available as a frame for interpreting subsequent tragic events.
The book tells the story of the murder of Santiago Nasar by the brothers of Ángela
Vicario, a woman whose virginity Santiago had supposedly taken. Ángela’s husband
discovers his bride’s lost innocence on the night of their wedding and immediately
returns her to her family. Ángela names Santiago as the culprit, and her brothers,
butchers by trade, set out with knives to avenge their sister’s honour. Intoxicated
from the previous night’s festivities, the Vicario brothers are not discreet about their
objective. They are seen all over town sharpening their weapons, preparing their attack,

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Prognosis past 175

even boasting about their plan to kill the man who has sullied Ángela’s reputation.
Nearly everyone knows what is going to happen, and yet no one intervenes to prevent
the murder. There are different reasons for this: some townspeople doubt the sincerity
of the Vicario brothers’ threats; others attempt unsuccessfully to warn the intended
victim. In the end, Santiago is stabbed to death on the threshold of his family home.
The central problematic and temporal structure of this short work by the
most recognized of modern Colombian authors parallel the prognostic modality
of environmental politics described above. The narrator returns to the town many
years after the murder, only to find evidence that everyone had known the killers’
intentions ahead of time and had been unable to stop them from accomplishing the
deed. The tale recounts not the inability to foresee future events, but rather the failure
to act appropriately on the knowledge available prior to their occurrence. It is both
retrospective and prospective, looking backward to a moment in time in which an
event was about to take place and forward in time from that moment to a future that
was known. Neither the townspeople nor the authorities had stepped in to prevent the
killing; the outcome was una muerte anunciada, a ‘death foretold’.
Clearly referencing Garcı́a Márquez’s prescient story, two catastrophic events that
converged during one week in November 1985 were both seen, in their aftermath, as
tragedias anunciadas (or ‘tragedies foretold’). On 6 November, thirty-five members of
the M-19 guerrilla group attacked the Palace of Justice in central Bogotá taking hundreds
of hostages, including twenty-four Supreme Court judges. President Belisario Betancur
rejected their demand that he come and stand trial for accusations that he had betrayed a
previously negotiated peace accord, and instead ordered the Army to storm the building.
In the ensuing battle between the Colombian armed forces and the rebel gunmen, more
than seventy-five hostages were killed, including eleven of the federal justices trapped
inside. Exactly one week later, a volcano 80 miles west of Bogotá, the Nevado del Ruiz,
erupted suddenly and nearly 30,000 people died as a massive mudslide buried the nearby
town of Armero. The media quickly assigned blame for the casualties in both cases to the
government’s lack of foresight. Journalists demonstrated evidence showing that both
events could have been anticipated and, therefore, prevented.34 This sparked a crisis of
political authority for which future-orientated security mechanisms were seen as the
solution. From that moment on, the protection of human life against potential threats
(both human and nonhuman in origin) would be an orientating telos of government:
that is, a political rationality shaping the state’s authority over and responsibility to
its subjects. The prognostic act of forecasting the outcome of similar situations in the
future – according to scientific data on the probability of natural disasters or military
intelligence on the likelihood of insurgent attacks – became a key dimension of political
legitimacy.
The catastrophic events of 1985 remain historical referents for contemporary
understandings of political, legal, and ethical responsibility for the protection of human
life in Colombia. My interviews in 2008 and 2009 with state officials and policy experts
on the subject of disaster risk management were filled with references to the siege of the
Palace of Justice and the Armero disaster. A social scientist involved in the creation of
risk-management policy in Colombia referred to them as two of the most unforgettable
events in recent memory. Like many of my other interlocutors, he pointed to them as
central to the formation of political rationalities concerned with potential threats to
collective life. The continued significance of these tragedies reflects how they were made
to constitute a crisis in which the government’s inability to anticipate and avert them was

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
176 Austin Zeiderman

seen as a monumental failure, and predictive, preventive, and pre-emptory techniques

were the solutions proposed.35 Although Colombians were more than familiar with both
political violence and natural disaster prior to November 1985, it was at this moment
that a new framework emerged through which such events would be understood and
managed thereafter.
This was not immediately clear to me when I began fieldwork in Bogotá on the politics
of disaster risk. Although I sought to historicize what I saw as a constitutive relationship
between foresight, authority, and responsibility, legitimacy, and responsibility, at first
it was difficult to engage my informants in this pursuit. There was an obviousness
surrounding the topic that lent it an aura of inevitability: it seemed natural to expect that
the state should be able to anticipate future threats and prevent them from materializing.
When I asked people to consider what may have motivated such an expectation, they
often returned to 1985. For my informants, this was the year of the ‘tragedies foretold’.
These catastrophic events thereafter came to define the state’s responsibility to protect
human life from future harm.

Conclusion
I would like to conclude with a reflection on the prognostic modality of environmental
politics highlighted by the Colombian and Italian cases by distinguishing between two
somewhat different temporal orientations. In the first, an individual or group denounces
the state for not being aware of, attentive to, or prepared for an event that has yet to take
place. Back in September 2011, Doña Lucia and her neighbours looked to the future,
identified a threat, organized prospective victims, demonstrated their vulnerability, and
demanded pre-emptive action. The second temporal orientation, which I am calling
risk in retrospect, involves a critique aimed at political authorities and technical experts
for not having been aware of, attentive to, or prepared for an event that eventually
did occur. This critique is prospective in its reference to the state’s responsibility for
potential threats. Yet it is also retrospective: protesters responding to the Bogotá floods
and lawyers representing the L’Aquila earthquake victims both positioned themselves
simultaneously in the aftermath of these events when their consequences were already
known and prior to them when prevention could (or should) have been possible.36
They mobilized a combination of hindsight and foresight to demand accountability for
the loss of life and livelihood.
While the latter formulation differs from the previous one in its attempt to hold
the state accountable for an actual event in the past, they share one key element:
without calling into question the imperative to render the future governable in the
present, those engaging in this prognostic modality of environmental politics demanded
more and better mechanisms of prediction, prevention, and preparedness. And rather
than disputing the fact that their status as political subjects was predicated on their
vulnerability or victimhood, they sought to mobilize concern for an additional threat
or to recognize a larger group of victims. Thus, while positioning themselves as critical
of the state, they ultimately reinforced the future-orientated rationality of security –
organized around the imperative to protect the life of the population against potential
threats – as the basis of political authority and legitimacy. This raises questions about the
transformative potential of prognosis in places, like Colombia, where security saturates
the domain of politics and government.
These observations offer insight into the terrain of political engagement organized
around environmental futures. They show that prognosis, while central to political

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Prognosis past 177

authority, legitimacy, and responsibility, is also the ground upon which people formulate
both demands on and critiques of the state. Although these claims, aspirations, and
expectations may be constrained by the overarching logic of security within which
they are situated, prognosis can be mobilized for a variety of political purposes. It is
often deployed in order to draw attention to the state’s shortcomings, contradictions,
and inadequacies by demonstrating the failure to provide protective care to its most
vulnerable subjects in the face of potentially catastrophic events. Across the political
spectrum, the key question is how prognosis is harnessed to specific political projects
and to what effect.
This is an important corrective to work that reduces the future to a domain of
hegemony and domination and assumes a limited set of positions and possibilities.
Temporality is not only a mechanism of social control through which to consolidate
political authority, facilitate capital accumulation, and produce subjects amenable to
both. In the cases I have described, prognosis is the ground upon which the state
and critiques of it both rest. It is often within a prognostic domain, and not outside
of or in opposition to it, that the poor demand more from their governments. And
yet the transformative potential of prognosis as a domain of environmental politics
is limited. Rather than calling into question, destabilizing, or taking hold of the
state, the modality of prognosis I have analysed in Bogotá reinforces security as
the orientating telos of government. Ultimately, while prospective denunciations take
an oppositional stance vis-à-vis the state, they uphold the established rationalities
from which they derive their meaning and force as forms of popular political
expression.
I have brought together the L’Aquila earthquake and the Bogotá floods to
demonstrate how prognosis becomes the basis of political engagement. But rather
than revealing the ‘hidden’ politics of predictive techniques that are ostensibly objective,
neutral, and scientific, my goal has been to highlight a modality of environmental politics
in which future projections are explicitly central. And instead of showing how efforts to
know and govern environmental futures shape the present, I have focused analytically
on the problem of prognosis in the past. After all, concentrating exclusively on the future
would risk mirroring the state’s fixation on the virtual, the potential, and the possible.
In contrast, focusing methodologically on the past allows us to contextualize the tight
connection between foresight, authority, and responsibility. As political legitimacy is
increasingly tied to knowledge about the future – of resources, of disasters, and of many
other objects and events – our ability to understand the politics of prognosis becomes
ever more urgent. We need to reflect critically on the strategic potential of prognosis for
those usually resigned to simply wait for something better (or worse!) to come along.

NOTES
My thanks go to Jessica Barnes for her tireless efforts in assembling this collection of essays, and to her
and Andrew Matthews for editorial guidance. Two anonymous reviewers also commented generously and
provided helpful suggestions. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2012 annual meeting of
the American Anthropological Association. In Bogotá, my gratitude goes to Laura Astrid Ramı́rez for her
research assistance. The names of those quoted in the text were changed to protect their anonymity and all
translations from the Spanish are my own.
1 http://wsp.presidencia.gov.co/Videos/2010/Noviembre/Paginas/Index.aspx (accessed 18 January 2016).

Sistema Informativo del Gobierno, Presidencia de la República de Colombia. Recording of Santos’s addresses
to Armero, November 2010.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
178 Austin Zeiderman

2 Prognoses of resources and disasters are additionally related by the fact that both need to account for the

eventual effects of climate change. Earthquakes are different in this regard, since they are not connected to
climate in any direct way. Moreover, there are really no models or simulations for predicting the occurrence
of an earthquake, although such techniques can be used to predict their effects.
3 Secondary sources consulted were the Bogotá daily newspaper El Tiempo, the weekly news magazine

Semana, and the news broadcaster Noticias RCN from December 2010 to February 2012.
4 For a related analysis of expectations surrounding innovations in the fields of heath and life science, see

Brown & Michael (2003). The authors propose the concepts of ‘retrospecting prospects’ and ‘prospecting
retrospects’ as ‘interpretive registers’ through which people understand and discuss expectations of future
change.
5 For similar diagnoses of temporal politics in urban studies, see Auyero & Swistun (2009), Mitchell (2009),

and Yiftachel (2009).

6 An inspiration for this analysis is Koselleck, who writes ‘not of one historical time, but rather of many

forms of time superimposed on one another’ (2004: 2).

7 Here I am in agreement with Adams et al. when they conclude their critique with the question: ‘What

would it mean to not-anticipate?’ (2009: 260). Although their article seeks to imagine ‘strategies of refusal’
that disrupt anticipatory regimes, they nevertheless recognize that ‘perhaps a better tactic is not to refuse
anticipation’ and instead consider what relations to the future are desirable, and how we might go about
fostering them.
8 Gisa Weszkalnys’s (2014) work offers another important resource for thinking about anticipation and the

temporal politics of disaster. See also her contribution to this volume.

9 These anticipatory practices hinge on the recognition that dominant logics of capital accumulation and

political rule are always fractured and inconclusive – as Simone argues, they are ‘full of potential holes capable
of providing, albeit always temporarily, shelter and maneuverability’ (2010: 98).
10 After all, it is also through the promise of alternative futures that members of the urban poor come to

believe that political change or economic development will eventually materialize, which limits their options
and reduces their leverage.
11 For discussion of the relationship between past, present, and future, see Huyssen (2003), Koselleck (2004),

and Luhmann (1998).

12 We are now aware that this idea was predicated on colonial assumptions about time and space, such that

futurity mapped on to the spatial categories of centre/periphery and West/non-West. Geographical distance
was equated with temporal difference (Fabian 2002), as places beyond the metropole were relegated to a time
before the present.
13 Naomi Klein (2007) traces the political-economic logic of what she calls ‘disaster capitalism’.
14 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing connections between my argument about the state’s

responsibility to predict and mitigate future catastrophes and James Laidlaw’s (2013: 204-9) work on the
proliferation of ethical responsibilities enabled by new forms of statistical reasoning.
15 Semana, 7 December 2011; El Tiempo, 8 December 2011.
16 Semana, 9 December 2011.
17 ‘Autorizan inundaciones controladas en baldı́os del norte y sur de Bogotá’, Semana, 7 December 2011.
18 ‘Damnificados subieron a 45.196 en tres dı́as’, El Tiempo, 9 December 2011.
19 ‘Inundaciones: gobierno entregará ayuda económica a damnificados en Bogotá’, Semana, 9 December

2011.
20 Ibid.; ‘Ayuda para damnificados de Bosa será entregada la próxima semana’, El Tiempo, 10 December

2011.
21 ‘En Bosa hay 5 mil damnificados a causa de las fuertes lluvias’, El Tiempo, 8 December 2011; ‘Damnificados

subieron a 45.196 en tres dı́as’, El Tiempo, 9 December 2011.

22 ‘Bogotá: ası́ se entregan las ayudas en Bosa y Kennedy’, Semana, 13 December 2011.
23 ‘Vı́ctimas de invierno en Bosa y Kennedy viven drama para recibir ayudas’, El Tiempo, 13 December 2011.
24 ‘Damnificados subieron a 45.196 en tres dı́as’, El Tiempo, 9 December 2011.
25 ‘Después del diluvio’, Semana, 7 January 2012.
26 El Tiempo, 7 December 2011; Semana, 7 December 2011.
27 ‘Después del diluvio’, Semana, 7 January 2012.
28 Yolanda Reyes, ‘No es la “maldita niña”’, El Tiempo, 12 December 2011.
29 ‘La alcaldesa respondió a las denuncias por la entrega de ayudas’, El Tiempo, 14 December 2011.
30 Ernesto Cortés Fierro, ‘Alcalde, ¿y del invierno . . . ?’, El Tiempo, 11 December 2011.
31 ‘Al invierno, se suma drama para recibir ayudas’, El Tiempo, 13 December 2011.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Prognosis past 179

32 ‘Antonio Navarro Wolff asumió como Secretario de Gobierno de Bogotá’, El Tiempo, 2 January 2012;

‘Con modelo hidráulico buscan evitar nuevas inundaciones en Bogotá’, Semana, 17 January 2012.
33 Noticias RCN, 9 December 2011, http://www.canalrcnmsn.com/noticias/inundación_en_bosa_hab%C3%

AD_sido_denunciada_desde_hace_tres_meses (last accessed 23 May 2014).

34 El Tiempo, 16 November 1985; Daniel Samper Pizano, ‘Apocalipsis anunciado’, El Tiempo, 18 November

1985; Gloria Moanack, ‘Colombia, region de alto riesgo sı́smico’, El Tiempo, 14 November 1985.
35 For a discussion of the crisis de ‘gubernabilidad’ that ensued after the coincidence of the Armero tragedy

and the attack on the Palace of Justice, see Ramı́rez Gomez & Cardona (1996: 267).
36 To quote one of the lawyers for the victims’ families: ‘It’s not possible to predict an earthquake. But it was

possible to predict the seismic risk in L’Aquila after months of tremors’. As such, this modality of prognostic
politics often supports demands for emergency response, humanitarian aid, and financial reparations.

REFERENCES
Adams, V., M. Murphy & A.E. Clarke 2009. Anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality. Subjectivity
28, 246-65.
Auyero, J. & D.A. Swistun 2009. Flammable: environmental suffering in an Argentine shantytown. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Bakhtin, M. 1981. The dialogic imagination: four essays (trans. M. Holquist). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bear, L. 2014. Doubt, conflict, mediation: the anthropology of modern time. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 20, 3-30.
Brown, N. & M. Michael 2003. A sociology of expectations: retrospecting prospects and prospecting
retrospects. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 15, 3-18.
Buck-Morss, S. 2000. Dreamworld and catastrophe: the passing of mass utopia in East and West. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Cooper, M. 2006. Pre-empting emergence: the biological turn in the War on Terror. Theory, Culture & Society
23, 113-35.
——— 2010. Turbulent worlds: financial markets and environmental crisis. Theory, Culture & Society 27,
167-90.
Edwards, P.N. 2010. A vast machine: computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
——— 2012. Scaling disaster: simulating the extent of the Deepwater Horizon and the Fukushima meltdowns.
Society for Social Studies of Science annual meeting, Copenhagen, 20 October 2012.
Escobar, A. 1992. Imagining a post-development era? Critical thought, development and social movements.
Social Text 31/32, 20-56.
Fabian, J. 2002. Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ferguson, J. 2006. Global shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Fukuyama, F. 1992. The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press.
Garcı́a Márquez, G. 1981. Crónica de una muerte anunciada. Bogotá: La Oveja Negra.
Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Gell, A. 1996. The anthropology of time: cultural constructions of temporal maps and images. Oxford: Berg.
Greenhouse, C.J. 1996. A moment’s notice: time politics across cultures. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Huyssen, A. 2003. Present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. Stanford: University Press.
Klein, N. 2007. The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.
Koselleck, R. 2002. The practice of conceptual history: timing history, spacing concepts (trans. T.S. Presner
et al.). Stanford: University Press.
——— 2004. Futures past: on the semantics of historical time (trans. K. Tribe). New York: Columbia University
Press.
Laidlaw, J. 2013. The subject of virtue: an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: University Press.
Levitas, R. 1982. Dystopian times? The impact of the death of progress on utopian thinking. Theory, Culture
& Society 1, 53-64.
Luhmann, N. 1998. Observations on modernity. Stanford: University Press.
Martin, R. 2007. An empire of indifference: American war and the financial logic of risk management. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Massumi, B. 2009. National enterprise emergency: steps toward an ecology of powers. Theory, Culture &
Society 26, 153-85.
——— 2010. Perception attack: brief on war time. Theory & Event 13.
Mitchell, K. 2009. Pre-black futures. Antipode 41, 239-61.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
 14679655, 2016, S1, Downloaded from https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9655.12399 by <Shibboleth>[email protected], Wiley Online Library on [04/06/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
180 Austin Zeiderman

Munn, N.D. 1992. The cultural anthropology of time: a critical essay. Annual Review of Anthropology 21,
93-123.
Pinder, D. 2005. Visions of the city: utopianism, power, and politics in twentieth-century urbanism. New York:
Routledge.
Rabinow, P. 2008. Marking time: on the anthropology of the contemporary. Princeton: University Press.
Ramı́rez Gomez, F. & O.D. Cardona 1996. El sistema nacional para la prevención y atención de desastres en
Colombia. In Estado, sociedad y gestión de los desastres en América Latina: en busca del paradigma perdido
(eds) A. Lavell & E. Franco, 255-307. Lima: La RED, FLACSO, ITDG-Perú.
Robinson, J. 2004. In the tracks of comparative urbanism: difference, urban modernity and the primitive.
Urban Geography 25, 709-23.
Rosenberg, D. & S. Harding 2005. Introduction: histories of the future. In Histories of the future (eds)
D. Rosenberg & S. Harding, 3-18. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Roy, A. 2008. The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory. Regional Studies 43, 819-30.
Simone, A. 2010. City life from Jakarta to Dakar: movements at the crossroads. London: Routledge.
Weszkalnys, G. 2014. Anticipating oil: the temporal politics of a disaster yet to come. The Sociological Review
62, 211-35.
Yiftachel, O. 2009. Theoretical notes on ‘gray cities’: the coming of urban apartheid? Planning Theory 8,
88-100.
Zeiderman, A. 2012. On shaky ground: the making of risk in Bogotá. Environment and Planning A 44, 1570-88.
——— 2013. Living dangerously: biopolitics and urban citizenship in Bogotá, Colombia. American Ethnologist
40, 71-87.
Žižek, S. 2010. Living in the end times. New York: Verso.

Pronostiquer le passé : politique temporelle des catastrophes en Colombie

Résumé
L’auteur explore, dans le présent article, une modalité pronostique de la politique environnementale qu’il
appelle risque rétrospectif. Pour cela, il examine des conflits liés non seulement à la capacité de la science
d’État à connaı̂tre et régir le futur, mais aussi à son incapacité d’y parvenir par le passé. Il commence
par discuter du séisme qui a frappé la ville italienne de L’Aquila en 2009, avant de se tourner vers un cas
similaire en Colombie, reflétant l’un comme l’autre la relation de constitution entre autorité politique et
prévision. Il remonte ensuite au fort précédent historique de ce type de situation politique en Colombie
en discutant d’une référence culturelle essentielle : le livre de Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez Chronique d’une
mort annoncée, paru en 1981, ainsi que de la convergence de deux événements catastrophiques survenus la
même semaine en novembre 1985 et dont les conséquences ont été qualifiées de « tragédies annoncées ».
Pour finir, il réfléchit aux implications possibles de l’éventualité où le pronostic deviendrait le terrain sur
lequel les citoyens s’engagent dans des relations politiques avec l’État.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 163-180


C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016