Abstract Analysing the sugarcane landscape in the flat valley of the Cauca River (Colombia) reveals that agricultural industrialization in the region required the concentration of land use by regional industrialists and the corresponding exclusion of landowners and poor peasants from territorial decision‐making processes. The analytical lens used in this article, based on the use and control over land and land‐based natural commons, allows for the characterization of three periods in a non‐linear process of articulation and dispute between poor peasant and capitalist agents in the expansion of the sugarcane monoculture during the 20th century. The different constellations of social agents, governmental nexus, and capital enclosures have enacted through mechanisms that, beyond concentrating land property, have managed to deprive rural ethnic communities from their cultural and environmental heritage, traditional economies, and possible futures.