Gutierrez, Francisco (2006). Internal Conflict, Terrorism and Crime in Colombia

7/28/2019 Gutierrez, Francisco (2006). Internal Conflict, Terrorism and Crime in Colombia

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Journal of International Development J. Int. Dev. 18, 137150 (2006)Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jid.1267

POLICY ARENA

INTERNAL CONFLICT, TERRORISM ANDCRIME IN COLOMBIA

FRANCISCO GUTIE RREZ SANIN* Instituto de Estudios Pol ticos y Relaciones Internacionales Universidad Nacional de Colombia,

Colombia

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between terrorism, civil war and crimein Colombia where the internal conict is both highly criminalized and low to medium inintensity. One of the main tenets of the new wars thesis is that the civilian/combatant ratio incivil conicts has worsened dramatically, said to be associated with the increasingly violent orterrorist behaviour of the groups that participate in the conict. However, in Colombia the new

wars thesis does not hold, despite the very strong link between the guerrillas, the paramilitaryand the narco-economy. This argument is supported by an exploration of the methods used andfactors motivating the actors involved in the conict. In constructing a political economy of internal conicts and terrorism and in the context of territoriality, it is further argued that thepolitical part of the equation is often under-estimated, due not least of all to the lack of aworking notion of governance. The policy relevance of the argument is that terrorist acts needto be located in political context and understood in relation to the political content of thechallenge they pose and the response they elicit. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: Terrorism; criminality; new wars; states; bounded violence; internal conict

1 INTRODUCTION

Based on the Colombian experience, this article discusses the relationship betweenterrorism, civil war and crime. Colombia represents a puzzle for the researcher. On theone hand, its internal war is highly criminalized. On the other, it is a low-mediumintensity conict (Pizarro, 2004). In other words, with all its horrors it has only producedlimited destruction. This paradox appears to contradict present theories about war,terrorism and criminality, or at least constitutes a grey area not taken into account by

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

*Correspondence to: Francisco Gutie rrez Sann, Instituto de Estudios Pol ticos y Relaciones InternacionalesUniversidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia. E-mail: [email protected].


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them. To understand this mismatch between a criminalised but bounded conict, it isnecessary to tinker with the basic denitions and current theoretical statements concerningterrorism. As pointed out in Section 1, one of the many problems with the word terrorismis that one persons terrorist is somebody elses freedom ghter. Here terrorism is notseen to relate to a distinct or stable category of people. Rather it is regarded as a politicaland military method that is used by different agents in given circumstances. In fact, this isa standard denition, widely accepted by both academics and the military establishment,in which terrorism is: a form of warfare in which violence is directed primarily againstnon-combatants (usually unarmed civilians) rather than operational military and policeforces or economic assets (public or private) (O Neill, 1990, p. 24). Thus, we are facingterrorism when a force launches attacks on civilians to obtain political objectives (see alsoUS Army 1984). Hence, terrorists are people who systematically use violence against non-combatants to produce some kind of political and/or military effect. Any analysis that, inan ad hoc fashion, includes some agents and excludes others is simply an exercise in

double standards, with little potential for advancing our understanding of terror.Concentrating on the method, though, requires that we understand what factors trigger itsuse. Contemporary theories of internal conicts (ICs) posit that their degradation (forexample, in terms of the greed of its leaders) is directly proportional to the use of terroristtechniques. In other words, todays ICs are more criminal and thus more terrorist. Forexample, Mary Kaldor found that war is not what it used to be (Kaldor, 2001). She has arguedthat since the1980s ICshave become new wars (NWs), whicharea productof the last phaseof globalization. They are directed against civilians and implemented by forces in whichpolitical and criminal motives blend. That is, they are increasingly terrorist and criminal.According to Kaldor, the leading gures of contemporary ICs react against globalization by

wayof identity politics that in turn are intrinsically exclusionary. In the past, a politics of ideasaspired to convince and incorporate. Identity politics are by contrast built upon aninsurmountable we-them gulf. Against a strong counter trend in the literature, Kaldoraccepts that NWs are ultimately political. However, she points to their being built upondepredation and criminality and the disappearance of differences between the economic andpolitical realms, alongside an increase in the role of gangsters (Kaldor, 2001, p. 138).

Not only is Kaldors prescription accepted and shared by many practitioners, journalists,and academics, but some writers go much further. According to Collier, for example,rebellion is a form of criminality and greed is the fuel of organized violence (Collier,2000). This article considers whether such perspectives capture the actual evolution of internal warfare. Kalyvas (2001) has shown that the contrast between old and new warsdoes not hold for an important set of cases: based on a description of the post WW2 Greek conict, he has suggested that perhaps always, or at least during very long periods,combatants have extorted, attacked, killed and maimed civilians. Other factors that areidentied by Kaldor as typically new might better be described as very old. For example,the relation of warriors with criminality predates the 20th century, and the period in whichwarfare and looting were not associated may have been quite short and fragile.

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The dual character of the Colombian IC puts into further question the associationbetween criminality and terrorism because even when many of the characteristics of NWsare present, the increasing use of terrorist methods may not be. Kaldors global analysiswas informed by the Yugoslavian conict. Does this hold up as a good empirical example,

1 The case is made brilliantly by Polanyi (1992); while a very good example of an important specic case(Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s) can be found in Brian (1995).

138 F. G. San n et al.

Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 18 , 137150 (2006)


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and as a viable analysis of contemporary ICs? Does it explain adequately the evolution of terrorist practices? Based on the Colombian case, I suggest that a negative (or at leastsceptical) answer to all three questions is appropriate. It is true that Kaldor explicitly statedthat her model was devised mainly for the East European and African experience, and inconsequence any criticism based on other cases ought to be prudent. On the other hand,Kaldor builds her analysis on her fundamental claim that NWs are the product of globaldynamics; and her discussion certainly intends to capture strong global trends. Further-more, Colombia does appear to be the epitome of a greedy NW.

2Many of Kaldors

descriptions seem to apply to it quite well. For example, the links between the narco-economy and (counter)-insurgency exhibited by the Colombian conict are stridentlyobvious. However, despite this intimate relationship and high levels of criminalization, Iwould suggest that the monotonic template of Kaldor and othersthe newer the war, themore criminal, the more anti-global, and the more terrorist it isdoes not t well theColombian IC. Nor does it account for the complex mechanisms that allow for the onset of

systematic and large-scale violence against civilians.This point is important in its own right. However, a policy dimension comes into play aswell. The idea that more criminal implies more terrorist has been extremely inuentialamong journalists, decision makers and academics. Furthermore, terrorist practices pose achallenge to hard-nosed rationalist explanations of organized violence. For example, theattempt to explain suicide bombings as utility-maximizing acts very rapidly becomespreposterous and/or naive, as Euben (2002) correctly notes.

3Nevertheless, purely impres-

sionistic descriptions of the events are not a good alternative either. A careful considera-tion of the social mechanisms that trigger large-scale terrorism is necessary. In this sense,the Colombian IC poses a quite interesting question: How is it that low intensity (that is,

with bounds to the use of violence) has coexisted with high levels of criminalization?In the rst section of this article I present a short account of the Colombian IC. Due to the

nature of the conict and the gaps in knowledge about it, this is inevitably a sketchy andsimplied narrative. The second section is dedicated to an analysis of the evolution of itsrepertoire of violent acts. I show that in terms of one of Kaldors key criteriathe civilian-combatant casualty ratioColombia hasevolved in thedirection of a heaviercombatant toll:exactly the contrary of the trend that would be expected by adherents of the NWs thesis. Thethird part is dedicated to the mechanisms involved: how can greed or rent seeking increase, ortame, terrorist violence? In the conclusion I discuss the complex relationship between greed,war and terrorist violence, and point to some of the consequences of the shifting perspectivesabout how to prevent terror.

2 COLOMBIA: A TYPICAL NEW WAR

Colombia has suffered two main cycles of political violence (approximately 19481962and from around 1980 to the present).

4The rst cycle was a civil war proper, pitting the

2 I have argued this elsewhere (Gutie rrez 2004), as have Collier (2000), Azam (2002), and others.3 For example, supposing that suicide bombers literally believe that if they kill themselves for the cause they will

enjoy paradise for centuries to come (Endler and Sanders, 2000). The naivete here comes from at least twosources. First, it is a very poor cultural description of the mindset of believers. Second, it does not explain whysuch a belief may be acquired by so many people in the rst place. A rationalist model cannot take for grantedbeliefs that push people to behaviour that, for non-believers, appears obviously self-hurting.4 According to standard quantitative criteria, Colombia has been at war from 1983. A more contextual view mightchoose an earlier date, though I would suggest not before 1978.

Internal Conict, Terrorism and Crime in Colombia 139



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countrys two main political parties against each other. As a typical Clausewitziancontinuation of politics by other means, this conict, known as La Violencia, involvedbroad chunks of the populationespecially the peasantsin violent acts and divided thepopulation into two according to political preferences. An important part of the warconsisted of feuds and raids against the enemy. Despite the extensive and rich literatureproduced on the subject, there are still several key knowledge gaps, especially regardingthe count of victims. The qualitative narratives however highlight a routine use of terroristmethods against the enemy.

In La Violencia as probably in almost any other war (Keegan, 2001) politicalmotives and greed coexisted (Keegan, 2004). However, as the conict unfolded, peasantresistance turned into political banditry (Sa nchez and Meertens 1983). The combinationof resentment, thirst for vengeance and economic motivations triggered extremely hideousforms of violence against civilians (Henderson, 1985). Both the Liberal and Conservativepartisans ( bandoleros and pa jaros , respectively) indulged in systematic brutality against

their adversaries, even after 1957 when the party leadership reached an agreement andrebuked violent activities in their name. From 1958 on, civilian governments were able topacify the regions in which bandoleros and pa jaros had some inuence, and by 1964these had practically disappeared.

They were replaced, however, by new armed groups: revolutionary guerrillas associatedwith the communist party or with some of its competitors to the left (Maoist, pro-Cuban,and in the 1970s the M19, a nationalist group). If the bandoleros and pa jaros had beentagged by the government and journalists as exponents of a process of criminalization andde-politicization of violence which explained their gory methods the guerrillasrepresented a conscious effort to retrieve politics. At the beginning the guerrillas were

marginal, and from 1965 until around 1975 their impact on national politics wasnegligible. One of them (the pro-Cuban ELN) was nearly destroyed in 1973, and theothers played no signicant political role. The M19, however, was capable of nationaliz-ing the war; this, plus the very fast and strong development of the narco-economy in thesecond half of the 1970s, pushed the problem of widespread violence to the centre stage of political life. If the M19 was the great innovator of the Colombian conict, the guerrillathat was most favoured by the hike in its intensity was the FARC. In the 1980s a full-edged IC was being fought in the country, with some extremely brutal events takingplace. The guerrillas became deeply involved in the narco-economy, as did the counter-insurgents (though in quite different forms). The Colombian government claimed that inmany cases an implicit or explicit alliance between narcos and guerrilleros had takenplace. Indeed, in the second half of the 1980s the narco-trafckers declared a terrorist waragainst the state. This other war was waged planting bombs in the countrys main cities,blowing up a plane full of passengers, kidnappings (more often than not followed byassassinations), and shooting against state ofcials, policemen and politicians, amongothers. While attacking the state, the narcos were still enthusiastically funding para-military groups.

In the meantime, the latter were growing even faster than the guerrillas. Following thestandard strategy of such groups in Latin America, to dry the pond so as to be able tocatch the sh, they exercised systematic terror against civilians. They routinelymassacred the peasant population in the guerrillas areas of inuence, triggering hugedisplacement waves. The paramilitary groups in the eld constituted a de facto coalitionthat included army ofcers, cattle ranchers, agro-industrialists and big-time criminals(Medina, 1991; Romero, 2002; Gutie rrez and Baro n, 2005). Their murderous activities




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continued throughout the 1990s, reaching a peak in the 19982002 administration whenthey carried out an offensive against civilians through quotidian massacres, in order tocreate a climate of terror and sabotage the peace talks between the FARC and thegovernment. However, from 2004 onwards, paramilitary groups have been in a process of demobilization, though they remain a deeply criminalized force.

3 THE EVOLUTION OF THE REPERTOIRE OF VIOLENCE

The narrative above appears fully to coincide with the NW paradigm: increasingcriminalization, greed and terrorism, at horrendous human cost. It is worthwhile re-examining some of the diverse forms in which illegal armies attack populations, often as away of nancing their wars. Kidnapping is key and has acquired industrial proportions.Moreover, Colombia is a country where the majority of such events have taken place.Massacres are common and in Colombia have occurred from the very beginning of the conict. Although they are committed mainly by the paramilitary (CINEP, 2005)the guerrillas also resort to such practices. Displacement, another common outcome, inColombia has acquired the dimension of a humanitarian tragedy; no less than two millionpeople (by a conservative estimate) have lost their homes and assets. Narco-trafckers andguerrillas have planted bombs in residential places. Whole political parties (the Unio nPatrio tica , Esperanza-Paz-y Libertad ) have been wiped out. Intimidation and threats areroutineDaniel Pe caut (2001) speaks about a banalization of violence not to mentionthe collateral damages inicted in the course of combat. The amount of human sufferinginicted on civilians during the Colombian IC has been enormous. However, the matchbetween the standard association (the newer the more criminalized and the moreterrorist) and the actual evolution of the Colombian conict is rather poor.

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Indeed, it is difcult to evaluate the association precisely because of the fuzziness of the term terrorism. For example, according to a database on terrorism held by the Departamento Nacional de Planeacio n (National Department of Planning), between1993 and 2001 there were 11 152 events, all of them related either to the use of explosives or to res caused by illegal armies. Here terrorism boils down to theinstrument used . If one is focusing on the method instead, then possibly the best indi-cator is the one used by Kaldor herself: the civilian-combatant casualty ratio (Figure 1). 6

The indicator is extremely important in Kaldors conceptualization, as she argues thatone of the most important observable differences between old and new wars is thetransition from a 1:8 ratio to an 8:1 in contemporary wars. This is actually Kaldors mostimportant piece of evidence in favour of the NW thesisa clear advantage in Kaldorsanalysis, as many others are awed by a very poor operationalization of what terrorism

5 Note that I am not analyzing a cross-national database, so the standard counter-argument (that the case is anoutlier) is not pertinent here. The discussion is simply about the social mechanisms: how are criminality (oralternatively, anti-globalism) and terrorism inter-related?6 According to the IEPRI database of lethal political violence. The database starts in 1975, but in the context of a

Crisis States Programme project William Acevedo and I pushed it back until 1957. From 1949 to 1957 there werein the country strong restrictions on press liberty, and since the source of the database was newspapers, for thetime being it is not possible to go back beyond 1957. The database captures the death toll caused by politicalorganizations, not the direct activity of exclusively criminal associations. However, this is a good entry point toevaluate the quantum of increase of lethal violent activity against civilians triggered by the criminalization (in thiscase, narcotization) of rebels and counter-insurgents.




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or a terrorist event may mean. 7 The indicator captures quite explicitly the quantum of terrorist methods relative to standard military activity used by a given army during aconict. Thus, Figure 1 tells an important story. It can be divided into several periods.

Between 1957 and 19621963, the Colombian war was newer than today, with more orless eight civilians for every combatant killed. As pointed out above, the Liberal andConservative groups were remnants of a civil war proper, engaged in punitive expedi-tions against their political adversaries. Yet at the same time they were deeplycriminalized and devoid of any clear military structure (Sa nchez and Meertens, 1983).The substitution of these irregular forces linked to the two main political parties byrevolutionary guerrillas took place in the mid-sixties. As can be seen in Figure 1, theratio fell to more or less four, and oscillated around that level with a peak just before1980, and then gradually dropped to below two. It has remained there until today.

There are several anomalies here. The traditional rural violence of the late 1950sresembles much more the new wars description than the contemporary conict. Theformer was much more terrorist, identity-based (the main identities being the two mainpolitical parties) and localist than that which is taking place today. Despite the criticismsmade by the revolutionary guerrillas of the old practices and the ritual killings associatedwith them, the civiliancombatant ratio remained at a high level until the 1980s, preciselywhen all the armed groups were becoming associated with the narco-economy. What hasbeen happening? Or is all this an optical illusion?

In the rst violent cycle, the explicit objective of the combatants was the carrying out of punitive expeditions against political adversaries, to persuade them into the correct

Figure 1. Civilians-combatants casualty ratio 19571975

7 For example, in many papers and databases US-sponsored terrorist activities in Latin America simply disappear.In Enders and Sandler (2000), to pick one among literally hundreds of cases, though terrorism is dened as amethod, in practice it is operationalized as a method used by the enemies of the United States (or of Westerncountries). No serious analysis can be built with such an obviously biased starting point. The advantages of Kaldors clear cut criterion appear very clear when compared with such practices.




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political convictions or to chastise their obstinacy. These waves of aggression took theform of a macro-feud. Despite (or because of) the huge criminalization of the armedorganizations that acted in the name of the Liberals and the Conservatives, vengeanceloomed large as a core motive, and brutal attacks against civilians fullled the doubleobjective of settling scores and intimidating the survivors. Ostentatious cruelty was arule and a tool of war. The Marxist guerrillas that appeared in the 1960s went, many atimes explicitly, against this pre-modern mentality. All the same, the improvement of the civiliancombatant ratio was limited. The guerrillas were small, very weak, rovingorganizations, extremely vulnerable to information leaks, and thus very much concen-trated on the activity of murdering those who they considered to be informants. In the caseof some guerrillas, the assassination of informants and internal purges were the centralactivity of the organization, with combats taking place only very occasionally.

By the 1980s, the paramilitary had come into the scene. As noted above, their corestrategy was to force the peasants to withdraw their alleged support to the guerrillas, and to

take the water away from the sh, a standard strategy of Latin American paramilitaryforces. This implied the systematic use of terrorism, a strategy if not applauded at leastaccepted by US military analysts. Valentino cites Lindsay who comments: When twoforces are contending for the loyalty of, and control over, the civilian population, the sidewhich uses violent reprisals most aggressively will dominate most of the people, even if their sympathies may lie in the other direction, adding that in any case it worked(Valentino, 2004, p. 200). Counter-insurgents engaged in mass killings of civilians,employing the same use of intimidatory writings on the bodies of the victims as hadbeen used by the pa jaros and bandoleros . While the ritual aspects of killing had beenbanished by the guerrillas both out of ideological conviction and due to technological

change (for example, the machete disappeared as a key weapon in combat), criminals andparamilitaries reintroduced them.

By the mid 1980s, the situation had begun to change in three crucial respects. First, theintensity of combat activity was increasing on the part of the guerrillas. The FARC hasremained a fairly army-like force, and the fall in the civiliancombatant ratio is due mainlyto the ever-growing number of combat-caused casualties. Second, several forces (includ-ing the paramilitary) were harbouring real expectations of reaching some peace accordwith the government, which forced them into rational calculations over the costs of massacring given the increasingly severe international environment. Indeed, between 1998and 2002 the paramilitary engaged in an extremely vicious campaign during the peaceprocess with the FARC, which implied a crescendo of massacres and atrocities committedagainst the population. However, regarding the civiliancombatant ratio this was offset bythe ever-growing combat activity of the guerrillas, especially the FARC. 8 Third, each forcewas playing its own global political game. For complex reasons that lie beyond the scopeof this paper, the FARC discovered that it could play a new role in Latin Americangeopolitics. As a result it started to redirect its discourse, both rhetoric and actions. Theparamilitary were intent not only on their reinsertion into the milieu but also on beingincorporated as acceptable actors in the US War on Terror. These political readjustmentshad a direct impact on the calculations and expectations of the leadership of all the illegalarmies.

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8 The peace process did not imply a truce.9 There is much evidence of these rational calculations amongst even the most genocidal types about an eventualreturn to legality. See for example Aranguren, 2001.




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the armies of the criminal leader of a neighbouring one. When they nally found that thecosts of war were prohibitive, they strived to reach a pact among themselves. In theprocess they were able to obtain the support of the Church, as well as the local, regionaland national authorities (Ocampo et al ., 1993). The pact has lasted from 1990 until todayand has been able to prevent open confrontations between the Dons, despite continuedoccasional brawls.

All this reminds one that greed is solid ground for the building of standard rationalcalculations. These can cause but also limit violent behaviour against civilians. A greedy,exclusively self-regarding agent will have no scruples in killing somebody if this goes inhis or her own interest, but if s/he has no incentives s/he will refrain. Actually, in certaincircumstances a greedy actor can have strong incentives not to escalate the level of violence. In some forms of criminality the victim becomes a commodity, and his or hercaptor is interested in preserving life, at least while it is not evident that adequate paymentwill not be received. Kidnapping (one of the most brutal forms of aggression against

civilians during the Colombian IC) is a very good example. It is an extremely brutalexperience for the victim but, at the same time, ties the hands of the kidnapper to a speciceconomic interest. In medieval war, kidnapping and ransom were devices to establish self-enforcing upper bounds in the use of violence against the higher ranks. 11 Precisely becauseit was self-enforcing, it was seldom violated (Keegan, 2004). In the other direction, thealleged de-ideologization of the guerrillas or in any case their movement from anecumenical discourse to a much more local onecan not only trigger terrorist activitiesagainst civilians (for example, killing people for not paying their quotas) but also limitthem.

For any comparative study of war it should be quite obvious that ideology can lead to

worse consequences than pure greed. Agents focused not on their individual gain but onthe victory of their universal cause can treat terrorism as an indispensable tooltheproverbial mentality that the end justies the meansand as an actual method for savinglives. Here a quote from Trotsky comes in handy:

Terror can be very efcient against a reactionary class...Intimidation is a powerfulweapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, isfounded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only aninsignicant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breakingtheir will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates

thousands (cited in Taber 2002: 95).12

In Colombia, forces informed by the most diverse doctrines have shot against deviants,enemies, and transgressors. 13

Identity qua ideology deserves specic comment. In Kaldors version, NWs pitcosmopolitan universalists (the defenders of democracy and peace) against identitarianparticularists. As the above narrative shows, the general landscape of wars appears to bemuch more muddled. Global forces and actors, the purest cosmopolitans imaginable,have boosted and promoted terrorist activities. At the same time, the bad guysthe

11

Reading judicial proceedings of kidnapping one sees in action similar social mechanisms: extreme brutality, thehumiliating commodication of human beings, and at the same time the establishment of objective relationalbounds to the use of violence.12 Note that an important argument used to support the invasion of Iraq had exactly the same structure: think howmany lives we will be able to save if we topple the repressive dictator and neutralize his aggressive plans.13 The same, of course, can be said of other historical experiences.




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identitarianswere not only globalized from the very beginning, informed as they wereby the motives of the Cold War, but also strive today consciously and politically, tobecome once again global actors and to develop global skills (not to mention their beinglinked to a global market).

One of the main activities of the FARC is to extract rents in the territories under itsinuence. However, FARC membersat least those that are not planning to desertdonot have the intention of returning shortly to legality. The paramilitary, on the other hand,do. First, they have been speaking about the issue for a long time (Aranguren, 2001).Second, unlike the guerrillas, their members do not break with their immediate socialentourage and therefore may come under greater pressure to conform. Third, since they arepaid a salary, it is in their nancial interests to do so. These monetary calculations havebeen the source of brutal offensives to expropriate peasants in the name of counter-insurgent policies. 14 Can they trigger micro-mechanisms that limit violence? The follow-ing testimony is all the more interesting as it was uttered by a member of a group created

explicitly to develop terrorist activities against the population:. . . no, exactly, I did not agree with the practices [of the organization] from the rstday I was there, because they had told me that I would only be a watchman in ahouse...they hadnt told me about the trainings, the weather, the lack of friendliness(compan erismo ), the smallest pretext and then they [the other paramilitaries] startedto ght between them, they threatened each other, they shot each other, they had nottold me that I had to patrol in the nights, they had told me nothing of that, and then Ithought, I am becoming an enemy not only of the guerrilla but also of the legalauthorities of my country.... then I started to behave rather prudently, because I knew

that in any moment they would re me, and I was afraid of spilling blood in thisorganization, I asked God every day not to allow me to spill blood and he helpedme to retire without danger and with money so that I would not need to go back to manual work and instead could put a small business in a place where the guerrillawould not threaten me (Judicial Proceeding - Rubio/Ampliacio n de la declaracio ndel sen or Rogelio de Jesu s Escobar Mej a, 02/08/1990).

There is a lot of self-justication in such discourse and it should not be forgotten that thestrategy of the paramilitary consisted in applying murderous violence against civilians,often without any obvious economic incentive. Nevertheless, it does suggest that membersof an illegal organization, who have the rational expectation of gathering some money inillegal activities and then returning to normal life, may sometimes hesitate beforecommitting irreparable acts. Actually, I am tempted to claim that similar reasoning hascome into play in the process of reinsertion of the paramilitary in 2004. The highlycriminalized leaders of this force were the same people that directed a wave of massacresbetween 1998 and 2002. Nowadays, however, they have reached the conclusion that theindiscriminate use of violence is counterproductive: for business, for the protection of theassets they have accumulated through war and narco-trafcking, and for avoiding jail.

Particularistic territoriality, one of the culprits of Kaldors story, is also associated withterrorism in complex ways. Indeed, building control and maintaining it not only entails

shooting civilians but also demands establishing some form of governance. This can beseen empirically as well. Though the death toll of the Colombian conict has increased

14 During its conict Colombia has witnessed a huge agrarian counter-reform, of which the protagonists are theparamilitary.




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gradually since the 1980s until today, regionally there is a sequence of heating up andcooling down (Gutie rrez, 2003). The heating-up phase takes place when the giventerritory is disputed by two or more armed actors that engage in a bid to terrorize thepopulation into acquiescence. Once there is a victor, both economic and politicalcalculations come to the fore. Governing entails establishing minimum rules of thegame and some limit to the arbitrariness and discretion of the warriors concerning the lives

of the civilian population. Certainly, the study of some emblematic cases of heating up andcooling down shows that the levels of homicidal violence do not regress to normality at theend of the cycle. Governance falls into the hands of a force that lacks any semblance of institutionalized checks and balances, and that has a homicidal tradition to build upon. AsFigure 2 shows, the rates of homicidal violence remain at a high level. The same can besaid about the territorial control of the paramilitary in Puerto Boyaca and neighbouringmunicipalities. Here the hot-cool sequence appears in its purest form: the paramilitariesappeared to contest the predominance of the guerrillas, and while doing so, they engagedin hideous forms of violence against the population. After they evicted the FARC, theyestablished very strong alliances with drug cartels and continued exercising coercion, thistime economic. However, with time the political costs of this were so great that re-structuring processes took place and a very thin veil of self-control fell over their territorialhegemony.

The centrality of forms of territorial governance highlights the limits of a politicaleconomy of war and terrorism in which the political part of the equation is weak due,among other things, to the lack of a working notion of governance. Governance rules arekey mediating structures between the act of organizing violence and interacting withcivilians in any form. They are also ideal entry points by which to understand why certainsocial mechanisms and motivations sometimes act as a catalyst, and sometimes as a limitto violence against civilian populations. For example, instead of the quaint psychologicalproposition that suicidal bombers expect innite benets from the act of blowing othersand themselves into pieces (Enders and Sandler, 2000), one can focus on strong chains of command in organizations that are able to mobilize and structure anger and hatred andtransform combatants into non-individualist agents of a cause. In the case of Colombia,

1984 1989 1998

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Figure 2. Homicides in Occidente de Boyaca 19841998

Municipalities: Chiquinquira, Bricen o, Buenavista, Caldas, Coper, La Victoria, Maripi, Muzo,Otanche, Pauna, Quipama, Saboya, San Miguel De Sema, San Pablo De Borbur, Tunungua, TotalSource: Police Department of Boyaca




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particularistic armies have had to develop broad rent-seeking and governing capacities thatforce them into a format of sustained but bounded coercion against civilians. It is preciselythis that allows for Colombias IC to be both highly criminalized and low to mid-intensity.

5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

I have agged some of the mechanisms that have allowed two characteristics lowintensity and high criminalizationto coexist in the Colombian IC. Nevertheless, thepoint should not be exaggerated. The links between organized crime and terrorism areobvious in the Colombian case and feuds between illegal or semi-legal economic groupshave been extraordinarily brutal (Guerrero 1986; Ocampo et al ., 1993). Hardenedcriminals have few normative concerns and not much empathy with their victims, showingan eerie resemblance to the typical psychopath (as well as with at least the most simplistic

versions of homo economicus ). However, if they are business-oriented they need notnecessarily act as unbounded terrorists.One of the great merits of Kaldors thesisbesides having noted genuine changes in the

way organized violence is carried outis underscoring the continuing importance of politics in contemporary ICs. Where her new wars study is limited is that it lacks anyexploration of the micro-foundations of organised violence, reected in both the descrip-tion and the analysis. It is open to several other criticisms. First, the newness of contemporary ICs is questionable. Kalyvas (2001b) shows that many of the traitsdescribed by Kaldor as new were already present in ICs in the aftermath of the SecondWorld War, and long before. On the other hand, this article has shown that in some crucial

respects (the civilian-combatant ratio) a quite criminalized war like the Colombian hasevolved precisely in a direction that runs contrary to that prescribed by Kaldor. Second, themechanisms suggested by Kaldor as the explanation as to why wars have evolved from oldto new do not always work well. For example, the idea that global forces and actors arenormatively superior to particularistic warmongers simply does not hold. Globalism andterrorism intermingle in multiple ways; sometimes they limit each other, sometimes theyare related through positive feedback. 15 Third, exclusionary, fragmented and even criminalprojects need not be oriented towards the wiping out of populations. When for one reasonor another there is an economic project behind extremely brutal forms of violence, thesemay fall short of genocide because once any given group has rmly established itsterritorial control it faces the challenge of governing, and thus of establishing explicit rulesof the game for the population under its control (Kalyvas, 2001). Fourth, the argument infavour of the politics and war of ideasthe source of the good old wars of the pastisblissfully optimistic. For different reasons, ideologues and strategists endorse terroristmethods. In this article, three different examples of how terrorism has been justied havebeen offered: saving lives; defeating the enemy; and disciplining the population. The samelogic applies with regard to the universalismfragmentation dichotomy. Historicalexperience shows that universalistic drives can be extraordinarily violent (see, forexample, Giddens, 1987).

In reality, the main limit of the NWs discourse and similar stories about war, violenceand terrorism is an almost complete absence of any analysis of states, governancestructures, and political regimes. They are frequently absent from view in two crucial

15 And particularism need not be violent.




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forms. First, they are invisible as propitiators of terrorist actsonly rogue states, theproverbial bad guys, appear in that capacity. Yet as the Colombian case shows, once theconict has commenced, a limited but obviously not completely sham democracy canengage in sustained terrorist acts against the civilian population. State terrorismoftenpublicly tolerated, endorsed, or sponsored by the democracies of the developed coun-tries is an indispensable part of the picture of post-1945 terrorism. Second, states are notoften recognized as actors in broader social processes. From different perspectives, severalanalyses of state building coincide in stressing the critical role that particularisticterritorial control has played in different phases of the process. Challenging, de-con-structing and reconstructing the state does not occur in an institutional vacuum: on thecontrary, it entails the development of a whole set of governance devices and organiza-tional structures, whose interplay within the dynamics of civil war is decisive vis-a `-vis theonset of systematic violence against civilians.

All this has certain policy relevance. Intellectually, the global War on Terror has been

associated with the conscious effort of denying terrorists (conceived of as distinct actors,not as a method) their political character. This is something that has also occurred inColombia. Though the concern with terrorism is not new, the notion of the non-politicalcharacter of the terrorist is; and this has both important legal (Franck, 2004) and politicalimplications. During the Cold War, when combat against communist terrorists wasprevalent, the main concern was to impede them from winning the hearts and minds of the masses. It thus involved at least in principlea very wide set of socio-economic andinstitutional reforms. Such a perspective was explicitly stated, for instance in the Alliancefor Progress and possibly other similar endeavours. The advantage of stating the problemin such terms is that it identied terrorist acts as embedded in organizations, chains of

command and governance structures. Curiously, todays formulation weakens criticallythe political content and context of the challenge and the response. This is clearly reectedin the Colombian ofcial discourse on the roots of political violence, and the methods toeradicate it. For more than four decades from 1958 on, despite all its limits, this discoursetook into account both the military and economic-political dimensions of conict, andproduced recipes (public policies) to face both. Today, an extremely one-sided perspectivehas replaced this point of view. 16

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Documents

Gutierrez, Francisco (2006). Internal Conflict, Terrorism and Crime in Colombia