Colombia otros 100 años de soledad-James Robinson

8/13/2019 Colombia otros 100 aos de soledad-James Robinson

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Adecade ago Colombia was in a terrible mess.The country had the highest homicide ratein the world, and was the center of the in-ternational drug industry. Kidnapping was rife. Aseries of leading politicians had been assassinated,and probably one-third of all the legislators elect-

ed in 2002 received assistance from paramilitarygroups. The combined fighting strength of non-state-armed actors, left-wing guerrillas, and para-militaries was approaching 50 percent of the sizeof the national army, and the guerrillas had formu-lated a plan to encircle and capture the capital cityBogot. In high society something akin to a panicwas setting in, as Colombians tried to move theirassets overseas and angled for foreign passports.

Things changed in 2002, when lvaro Uribewas elected president on a platform of democraticsecurity. Uribe increased the size of the army from

203,000 soldiers in 2002 to 283,000 a decade lat-er. The army also began relying less on conscripts,with the number of professionals in the ranks ris-ing from 59,000 to 87,000. Defense expendituresincreased by 10 percent relative to GDP(from 3.7to 4 percent) during this period. To help pay forthis, Uribe imposed on rich citizens a progressivedemocratic security tax, which averaged about0.35 percent of GDPper year.

A sustained military offensive pushed the princi-pal rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces ofColombia (FARC), out of half of the municipalities

in which it was present in 2002, and led to the kill-ing of its leaders Ral Reyes, Mono Jojoy, and Al-fonso Cano, while the main leader, Manuel Maru-landa, died in 2006 of natural causes. A sharp dropin the homicide rate and the numbers of kidnap-

pings accompanied the military successes. In 2005,Uribe also persuaded around 30,000 members ofparamilitary groups to demobilize and confess totheir crimes in exchange for reduced sentences.

As the security situation improved, so did Co-lombias international image. The country has

gone from being a potential failed state to joiningCIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt,Turkey, and South Africa), a group of dynamic andnewly emerging states ready to take an equal placeat the world table.

Foreign direct investment over the past 10 yearshas risen from $1.5 billion to $13 billion. Invest-ment has grown from 17 percent of GDPto 27 per-cent, undoubtedly in response to enhanced secu-rity and greater optimism about the future. Saving,meanwhile, has increased to around 18 percent ofGDP. Government debt has fallen from nearly 60

percent of GDP in 2002 to 43 percent today. Andthe rate of economic growth has accelerated: Af-ter averaging 3 percent per year between 1990 and1999, it rose to 4.2 percent on average between2000 and 2011. Finally in 2011, US PresidentBarack Obama signed a free trade agreement withColombia.

Building on these developments since enteringoffice in August 2010, President Juan Manuel San-tos, while trying to maintain the military initiative,has launched an ambitious attempt to resolve Co-lombias conflicts once and for all by restoring vast

amounts of land to people who have been dispos-sessed of possibly 5 million hectares in the fight-ing. This program of land reform, encapsulated inthe so-called Victims Law, went into effect on June10, 2011. And in August 2012, the Colombiangovernment signed a six-page set of principles forpeace negotiations with the FARC, which are ongo-ing in Havana, Cuba, as I write.

Has Colombia finally turned a corner, and willpeace with the FARCand possibly the other main

JAMESA. ROBINSONis a professor of government at HarvardUniversity and a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center

for International Affairs. He is co-author, with Daron Acemo-glu, ofWhy Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity,and Poverty(Crown Publishers, 2012).

Colombia: Another 100 Years of Solitude?

JAMESA. ROBINSON

CURRENT HISTORY

February 2013

[D]espite all of the gains under the past two presidents, neither administration has broken

with the fundamental system of governance that created the countrys problems.


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rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN),represent the finishing touches to its resurgence?

The first step toward answering this question isto consider where Colombias violence and disor-der originated. It is tempting, and common, to at-tribute such problems to the drug industry, but thisis a mistake. The countrys status as the capital ofworld drug trafficking reflected the prior dysfunc-

tional organization of Colombian society. It is alsotemping, and wrong, to blame Colombias woes onthe guerrillas. Like the drug industry, they are anoutcome of more deep-seated problems.

Fundamentally, all the ills that Colombia hasexperienced stem from the way it has been gov-erned. The best way to conceive of this is as a formof indirect rule, common during the period ofEuropean colonial empires, in which the nationalpolitical elites residing in urban areas, particularlyBogot, have effectively delegated the running ofthe countryside and other peripheral areas to localelites. The provincial elites are given freedom torun things as they like, and even represent them-selves in the legislature, in exchange for politicalsupport and not challenging the center.

It is this form of rule in the periphery that cre-ated the chaos and illegality that have bedeviledColombia. Drugs, mafias, kidnappers, leftist guer-rilla groups, and rightist paramilitaries certain-ly have exacerbated the countrys problems, butthe problems all have their source in the nationsstyle of governance. As the Colombian writer R.H.

Moreno Duran put it: In Colombia, politics cor-rupts drug dealing.

STAKESINTHESTATUSQUOThis system, such as it is, raises obvious ques-

tions. First, what interests keep it in place? Sec-ond, how can a system that creates such disorderin the periphery be stable? And third, why do pe-ripheral elites find it in their interests to have sucha chaotic society?

None of these questions has a definitive answer,but some of the mechanisms at play seem clear.

First, it is easy to see at least some of the interestsinvolved in the system. The turmoil in Colombiascountryside lowers the price of votes. Instead ofhaving to develop platforms and win support byoffering policies or particular favors, politiciansget elected by winning the support of local bosses,or perhaps become the bosses themselves.

Consider the former senator Fabio ValenciaCossio, who in 1998 boasted the second-highestnumber of votes cast for a senator, after the for-

mer presidential candidate and long-term kidnapvictim Ingrid Betancourt. Valencia Cossio, subse-quently interior minister under Uribe, knew ex-actly how to pile up voteswith the aid of RamnIsaza, leader of a paramilitary group, the PeasantSelf-Defense Forces of the Middle Magdalena,whose help he solicited in winning elections.So one explanation for the durability of peripheral

chaos is that, by facilitating deals like the one Va-lencia Cossio tried to make with Isaza, the systemmakes it much cheaper for elites to garner votes,The elites in any case view it as too costly to actu-ally build state capacity in rural areas.

A second mechanism showing the interests atstake is that the system makes Colombian democ-racy very elite-friendly. One salient theory of theorigins of democracy is that it results from a com-promise or a concession made by elites to avoiddisorder, or in the extreme to limit revolution. Ina nondemocratic system, the disenfranchised maycause trouble, riot, or rebel because they have nosay in how policy is determined. Such rebellion iscostly to elites, so they create democracy as a wayof bringing people into the system, thus escapingsocial chaos.

This is not a good model, however, for explain-ing the origins of Colombias democracy. It wasnot forced on elites by a threat from the masses.Rather, as the research of Eduardo Posada-Carbhas shown, democratic political institutions pro-vided a means for elites to share power among

themselves in a way that would avoid infighting.An early version was the incomplete vote af-ter an inter-party conflict known as the War ofa Thousand Days between 1899 and 1902. Thissystem, which Sebastin Mazzuca and I havestudied, gave two-thirds of legislative seats toConservatives, the dominant party at the time,but guaranteed one-third to Liberals, howevermany votes they polled, to keep them happy. Thesystem broke down in the 1930s. However, in1958, after another bloody inter-party civil war,a National Front pact provided more or less the

same arrangement, except that the parties sharedeverything 5050.

These agreements and their persistence revealone of the remarkable things about Colombian pol-itics, namely the extent to which the nineteenth-century political parties remained in power duringthe twentieth century, a phenomenon unique inLatin America. But to keep moving ahead with dif-ferent schemes to cartelize politics, one thing wascritical: Entry of new political parties had to be


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Colombia: Another 100 Years of Solitude? 45

avoided. This was achieved by various methods,including the form of the electoral system.

But another obvious contributing factor is theease with which new political forces could beeradicated by murder and violence. In the 1980s,around two thousand members of the PatrioticUnion Party were murdered, along with two ofits presidential candidates, Jaime Pardo Leal and

Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa. Carlos Pizarro, the 1990presidential candidate for the demobilized guerrillagroup M-19, was assassinated as well. And politicalmurder did not start then. It goes back at least tothe assassination of the radical Liberal leaders JorgeElicer Gaitn in 1948 and Rafael Uribe Uribe in1914, and probably far earlier. Thus chaos in theperiphery facilitated the persistence of the cartel-ized, oligarchic democracy which the traditionalparties created in the nineteenth century.

Another mechanism revealing the interests atstake in perpetuating Colombias system of gover-nance is that conflicts in rural areas guarantee thatthe periphery is not able to cooperate against thecenter. A common theory in African politics is thatthe center foments chaos inthe periphery in order to di-vide and rule. Sudan andCongo are the classic cases.And this idea can certainly beapplied to Colombia. Consid-er Rodrigo Garcia Caicedo, acattle rancher and civic leader

in Crdoba, who was centrally involved in the cre-ation of paramilitary groups in his department. In1990 he told a leader of the M-19 rebels: I am surethat if the guerrillas had spoken to us, instead of at-tacking us, we would have had a common war, nota war amongst us or against us. We would have or-ganized and had all risen against the central state.

When another paramilitary boss, Rodrigo TovarPupo (nicknamed Jorge 40), was writing an au-tobiography before he was extradited to the Unit-ed States in 2008, he recalled realizing the greatinequalities of the country and the lack of commit-

ment of the few owners of power to work for thebenefit of the large social majorities of the coun-try. The owners of power Jorge 40 was referringto were in the national government in Bogot.

SITUATIONALETHICSThe second questionhow can a system that

creates such disorder remain stable?is evenmore difficult. The last set of arguments suggeststhat it would not be in the interests of those bene-

fiting from the system if the country became some-thing like a sub-Saharan African country with farless wealth for everyone. But how could they stopthis from happening?

I think the reason is that the core and the periph-ery have evolved into a stable equilibrium where allthe actors behave differently in different contexts.This is a form of what the political anthropologist

Edward Banfield described as the root of poverty insouthern Italy. Banfield pointed out that people ap-plied very different criteria to behavior in differentcontexts: one within the extended family, anotherone toward everyone else. Although the relevantsetting in Colombia is not necessarily the family,many examples suggest that Colombians also ap-ply generalized or limited morality in different con-texts. The net result is to make the system stable.

Two examples illustrate this phenomenon. Thefirst relates to one of the burning issues in Colom-bia today: compensation for the perhaps 4 mil-lion people who have been displaced from ruralareas in 15 years of conflict. Chapter three of theVictims Law establishes land restitution for peas-

ants who were dispossessedof their land in the past twodecades.

In the Colombian Sen-ate, one of this policys mainproponents has been JuanFernando Cristo, originallya politician from the depart-

ment of Norte de Santander. However, in 2011 lo-cal elections, he supported the bid of his brotherAndrs to become mayor of his hometown, Ccu-ta, in alliance with the powerful local political bossand ex mayor of the city, Ramiro Surez. Surez,who was arrested on August 12, 2011, was a well-known ally of paramilitaries responsible for mur-ders and thousands of crimes in the department.A regional court has since sentenced him to spend27 years in prison for the assassination of a formercity legal adviser. When confronted by a journalistwith the contradiction, Senator Cristo simply said:

Local politics operates under a different logic.A second telling example is the career of Con-

gressman Vctor Renn Barco. Barco formed partof what was known as the coalition that ran thedepartment of Caldas for 30 years until his retire-ment from politics shortly before his death in 2009.In Bogot, Barco was often seen with the Economistmagazine under his arm. He was a regular contrib-utor to the business newspaper Portafolio. He wasknown as the nemesis of the minister of finance

If the FARC and maybe the ELN do

decide to demobilize, the countrys

problems will be far from over.


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for his unyielding advocacy of fiscally prudent mac-roeconomic policies. Yet back in Caldas, in his baseat La Dorada, Barco had the reputation of runningone of the toughest and most uncompromisinglyclientelistic vote-buying machines in the country,a machine that would not tolerate opposition orcriticism. The fate of journalists who investigatedthis machine, such as La Patrias Orlando Sierra,

was typically a bullet in the head.These examples show that in different contexts

Colombian politicians apply different standardsand rules of behavior. Sometimes, when nationallyadvocating for sound economic policy or the Vic-tims Law, they appeal to universal principles. Atother times, when involved in peripheral politics,they apply much more parochial standards. Thatpeople behave like this and have become condi-tioned to do so is a big part of how the systemreproduces itself without some grand design.

SHIFTYELITESThe third questionwhy do peripheral elites

find it in their interests to have such a chaotic soci-ety?is also hard to answer.You might think that localelites would have little causeto foment conflict and woulddo better economically withstability. Take the case of for-mer Senator lvaro AlfonsoGarca Romero, now serving

60 years in prison for connections with paramili-taries and for masterminding a 2000 massacre inMacayepo, in which 15 peasants were beaten todeath. He was a prime example of a regional land-ed elite whose family had extensive landholdingsas well as important interests in tobacco and otheragricultural crops. Why would he bother gettinginvolved with massacres?

The best way to think of this is as part of anequilibrium that does not always serve the inter-ests of the regional elites who dominate at any par-ticular moment. The key point is that there is a

huge amount of elite circulation. In Bolivar, for ex-ample, the current senator who receives the mostvotes is Hctor Julio Alfonso Lpez, known as ElGatico (little cat). His nickname comes from hismother, Enilse Lpez, known as La Gata (the cat),who for the past decade has run a monopoly of thegambling game known as chance in the coastaldepartments. Hctor Julios brother, Jorge Luis, isin prison, under investigation for irregularities, in-cluding murder, during his tenure as mayor of Ma-

gangu, where La Gata is headquartered. La Gata,supposedly a former girlfriend of Gonzalo Rodr-guez Gacha, one of the founders of the Medellindrug cartel in the 1970s, rose to power with thehelp of paramilitaries. She is accused of involve-ment with many massacressuch as one at ElSalado in Sucre in 2000, in which paramilitariesmurdered 60 people.

La Gata and El Gatico are not traditional elitesby any stretch of the imagination. They are new, up-wardly mobile elites who have emerged thanks totheir ability to manage and benefit from the con-flicts in rural Colombia. Although the system hasa remarkable capacity to absorb such people, thisdoes not imply that it generates very good institu-tions in rural areas. Rapid turnover of elites tends tocreate incentives for predation, and it fosters poorproperty rights and investment incentives. The newelites prey on the old ones and are themselves inturn preyed upon. A complementary factor is thatfew Colombians have well-defined property rights,and much land has been acquired illegally, thusmaking it difficult to legalize any particular status

quo.It is easy to think of para-

military leaders like Jorge40 as gangsters, mafiososas some were and are. Butto think of them only thisway is to misunderstand thephenomenon. In one-third

to one-half of rural Colombia they are the state,and can do anything they like. Colombians calledJorge 40 El Papa Tovar (in Spanish, the Pope),and from his Vatican in the San Angel plains ofthe Magdalena River in the department of Cesar heruled over his small empire of 20 armed fronts inthree departments. His authority in that region ofthe Caribbean coast was such that peasants whoseland had been stolen by his men petitioned him asif he were a government official. With my usualrespect, I write to you to authorize whomever itcorresponds to return my land in the municipal-

ity of San Angel to me. . . . I was evicted from thisland four years ago and my family depends on it tosurvive. Today we wander from city to city lookingfor ways to make a living, wrote a woman whoseletter was found by the police in Tovars headquar-ters. Jorge 40 wasthe state in Cesar.

Other groups were just as dominant. RamnIsazas capital was Puerto Triunfo in the far eastof the department of Antioquia, where he startedhis first paramilitary group, called The Shotgun-

Colombias elites have little

interest in financing efforts to

establish order in the countryside.


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ners, in 1977. Isaza ruled the area for almost 30years. One of his key commanders was his son-in-law, Luis Eduardo Zuluaga (nicknamed Mac-GyverMcGuiver in Colombiaafter a UStele-vision character). McGuiver commanded the JosLuis Zuluaga Front (FJLZ), which controlled a ter-ritory of some 5,000 square kilometers.

The FJLZhad a written (albeit very incomplete)

legal system of estatutos (statutes) that it (im-perfectly) enforced. It allowed rudimentary equal-ity before the law in the sense that the same lawsapplied to members of the FJLZ as to civilians.The FJLZ also had a bureaucratized organizationwith functional specialization among the militarywing, civilian tax collectors, and a civilian so-cial team, which appears to have been remark-ably unpatrimonial. The FJLZregulated trade andsocial life. It had a mission statement, an ideology,a hymn, a prayer, and a radio station. It handedout medals, including the Order of Francisco dePaula Santander and the Grand Cross of Gold.

The FJLZtaxed every landowner and business-man in its territory. It even taxed drug dealers andcocaine laboratories, though it was not itself in-volved in the drug business (indeed, it rather dis-approved of it). It built hundreds of kilometers ofroads, and extended electrification in rural areas.It built schools, and paid for teachers and musicalinstruments in others. It started a health clinic, re-built an old-age peoples home, constructed hous-es for poor people, created an artisan center, and

built a sports stadium and bull ring.All of this is perhaps best summed up by theironic question a paramilitary boss, Ernesto Bez,asked of a judge in Bogot: How could a small in-dependent state work inside a lawful state such asours? If you want to understand Colombia, youneed to understand how.

POLITICALCARTELSThe complexity of this system today is that it

is not held in place by some grand Faustian pactor Machiavellian calculation, but has evolved over

a long period of time. There is considerable evi-dence for this duration. Take the career of DumarAljure. An army deserter and Liberal guerrilla dur-ing the civil war known as The Violence in the1950s, he ran an independent republic in theplains department of Meta for 15 years until thearmy killed him in 1968. From his capital in SanMartn, Aljure raised taxes and regulated trade andsociety, just like Jorge 40 or Isaza. More impor-tant, he also delivered votes for local politicians in

Villavicencio, who in exchange left him alone. Hismistake was to attempt to change sides in the 1968election. He backed the losing candidate, and thewinner finally let the army go after him.

The system of governance in Colombia generatesother phenomena that also tend to reproduce it.One is the remarkable extent to which the economyis cartelized. Rich people in Colombia mostly make

their money from monopolies in protected sectorsthat are created and shielded by the government andenforced by predatory behavior and even violence.The richest men in Colombia have monopolizeddifferent sectorsCarlos Ardila Llle, soft drinksand sugar; Luis Carlos Sarmiento, banking and fi-nancial services; Julio Mario Santo Domingo, beer.

Such cartelization arises easily from a politicalsystem that lacks accountability. And it extendsfrom production to wholesale, where, for exam-ple, El Cebollero (The Onion SellerAliriode Jess Rendn) used violence to establish amonopoly of the domestic trade in onions. Thiseconomic structure creates large differences be-tween domestic prices and those in neighboringcountries, which induce a vast flow of contrabandacross Colombias borders. Indeed, the famousdrug lord Pablo Escobar started his criminal careersmuggling cigarettes and other consumer goodsbefore switching to cocaine. Thus the system ofgovernance creates a comparative advantage forcriminality, perhaps the main factor that made Co-lombia a global center of drug trafficking.

BABYSTEPSDespite this history, the nation has seemingly

changed in the past decade. Is this a new Colom-bia? Perhaps. Certainly, many believe this to betrue. However, general signs and the logic of myargument suggest that it is not. There are manyreasons for this, but the most fundamental is that,despite all of the gains under the past two presi-dents, neither administration has broken with thefundamental system of governance that createdthe countrys problems.

The unreformed nature of governance has sur-faced many times during the past decade. Presi-dent Uribe wasted vast amounts of time and politi-cal capital attempting to change the constitutionso he could remove a term limit and stay in power.He succeeded once (with the politicians electedwith paramilitary support in 2002 heavily in fa-vor), but failed at his second attempt.

Also indicating a lack of change is the so-calledchuzadas scandal, in which the Uribe govern-


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ment used the Administrative Department of Secu-rity, the Colombian version of the Central Intelli-gence Agency, to illegally tap the phones of a largenumber of political opponents and anyone whocriticized the administration, including the localdirector of Human Rights Watch. The governmentalso phone-tapped members of the Supreme Courtto find evidence to disgrace them.

Even the Victims Law, President Santoss flag-ship policy to change the country, is widely re-garded within Colombia as symbolic and basicallyimpossible to implement. In September 2010 Agri-culture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo visited themunicipality of Necocl in the region of Urab, thenorthern part of Antioquia. He was there to startthe process of land restitution. The same day oneof five community leaders who had led the cam-paign for justice, Hernando Prez, was beaten todeath. Four unused bullets were left at the scene:one for each of the other leaders. The sixth, Al-beiro Valds, had been murdered four months ear-lier.

An interesting comparison is with the govern-ment of Carlos Lleras Restrepo, which, between1966 and 1970, launched an ambitious programof agrarian reform. Lleras Restrepo, probably themost competent Colombian president of the twen-tieth century, possessed impressive technocraticskills, and he operated in a cooperative interna-tional environment, in the context of the Alliancefor Progress launched by President John F. Kenne-

dy. Yet agrarian reform failed, mostly because Lle-ras Restrepo could not get local elites to cooperate.A series of articles in October 2012 in the news-

paper El Espectador, regarding the northwesternUrab region, revealed that no land there has yetbeen redistributed. It quoted a local peasant as say-ing it is easier to hold back the sea with a fingerthan return these lands to their legitimate owners.The same series pointed out that, while the para-militaries may have demobilized in 2006 and thesenior leaders are in prison, their actual numberon the ground has doubled in Urab. Leaders such

as El Aleman (The GermanFreddy RendnHerrera) effectively exercise control from prison.

It is true that violence has declined in Colom-bia, and there is now for the first time a police sta-tion in La Danta, something McGuiver insistedon before he demobilized. But despite these un-deniable gains, the rich people in Latin Americasmost unequal country remain unwilling to pay formany public goods. When the Uribe governmentlaunched its flagship National Consolidation Plan

in 2008 to establish the presence of the state inareas from which the FARChad been driven, $237million to fund the initiative had to come from theUSAgency for International Development. Colom-bias elites, accustomed to their politics of indirectrule, have little interest in financing efforts to es-tablish order in the countryside. And this is notbecause they face high rates of taxation already:

While the poorest 10 percent of Colombians pay8 percent of their income in taxes, the richest 10percent pay just 3 percent.

Violence remains a remarkable and normal partof life in Colombia. In the local elections of Octo-ber 2011, 41 candidates were murderedthe tipof an iceberg of intimidation and threats. Of 76trade unionists slain in the world in 2011, accord-ing to the International Trade Union Confedera-tion, 29 were killed in Colombia. In October 2012the transportation secretary of the city of Cali, Al-berto Hadad, had to leave the country in the faceof death threats. His crime was to propose theconstruction of an integrated public transport sys-tem for the city, which would have underminedthe rents that accrue to private bus operators.

NOTIMEFOREUPHORIAAll of this implies that if the FARCand maybe the

ELNdo decide to demobilize, though this will be agood thing, the countrys problems will be far fromover. Like the drug economy, Colombias left-winginsurgency is an outcome of the style of indirect rule

that spawns violence and illegality in the periph-ery. Indeed, the demobilization of paramilitaries in2006 led to a proliferation of new armed groups, forexample Los Urabeos and Los Rastrojos, theformer of which showed its power in January 2012by enforcing a two-day armed strike across thedepartments of the Caribbean coast, forcing manybusinesses to close for 48 hours. The FARCs demo-bilization could have similar effects.

Making a different Colombia entails tacklingthe basic way in which the country has been gov-erned since its inception as an independent repub-

lic in 1819. Uribes National Consolidation Planrepresented a small first step toward that end, but,good though it was, its framing did not sufficientlyacknowledge the politics behind the Colombianstates incapacity in the periphery. Unfortunately,rather than encouraging and intensifying agrarianreform and state-building efforts, peace with theFARCis more likely to lead to so much euphoriathat all such plans will be canceledprecisely thewrong thing to do.

Colombia otros 100 años de soledad-James Robinson

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