Introduction
Although Colombia is “one of Latin America's oldest continuously functioning democracies” , the weakness of its state has been highly correlated with its relentless problems of violence, civil warfare and social instability. Unlike other civil conflicts that have receded after the end of the Cold war, the Colombian conflict has escalated and its dynamics have perceptibly changed. The state’s eroded authority and its capacity to recapture its monopoly of power is being contested by major nonstate nodes of power, what has been called the “Hobbesian Trinity” : guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
This paper analyses the case of Colombia to address the effects of globalization on the particular context of a weak state. The first section reviews the main theoretical framework on the definition of a strong state, the main theories of formation of strong or predatory states and an overview of the debate on the effects of globalization on stateness. In the second and third sections the paper examines the main historical causes that led to the emergence of a weak state in Colombia and explains the current civil conflict as a legacy of its weakness. Subsequently, the fourth section explores the main challenges and opportunities that arise from the expanding process of globalization in terms of state building.
The hypothesis of this paper is based on the view that the effects of globalization on the authority and sovereignty of a state are context-specific and contingent on the conditions and strength of each specific state. Depending on their level of stateness, (legitimacy and strength and capacity of enforcement), particular states will cope differently with both the challenges and opportunities posed by globalization. In the case of a weak state, already incapable of exercising legitimate authority throughout the national territory, it is argued that globalization further inhibits the capacity of the state to recapture and consolidate centralized power and legitimacy. The inability of the state to regulate intra-border networks and flows, the pressures for reform to and the strengthened role of international organizations as supervisors and enforcers of global standards may become significant deterrents. Through alternative funding and legitimation channels, globalization provides for the strengthening of nonstate actors that contest the state in its already eroded monopoly of power and social control.
Theoretical Background
Definition of a strong state
Max Weber defines the state as an organization, composed of several agencies led by the state’s leadership that has the authority to make and implement the binding rules for the people as well as to establish the boundaries of rulemaking for other social organizations. However, in reality, states vary considerably from this “ideal definition”. To determine the degree of stateness of a particular state it is important to differentiate the “strength” from the “scope” of the state. According to Fukuyama (2004) a weak state is typified by “the lack of institutional capacity to implement and enforce policies, often driven by an underlying lack of legitimacy of the political system as a whole.” Strength as opposed to scope is what determines an effective role of the state. It’s the state’s ability to legitimately design and enforce the rules of the game rather than the breadth of functions that it carries out which will determine its success to foster development and stability. An effective state must be able to: “monopolize the legitimate use of force, extract resources, shape national identity and mobilize consent, regulate society and the economy, maintain the coherence of state institutions, and redistribute resources”.
Theories of state formation – the emergence of strong states
The theories of state-formation in Western Europe are centered on the proposition that geopolitical competition induced state makers (monarchs and rulers) to build states as they mobilized resources to engage in this contest. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which defined a system of sovereign states, whose boundaries were defined by international agreement, state-formation in Western Europe was for the most part the product of a contested international system of states. International wars have been the great shapers of the Western state. The formation and maintenance of large armies, required to compete in the international arena, became an instrument for revenue extraction, social coercions and, hence, state formation. The military gained a preferential status as a link and instrument of the rulers and increased their freedom to get involved in domestic politics and to achieve the necessary degree of coercion to mobilize society.
The consolidation of central control was done to a great extent by means of strong methods of coercion and extraction. The costs of state-building in Europe were tremendously high in terms of “deaths, suffering, loss of rights and unwilling surrender of land, goods or labor.” Given that state building process began at the heart of a largely decentralized peasant social structure, the costs to create centralized self-governing organizations and to reduce the incidence of semiautonomous authorities were enormous. Among the general conditions which appear to have favored the survival of particular political units in Europe were: the availability of extractible resources; success in war; homogeneity (initial or created) of the subject population; the intimate connection between the conduct of war, the building of armies, the extension and regularization of taxes and the growth of the state apparatus and the large role of alternating coalitions between the central power and the major social classes in determining broad forms of government.
According to Mann, increased social control is the underlying condition for the increased capacities of the state. This relationship is captured under his concept of “infrastructural power”. The driving compulsion of the states to exert control over their societies arises from the international context, where the fight for survival among political entities demanded unimagined strength. The process of state formation in Europe followed this path given the rivalry among great powers.
Theories of formation of clientelist states
The emergence of clientelist and predatory states is connected with several factors ranging from geographical conditions to the absence of external threats and international wars. Geography has been an important unit of analysis in the state and institution building literature. For instance, Acemoglu et al. argue that geography has an effect economic development because it has influenced the type of institutions that were put in place by European colonizers. In tropical regions, with inferior health conditions, Europeans established mostly extractive structures and fostered extensive land-ownership, which led to “oligarchic” societies. In the temperate climates, where they settled, they built more “democratic” institutions that fostered broad structures of ownership, property rights and rule of law. They show that the more democratic society has greater ability to take advantages of technology for economic growth, while in the oligarchic structures inequality becomes the main way to maintain power in a few hands at a huge cost for society.
The absence of external threats or the lack of international wars has been another important line of argument related with the emergence of weak states. This view is a counterfactual to the theories of state formation in Western Europe reviewed above. For instance, Migdal (1988) claims that, in the aftermath of WWII, the bipolar configuration of the world allowed for weak states to survive in a kind of safe haven and bypass the effort of gaining predominant control over their societies. States were not induced to coerce and cohesion society through massive mobilization. The lack of mobilization precluded the formation of the specialized organizational frameworks needed to enable the state to efficiently collect tax revenue, put together stronger armies and perform many other tasks to enforce the “rules of the game”. In Migdal’s view, the ineffectiveness of many Third World states stems from the resilience and resistance of “chiefs, landlords, bosses, rich peasants, clan leaders, [and] caciques…through their various social organizations”. Through “social control”, these local strongmen have successfully captured, Migdal claims, parts of Third World states. As social control remained greatly fragmented throughout a territory, the struggle for power among the state and competing organizations becomes a hardship.
John Sidel (1999) points out the advantages posed by a shallow democracy as a playground for the consolidation of a clientelist state. This scholar explores the nature of the predatory state on the Philippines, more precisely the nature of “bossism” and the influence of localized monopolies on coercive resources and economic activities. He claims that the emergence of cacique-client relations is a common phenomenon of state formation when electoral democracies are imposed over a state apparatus at an early stage of capitalist development or “primitive accumulation”. Bossism characterizes a system of despotism and predation where “control over the agencies of the state provides the key to capital accumulation rather than viceversa.” These relations stem from the traditional patron-client relationships but are aggravated through greater coercion and power brokerage for private accumulation. In Sidel’s view, although weak as developmental states, these states prove to be strong as “predatory states” and it is under the existence of competitive elected officials that the opportunities for local bossism can fully be realized.
Theories on globalization and the strength and authority of the state
Globalization, both as a concept and its effects on the strength and sovereignty of the nation state, is subject to a heated debate. Held et al. (1999) propose a concise definition of globalization as “a process which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions ... generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power.”
One of the most substantial manifestations of globalization has been the increase in economic and political influence of transnational corporations (TNCs), which have taken advantage of the developments in communications and transportation to transform the logic of production into a global arena. Concurrently, the financial sector has become ever more massive, sophisticated and integrated among borders resulting in an exponential increase in transnational capital flows. Another important feature is the increasing prominence of a range of intergovernmental and non-state actors linked within in the international system that is beyond the capacity of domestic states to control.
On one side of the debate maintains that globalization is leading to the erosion of the state. The emergence of interdependent systems of production and consumption, dramatic flows of currency across national borders, and increasingly sophisticated technologies for gathering and processing information challenge the exclusive authority of the state. Susan Strange is one of the main theorists in this position. She sustains that the increasing role of economic actors as authorities, wielding power over political and economic decisions and contesting the state. On the other side, theorists such as Michael Mann (1997) suggest that, global governance and transnationalization may mean more, not less, state. He argues that there is a relative causality of the effects of globalization on state strength and, thus, differential impacts on diverse types of state among different regions are expected. In his view, capitalist transformation, a key phenomenon of globalization, seems to be “weakening the most advanced nation-states of the north yet successful economic development would strengthen nation-states else where”. The middle-range position in this debate, that the state is highly adaptive and resilient to changing global conditions, is well represented by Scholte (2000).
However, the relationship between globalization and the state is not so clear-cut. There is a reverse causality in the sense that strong states are necessary for the stability of the international system. Fukuyama asserts that “weak governance undermines the principle of sovereignty on which the post-Westphalian international order has been built.” Moreover, he remarks on the importance for the state to retain its exclusivity of power as a major determinant of its sovereignty within the international system. “The one power that is unique to sovereign nation-states, even in today’s globalized world is the power to enforce laws. Even if existing international organizations did accurately reflect the will of the international community, enforcement remains by and large the province of nation-states.” Fukuyama introduces as well the notion that the emergence of a variety of multilateral and international organizations may further intensify the lack of state strength as these organizations are designed to take over certain “governance functions over nation states.”
The role of economic liberalization and market-oriented reforms is an additional point that deserves analysis. Fukuyama claims that the “Washington Consensus” reforms were designed to reduce the scope (and size) of the state but didn’t focus on a “state-building agenda”. The result was that these liberalization and adjustment programs did not address a crucial element for economic development: the strength or capacity of the state to enforce laws .
The Emergence of a Weak State
Colombia is a geographically large state that has historically been weakened by strong regionalist tendencies and an elite preference for weak central authority. These tendencies have been exacerbated by the difficult geographical conditions. The main historical causes of the formation of a weak state in Colombia are: strong regional cleavages inherited from the Spanish colonial system and intensified by the complex geographical setting, the inability of the state to centralize power (given the absence of an external treat), and the formation of factionalist political parties through the consolidation of regional clienteles and militias.
Strong regional cleavages formed before independence and have shaped the Colombian state formation process. The Viceroyalty of the Nueva Granada was composed of provinces with strong regional socioeconomic and cultural differences, which were exacerbated by a complex geographical setting. The independence process from Spanish rule was not a unified one, instead each province declared independence in a piecemeal fashion. Cartagena, was the first province to establish a junta, followed by Bogota. Moreover, as soon as these provinces became independent, towns within the provinces started to declare independence to their provincial capitals to establish autonomous governments. An effort of bringing these colonies together has been referred to as the Patria Boba. The regions kept on fighting among themselves; the state and military were unable to centralize power. This first unification effort didn’t even include Bogota, the most important province. David Bushnell describes this political disunity as “to some extent inevitable. Certainly no part of Spanish America had so many natural obstacles to unity –so many obstacles to transportation and communication per square kilometer – as Nueva Granada, with a population scattered in isolated clusters in various Andean ranges not to mention other settlements along the coasts” .
The extractive structures implemented by the Spanish colonial rule remained long after independence and became deeply rooted client-patron relationships. The Spanish extraction systems required a subservient and indentured labor force. Establishments such as the mita and the encomienda, where a group of Indians were assigned to a landlord, were abundant . Martz describes this as “traditional clientelism”, as a system where the “coercive nature of the patron-client linkage was omnipresent, with the latter entrapped in a vicious circle of obedience, subservience and impoverishment” . This clientelistic system has been explained from the “rational choice” theoretical framework as a dilemma of whether the leaders will support the public good and economic growth over their own private and political growth.
The desire of the elites to consolidate power in their original pre-independence jurisdiction were they were able to have enough traditional influence deterred the possibility of pursuing of a more visionary and unified state project. Lopez, a former president of Colombia, argues that the country made a tradeoff where “patrias chicas” were strengthened in such ways that landowners built in effect private governments within them. Private land owners in fact made rules for the areas of influence; paid some of their employees to enforce them and kept workers who misbehaved in “private prisions”. This resembles the warlord politics or the “bossism” patterns of state formation described by Sidel in the Philippines . Additionally, the relationship illustrates the coexistence of a weak state and strong society as presented by Migdal.
The weak role of the military
The process of state formation in Colombia can be described as a combination of inherited elite preferences from the Spanish colonial system backed by the absence of external wars. Centeno has described the Colombian process, as others in Latin America, as a counterfactual of European state formation theories. Contrary to the aforementioned theories of state formation (Tilly, Mann), the Colombian state has developed in the absence of any substantial international war. During the 19th and 20th century there were only two minor international conflicts (border conflicts with Peru and Ecuador) of no substantial transcendence in terms of the requirements of the state for social mobilization, military strengthening and resource extraction. However, during this same time period, Colombia faced 9 internal conflicts that in some cases scaled up to civil wars (The War of the Thousand Days that started in 1889 and La Violencia period from 1946 to 1957).
The military has played a very weak role in state-building. Through most of the 19th century, the army seldom counted more than 2,000 soldiers. The reasons for a small and weak military are deep-seated in historical factors. The army that obtained independence from Spain in 1820, led by Simon Bolivar, was composed mainly of Venezuelans. Additionally, given the requirements of the war, the army became an institution that recruited from the lowest strata of society, making the military “unpopular and undesirable” for the elites given the strong existing racial and class tensions. Contrary to what characterized army participation in Europe, where the civilians were involved in winning the war, Colombia exemplifies the “rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight.” The rich families won’t send their children to war. Instead, as fighting in the conflict provides a source of wages, the poor are happy to go fight.
Nueva Granada differentiated from other countries in Latin America in that violence did not had its origins in the government. On the contrary, the foundations of violence have been the “lack of government, the absence of discipline and the propensity to anarchy”. As a result of the weakness of the state, justice and enforcement were delegated to private hands. The Colombian elites preferred to sustain a live-and-let-live approach between the armed forces and society and regional elites did not want to give too much authority to Bogota, either in military strength or taxing power. According to Marcella: “The institutional bias against the military impeded the nurturing of mutually supportive civil-military relations and development of the strategic instrument of legitimate coercive authority.” The lack of external conflict offered a just right environment for backing an elite preference for a weak state authority and a weak military.
Problems of taxation sources and mechanisms
The inability to collect taxes was another notorious indication of the state weakness. Through the 19th century the Colombian state proved unable to collect the necessary revenues to make it an effective state. This low revenue collection was to a great extent the result of a weak economy in general and for the lack of export capacity in particular. Tax initiatives, additional to custom duties and direct taxes, failed because of the national government’s inability to enforce them. Irregular taxation became standard by the party militias and regional governments, especially during the times of civil conflict, in the form of asset seizure (cattle, horses, farm workers).
Sectarian and Consociational Democracies
Party affiliations were generated as a response to the strong interregional tensions. The weakness of the state, and of its army, inhibited it to reach the rural areas and curtail the conflict. In absence of state presence, to settle their struggles, small-town and rural elites continually sought support from a group of caudillos and their militias. Political chiefs and landlords, by using their laborers as “voluntary militia”, were able to reach deep into society. The clientele ties between party-leaders (gamonales) and their followers strengthened through what Lopez-Alves calls “unmediated party rule” where “no central despotism existed but it was substituted by nine sectional autocracies”.
The ingrained clientelistic relationships were a key element of the ability of Liberal and Conservative parties to monopolize power. Patronage became the main way to articulate into the institutionalized political system, as personal patrimonial rule became party hegemony . Moreover, it is argued that, as the Colombian state was relatively poor and had no real economic benefits to offer, jobs in the public sector became the main source for patronage. This, coupled with the inexistence of a civil service, became the foundation of a “winner takes all” arrangement, in which the main goal of the two parties was to attain power in order to bring in all their clientele into the government structure. Party competition for power, under a zero-sum game arrangement, during the 19th century and first half of the 20th century took yielded in deeply violent conflict among regional party factions. The alliance of the Catholic Church with the Conservative party gave this conflict additional intensity and bitterness. The religious struggle helped in the creation of party hegemony, as Orlando Fals Borda argues, by placing socio-class consciousness in a second-stage and converting the political parties into “simple agglomerations in which there remained together both members of the elite and of the lower classes who had their inclinations.”
With the establishment of the National Front, the sectarian democracy of the 19th and early 20th century transformed into a consociational democracy. Industrialization and the growth of urban working and middle classes became strong pressures for the sectarian political system and led to its breakdown in the 1940s. The result was a traumatic civil war period known as La Violencia (1948-1958) during which it is estimated that 200,000 people were killed . The National Front, a sixteen-year period of coalition government between the Liberals and Conservatives that started in 1957, was designed as an arrangement to lessen the escalating partisan violence. This agreement, a constitutional amendment reached through a national plebiscite, consisted of political parity in Congressional representation and the alternation of parties in power. It stated that the church privileges were to be accepted by both parties and that the military would be respected and not prosecuted.
Views about the outcome of the National Front are mixed. It is commonly accepted that this pact achieved two of its major goals: the restoration of Civilian rule after the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship and bringing to an end the partisan strife. The country enjoyed relative peace and stability during approximately 30 years. It has been argued as well that the coalition arrangement helped to reduce the importance of gamonales and that this led to their abandonment of sectarian practices. However, several authors have asserted that Colombia lost a new opportunity of state formation and that the National Front encouraged the formation of a “consociational democracy”. At the same time as the National Front dismantled inter-party competition it encouraged intra-party competition. The main reason for party unity hitherto had been the defense and contest against the other party. Thus, the absence of a threat from the opposition party exacerbated the internal fractioning and factionalism had always existed within them. Moreover, as argued by Pierce, “the state became a mediator through which the members of the ruling elite distributed power and privileges among themselves” and led to what she calls “oligarchic democracy”. In theory, the consociational agreement of the National Front ended in 1976, but in practice it lasted until 1991 and limited the participation of other actors.
Although the constitutional reform of 1991 effectively ended the consociational agreement and provided more democratic rules in the political arena, the lack of profound reform of the weak judiciary system, reflected in impunity, reduced the ability of the government to sustain a democratic rule of law. To overcome the excessive political exclusion the new constitution gave momentous emphasis to civil society participation and to the establishment of checks and balances within the state powers. However, the lack of provisions for adequate party discipline and representation impelled the propagation of numerous political parties and independent political figures . From 1991 to 1998 the number of parties had more than triple-folded. This system of, what have been called “electoral microenterprises”, leads to a weakening of party functions and an atomization of political representation, which in turn further undermines democratic governance.
The legacy of a weak state: the emergence of illegal armed groups
Colombia can be categorized into Migdal’s portrayal of the coalescence of a weak state and a strong society. The state does not exercise control over an estimated 40 percent of the national territory. These areas are precisely where the FARC, ELN, paramilitaries and narcotraffickers became active, filling the absence of the state with de facto administrative and social control systems . There is a marked difference between these abandoned areas and the other regions of the country where the state maintains presence. As Kline argues, Colombia is a weak state because of its multiple insurgencies, but it is a relatively strong and well-performing state in those regions over which it maintains control, especially the urban areas.
Three major factors have been decisive in the emergence of guerrillas and paramilitaries, the main nonstate actors that contest power with the state and shape the Colombian conflict. First, an exclusionary political system resulting from the bipartisan hegemony during the National Front gave origin to the formation of the Marxist guerrilla groups. Second, the legacy of the resilient power of the elites, in the forms of gamonales and caudillos, and the locked-in arrangement of patronage relations led to the flourishing of paramilitary groups. And third, the absence of state presence in several regions of the country given the geographical complexities, lack of centralization of power and a weak military, set a perfect stage for the origination and proliferation of the guerrilla and paramilitary groups.
The emergence of illegal armed groups in Colombia derives largely from deep-rooted historical grounds. The vertical loyalty systems of bosses (gamonales) and workers were the basis of independent power structures of guerrilla-style leaders (pajaros) and bandits, which consolidated through land robbery, extortion and the capture of local political power. Each of the two main current guerrilla groups (FARC and ELN) emerged in the 1960s out of the remnants of the bipartisan violence period and the political deadlock generated by the National Front “consociational agreement”. Until the late 1980s the civil strife between the guerrillas and the state had been a rather contained confrontation and peace negotiations were customary . The right-wing paramilitary or “self defense groups” are a legacy of the regional client-patron relations and the use of private militias in the bipartisan conflict. In the recent conflict, these self-defense groups emerged in reactions to the guerrillas. Small private “social control” and security forces, initially financed by large landowners, became the building blocks for the development of a powerful private army. Some of these groups started as civil defense units organized by the Colombian government during the 1960s and 70s. Other groups were created and funded directly by the drug traffickers and other criminals for private protection. Well-funded paramilitaries have become a growing illegal force of more than 12,000 combatants .
Globalization: from a weak to a besieged state
Globalization and expanded access to international flows of funds and weapons have fueled the escalation of the conflict, the growth in the number of armed combatants, and the spread of conflict to previously unaffected areas of the country: the cities. These events have also led to the unprecedented internationalization of the conflict, both in terms of spillover effects to neighboring countries and of direct international involvement. Additionally, the emerging illicit economy has created distortions and rampant corruption that have allowed the illegal armed groups to capture the local economic and political system. The illegal groups regulate and extract taxes from economic transactions, threaten and protect communities, shape justice and the rule of law and hold control of the most profitable illegal activity: drug trafficking. For more than a decade, both guerrillas and paramilitary groups have expanded their geographic operations within the country and they have become important political actors in the semi-urban and rural zones.
Since the mid-1980s, narcotics have entirely transformed the Colombian conflict by providing larger amounts of funding to support military operations against the state and society. Both guerrillas and paramilitary have grown very fast, both in numbers and in expansion throughout the Colombian territory. The FARC grew from having 900 men and 9 war fronts in 1982 to around 15,000 men and 60 fronts by the end of 1990s. In this same period the ELN went from 70 combatants to 3,500 and from three to thirty battlefronts. This growth has been proportional to the increase in illicit crops cultivation (see Figure 1). The territorial expansion of the illegal armed groups has been dramatic. While in 1982 the guerrilla groups had strong presence in 75 municipalities of a total of 1025 municipalities. Nowadays they have strong presence in around 620 municipalities, although it seems that they have total control on one third of these municipalities (around 200).
The drug trade activity has provoked a dramatic twist in the military objectives pursuit by both guerrillas and paramilitaries from a political or ideological (or at least self-defense) to an economically driven war. In this sense, Colombia is comparable to several states where a particular blend of “greed and grievance” is the determinant fuel of violence. As Marcella puts it: “Cocaine and to a lesser extent heroin, are referred to as the equivalent in Colombia of diamonds in Sierra Leone and Angola”. Daniel Pecaut, a Colombian scholar, argues that it is crucial to acknowledge the existence of a different type of violence that has consolidated during the 90s and that has set a new playing field for the state. What differentiates today’s violence from the past patterns of violence is the emergence and consolidation of drug trafficking. He argues that “for the first time an armed group (as the guerrillas and the paramilitaries) undertook violence that was deliberately intended to destabilize the state itself” as a means to preserve the illicit drug trade, a phenomenon that had never occurred in the previous long history of violence in Colombia.
Figure 1: Illegal armed group membership versus illegal drug cultivation
Source: Guaqueta (2002)
Echandia (1997) analyses the guerrilla’s patterns of expansion and argues that the presence of these groups has focused in wealthy areas of the country where they can profit from predation of productive economic activities. Moreover this study shows evidence of guerrilla groups expanding toward more strategic areas, such as urban areas and major cities. The author claims that the changes in expansion strategies suggest that the guerrillas are no longer interested in representing the poor or fighting inequality but in making a living from illegal activities and extractive strategies in rich areas of the country.
The upsurge of illicit drugs traffic in Colombia has shaped the activities of paramilitaries and guerrillas but, concurrently, the association with these armed groups has had significant bearing on the more recent transformation of the traditional drug cartels into a real transnational mafia network increasingly capable of capturing the state and undermining governance. The big drug-cartels were replaced by over 500 atomized structures known as “baby-cartels”. These new organizations are smaller, enclosed and clandestine and have specialized in each step of the drug process (production, processing and distribution). They operate as professional suppliers of a commodity. The guerrillas and paramilitaries provide the necessary security, services and political pressure for these networks to operate and they extract resources from the different stages of the process. According to government figures it is estimated that in 1998 the various illegal organizations derived US$ 551million from the drug traffic , which amounts to more than 50% of their total income. Other sources of revenue have been, traditionally, extortion, revolutionary taxes and kidnapping.
The drug business has completely distorted the local economy and captured governance. Narcotics revenues are of such magnitude that they have given the various syndicates involved in the business a virtually unrestricted capacity to corrupt. This has taken the historical and ingrained clientelist patterns of the Colombian state to a new level, through the narcotization of politics. Both guerrillas and paramilitaries have been able to achieve a high level of infiltration into power by corrupting judicial, security or government officials. Through a mix of bribery and threat these groups are able to obtain impunity for their businesses, information, protection or to influence public policies that may affect them. The main institutions -the Presidency of the Republic, the police, the army, the political parties, the Congress, and the regional-municipal councils- have been subject to the influence of drug trafficking at a large scale. At the national level, political campaigns have been financed with illicit money. For instance, the 1994 run-off presidential election received financing for US $6million from the Cali cartel. The resulting political crisis was very costly in terms of legitimacy and economic growth.
Another key political tool of both the guerrillas and paramilitaries is to control local governments. Decentralization, which devolved authority and resources since 1991, made the local governments more attractive targets. The guerrilla groups, for instance, exert pressure on a city’s administration and are able to command the allocation of public resources, choose which companies are to be given contracts for public works (roads, bridges, etc.) and charge for a fee of as much as 10% of the contract’s value. These groups also capture a share of public resources directly through threat and extortion or simply buying-off the city officials. According to the Ministry of the Interior, from 1998 to 2000, 26 mayors were assassinated, 10 were forced to resign because of threats to their lives and 50 more had to leave their municipalities. In some states where there is high infiltration of guerrilla or paramilitary groups, the central government has been forced to freeze public transfers and other funds because of extensive misappropriation by these illegal groups. Guerrillas and paramilitaries replicate the functions and methods of the traditional political bosses in the local political arena.
In addition to the cross-border flow of funds, the transnational information networks have also increased with globalization. Although the Colombian guerrillas have not been as active as the Mexican Zapatistas in creating international awareness and using the so called “information-age” warfare techniques to paralyze government action, to a certain extent the FARC and ELN have been able to mobilize international opposition to government strategies. For instance, there was significant mobilization against the Plan Colombia from European human rights organizations and the European Union has been resistant to support any government program. International migration, which has also increased with globalization, has served to enhance the transnational networks of drug dealing, money laundering and drug smuggling and the organization of criminal bands to serve these purposes. Additionally, innovations in information and communication technologies are also part of the structural backbone of transnational activities that link the Colombian mafia networks with criminal organizations, especially in Central America, Mexico and the US, in a multinational chain of drug trafficking, money laundring and arm smuggling. This constitutes a new dimension of the conflict that is beyond the ability of the Colombian state to control.
The strengthening scope and influence of international actors, multilateral organizations and international NGOs may further limit the state’s ability to recapture authority and reinstall order. The modern state no longer has access to the “monopoly of the use of violence”. To give an example, given the distorted set of incentives that has been created through illicit drugs, in order to be able to negotiate the demobilization of paramilitary groups, the Uribe government needs to be able to have flexibility in the level of impunity and in the generosity of the procedure. However, the government’s room for maneuver is limited by over-watching international organizations, for example the International Criminal Court wont allow that the government doesn’t punish those actions that have been categorized as horrible crimes. Other organizations leverage pressures over foreign governments, as is the case of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty international on the violations of human rights. Although this advocacy is extremely important for the sake of civil society it places an additional constraint for the state to recapture its authority.
However, Globalization also offers opportunities for strengthening the Colombian state in terms of economic growth, access to markets, technological advancements and support from the international community (essentially the U.S.). A more globalized economy has permitted Colombia to achieve sustained growth and to diversify its patterns of production. Additionally, international migration has increased remittances, which in the past 5 years have more than triple-fold and account for around US $3billions, the second source of foreign currency next to oil. New information and communication technologies and advancements in transportation systems increase the ability of the state to reach throughout the country and reduce the obstacles generated by the complex geographic setting. Furthermore, the interrelatedness and the socio-political impact of this illicit drug-driven conflict on the US has prompted strong support, initially in the form of counter-narcotics assistance and more recently to a more overt war on drugs strategy with a strong military component.
The government is recurring to numerous strategies to improve the security conditions and to recapture authority. There have been some improvements in this respect. The main goal of Uribe’s democratic security program is to make the state capable to enforce the law. The US assistance through the Plan Colombia has given the Colombian government the opportunity to strengthen and modernize the military forces and the government has increased its defense budget from 2.34% of GDP in 1990 to 3.56% in 2000, partly financed with a new tax of 1.2%, known as the peace tax, imposed to the wealthiest citizens and business. This may lead to more state presence in keeping order and enforcing the rules. Additionally, civilian information networks are being promoted throughout the conflict regions as a means for the state to recapture authority and to provide security. Both Paramilitaries and Guerrillas have been recently added to terrorist organization lists, undermining their legitimacy and popular support.
Conclusion
The causes of the current situation in Colombia are found primarily in the state’s inability to effectively guarantee civil rights and liberties. This has been largely the result of a historical failure to consolidate a strong state within a complex geographical territory and under no presence of unifying external threat. The lack of state presence in vast areas of the country has given rise to powerful nonstate actors that challenge the state’s capacity to control its territory and the population. The weakness of the state apparatuses charged with providing defense, security, and the protection of its citizens has resulted in its losing the monopoly on coercion and justice.
Globalization poses additional challenges to a state that has been historically weak to begin with. Increased cross-border flows of funds, products and people as well as strengthened influence of international actors and organizations become an additional contest for the state and further undermine its ability to recapture power. This is not to say that globalization has eroded the Colombian state, as it has never been a strong state. However, this case seems to illustrate that the forces of globalization in the context of a weak state represent an important impediment for its recovery. The state no longer has access to all the extremely costly coercion mechanisms (those that were used by countries in Western Europe during their mobilization for war) to be able to centralize and consolidate the monopoly of power and authority. The state has also suffered the unexpected and unwanted effects of reforms aimed at opening the political system that began in the mid1980s. The erosion and fragmentation of political parties and weakening of political society, described above, as well as the decentralization process, have significantly diluted the authority of the state and strengthened the playing field for the insurgent-paramilitary-narcotics to increase their social control, which further undermine the state’s capacity to centralize power.
The recovery of legitimacy and reconstruction of the rule of law are the necessary conditions for preventing the collapse of Colombia’s besieged state. The first step toward this ambitious goal is for the state to establish effective and legitimate public security at the many areas where it is extremely deficient. If the Colombian state has the ability to re-insert itself into the disputed zones, recover control of its national territory and provide dependable public security, then, a weak, and besieged state will be able to move farther away from possible failure toward strength. U.S. military assistance may provide some of the means that the Colombian state needs for this purpose. Yet the legitimacy of the state is questioned by large sectors of the population— particularly in rural areas—who have been subject to forced displacement, human rights violations, and loss of property at the hands of state security forces. For these reasons, a military victory over Colombia’s illegal armed groups may remove the immediate threat posed to state sovereignty and national security, but alone is incapable of restoring state legitimacy.
Expanding political participation and economic opportunity to marginalized sectors of the population has to be an equally important goal for the state to restore its eroded legitimacy. Coordinating state institutions to provide public services, including justice, education, health and sanitation, communications, and economic development should be at the center of the state strategy. But the most important transformation has to come from recognizing and confronting the pervasive political clientelistic structures that have led to the formation of the Colombian weak state and that have allowed for the escalation of the conflict and for the synergic relationship between drugs and insurgency.
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