Peasants who settled in the Colombian Amazon region as a result of different waves of migration, and who today grow coca, have been stigmatized as criminals with no regional identity. The central state does not accord them a place within national society except as guerrilla auxiliaries or drug traffickers. As such, they can be the object of state violence. The collective identities in the Amazon region are shaped by the sense of exclusion from and abandonment by the central state, and politicized identities emerge as a protest against exclusion and misrecognition.