Lina Pinto-García, "Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

May 31, 2025

Lina Pinto-García, a postdoctoral fellow and author, takes listeners through the complex relationship between war and the skin disease cutaneous leishmaniasis in Colombia. She reveals how this disease, linked to the armed conflict, affects both state soldiers and guerrilla members. Pinto-García introduces the concept of 'maraña' to describe the intertwined nature of health, conflict, and societal stigma. She also discusses the geopolitical implications of glucantime, the treatment for leishmaniasis, highlighting how disease and warfare shape each other in profound ways.

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ANECDOTE

Discovery of Disease Stigma

Lina Pinto-García discovered the stigma and restrictive control on leishmaniasis treatment while working at a Colombian research institute.
A scientist feared guerrilla groups would forcibly demand the treatment medicine, revealing tensions around disease access and conflict.

INSIGHT

Mild Disease, Strong Impact

Cutaneous leishmaniasis causes skin lesions but is mild, not fatal or contagious.
Its impact in war zones stems from stigma and social consequences, not severity of symptoms.

INSIGHT

Maraña as Entanglement Metaphor

The concept "Maraña" captures the dense jungle and entangled relations linking leishmaniasis and war.
It illustrates complexity while inspiring ways to disentangle disease and conflict for peacebuilding.

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In Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Lina Pinto-García delves into the relationship between war and disease, focusing on Colombian armed conflict and the skin disease known as cutaneous leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis is transmitted through the bite of female sandflies. The most common manifestation, cutaneous leishmaniasis, is neither deadly nor contagious: it affects the skin by producing lesions of varying size and shape. In Colombia, the insect vector of the disease is native to the same forested environments that have served as the main stage for one of the longest and most violent civil wars in Latin American history. As a result, the populations most affected by leishmaniasis in Colombia are members of the state army and non-state armed groups.

Pinto-García explores how leishmaniasis and the armed conflict are inextricably connected and mutually reinforcing. Her title, Maraña, means "tangle" in Spanish but is also commonly used in Colombia to name the entangled greenery, braided lianas, and dense foliage that characterize the tropical forests where leishmaniasis typically occurs. Pinto-García argues that leishmaniasis and the war are not merely linked, but enmarañadas to each other through narratives, technologies, and practices produced by the state, medicine, biomedical research, and the armed conflict itself. She also uses the concept of desenmarañados (disentangled) to discuss how other attachments between leishmaniasis and society could be formed through different scientific programs, technological designs, healthcare practices, regulations, and social and cultural processes capable of challenging violence, suffering, and inequality. All told, Maraña is a passionate study of how war has shaped the production of scientific knowledge about leishmaniasis and access to its treatments in Colombia.

This episode is hosted by Elena Sobrino, a lecturer in the Science and Technology Studies Program at Tufts University. Her research explores volunteer work, union histories, and environmentalism in the Flint water crisis. She is currently writing about the politics of fatigue and crisis, and teaching courses on science and technology studies, ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site.

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