“War exacts many obvious costs upon bodies and ecologies: grave injuries, toxic waste, psychological trauma. In Maraña, Pinto-García calls our attention to a slower, more elusive, yet no less consequential cost of war. Her gripping account of how cutaneous leishmaniasis came to be the signature pathology of Colombia’s protracted armed conflict blends a keen eye for scientific detail with an incisive and meticulous critique of militarized healthcare. A major contribution to environmental and medical anthropology, this book illustrates how relations of care for people and landscapes are shaped by economies of violence—and how it might be otherwise.”

Alex M. Nading, author of “Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health, and the Politics of Entanglement”

“This outstanding book constitutes a pathbreaking ethnography rooted in scientific evidence, technological studies, and medical anthropology, through which Pinto-García underscores and unwraps the maraña, or the entanglement, of the armed conflict with leishmaniasis in Colombia. She reveals how in this violent context, which takes place mainly in the tropical jungle, leishmaniasis has been constructed as a war or guerrilla disease. As the testimonies of soldiers, guerrillas, nurses, scientists, and local residents are unraveled, it becomes clear that the stigmatization of the disease has led to a biomedical war regime that prioritizes war over public health. The author leaves readers with the question of how to disentangle leishmaniasis and war, and how to consider a non-pharmaceutical solution to a public health problem.”

María Clemencia Ramírez, author of “Between the Guerrillas and the State: The Cocalero Movement, Citizenship, and Identity in the Colombian Amazon”