Colombia

Epilogue on forced displacement

In these 19 interviews, peasant farmers, Indians and Afro-Colombians relate the great drama of forced displacement which they themselves have lived. Some of them have been displaced more than once, and all have them have left behind children, brothers, dead and disappeared spouses in the journey of their flight. They were born in isolated regions, very distant from each other and, nonetheless, all the testimonies have something which identifies them: terror. To abandon one’s regional roots, the labour accumulated during years, one’s family and throw oneself into the abyss, is one of the most difficult torments and uncertainties that a human being can live through. Because in Colombia displacement is an exodus without a promised land and, in fact, without a guide. Though more than 3 million people have fled, the displaced person is a solitary person to whom terror has taught distrust in everyone.

One of the most striking features of the interviews – of which the country is unaware – is the simple fact that the persecuted are as such because at one time, or in some way, they were in disagreement with the regional or local bosses and ended up being accused as subversives. A woman from Palenque de San Basilio – a region near Cartagena de Indias, where a group of slaves took refuge in the XVIII century – affirms “[when] we realized that the politicians were cheating the people, they began to accuse us of being guerrillas. For me, the issue of our displacement was political, because, it was a policy that that old man used, where he was the person who controlled everyone.” It is not just being in disagreement that generates persecution: it’s finding an alternative to the traditional order. Straying from the herd is a crime with a high price. The interviews make clear the distance that exists today between the real political regimen which rules in the regions from which peasant farmers are expelled and the democracy invoked as the basis of the institutional order.

The objective of this essay in none other than to bring to light the connections that exist between the agrarian question, the political structure and the displacement of the population. It thus seeks to highlight the current situation of displacement, within the context of a historic tendency that characterizes our society. The appearance and development of drug trafficking and, as we will see, paramilitarism has had a disastrous effect on the aspirations of the peasant farmer class for agrarian reform. The drug traffickers have conquered enormous territorial power by dispossessing peasant farmers and medium-sized owners of their lands. That does not exclude the buying of large estates, illustrating, to some extent, agreements and even alliances between the old landed aristocracy and the new drug trafficking class. But the dispossession of lands was facilitated by terror, and that terror was achieved through massacres, disappearances, kidnappings, and executions. It was achieved, above all, by the effect of example, in other words, by the brutality and cruelty which the operations were carried out.

The role played by the action or omission of the state in these monstrous events should also be emphasized: a role that does not end with displacement or dispossession. Rather, displacement fulfils another function, that of a political nature: the assassination and displacement of political enemies. Expressed in other way, terror doesn’t have as its only objective the plundering of lands, but also regional political control, something demonstrated in today’s so-called ‘para-political process,’ which has numerous politicians and high-level public employees of the current government criminally compromised. But there is more. The control of the political machine has still another objective: the control of the economic resources of the state. From that, administrative corruption emerges. Narco-paramilitarism is not content with the plunder of private lands, but extends beyond to the plunder of public assets.

To that general outline, it’s worth adding that the combined factors considered are expressed with great clarity in what we agree to call violence and colonization. Violence can be defined as a form of coercion which appeals to terror to impose a determined social conduct, and colonization, as a process of occupation of lands – or territories – which lack title from the state and are, therefore, part of a reservoir of unclaimed national lands. Those two definitions of violence and colonization, ambiguous and rigid at the same time, can help those unfamiliar with such historical themes from falling into error.

This essay purposefully lacks statistics; it is a qualitative reflexion which aspires to a fuller understanding of processes that the official version tends to cover up. A decision was taken to edit testimonies of the displaced rather than to employ the traditional statistical study. We wanted to get to the bottom of the drama which millions of Colombians live without discrediting other analyses that are made in a more cold and distant manner. A word about the citations: they are not authoritative, but rather a bibliographical indication so the reader can amplify aspects of this work.


Historical constant

Violence is not a current phenomenon in the history of Colombia, but a constant. To what is it due? I believe that, in the final analysis, to resistance and to the force with which people seek to conserve and reconstitute their primary social relationships in the face of overbearing political regimes. Violence always accompanies expansionism, call it mercantilism, economic liberalism, or globalization. The demographic catastrophe resulting from the Spanish colonization in America has been established with rigor (Konetze, 1971). In part, it was the product of a war of extermination aimed at domination -- and from that the term of conquest that defines the era -- and, in part, a religious mission of a cultural nature. The two weapons – the sword and the cross – served to displace the native population and seize their lands and riches, or subjugate them, exploit them, and, at best, make them tributaries of the Spanish Crown.

Economic liberalism – a regime which today determines our social organization -- tends to subordinate other social relationships and other cultures, like the Indian, peasant farmer and black cultures. There are two ways of imposing that power: the ideological one – generally religious – and the armed, or political one. Both provoke resistance, but the resistance to armed domination tends to be insurrectional. Resistance causes the dominating forces to appeal to intimidation and terror: severe punishments, exclusion, assassinations, massacres and territorial expulsion. Violence and displacement of the population are historic phenomena that are mutually determining.


Back to topCivil wars

During the XIX century, there were a dozen national civil wars and fifty local uprisings against central or regional power (Pardo, 2004). The great majority of these bloody conflicts had specific emblems (causes) justifying the confrontations. Nonetheless, the interests behind them were simple: centralism or federalism, lay or religious, free trade or protectionism. But the land and the forms of land ownership and distribution prevailed over these emblems. They had a particular significance in the mobilization of troops and the managing of war and its financing.

The political parties that appeared at the beginning of the XIX century, with the declaration of independence, were doctrinally consolidated in the middle of the century and continue today as ideological formations. In general, the governments were constituted as alliances of one party with a sector of its rival, but there were periods – like the Frente Nacional (National Front) [1958-1974] – in which a government grouping was agreed upon, which excluded all political opposition, and which cost, as is known, much blood and instability. The bipartidismo (bi-party system) is and has been in Colombia a system which defends, above all, the political exclusivity of two parties and the exclusion of all tendencies or movements that could serve as rivals in the electoral field. It is, in reality, an exclusive hegemony which has generated as much governability as repression, as much stability as violence, and, even more administrative corruption and impunity. Administrative corruption of the Seventies was the breeding ground for the violence of drug trafficking, as it had been since time immemorial the breeding ground for contraband. And, in effect, drug trafficking began as a branch of contraband and had in its origins identical political protagonists: clientelism and high-level public employees.

In general, the armed conflicts during the entire XIX century began with a proclamation followed by a voluntary or forced recruitment; then came the armed confrontations and, finally, the peace accords, the amnesties, and, almost regularly, the writing of new political constitutions.

With respect to the displacement of the population, there are three aspects that have to be considered: the recruitment which required a suspension of economic life both for the soldiers – usually peasant farmers -- and for the officers, usually landlords; the confiscation of goods from the defeated which was the culmination of the landlords’ work; and, for the peasant farmers, the discharge of troops in remote regions where they tended to stay and reconstruct their lives. There was an intermediate situation: the flight of peasant farmers faced with a recruitment order or the presence of an enemy force.

The opening of many areas of colonization was a product of civil wars. The territorial occupation of unoccupied lands, as an effect of the demobilization of armies, incorporated many lands into the productive system. The coffee colonization that unfolded in the Central and Western mountain ranges, beginning in the middle of the XIX century, was truly significant in that sense. It stabilized during the first half of the following century. The movement of armed forces from one end of the country to the other meant not only displacement and, on occasion, the settling of troops, but also the identification of the population, both armed and civilian, with the concept of nation, as López Michelsen, a Liberal patriarch and president of the country from 1974 to 1978 (López Michelsen, 1974), has affirmed on repeated occasions. Mario Latorre, a notable political analyst and ex-rector of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (National University of Colombia) wrote: “In these civil wars, history was created in fits and starts, national unity was woven rough and course, and the Colombian people were unified.” (Pardo, 2004)


Back to topConservative Hegemony and Liberal Republic

Now, the new constitutions, when they permitted important changes in the economic regime, also implied, for that very reason, displacement of the population. The Constitution of Rionegro (or of 1863) opened the country to free trade and the cultivation of tobacco, indigo and coffee. Extensive areas were ‘civilized’ by displacing the native population and replacing it with a new population in the west of Cundinamarca and Santander, along the basins of the Bogotá, Negro and Lebrija rivers (Rivas, 1972). In the war of 1885 – lost by Liberalism – General Gaitán Obeso mobilized thousands of peasant farmers in his armies from the Upper Magdalena to the Lower Magdalena, where, once the peace agreements and the decrees of amnesty and pardon were signed, the ex-combatants stayed in the regions, working the land and starting their lives over. In the War of a Thousand Days [1899-1902], General Ospina stationed his army, of Antioquian origin, in the department of Córdoba; he appropriated a good portion of the best lands, and his soldiers colonized, with the subsequent displacement of Zenú and Embera Indians, the basins of the Sinú and San Jorge rivers (Sánchez y Aguilera, 2001).

The War of a Thousand Days, which involved the entire country in conflict and led to the loss of Panamá – a state of Colombia – initiated a period known as the Conservative Hegemony [1900-1930], given that the Liberal Party was defeated and totally excluded from political life. In the second decade of the new century, the coffee economy was consolidated, the country received from the United States an indemnity of 25 million dollars for the ‘loss’ of Panamá and international loans increased markedly. It was the so-called Danza de los Milliones (Dance of the Millions) [1925-1929]. The investments in public works and an appreciable growth in manufacturing and the income of the state created a great demand for labour. The peasant farmers, weighed down by a servile regimen of labour, moved massively into the urban centres. Numerous associations and unions were created. (Ocampo, 1997). The emigration to the cities was a kind of displacement, originating in the great economic changes taking place. The majority of peasant farmers were contracted by the new industrial concerns. The unions soon demanded their rights.

The country had not taken note of the new direction when the crisis of the New York Stock Exchange erupted with serious consequences for Colombia. As investments were paralyzed, agricultural and livestock production collapsed, real estate slumped, and unemployment soared. The peasant farmers – now with union experience – returned to the countryside. The landlords had occupied the abandoned lands and the return of the of the workers brought with it agrarian and social confrontations. Well remembered are the conflicts in the regions of Sumapaz, Tequendama, Chaparral. Between 1940 and 1970 those regions saw the harshest confrontations between Liberals and Conservatives. As a result of the agitation, both rural and urban, Liberalism won the elections in 1930 and initiated the so-called Liberal Republic [1930-1946], with a profound constitutional reform, which included legislation on the social function of property (Zalamea, 1999). In 1936, Congress passed Law 200, which, as a source of private property, gave primacy to direct labour on the land over the titles awarded up to that moment by the Spanish Crown and the Republican State. During that period, areas of new colonization were opened that absorbed peasant farmers rejected in other economic areas. Examples of these displacements that led to colonisations can be seen in the west of Cundinamarca, the north of Tolima, and the Magdalena Medio Santandereano (the Middle Magdalena portion of Santander).


Back to topExtractive Economy

One of the most visible developments in the first quarter of the last century was that of the extractive economies: bananas, petroleum and rubber. Banana cultivation opened extensive areas to foreign capital associated at first with national capital in the department of Magdalena. Colombia became one of the principle international producers of the fruit for the North American and German markets. The labour regimen imposed by the companies was abusive and brutal. The system of pay per item facilitated great abuses, leading to a no less aggressive stance by the unions. The clash is known as the massacre of the Banana Workers – recounted by García Márquez in Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) – which begins the colonization of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía of Perijá (Perijá Mountain Range).

Rubber began to be exploited in the southern jungles at the end of the previous century and experienced a big surge during the First World War (Anonymous, 1995). It amounted to a criminal exploitation of Indians who were subjected to slavery through a system of indebtedness. That system consisted of offering credits in merchandise that the natives then repaid in rubber. The difference between the prices of the merchandise offered and the rubber delivered was abysmal and led to a chronic indebtedness of the Indian from which he could almost never escape. The novel, La Vorágine, by José Eustacio Rivera details these atrocities. Entire communities were moved to the rubber plantations, far from their regions, never to return. Many of them, knowing the system, fled to other jungles, and families disintegrated, with the resulting ruin of the culture and traditional authority. The denunciations of Cassemont (Anonymous, 1995), who was appointed by the British Parliament to investigate the situation of the rubber plantations in Colombia’s Putumayo, revealed to the world the savagery that was being committed in the name of progress. Electrical conduction and the production of tires propelled the rubber plantations forward, as latex was the essential raw material of those processes.

Finally, industrial development brought to our jungles a new actor: the petroleum companies. In Catatumbo, on the border with Venezuela, large oil wells were handed over almost unconditionally to foreign companies for their exploitation. Their first victims were the Barí Indians, who lived in the Serranía de Perijá and in the basin of the Catatumbo River. The Colombian Petroleum Company began exploration and production in 1920 and forced the Indians from their territories by bloody means; at the same time, the demand for workers created neighbouring areas of peasant farmer colonization which intensified the expulsions (Villegas, 1968).

Finally, the Hegemonía Conservadora (Conservative Hegemony) created several prisons in the middle of the jungles intended to isolate prisoners and make their escape more difficult. Laws were passed against vagrancy, not only to imprison vagrants and common criminals, but also political opponents. Two prisons were very well known: that of Ituango in Antioquia and that of Acacías in Meta. With the passage of time, the escapes, the transfer of families, and the jailers’ journeys stimulated the creation of routes of colonization that led to the occupation of the Nudo de Paramillo and the Serranía de la Macarena (the Macarena Mountain Range). These regions would be, during the decade of the eighties, the first headquarters of the general command of the paramilitaries and the second headquarters of the FARC guerrillas (Molano, 1989.)


Back to topThe Fifties

The hypothesis on the political violence of these years that will be defended here, can be formulated in the following manner:

In 1936, the Liberal Party managed to impose a series of institutional changes: an agrarian reform which, as indicated above, recognized the social function of property and, therefore, the supremacy of labour over land titles; tax on income; freedom of education and the right to strike (Tirado, 1971). The reaction of Liberal and Conservative landowners, national and foreign businessmen, the Catholic hierarchy, and the official armed corps was one of intransigence. Triumphant fascism in Europe inspired opposition to the reforms and opened diverse fronts of battle to stop them. At the same time, the dispossessed peasant farmers, the unemployed workers and the middle class threatened by the recession sided with Liberalism, which despite popular support – or perhaps because of it – soon began to split little by little between a sector inclined towards an alliance with the Conservative Party, as a way of making the changes less radical, and a more popular sector, which sought to deepen the reforms (Tirado, 1995).

The moderate sector won the elections with Eduardo Santos, a millionaire businessman and owner of El Tiempo -- the nation’s most important newspaper – and decreed a pause – or rather a halt to the reforms. The other sector turned more radical, spurred by poverty, unemployment and repression. It was led by Jorge Eliécer Gaitán [1898-1948], who had a tremendous popular following. Santos ended up allying with the Conservative reaction. Gaitán, who led the reform movement, was assassinated on April 9, 1948 while on the threshold of power, leaving popular aspirations truncated and his movement leaderless. The Conservatives, who had been organizing since the end of the thirties, prepared from their position in the National Congress the atmosphere for an armed reaction that sought – and achieved – a reduction in the Liberal vote, physically eliminating it and inhibiting it through terror. The exemplary assassination, carried out by the armed faithful, sought to make the electoral base of the Liberals more conservative (Guzman et al., 1966). The loyalty was rewarded with the land of the victims, both that of the dead and of the uprooted.

As can be deduced, the scheme of displacement through terror is not novel in the nation’s history. The same mechanism is employed today as was employed during its first great wave 60 years ago. The government back then, which was Conservative, offered impunity to its followers, while the Catholic Church blessed their criminal actions. The landowners of both parties armed their peons to defend their property against the Liberal peasant farmers emboldened and enabled by Law 200 of 1936; the government promoted groups of paramilitary killers who ravaged the countryside and the small towns (Sánchez y Meertens, 1983). The result was macabre: 300,000 citizens were assassinated between 1948 and 1953.

In summary, the reforms that were begun, especially the agrarian reform, were halted by great violence, and their principle leaders were assassinated. It is reasonable to assume that if the number of assassinations was so high, the figure for forced displacement must have been simply horrific. The country never was the same after that period [1948-1965]. During the civil wars, thousands of citizens changed homes – and identities; many regions were colonized by persecuted people seeking a place to hide, and entire regions were depopulated only to be repopulated by peasant farmers loyal to the Conservative governments [1946-1957]. Peasant farmers were expelled from the best lands so that agricultural and livestock companies could be established – sugar refineries in the Valle del Cauca, rice concerns in Tolima, ranching concerns in Urabá – linked to the national or international market and based on salaried labour (Guzmám et al, 1966)

There is copious empirical material and testimonies attesting to the fact that the violence of 1948 to 1965 -- known by historiography as the Violence – was organized by the political leaderships and unfolded through the electoral machinery of both parties. The evidence affirms that the violence rapidly became a murderous crusade against ‘the opponent’ and against anyone who seemed like one. Conservatism had the support of the Church, the police and a big proportion of the landlords and small landowners; Liberalism, the support of sectors of the provincial middle class, salaried workers and loyal peasant farmers. The Army intervened on the side of the Conservatives. Little by little, the ‘crusade’ against Liberalism and the communists became a scorched-earth campaign. Entire populations were forced to flee in the face of the Conservative terror. (Lleras Restrepo, 1955). Massacres, exemplary and macabre crimes, kidnappings and forced displacement were all used to drive the people from their lands and open up space for others, who were faithful to the victimizers, and who occupied the abandoned property. It’s enough to cite the events in the Western Mountain Range which, having been liberal, was “made Conservative” with terrific violence. The Llano (The Plains) were subject to Conservatizing forces in the same way. The Central Mountain Range – between Tolima and Valle – was “Liberalized” that way as well. (Molano, 1996).

In general, victims and victimizers had the same social origin: they were peasant farmers. The difference was in popular support; in other words, in the guarantee of future impunity, because it was an irregular civil war that counted on the eventual defeat of the opponent. Impunity implied the right to usurp the goods and the lands of the enemy: in the war of One Thousand Days the aphorism that “who loses the war, loses the estate” became popular (Pardo, 2004). The displacements of the population had two principal effects: the concentration of the land – the best lands – in the hands of the bosses who armed their peons against their enemies, and the change in the political colour of the large regions through reoccupation. One or the other of those effects drove colonization towards regions that had been unoccupied until that moment, and, of course, spurred urban growth.

In 1953, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla [1953-1957] backed by the Liberal Party and a sector of the Conservative Party, staged a coup and immediately decreed amnesty for those who had risen up in arms. The peace agreements signed by the general at the beginning of his government led, in some regions like Tolima, to the exchange among peasant farmers of usurped properties and the recovery of farms by some of the displaced (Guzmán el al., 1966). It could be concluded that the exchange illustrated that relationship between violence and land. It inspired in many people – like the future presidents Lleras Camargo and Lleras Restrepo – the idea that an agrarian reform was the secret to peace.

To some extent, land reform was one of the bases of the National Front [1958-1974] signed by the two parties in 1956 to topple Rojas and recover power. The initiative was later backed politically and economically by the United States, with the Alliance for Progress, a strategy adopted by President John F. Kennedy [1961-1963] to stem the continental influence of the Cuban revolution [1959] (Lleras Camargo, 1997). Both the Rojas agreements and then the agrarian policy adopted by the National Front, spurred what were-called the “managed colonisations” supported by the World Bank, with three pilot projects: Saravena (Arauca), Ariari (Meta) and la Mona (Caquetá), which to a certain extent accelerated the colonization of the piedemonte Llanero (Foothills of the Plains) between Venezuela and Ecuador, accommodating important contingents of colonization, and, at the same time, preparing the way for the emergence of agricultural and livestock companies. These companies were generated in the chronic and cyclical economic crises of the peasant farmer colonizers. At the same time, in other regions, transport projects of great magnitude were built, which opened new routes to colonization: Magdalena Medio (the Middle Magdalena) was crossed from south to north by a railroad; the highway al Mar (to the sea) (Medellín-Turbo) was finished; the Marginal de la Selva was begun and the connections between Santa Marta and Riohacha and between Riohacha and Valledupar and Bucaramanga were completed. Each stretch of road created a point of colonization and then a small town. From these precarious villages, a new front of colonization emerged. Millions of hectares were integrated into the economic life of the country between 1955 and 1970. These processes – which in their core were true exoduses – traced a new human geography.


Back to topThe Sixties

Rojas sought to prolong his mandate beyond simple arbitration, and the Liberal Party, knowing that it had a majority, went into opposition. Rojas sought unconditional support from the post-war United States and the Colombian oligarchy and decreed a war against communism. A student demonstration was repressed with bullets in Bogotá [1954], causing several deaths; the government blamed the incident on the Communist Party and banned its activities. At the same time, the radicalized peasant farmer movement attacked. The movement had not handed in all its weapons to Rojas Pinilla in 1953 and had political influence in the central departments of Cundinamarca and Tolima. This peasant farmer movement, despite having signed a peace, conserved the emblem (cause) of the agrarian reform movement. It was known as the war of Villarrica and was, in reality, the first chapter of the Cold War in Colombia.

The United States tried new counterinsurgent strategies and tactics, led by the recently created School of the Americas. A gigantic operation of siege and destruction, backed by aerial bombardment – napalm made its debut – was carried out during 1955 against the peasant farmer regions of Sumapaz and Tequendama, in Cundinamarca. The peasant farmers in this massif – the refuge for those from the south of Tolima and the north of Cauca – took up arms again. They tried to confront, without success, the government offensive, entrenching themselves in fixed positions, in a kind of native Maginot Line called ‘la Cortina’ (The Curtain). Aerial supremacy defeated this strategy, and the movements’ leaders resorted to guerrilla warfare and organized flight, both of troops and of the civilian population. It was one of the nation’s most massive displacements, still unknown by the nation’s historiography. Peasant farmer self-defence groups were created. They fled east and south; they set themselves up in the jungle and colonized entire regions, where they tried to create a relatively autonomous and self-sufficient government.

It was the first phase of the so-called ‘armed colonization’ (Molano, 1991). Shortly afterwards, the government accused the settlements of being independent republics and attacked them. The self-defence forces resisted the offensive with success and, though they were displaced, escaped destruction. From their regrouping, the FARC emerged in 1964, with an ample theatre of operations: north of Cauca, south of Tolima, west of Meta and the entire massif of Sumapaz in the centre of Cundinamarca. The FARC would become one of the oldest guerrilla movements in the world, if you consider that some of its commanders rose up in arms in 1948. From the regions gripped by irregular war during that period, thousands of families fled to other regions, from which they would be displaced in the Eighties and the Nineties. The testimonies presented in this book show that the road of the displaced is very long and begins very far in the past.

The principle zones of influence of the peasant farmer self-defence forces became the eastern foothills and Magdalena Medio. During the Seventies and Eighties this tendency continued and strengthened. The armed groups were transformed little by little, under the influence of the Communist Party into regular guerrillas of the FARC. This military formation, supported by agrarian unions and neighbourhood committees, held local power of great influence. It was also accepted, to the extent that it not only demanded land but made other complementary demands, like for credits, roads, schools, hospitals and political freedoms. The peasant farmer movement of the Thirties and Forties reappeared in areas of colonization in the Sixties, but, especially in the Seventies, when the bipartidismo (bi-party system) – as will be seen later – wiped out the timid agrarian reform (Ocampo, 1997).

The guerrillas were the head and arms of this new peasant farmer attempt at colonization, which represented a form of displacement, or rather, resolution, regrouping the affected under its ideological and armed authority. At a local level, the guerrillas exerted an absolute power which governed almost all social relations: from the distribution of unoccupied lands to the organization of beauty contests; from the registration of births to the collective construction of roads (Molano, 1998). They were authoritarian executive, legislative and judicial powers. As such, they imposed by force a tax system based on voluntary or obligatory ‘collaborations’ paid by the colonizers or on ‘vacunas’ (inoculations) extortions obligatorily paid by every profitable company: estates, ranches, pawn shops, distributors, traders, transporters. At the pace and to the extent that the armed confrontations between the guerrillas and the security forces intensified, this local government and tax power was extended and deepened. Seen from the perspective of today, these independent republics and the movement of peasant self-defence forces -- which transformed into mobile guerrilla forces and were extended throughout the country (Magdalena Medio, Urabá, Santander, Antioquia, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the whole eastern foothills) -- were partly a product of the exclusionary nature of the bi-party system (bipartidismo) of the Frente Nacional (National Front) and of the Cold War (Alape, 1996).

During the post-war period, the army of the United States forged hemispheric pacts of Pan-American defence, based on the doctrine of national security. Colombian military schools taught the thesis of the ‘internal enemy,’ a camouflaged extension of the external enemy, which, at the time, was the Soviet Union. The enemy was not, of course, a uniformed soldier, but a soldier dressed as a civilian and infiltrated in social organizations, who collaborated with the national armed movements, like the guerrillas. This thesis, inspired indirectly by the Maoist strategy of China’s Long March, led theorists of irregular war to highlight the role of the civilian population in such war and formulate strategies to control such connections. The civilian was considered from that time on a potential – or real – enemy. It was thus considered advisable to organize civilians under regular military commands that counteracted the internal enemy. (Noche y niebla or Night and Fog, 2006).

In Colombia, Law 48 of 1968 was emitted, authorizing the military organization of civilians in a kind of national guard, a figure which disappeared after the last civil war. Legally this was the basis for creating self-defence groups that didn’t fully develop until the end of the Seventies, precisely when drug trafficking emerged. As a representative of the Cámara (Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress) for the Liberal Party, the future president of Colombia, César Gaviria [1990-1994] denounced the existence in the country of some 600 paramilitary groups, as the irregular armed forces of the right have been called. Their name comes from the cooperation which they give to the legal armed forces. Therefore, it’s not such so simple to say that the paramilitaries arose as a legitimate civilian self-defence. In reality, they were born as a military project, conceived in Washington, and welcomed by the Colombian army and government. And they rapidly began to receive economic assistance from the guerrillas’ enemies: cattle ranchers, landlords, traders and, unquestionably, the security forces (Piccoli, 2005). Organizing civilians against the insurgency responded to the image of draining the water from the fish tank, whether through open recruitment, secret collaboration or simply through terror: all methods which are still in use today. The image of the water in the fish tank was inspired by Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara: the guerrillas should move within the civilian population as a fish moves through water.


Back to topThe Seventies

Law 200 of 1936 – several times cited here – in recognizing the social function of property, ignored the rights acquired by real titles, by tax titles or by simple titles of force; Law 100 of 1944 returned some of the guarantees removed by that norm (Kalmanovitz, 1944). From my point of view, that modification, which was a true agrarian counter-reform, contributed decidedly to la Violencia (The Violence) of the Fifties. It is precisely that mediation that explains how, once the peace was signed through the alternating of the parties in power, an agrarian reform was also agreed upon (Law 61 of 1959)), which received a few years later the political and economic backing of the Alliance for Progress. A decade later, the balance was very poor: a million hectares distributed, 90% of them with titles in unoccupied zones or zones of colonization. The reform didn’t have many defenders, but the instability and the concerns that it created among the large landowners strengthened its long-time enemies. Lleras Restrepo, who had advanced the reform as president of the Republic between 1966 and 1970, tried, upon seeing himself cornered by its enemies, to belatedly transform it into a peasant farmer movement (LLeras Restrepo, 1985). A bi-party agreement of 1974, called the Acuerdo de Chicoral (The Chicoral Agreement), retracted Law 61 of 1959 and gave back all the guarantees to the big landowners that they had demanded for investing in the land. With the Green Revolution in process, it also created credit mechanisms – Law 5a – to finance the accelerated development of commercial agriculture.

At the beginning of the Seventies, irreconcilable forces clashed: that which Lleras Restrepo had tired to create and which gained political power with the creation of the Asociacíon Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos (National Association of Peasant Workers) (Anuc) and the counter-reform, which validated the landlords’ power. Thousand of hectares on large estates were invaded by peasant farmers, especially on the Atlantic Coast. The security forces repressed the movement, and the government divided the peasant farmer movement into a soft branch, protected by the state and accepted by the landlords, and a hard one, which insisted on a reform with the motto: “land for those who work it” (Kalmanovitz, 1994).

A new chapter opened in agrarian history. Colonization, which was at base a movement of displacement towards unoccupied lands, has been a political resource used by the state to avoid distributing property. And it has been the path chosen by peasant farmers when they are expelled from their lands, when they lose a war or when the cities are overrun by people and unemployment reigns. In the circumstances of the middle Seventies, this mixture of contradictory tendencies arose and the colonization of new lands gained new energy. It should be noted that during those years the import substitution model, conceived by the Comisión Económica para América Latina (Economic Commission for Latin America) (Cepal), showed its limits as growth in the secondary sector slowed (Bejarano, 1987). It also showed its limits in the inability of the government of Misael Pastrana [1970-1974] to synchronize the massive migration to the cities, as a result of the reactivation of industry, with the construction of housing. Urban unemployment led a large number of peasant farmers to move to the areas of colonization and cut down jungles to expand the agricultural frontier. It was in these regions that the seed of drug trafficking fell “as if falling from the sky” – as the peasant farmers themselves said.


Back to topColonization and drug trafficking

Marijuana arrived in the country as a commercial crop of cannabis brought by businessmen and as a prohibited herb imported by Mexican technicians of the banana companies. The first line wasn’t very successful and the second was transformed into a local, small-scale crop for the underworld. Nonetheless, the Vietnam War caused demand in the United States to soar. The Peace Corps – volunteers of the Alliance for Progress who worked in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta -- discovered the quality of the local marijuana and became the first small-scale growers and marketers of it. Locals involved in contraband and ex-pilots from the Vietnam War completed the picture. Colombian marijuana became famous in the United States. For Colombia, it was an export crop that very quickly spread throughout the areas of colonization. It was a widespread experiment that, nonetheless, created a culture: of easy money; of the corruption of authorities; of impunity; of a generalized familiarity with weapons. North American supply was soon substituted for the Colombian product with the help of the fumigating of crops here and tolerance there.

The hole left by ‘marimba Colloquial way of referring to marijuana’ was immediately filled by the trafficking of cocaine base from Perú and Bolivia, which was transformed into cocaine in Colombia and exported to the United States and Europe, where the market was expanding, also as a result of the Vietnam War. Coca is a wild, Andean crop.

First marijuana and then coca arrived to the zones of colonization for two reasons: the poverty of the peasant farmers -- in their state of permanent bankruptcy – and the weak and corrupt presence of the state. The guerrillas were fiercely opposed to marijuana and coca crops, believing that it was a strategy of the enemy – principally North American – to corrupt the colonizers and, by enriching them, deprive the insurgency of their social base. But on that front the colonizers offered a dilemma: the guerrillas had to either permit the new crops or the peasant farmers would turn their backs on them. The guerrillas opted for the first alternative, realizing that they could participate in the bonanza through the taxes they controlled. That way the peasant farmers’ ‘collaboration’ would increase as their income increased. The guerrillas jealously guarded the coca crops and the coca trade, as well as the trade in coca processing chemicals, so as to be able to charge a ‘collaboration’ both from the peasant farmers and all the other economic agents of the business. At the same time – and to the same or a greater extent – the competent authorities – the army and the police, the mayors and the judges – collected bribes and the priests, “narco-charity.’ It was an era of generalized illegal bonanza to which no social force was stranger. The tradition of the rubber plantations was reborn. And, for diverse reasons, the geography of the two traditions coincided (Salazar, 2001).

Colonization has been not only an escape valve, but also a tool of capital accumulation. The law of colonization has been and continues to be one of: “you cut it down, I will collect it.” The colonizer is a worker stripped of all resources, except that of family labour. He sometimes even lacks tools. He confronts on his own an incredibly powerful jungle in very adverse conditions. He has to appeal to usury to be able to work and live while he awaits the first harvests, which, as is obvious, he already owes in debt. The richness of the land occasionally allows him a minimal margin of profit, a breath that feeds his hope. Nonetheless, in general, he cuts down the jungle and makes himself a farm with the debts acquired from traders. It’s the same as saying that his work – represented in ‘improvements33 Editor’s note: refers to the work the last possessor has carried out on the plot of land, whether in construction or crops ’ will end up sooner or later in the hands of his creditors, who will concentrate many accumulated farms in a large estate. In truth, the colonizer is legally dispossessed of his land and colonization is a process by which the large landowners (latifundistas) expand the frontier. The colonizers become true professionals in that transference, and thus, live by clearing farms, surviving. In other words, permanent colonization is at base an expression of permanent displacement. Many colonizers end up as peons on the land they cleared, others insist on testing horizons (Molano, 1991).

The growing crisis of the peasant farmer economies of colonization – the lack of roads, scarce credit, the greed of the landowners – has had two consequences: the strengthening of the guerrillas and the “cocalizing” of colonization. They are separate phenomena, gestated, nonetheless, in the same womb: the political exclusion of the opposition and the bankruptcy of the peasant farmer class. The decomposition of the peasant farmer economy and the splintering of its social structure makes for a true explosion, and, therefore, the systematic and massive displacement of the population. With family ties, the neighbourhoods and the entire network of social relationships based on automatic solidarity destroyed, the society of peasant farmers releases a ‘demographic surplus’ and a powerful political energy that in Colombia – as has happened in other countries and in other contexts – is susceptible to transformation into violence and armed conflict. The peasant farmer wars to which history has been witness record it as such. On the other hand, the concentration of property, urban unemployment and low salaries have channelled the decomposition of the peasant farmer class toward the opening of new lands where the state is absent, except to repress all expressions of discontent and disagreement. It is the great historical nuance which explains the origin of the permanent phenomenon of displacement, the uncontrolled and disorderly growth of urban centres and the explosive expansion of colonization.

For the peasant farmers, the illegal crops appeared as the face of a new bonanza, just as rubber, skins, gold and emeralds had been. The peasant farmers soon saw for themselves that with coca, their work was compensated and their effort recognized for the first time. The illegal crops were for the peasant farmers the embodiment of their dreams and the embodiment of the demands they made on the state: commercialization, credit, roads and access to health, education, and entertainment. In a very short time, the colonizers escaped from chronic bankruptcy and became integrated into the world of consumerism. The guerrillas were astonished. They felt that their chair had been moved. They had lived from peasant farmer collaboration and protection and they feared that the illegal crops would erode their social base by enriching it. They considered marijuana and coca as weapons of imperialism and categorically prohibited their cultivation and commercialization until the day when the peasant farmers told the FARC: “either you permit us coca or we abandon you.” At the same time, the guerrillas saw that the areas flooded with money, and therefore, the ‘taxable’ – or ‘extortionable’ -- base increased. The insurgency opted for accepting a done deed and used the new bonanza in its favour, a bonanza which – in a strange fate –coincided with the political and ideological crisis of communism. While the guerrillas were left orphans of known horizons, they paradoxically found a solid economic source to contribute to the financing of an ever more intense war in a context where the social conflict got worse and the weakness of the state was clear.

It should be noted that the guerrillas weren’t the only force that benefited from drug trafficking. The chain that links direct producers to final consumers is constituted by parallel interests that permit the flourishing and the reproduction of the phenomenon. The sellers of chemical precursors, many of them illicit -- gasoline, permanganate, acids, cement, light salts, acetone – are an integral part of the business, and large capital, created by drug trafficking, was legalized by that route. Large fortunes were also made supplying local and national demand generated by the river of dollars that entered the market; in that sense, contraband held a prominent place. At the same time, the traditional landlords suddenly found themselves with a demand for land that increased the value of their properties and permitted, through the accelerated concentration of land, a real agrarian counter-reform. But perhaps no sector benefited as much as the legally constituted authorities – the security forces, judges, mayors, members of congress. The increase in bribes corrupted the political system from top to bottom. The state, in its multiple forms, was transformed into an organ for participating in all drug trafficking’s activities. And, without a doubt, the conditions that allowed the machinery of drug trafficking to function smoothly were the patrimonial nature of the state and the lack of political opposition. The voices and forces that were opposed to the phenomenon and which denounced the venality of the authorities ended up brutally wiped out or stigmatized as collaborators of the mafias or the guerrillas. Without the impunity and the tradition of corruption it would have been more difficult for drug trafficking to grow in the country. The big partners of drug trafficking were not only hunger and the needs of the people. They were also, without doubt, the corruption and corruptibility of the authorities. The United States State Department’s designation of the political system as a “narco-democracy” at the end of the Eighties was not completely off the mark (Tokatlian y Bagley, 1990)


Back to topThe Eighties

The social conflict had been getting worse since the end of the previous decade. Land invasions, labour strikes, protest mobilizations, interruptions of land travel and national stoppages, occurred one after the other. In areas of colonization, the social ferment began to be felt at the beginning of the Eighties. The colonizers of the Sierra de la Macarena (Macarena Mountain Range), faced with a situation in which the government could not recognize occupied lands as property because they were in the intangible area of a national park, organized a series of protest marches to regional capitals, like Villavicencio and San José de Guaviare. Titling for the lands they occupied was their emblem. But at the same time, they made demands on the building of roads, the cheapening of credits, subsidies for commercialization and respect for life. That’s when the assassination of leaders of the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union) (UP) began. This was a political party that emerged from the peace talks between the government of Belisario Betancur [1984-1988] and the guerrillas of the FARC. In the midst of the terror, all the mobilizations ended in agreements, and all the agreements went unfulfilled. Some projects taken on by the government were partially realized, which, added to the disappearance and the assassination of civic leaders and leaders of the UP, led to new mobilizations (Americas Watch, 1993).

It is interesting to note that little was said about coca. It was an unspoken factor. The government didn’t want to recognize the fact so as not to have to sanction it, and the colonizers hid it so as not to add a new crime to their precarious legal condition as invaders. Public officials and peasant leaders, nonetheless, dealt with the topic in private. In fact, for the colonizers, it was a negotiation card. The strategy consisted simply in trading coca for development and the presence of the state.

But the problem grew. The areas of cultivation expanded, the commercial activity was truly frenetic. But the response of the state was tardy. Seen from the perspective of today, it’s easier to see that the scorn around the issue and the failure of the agreements were perhaps not that spontaneous. The country was getting rich and all the economic sectors, legal or not, benefited from the bonanza. When President Betancur demanded that the guerrillas, as a condition for negotiations, renounce kidnapping and offensive operations, the guerrillas could give up both things without affecting their military force. At the end of Betancur’s government, despite the tragedy of the Palacio de Justicia (Palace of Justice), taken with great violence by the guerrilla movement M-19 – and retaken in the same way by the National Army – and the now systematic assassination of leaders and members of the UP, the possibility of an experimental and local negotiation in Caguán on eradication of illegal crops emerged. The negotiation involved the eradication of crops in exchange for programs of agricultural and livestock promotion and the titling of lands (Pardo, 1996). But the project was frustrated at the beginning of the Barco government, when the talks in Puerto Rico (Caquetá) were broken off and the process of negotiation begun by Betancur, came to an end, eliminating, in the process, the Caguán programs. Then came the fumigation of coca crops. This new repressive strategy displaced the population. (Vargas, 1999). The thesis of a narco-guerrilla had been officially adopted by the army, and the government, though it didn’t totally accept the thesis, never disavowed it.

Nonetheless, in the south of Cauca and the north of Nariño, the United Nations began a program of crop substitution with the participation of the communities and the support of the state. The condition –given the policies of the organization – stipulated the incompatibility of the programs with fumigation. But the initiative failed for three reasons: 1) the crops that replaced the coca – yuca (cassava) and dried plantains – didn’t have a market either guaranteed or previously agreed upon; 2) a good part of the substitution was done with coffee at a time when the world agreement on coffee quotas was falling apart; and 3)the Cali Cartel introduced with very enticing bait the cultivation of poppies so that part of the money that the peasant farmers received as credit for crop substitution financed the planting of the flower. Despite these failures, the United Nations insisted in its projects and inaugurated one in Guaviare and another in Putumayo. Those projects also failed, thus closing that chapter.

At the end of Barco’s government [1986-1990], an agreement was reached which was as promoted by the government as it was poor in its results. The Cali Cartel, a true mafia syndicate of drug traffickers from the Valle del Cauca region, accumulated lands in the flat areas of Cauca and el Valle and one of the estates that it wanted to acquire was occupied by Indians, which led to the terrible massacre of El Nilo. The Indians, who, in fact, had been accepting the cultivation of poppies and tolerating at great risk the occupation of their reservations by drug traffickers decided to ask the government for help in eradicating poppies from all their territories. It was the agreement of Jambaló. The state committed itself to carry out development programs agreed upon between the council of Indian leaders and the government in exchange for a total eradication. The new government rejected little by little the commitment and the agreements were not fulfilled. The fumigation of the Macizo Colombiano (Colombian Massif) and the Central Cordillera (Central Mountain Range) then began. The Indian response was the seizure of highways, marches on Popayán, and the semi-paralysis of the economy of Cauca.

During the government of César Gaviria, peasant farmer protests were organized in Magdalena Medio, Catatumbo, the Atrato, Vaupés, Guaviare and Caquetá, which sought to commit the Colombian State to development plans as a way of leaving behind the coca economy. The plans, incidentally, were guaranteed by the United Nations and the United States. The agreements were fulfilled only partially.

In the meantime, the rupture of talks with the Coordinadora Guerrillera Simón Bolívar (The Guerrilla Coordinating Committee Símon Bolívar) – made up of the FARC, the ELN, the EPL and M-19 – in Caracas and Tlaxcala, spurred armed confrontation (Pardo, 1996). The guerrillas dedicated all their efforts to arming themselves, using as sources of financing, kidnapping, extortion and the ‘gramaje’ – a ‘tax’ on the production and commercialization of coca base and poppy latex. The theatre of war expanded notably and, after the attack on the headquarters of the general staff of the FARC called Casaverde, covered nearly the entire country: the troop strength of the FARC consisted of 60 fronts with some 10,000 men.

The military expansion of the guerrilla movement was facilitated, of course, by the cultivation of coca and poppies. But the role of the economic opening (liberalization) also has to be taken very much into account, an opening which came of age during the Gaviria Government. The commercial agriculture that had been declining, as a result of measures of openness (liberalizing measures) since the beginning of the Eighties, and, to a lesser extent, because of the importation of food which the abundance of foreign reserves-coca precipitated, entered into a definitive crisis. Many holders of capital sought to take the edge off of bankruptcy by associating with drug trafficking and investing in cattle ranching, one of the few activities protected by tariffs. The importation into the country – or entry into the country as contraband – of corn, rice, cotton, sorghum and soy beans dealt a devastating blow to domestic production, and the cultivation of coca and poppies entered their golden era. Another highly significant factor was the reduction of raw material imports from Peru and Bolivia for the national production of cocaine. Colombia stopped being an intermediary to become the world’s principle producer of cocaine.


Back to topThe Nineties

The Samper Government [1994-1998], in light of its political crisis and the failure of its attempts to reinitiate dialogue with the guerrillas, increased the fumigation of illegal crops throughout the country. The three most visible results of that strategy were first, that crops were displaced to new areas with the usual contamination and destruction of natural resources; secondly, that the prices of coca and heroin, which might have experienced a significant drop because of oversupply, remained high; and thirdly, an immediate response by the peasant communities. At the urging of the FARC and the ELN, gigantic mobilizations were organized in Magdalena Medio, Guaviare, Caquetá, Putumayo and Cauca. The planes fumigated, not only the illegal crops, but legal crops as well; not only large, entrepreneurial plantations of coca –which in reality were very few, less than one-fifth of the total – but small peasant farmer and Indian plots. The repression of the demonstrations added another point to peasant farmer demands, which were still the same: commercialization, titles, credits, roads, schools and health. Organized by the guerrillas or not, the demands were no different than what politicians stir up at election time, nor from what, with reasonable logic, might contribute to colonizers substituting their coca crops for other crops. The guerrillas benefited not so much from the demonstrations, but from the repression and the failure to fulfil the pacts invariably agreed upon by the peasant farmers and government (Rangel, 2003).

The private armed groups are part of a long and solid tradition and, have been, in recent history, the ideal lever for expelling and displacing peasant farmers, Indians, and Afro-Colombians from their regions of origin. As indicated before, the government authorized the army to created armed civilian groups in the Sixties, a norm that was declared unconstitutional in the Eighties. But in the mid-Nineties they reappeared as ‘security cooperatives’ (known as Convivir) to be again declared illegal by the Constitutional Court in 2000. The drug traffickers and the ranchers, the traders and the foreign companies had financed paramilitary groups whose function was to defend with great violence the constituted order and repress local demands that departed from clientelist control.

In the Nineties, drug trafficking gained strength to an astonishing extent. On the economic plane, the drug traffickers amassed the best lands and invested heavily in the financial world; on the social plane, they became a new class, with an especially aggressive culture. The issue of land concentration throughout the country alarmed many sectors of public opinion. The World Bank in its latest report (2002) affirmed that 0.4% of landowners held 62% of the land. Serious studies by the Universidad de los Andes (Los Andes University) speak of 4.4 million hectares of the best lands in the hands of the drug traffickers. They also say that 60% of the displaced had to abandon their lands to paramilitary groups (Codhes44 Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento Forzado (The Consultancy for Human Rights and Forced Displacement) y Unicef, 2002). With the population displaced and their land concentrated in a few hands, the paramilitaries acquired enormous local power and became lords of war. Their properties functioned as dollar “laundries55 Editor’s note: refers to companies for legalizing money originating in drug trafficking ” and became the bases of their illegal businesses.

With all that, they became involved in political activity that complicated the scheme of traditional domination. The drug traffickers participated directly or indirectly in electoral campaigns and their interference in all the branches of government increased considerably. At the same time, their control over paramilitarism became striking. It could be said that drug trafficking came to have – and still has, and to what an extent! – a non-institutionalized, legal political branch and an armed branch, which the state half combats, but which has gone in a decade from having 1,500 armed men to having more than 30,000. This structure has had two big effects: on one hand, it has intensified the war against the guerrillas and, on the other, it has accelerated and justified the North American intervention, both political and military. Today, Plan Colombia and the extradition treaty are the keys to the United States’ efforts to control public order in the country. The result has been a steady weakening of the Colombian state. Plan Colombia is a political, economic and military cooperation agreement, signed by President Andrés Pastrana [1998-2000], between Colombia and the United States. The original idea was to support the peace policy of the government and combat drug trafficking, but, as a result of the failure of talks with the FARC and the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became a counter-insurgency program (Téllez et al., 2002).

The government’s methods for combating drug trafficking have been unfortunate and, seen in the proper light, counterproductive. With great sacrifices, the so-called Medellín and Cali cartels have been formally dismantled, but in reality drug trafficking is a real hydra de Lerna66 Editor’s note: terrible water monster in Greek mythology having the shape of a serpent with various heads, each of which, upon being cut, grew back as two. It lived in the lake of Lerna in the Argolid and was destroyed by Hércules on his second try. and its activities continue with new modalities. The death or extradition of its big capos (bosses) has not only failed to weaken drug trafficking, it has strengthened it: 90% of the cocaine consumed in the United States and Europe is Colombian. The eradication campaigns – forced, voluntary, manual or by aerial fumigation with glyphosate – have experienced serious setbacks: mines, guerrilla attacks, planes shot down and denunciations of spraying over crops that Plan Colombia itself has financed. Those setbacks have meant that the objectives have not been truly fulfilled. The situation is so compromising that the newspaper El Tiempo, always inclined to favour the United States, wrote in an editorial: “Plan Colombia promised to reduce coca in the country by half within six years; with that period almost up, there is today, according to the latest report, almost the same amount of coca as there was in 2000.” (El Tiempo, 2006). If seen from the perspective of the real area of coca or the international price of cocaine, it is not a victory for the government. Rather, in terms of displacement of crops – which implies felling thousands of hectares of forest – and, therefore, in terms of displacement of people, the result has been highly negative: “The eradication of these crops has contributed – says Codhes – to the displacement of 36,000 people [between 1998 and 2002].” Today, the problem of displacement, both of crops and of people, is affecting Colombia’s relationship with its neighbours, especially, Ecuador and Venezuela: Ecuador will present its case to international courts and, especially, in the Hague. Venezuela has supported that decision and condemned fumigation in border areas, considering it an aggression.


Back to topDemocratic Security

In terms of public perception, Democratic Security – the emblematic program of the current government – has been a success and it’s argued rightly that today you can travel overland to the majority of places where before it was risky to go. The most important goal of Democratic Security has been to strike hard at the insurgency, so that the political negotiation with the insurgency will be less costly for the government and the establishment. The government provides statistics on the sustained and important reduction of homicides and kidnappings. Nonetheless, doubts abound with respect to the methodologies that the state uses to compile the statistics, not only in the security area but also in the economic one. The most emblematic case was that of the dismissal of the head of the Departamento Nacional de Estadísticas (National Department of Statistics) (DANE) for having revealed figures of growth and unemployment that didn’t suit Planeación Nacional (National Planning Department). Nonetheless, the big-scale military operations, such as those executed by the FARC against military posts between 1996 and 2000, have been substantially reduced. Not, however, the confrontations and ambushes, which are on the increase and also sustained. (Rangel, 2003). It’s clear that the FARC has been forced to suspend, perhaps definitively, its ambition for a strategy of regular war with confrontations against large masses of the army.

The Comisión Colombiana de Juristas (The Colombian Commission of Jurists) – a human rights ngo that has consultative status at the United Nations – has presented figures that contradict the official ones and show a very different panorama: it recognizes the reduction in kidnapping and homicides, but denounces the increase in forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions and forced displacement (Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, 2007).

The demobilization of some 30,000 armed paramilitaries did reduce the crime rate in the months that followed the formal acts of the accords of Ralito (2003) signed between the Uribe Government and the general staff of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia) (AUC); but only some 2,500 paramilitary commanders have availed themselves of the benefits of the law: there are 3,000 medium-level commanders who, according to the government itself, have been lost sight of and there are some 5,000 individuals more who, according to jailed paramilitary commanders, have taken up arms again for two reasons: first, because the government has partially broken the agreements, and second, because the vacuum left by the AUC upon withdrawing from zones has allowed the FARC to return. The first issue leads one to ask about the real accords made at Ralito. The second puts in doubt the real results of Democratic Security, which is showing its critics to be right in the sense that the FARC has been adopting a kind of pull back and is far from being significantly defeated militarily. The withdrawal of some guerrilla fronts to border zones has had two consequences: diplomatic difficulties with Venezuela and Ecuador, for now, and the displacement of Colombians to those nations. Ecuador has declared that it has 50,000 refugees and Venezuela has nationalized some of the displaced for different reasons, among them, displacement because of war (Valencia, 2002).

The Colombian government is currently trying to get new military aid from the United States government, which considers President Uribe a principal partner. The U.S. Congress, now with a Democratic majority, has made public some reservations, but assistance on the order of $5 billion dollars is taken for granted over the next three years to strengthen Plan Colombia, now baptized as Plan Victoria (Victory Plan). At the same time, the Colombian Fiscalía (Attorney General’s Office) reported that the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes (National Narcotics Office) has confiscated in recent days assets worth more than $8 billion dollars from drug traffickers and paramilitaries, an indication of the economic power that the paramilitaries have and their demonstrated political penetration.

The Ley de Justicia y Paz (Justice and Peace Law), approved by the Colombian Congress to complement the accords of Ralito, has begun to be only partially implemented, among other reasons, because the judicial system has been overrun by the appearance before the Fiscalía of just 10% of the potential beneficiaries. But it has had a big effect in the area of public truth, thanks to amendments the Corte Constitucional (Constitutional Court) made when it was being reviewed: the Court didn’t accept considering paramilitaries as committing political crimes – they can be extradited – and requires them to respond with legal and illegal assets. It also requires the Fiscalía to challenge the spontaneous declarations of the accused. The amendment has put the government in a serious predicament. The paramilitary leaders have accused it of treason and some very important ones, like Vicente Castaño and Martín Llanos, have refused to accept the law. The development of the law and its application have had unexpected collateral effects: in the first place, it has begun a process, called “parapolitico” (para-political), which has begun to trace the map of relationships between politicians, drug traffickers and paramilitaries, lines which threaten to reach into the world of the big businessmen – including international investors – as well as landlords, judicial and high-level military officers. Secondly, everything indicates that the networks of solidarity between those social sectors have begun to break and could put at serious risk the governability or, even, the stability of the current political regime. The series of effects undesired – nor calculated – by the government in pushing forward the legalization of paramilitaries and drug traffickers has permitted an understanding of the model which determined the mechanics of the process. Drug trafficking and paramilitarism opted for the concentration of land for various reasons: first, because of the peasant farmer extraction, or at least rural extraction, of the great majority of paramilitaries, even of those commanders who came from the security forces; secondly, because of the solidity that traditionally characterizes large-scale property and permits the effective and safe laundering of money, and thirdly, because power over the land is regional political power and that constitutes a route to national power. In the end, the strategy of the drug traffickers and the paramilitaries consisted – perhaps still consists – in an assault on political and economic power, without a doubt, with the collaboration of large sectors of the establishment. That puts in doubt whether the whole truth will be revealed, especially when the government and the Fiscalía count on the acceptance and the trust of the great majority of the international community. Under the cloak of the reduction of kidnapping and homicides a great fraud might be in the works, the legal recognition of a new power, whose bases and conduct have been openly terrorist. The expression of this diabolical strategy is the displacement of millions of peasant farmers, who won’t be able to return to their lands until justice is done and their return is backed by guarantees, something which cannot happen unless the international community participates with full independence: if the foreign ministries look at the ongoing processes from an economic and colonialist perspective.


Back to topConclusion

Eric Hobsbawm [1917], a notable English historian and authority on our reality, has said that the two most persistence characteristics of Colombian history are violence and colonization. Since the original theft carried out by the conquistadores, who later became encomenderos (colonists given land and Indians to work it) and then estate owners, history seems a cyclical process with a redundant taste. Political power is the result of the concentration of land, but is also the easiest tool for seizing lands.

Does that not mean, then, that displacement is the tragic thing that defines us? If we look at things clearly, we see that at the root of colonization is the expulsion of the population, normally forced, which obliges people to find a new region where they can start their lives and social activities over. The tragedy is that in the new circumstances – a kind of promised land – the phenomenon is repeated and violence reappears. The key to the process is the role of land – its possession and exploitation, as well as the resources that it exhibits or hides. The distribution of property implies a great imbalance in the country and, necessarily, the exclusion of a sector of peasant farmers from the enjoyment or control of the land, a mechanism without which the exploitation of work itself would be impossible. Between the large and the small land owners and, of course, the dispossessed, conflictive relationships are established. The concentration and, therefore, the exclusion are not curbed by simple economic mechanisms. On the contrary, they tend to become graver every day. The intervention of the state is necessary to regulate the process. In Colombia, political power, to a large extent a product of the concentration of land, rarely takes measures to reform the problem. Large landholding has been the basis of politics and in the provinces continues to be so.

To the violence born of unequal distribution is added the repression which maintains this order. The excluded, exploited or oppressed are obliged to flee and abandon their property, fruit of their labour and scene of their dreams. Therefore, the state, or the armed landlords, tend to be, from a historic point of view, responsible for displacement. An exodus occurs and people move to another region, where the colonizer cuts down the jungle, sets up his farm, and usually, burdened with debt, is forced to sell again what he has built. The buyer, who is almost always the creditor, adds the lands of the bankrupt peasant farmer to his own. And in that way, landholdings are further concentrated and the cycle is repeated.

The civil wars of the XIX century were linked to two basic processes: the preservation of political privileges derived from large landholdings and the displacement of the conquered to new regions. Ideology served as an emblem of nationality and represented those tendencies. The concept of Nation is born, paradoxically, from the confrontations and the territorial occupations of the conquerors of the moment, who succeed each other, without a modification in the property regime. It could be said that colonization since the end of the XIX century has been an escape valve which reduces the conflicts created by an unjust distribution of land. And under that formula, agrarian reform has always remained unrealized. Between the Twenties and the Sixties the land – with an enormous political significance as a source of power – was reduced by the creation of business and financial capital. It was the era of import substitution. A high level of substitution could never be achieved because of the limits that large landholding imposed on the market. Those limitations were what Liberalism, allied with leftist and popular movements, tried to remove with the constitutional reform of 1936. The right, led by Conservatism and the Catholic Church, tenaciously opposed the change. The result was the violence of the Fifties, and, again, the displacement of thousands of peasant farmers to the cities and the unoccupied zones. The National Front managed to put an end to the political confrontation between parties, and without wanting to, pushed the conflict into the social arena. To prevent the new type of problem, the confrontation of classes, it tried to execute a land reform, which would reduce the armed confrontation that was beginning to take shape. Despite the support of the Alliance for Progress, it wasn’t able to achieve that goal. Instead of redistributing land, the policy further concentrated it and, as a result, added fuel to the conflict. The irregular war not only continued, but intensified.

In the Seventies, subsequent governments drew ever closer to the United States and the conflict was absorbed by the Cold War, which masked the conflict’s social character. Thus, the organizing of armed civilian groups, which in all other respects, was a conventional resource of war. In its essence, the idea was to arm civilians – who because of their social nature were closer to the population – to control the most rebellious regions and conduct a dirty war, which by law was prohibited. Many communities were divided and others fled from the new repressive strategy. The new policy expelled many people towards the unoccupied zones where there was no presence of law or towards cities lacking the services to accommodate the unusual growth. In some ways, urbanization and colonization had the same cause.

It must be noted that violence was not the only cause of one or the other tendency. The laws of the market and the legal system that guaranteed them, based on clientelism and the patrimonial nature of the state, have perhaps contributed the most important conditions for that outcome. The existence of the guerrilla movement can be explained – though not justified – by the coherence of the political scheme, which defends the concentration of land and power and, at the same time, prevents a genuine political representation of the affected. Social protest has been repressed with the use of the police, but when it sought to become a political movement, the response has been violent repression. In those social conditions, it is not surprising that drug trafficking and the growing of coca and marijuana have become widespread and assaulted all sectors, all the structures and all the institutions, as is being revealed today. Of course, a big part of the explanation lies in the drug war that the United States imposed beginning in 1961 with the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. But the complement was added by the regime of political exclusion and economic inequality existing in Colombia. Dependence, corruption and hunger lie at the bottom of this powder keg. Meanwhile, people continue to flee from one place to another, and from one region to another. One tenth of our people flee, living in a kind of permanent exodus. The conditions of the market, always adverse for the weak and, especially for the peasant farmers; the irregular war without end which permits the accumulation of land and economic benefits in cash; the impunity and corruption associated with drug trafficking and the fight against it: all of these associated forces are the real matrix of the incessant displacement of people.
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