The Colombian crisis in historical perspective.

LeGrand, Catherine C.

Abstract. This article explores the nineteenth- and twentieth-century roots of the present violence in Colombia and the main actors involved therein. Focusing on the civilian government, the Colombian military, the FARC and ELN guerrillas, and the paramilitaries, it emphasizes the chronic weakness of the state, the privatization and regionalization of conflict, the impact of the cocaine export economy, and the difficulties of coming to a peace agreement. This article also explains connections and differences between the Colombian violence of the 1950s and the current conflict, and it provides a guide to the literature authored by Colombian social scientists on the subject.

Resume. Cet article explore les racines historiques de la violence actuelle en Colombie, qui datent du XIXe et du XXe siecles, et analyse le role de ses principaux acteurs. En se penchant sur le gouvernement civil, les forces armees colombiennes, les guerillas des FARC et de l'ELN ainsi que sur les paramilitaires, ce travail souligne les faiblesses chroniques de l'Etat, la privatisation et la regionalisation du conflit, l'impact de l'economie d'exportation de cocaine et les difficultes qui ont entrave le chemin vers un accord de paix. Cet article explique aussi les liens et les differences entre la violence des annees cinquante et celle du conflit actuel et fournit un guide de la litterature produite par des chercheurs colombiens sur le sujet.

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Colombia today is in major crisis. Large areas of the countryside are controlled by guerrilla groups (there are 20,000 guerrillas in arms) and paramilitary forces (the paramilitaries claim 10,000 members). The government has no legitimate monopoly of force and is extremely weak; it does not and cannot effectively protect its citizens. Most crimes never come to trial, judges receive death threats, and the army itself is accused of human rights violations. Since 1985 there have been 25,000 violent deaths per year, a total of 300,000 murders over the past decade and a half, 18% of which are attributable to the political violence. Homicide is the leading cause of death for men between the ages of 18 and 45, and the second leading cause for women. From 2000 through 2002, more than 5,000 people died in 900 massacres and another 3,500 a year were kidnapped for ransom. Trade unionists, teachers, human rights workers, politicians, church people, journalists, and peasant and indigenous leaders are threatened, and assassinations and disappearances are daily occurrences. In the past decade, 2.5 million people, mostly the rural poor, fled their homes and many remain refugees inside the country, while another 1.1 million Colombians, educated members of the upper and middle classes, have departed since 1996 for the United States, Europe, and other Latin American countries (mainly Ecuador and Costa Rica). Meanwhile, since 1999, the economy has gone into deep recession, the worst Colombia has experienced since the 1930s. (1)

North Americans tend to associate violence in Colombia with the drug trade. Indeed, Colombia is the world's major supplier of cocaine and an increasingly important supplier of heroin. In May 2000, Colombia suddenly leapt into the news in North America because the US Congress, at President Bill Clinton's urging, voted to send $1.3 billion mainly in military aid to Colombia to fight the drug war. The Colombian government was already the largest recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere and the third largest in the world, after Israel and Egypt. About 75% of the additional $1.3 billion allotted to what is known as "Plan Colombia" has gone to train a new Colombian anti-drug army battalion and purchase military hardware, including Black Hawk and Huey helicopters.

The stated aim of this controversial escalation in US involvement in Colombia is to significantly reduce cocaine consumption in the United States (which is viewed as a problem of national security) by eradicating production of the coca plant in the southern jungles of Colombia. According to the United States, the Colombian government is fighting a life-and-death struggle against drug lords in cahoots with left-wing guerrillas who, since 11 September 2001, tend to be labelled "terrorists" both inside and outside the country (Tate 2000; Roldan 2001; Estrada Alvarez 2001; IEPRI 2001).

In 2001 US President George W. Bush increased security assistance to the Colombian army and police through the Andean Regional Initiative to support counter-drug activities in the Andean countries of South America. Then in March 2002 the Bush administration began crossing the invisible line between counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency to target Colombian armed groups without regard to drug activity. Concretely, the US government sought congressional funding to protect economic infrastructure--the Cano Limon-Covenas oil pipeline--against guerrilla attacks (Isacson 2003). (2) In May 2003, in the wake of Colombian support for the war in Iraq, the Colombian president asked Washington to extend the program of aerial interception of drug shipments to guerrilla arms shipments and to provide Colombia with intelligence equipment no longer needed in Iraq to combat the drug traffickers and the guerrillas (El Tiempo 1-4 May 2003).

In this article I will argue that drugs and oil are only part of a much more complicated story. Colombia's difficulties did not begin with the illegal drug economy, and this is not a simple saga of a democratic government fighting against left-wing revolutionaries--or terrorists--bent on its destruction. This essay points to the weakness of the Colombian state, its historical failure to create institutional channels for the expression of popular concerns, and its less-than-complete control over the Colombian armed forces. It also details how the expression of organized violence in Colombia has changed over the past 55 years, the evolution of the guerrillas and the paramilitaries, and how land and resource issues undergird and are played out in the conflicts. Finally, it seeks an explanation of why the violence has intensified over the past two decades in the regionalized three-way competition between government, guerrillas, and paramilitaries for control of territory, people, and profits that fuels the Colombian conflagration today. In sum, my aim in this article is to shed light on the historical background and nature of the present crisis, drawing mainly on the work of Colombian historians and social scientists. (3)

Let me begin with an overview of Colombian geography and demography, which is essential to understanding the regional and agrarian dimensions of the conflicts today. Twice the size of France, Colombia has a population of 42 million people. The western half of the country is broken by three great ranges of the Andes Mountains. During the colonial period, the Spanish first settled in the cool, healthy mountains; there they founded Santafe de Bogota, today Colombia's capital, and Medellin, its industrial centre during much of the twentieth century. Beyond the mountains lie the hot lowlands which include the Pacific coast and the Caribbean litoral where the Spanish colonial ports of Cartagena and Santa Marta still attract tourists. The tropical lowlands also include the southern Amazonian jungles, the vast Eastern Plains (los Llanos Orientales), and the valley of the Magdalena River, which runs from deep in the interior between the eastern and central mountain ranges north to the bustling port of Barranquilla on the Caribbean Sea. The majority of the population lives in the mountains and is Spanish-speaking, of mixed Spanish and native Indian descent. Afro-Colombians add to the mixture and are a significant group in the cities of Medellin, Cali, and Bogota. During the colonial period, from 1524 until 1819, Spaniards consolidated large estates (haciendas) with tenant labour in the highlands around Bogota; the mountains harboured some Indian communities (resguardos) and villages of small-holding mestizo peasants, too. Along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts live significant black and mulatto populations, and in the Magdalena River valley are many people of mixed ancestry (Afro-Colombian/Spanish/Indian). The interior of the Caribbean coast and the banks of the Magdalena River are particularly suitable for cattle ranching. The eastern half of the country, the endless grassland plain that extends into Venezuela, always sparsely populated by cowboys and a few native hunting and gathering groups, has recently attracted international oil companies. Finally, in the southern jungles, native Indian villages that combine manioc agriculture with fishing and hunting spread out along the rivers. (Native people comprise only 2.5 % of the Colombian population.)

To grasp the agrarian dimensions of the current crisis, it is important to understand that before 1700 Colombia was a relatively poor colony with no centralized state authority and little domestic or external commerce. (4) Although the Viceroyalty of New Granada was created in 1717 with Santafe de Bogota as its capital, the radius of Spanish economic activity continued to be relatively narrow. Much land in the middle altitudes of the mountains and the lowlands remained Crown or public lands (terrenos baldios), that is, forests or grasslands open to homesteading. Thus, whereas the United States and Canada both had western frontiers, Colombia possessed many scattered internal frontiers, including the interior of the Caribbean coast, the Magdalena River valley, the Eastern Plains, and the southern jungles.

Like most other Latin American countries, after independence Colombia had trouble finding profitable export products. Finally, after 1870, Colombia began exporting coffee, and the coffee economy continued to expand in the twentieth century, shifting out of the eastern mountain range into the central cordillera to the south of Medellin (Palacios 1980; Bergquist 1986). Meanwhile, the introduction of barbed wire and sown pasture grasses precipitated a significant expansion of cattle ranching, and around 1900 the Boston-based United Fruit Company started up export banana plantations south of Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast.

The result of these novel economic activities (and the building of railroads, which also began in the 1870s) was that Colombians began migrating out of the highlands into the temperate middle altitudes and the hot lowlands, which became the epicentres of commercial production in the late nineteenth century. Peasants left haciendas or small farm areas, where land was scarce and families too large, to stake claims on public land down the mountain. Such frontier settlers, known as colonos, cleared public land and put it into cultivation, but often a decade or so after they arrived, land sharks appeared on the scene, threatening to take over their fields with fabricated property titles. So the growth of agricultural exports stimulated colonization movements of poor people into previously unsettled areas, often followed by the privatization of the land by men with resources who succeeded in consolidating large private properties. (5) This enclosure process, by which homesteaders were expropriated, led to social conflict over public lands between peasant settlers and land speculators or landlords seeking to form profitable new haciendas in economically dynamic regions. This is the major form of rural conflict in Colombia historically, and it is a major form today (LeGrand 1985, 1989).

Thus, Colombia's vast areas of public lands, its mountainous terrain, the variety of altitudes, climates, ecosystems, and peoples, and ongoing transport and communication difficulties produced a country of many regions and sub-regions, a profusion of central areas and wild hinterlands. From colonial to contemporary times, according to historians Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia has been marked by "spatial fragmentation, ... economic atomization, and cultural differentiation" (Safford and Palacios 2002, ix). The sense of nation remained tenuous, regional and local struggles for power were endemic, and the institutionalization of an effective central state proved difficult indeed. (6)

With this human geography in mind, let us turn directly to the historical roots of the current violence in Colombia. Colombian scholars emphasize that not just one but rather a multiplicity of violences afflict the country today. These include an enormous escalation in crime over the past two decades, conflicts between youth gangs, and the so-called "social cleansing" groups that attack prostitutes, homosexuals, and drug addicts in cities. There are many forms of nonpolitical as well as political violence (Comision de Estudios sobre la Violencia 1988; Perea Restrepo 2001). In this essay I will focus specifically on political violence, which is of direct interest for non-Colombians who want to understand the implications of United States policy and who are concerned with human rights and possibilities for peace.

The main domestic actors in the current political violence are: the civilian government, the guerrilla groups, the drug traffickers, the paramilitaries, the Colombian army, and civil society. The best way to make sense of what is going on is to examine these overlapping yet distinct forces one by one.

Political Parties and the Civilian Government

Colombia has not experienced military dictatorship like so many other Latin American countries. (7) What is confounding about the current violence and the widespread violation of human rights is that it is occurring in what appears to be a political democracy.

Soon after independence, in the 1830s and 1840s, two political parties took form in Colombia, the Liberals and the Conservatives. Soon everyone came to identify themselves as Liberal or Conservative: indeed, loyalties to one or the other political party became primary, almost hereditary, in the nineteenth century. It has often been said that in Colombia, one was born Liberal or Conservative; Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel In Evil Hour (La Mala Hora) vividly portrays how such affiliations were lived at the local level. Both the Liberals and the Conservatives were multi-class parties, led by elites and including middling groups and urban and rural poor (Safford 1972; Stoller 1991; Sanders 2000). During the nineteenth century, numerous civil wars between the two parties erupted: indeed, for 33 years of that century, civil wars were being played out in one or another part of the country. The seemingly interminable fighting culminated in the great War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902) that affected the whole country, killing, it is said, 100,000 people (Bergquist 1978; Sanchez Gomez and Aguilera 2001).

Of course, Liberal and Conservative parties also existed in most other Latin American countries in the nineteenth century. What is unique about Colombia is the depth of party affiliation. The parties were the first supra-local institutions with which people identified (most scholars of Colombia say that the state took form later). And these parties have endured: Colombia, Nicaragua, and Uruguay are the only countries in Latin America today where political parties that originated in the nineteenth century continue to be important on the political scene. In the 1930s and 1940s, Colombia did not give birth to an important populist party like APRA in Peru, the Peronists of Argentina, or even the Mexican PRI. In Colombia the emergence of the middle and working classes as political actors in the twentieth century was contained and constrained within the old two-party system (see Braun 1985; Pecaut 1987; Palacios 2001). Students of Colombia question, then, what impact the extraordinary continuity of the two-party system has had on the formation of the Colombian state and its evident weakness. Partisan attachments and antagonisms, with specific regional expressions, were primary; clientage networks within each party channelled political ambitions and access to resources, permeating, debilitating, and in some ways substituting for the state. Because of the monopoly of the two traditional parties, observers question, too, whether emergent social sectors have been able to find real political expression for their concerns (Reyes 1987; Palacios 1998; Hoskin 1998).

After the peace treaties that ended the War of a Thousand Days in 1902, an exhausted Colombia experienced 40 years of peace. But violence broke out again in the late 1940s. The years 1946 to 1964 in Colombia are known simply as La Violencia. After the US Civil War and the Mexican Revolution, the Colombian Violencia of the 1950s was the civil conflict in the Western Hemisphere that killed the most people: it left 200,000 dead.

Some people say La Violencia began with the elections of 1946 in which the Liberals lost the presidency to the Conservatives. But violence really erupted when the great Colombian Liberal populist politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was murdered in the streets of Bogota on 9 April 1948. Gaitan's death set off the largest urban riot in Latin American history, the Bogotazo, and it intensified tensions between Liberal and Conservative party elites, which some say soon precipitated the breakdown of the state (Oquist 1980; Sanchez Gomez 2000a). Political conflicts between party leaders set off a war in the countryside between peasant Liberals and Conservatives. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Conservatives controlled the government and military, and they also armed peasant groups that they turned into semi-military or irregular, what we call paramilitary, forces. In self-defence and retaliation, Liberals formed guerrilla groups to fight the Conservatives and the government.

There are many interpretations of La Violencia of the 1950s. (8) Some see it as a renewal of the nineteenth-century civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives, while others interpret it as a Conservative offensive against the followers of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Still others say that the breakdown of the state released a multitude of local conflicts, some political and others socioeconomic. Yet others see La Violencia as an abortive social revolution or, alternatively, as an offensive of landlords and business people against peasants and their allies who had begun to push for land redistribution.

Those who would make sense of continuities and changes in Colombia should note that La Violencia was mainly a conflict between Liberals and Conservatives, and those who died were mainly poor people in the countryside. In contrast, the conflict between Liberals and Conservatives is no longer relevant today. While these are still the main political parties in Colombia, they are not the protagonists of the conflicts, and they are losing coherence and influence. Also, today's violence affects everyone--urban and country dwellers and the upper and middle classes as well as popular groups. Today the powerful--presidential candidates, congressional representatives, and business people--are targets of the violence, as are the rural poor. Furthermore (it is important to remember) in the 1950s, there was no drug trade in Colombia. Thus the character of Colombian violence has undergone major changes in recent times.

By 1957 the Liberal and Conservative elites became alarmed by the extent of violence and fearful that social conflicts were getting out of control; so the leaders of the Liberal and Conservative parties came together to make peace through a political pact known as the National Front (Frente Nacional). The National Front of 1958 was an agreement between the Conservative and Liberal party directorates that they would alternate the presidency and divide political offices for the next 15 years (1958-74). Elections continued to be held, but everyone knew who would win: first a Liberal president, then a Conservative, then a Liberal again (Hartlyn 1988; Berry et al. 1980). This was a kind of elitist, restricted democracy, in large measure a return to the "politics of gentlemen" (Braun 1985) who arranged the affairs of the nation over drinks at the Jockey Club. As time went on, the establishment became increasingly bogged down in bureaucracy, clientelism, and corruption.

The problem, then, was that there was no real change. The National Front system was a formal democracy with two political parties and elections every few years, but as industrialization occurred and more people moved to cities, as society became more complex, and new social movements took form, Colombians could not find independent political expression. (9)

Beyond this need for the "democratization of democracy," those who have studied Colombia also emphasize that the Colombian state continued to be weak. Party affiliations, embodied in patron-client relations, took precedence; business and large landowning groups organized strong private gremios (lobbying groups) that played a major role in making economic policy; and, even in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the government did not have much of a presence in large areas of the country, especially in zones of recent settlement (see Hartlyn 1985; Leal Buitrago and Davila Ladron de Guevara 1990). According to historian Mary Roldan, "For most Colombians the central state was an abstract concept and power was largely exercised and determined locally or regionally, not in Bogota"(Roldan 2002, 296).

The Guerrillas

In the early 1960s, new kinds of guerrillas emerged in Colombia--armed left-wing organizations that challenged the system. Most of these new movements were inspired by the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro's success in using guerrilla tactics to take power (this is the period when young people all over Latin America sought to emulate Fidel and Che, and various small guerrilla groups, including the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, took form). But in Colombia, the new guerrilla movements also had domestic roots, since some of the guerrillas that challenged the political monopoly of Liberals and Conservatives emerged directly out of the armed groups of the preceding decade.

During the 1970s and 1980s, several guerrilla organizations were active in Colombia, including the pro-Chinese Popular Liberation Army (EPL) and the nationalist Movement of April 19 (M-19) (Pizarro Leongomez 1992; Arnson 1999). I will focus here on the two main groups that remain active today: the National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

The National Liberation Army (Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional, or ELN) was formed in the department of Santander in the early 1960s by Colombian university students who had gone to Cuba. Traditional ELN strongholds are in the valley of the Magdalena River between Santander and Boyaca on the east bank and Antioquia on the west (Magdalena Medio) and in northeastern Colombia, near Venezuela (the Catatumbo and Sarare areas). The ELN is active in regions of historic and recent oil exploitation and in recent colonization areas where there are ongoing conflicts over land. The ELN is the guerrilla movement that Camilo Torres, the first Latin American priest to take up arms, joined, and until his recent death of natural causes, the organization's leader, Manuel Perez, was a defrocked Spanish priest. So beyond its Cuban inspiration, the ELN also finds its roots in the Liberation Theology movement in the Latin American Catholic Church (Arenas Reyes 1971; Penate 1999; Broderick 2000).10

The ELN, with roughly 4,000 adherents, is significantly smaller and weaker than FARC: over the past decade it has been hard hit by a paramilitary offensive in the Magdalena River valley and the interior of the Caribbean coast. Despite the fact that, or perhaps because, it is on the defensive, in recent years the ELN has engaged in spectacular mass kidnappings, and attacks on oil pipelines and electrical pylons, which many regard as a sabotage of the national economy. The ELN has been more open to peace negotiations than the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, but no negotiations have been successful.

The other guerrilla group active in Colombia today is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC), the oldest guerrilla army in Latin America and the largest and most important in Colombia. FARC and the ELN are not a united front. They have rarely confronted each other directly, but neither do they collaborate in any concerted way. For the most part, the government's peace processes with each guerrilla group have been entirely separate.

Founded in the mid-1960s, around the same time as the ELN, FARC emerged directly out of the Colombian Communist Party and radical Liberalism at the end of La Violencia. Like other Latin American Communist parties, the Colombian Communist Party (PCC) was formed in the late 1920s, which happened to be a period of agrarian unrest in coffee regions in the eastern and central mountain ranges. Although numerically small, the PCC involved itself almost immediately in these struggles over Indian communal lands, the rights of tenant farmers, and public land claims. This early rural orientation of the Communist Party in Colombia and particularly its success in putting down roots in several areas of the countryside, some not far from Bogota, is unusual in the Latin American context. (11) During the 1950s, several parts of western Cundinamarca, eastern and southern Tolima, Huila, and Cauca, where the Communist Party had generated support 20 years earlier, came to be known as "independent peasant republics" (Gonzalez Arias 1992). These Communist-influenced rural redoubts became refuge zones for peasants fleeing from the partisan violence.

In the early 1960s, the National Front government attacked these peasant republics with aerial bombing, and people streamed out of them toward new frontier regions in the Eastern Plains and the northern part of the southern jungles. These refugees saw the state as the enemy because the government was attacking them. The new migrations became self-defence movements of armed colonization that went off in the by now familiar way to settle new areas of public lands and engage in subsistence agriculture. The FARC guerrilla movement originated in these colonization movements, and settlement areas of the late Violencia became FARC's local power bases. (12) FARC, then, was a real peasant movement, a response to official violence and military repression; in the 1960s and 1970s, FARC's strength lay in distant rural areas with virtually no state presence. It just so happened that these areas were suitable for growing coca leaves and, in the 1980s with the international drug economy in full expansion, peasants in these areas began raising coca commercially (Molano 1987, 1990; Jaramillo et al. 1986).

In 1982, the Colombian government under Conservative President Belisario Betancur began peace negotiations with the guerrillas. (13) In response to Betancur's initiative, some members of FARC agreed to seek change from within the political system by turning themselves into a legal political party. Thus in the mid 1980s out of FARC a new political party was born, known as Patriotic Union (Union Patriotica, or UP). Over the next decade, members of the Union Patriotica party who ran for political office, became involved in union organizing, and so on, were assassinated by faceless killers whom we now know were hired by incipient paramilitary groups, army people, or local political bosses. More than 2,000 people associated with the Union Patriotica were murdered in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the party was wiped out. (14) This experience, together with the deaths of many of the more moderate, more politically oriented members of FARC who had joined the UP, is in part responsible for FARC's reluctance to surrender its arms through peace negotiations. The inability or unwillingness of the Colombian government to create a secure political space was a blow to the possibility of consolidating a strong, inclusive state within which real democratic opposition could thrive.

In the early 1980s, FARC had only 5,000 guerrillas in arms, but since around 1990, it has expanded exponentially in numbers and geographical reach (Bejarano Avila 1997; Pena 1997; Echandia 1999; PNUD in press). Today FARC has 63 fronts (operations in different parts of the country) and the ELN has 33. Beyond their traditional regions of influence, the guerrillas have successfully established bases in areas of dynamic new resource economies, for example, oil, coca, heroin poppies, bananas, gold, and also in the vicinity of hydroelectric projects, where multinational corporations have shown an interest in investing, land speculation is rampant and social disequilibrium marked. Guerrilla groups are also active around major political and administrative centres such as Bogota and Cali. Today FARC is still especially strong in the southern jungle areas of Guaviare, Caqueta, and Putumayo (destinations of the armed colonization of the 1960s), and ELN in the region bordering Venezuela in Norte de Santander and Arauca, but together these organizations have a presence in approximately 700 of the nation's 1085 municipalities. FARC has 17,000 fighters in arms, one quarter of whom are women. (15)

Whereas at first FARC was a self-defence movement that sought to be left alone in the outback, today it plants land mines, takes police stations, and ambushes army patrols. It dynamites electrical towers and bridges and attacks urban water supplies; it lobs gas cylinders into village police stations, sometimes causing many civilian deaths. It has the capacity to cut off whole regions of the country through roadblocks and attacks against infrastructure, and it has urban militias and sets off bombs in the cities. In 2002, it took hostage a presidential candidate (Ingrid Betancourt), the governor of Antioquia, the ex-governor of Meta, a former minister of defence, the bishop who presides over the Latin American Episcopal Conference, and 12 members of the departmental assembly of Valle de Cauca, all with the aim of forcing a prisoner exchange (Human Rights Watch 2003; Semana 5 May 2003).

FARC's sources of financing are many: indeed, since the 1980s, in part because of the upsurge of cocaine profits, FARC has been autonomous financially, militarily, and politically. It pays recruits and purchases weapons by taxing the production of coca, much of which is cultivated in regions under FARC influence. Furthermore, in 2000 it emitted "Revolutionary Law 002," which required the well-to-do to pay FARC a tax of 5 to 10% of their capital; business people, landowners, and foreign companies paid significant sums, fearing that employees or family members would be kidnapped if they refused (El Tiempo 6 November 2001).

Traditionally, guerrilla groups in Latin America used kidnapping as a tool to obtain the release of political prisoners and garner publicity for their political programs. In recent years, FARC has practiced on a large scale the kidnapping of men, women, and children in cities and rural areas for immense ransoms. While FARC says that it only targets the rich, many middle class and even quite humble people feel "kidnappable." This is true especially since FARC began the practice of "miraculous fishing" (la pesca milagrosa), which involves setting up roadblocks on highways and kidnapping people out of cars or buses after verifying their credit ratings by radio or laptop computer (Symmes 2000). Recent investigations indicate that FARC also controls much of the profits from gold and platinum mining and from the stolen car business in Colombia, where 36,000 automobiles are stolen each year (El Nuevo Heraldo 18 February 2002; El Tiempo 26 March 2002).

When Conservative Andres Pastrana came to the presidency in 1998 on a peace ticket, FARC once again entered into peace negotiations with the government. Meanwhile, the war went on: the government, FARC, and the majority of Colombians accepted that it was necessary to negotiate in the midst of war. Because there was no ceasefire, all sides endeavoured to use force to strengthen their positions at the negotiating table. When President Pastrana broke off negotiations in February 2002, the anger in Colombian cities against FARC kidnapping and attacks on infrastructure had reached a fever-pitch. They were regularly labelled "bandits" and "terrorists," and progressive intellectuals accused FARC of targeting the civilian population, violating international humanitarian law, and precipitating a rightward drift in Colombian public opinion that favoured the paramilitaries and an escalation of war to exterminate FARC (El Tiempo 4 February 2002; Problemes d'Amerique Latine 2002).

A few general comments about the guerrillas are in order. First, they are particularly strong in both old and new colonization zones where there has never been a positive state presence. In these regions, they take on the role of local government. It is estimated that at present guerrilla groups exercise strong influence in at least one third of Colombian rural counties (municipios), which means that in these places they have a major say in who is elected and how municipal funds are spent. In such zones, the guerrillas are de facto the law, adjudicating disputes and punishing thieves, while taxing most productive activities, including the highly profitable coca crop (PNUD in press). Thus, the guerrillas continue to have strong territorial control in many parts of the country, despite President Pastrana's decision to retake the so-called "demilitarized zone" in southeastern Colombia, ceded to FARC in 1998 as a precondition for peace negotiations. In May-June 2002, FARC threatened hundreds of mayors and municipal authorities with death if they did not immediately resign: the aim was to prevent any state authorities from functioning in the small towns and rural areas so that FARC could move into the vacuum (Human Rights Watch 2003).

This situation of guerrilla territories (and, as we shall see, of paramilitary-controlled areas) leads to the crucial question of how is the Colombian government to re-establish control and/or legitimacy in such regions? If and when peace negotiations bear fruit, is there a possibility that the guerrillas may remain the local government there, reestablishing connections with the national government? (see Semana 9 April 2001). (16)

During the past 15 years, struggles over local political power have intensified in Colombia in part because of institutional reforms. Before 1988, departmental governors and local mayors were appointed by the central government. In an effort to democratize the political regime by decentralizing it in order to encourage greater participation, the Colombian government reformed the system to allow the popular election of mayors and governors (see Bell Lemus 1988; Gaitan and Moreno Ospina 1988; Angell et al. 2001). This move has had the unexpected effect of intensifying struggles over local control which have often turned violent, pitting local Liberal or Conservative political bosses (traditional gamonales) against candidates from new groups including in the 1980s, the Union Patriotica party, and in the 1990s, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries (Carroll 1999, 2000; Romero 2000a, 2000b).

Two further issues to be considered are the impact of the development of coca production on the guerrilla organizations since the 1980s and the relation of the guerrillas to social movements. Has drug money corrupted the guerrillas, and will a rich guerrilla seriously negotiate? According to former Colombian Attorney General Alfonso Gomez Mendez (24 November 2000), just as drug money has corrupted society and the establishment, it has also corrupted the anti-establishment. Extortion and kidnapping have weakened the ethical bases of guerrilla action and undermined its social legitimacy. In Colombia it is generally believed that neither FARC nor the ELN retains much of an ideological vision and that they are not doing much political organizing; rather they (and particularly FARC) are engaged in war as business. (17)

Do the guerrillas represent "the people"? In regions they control, FARC does support the survival of peasant farms against the encroachment of landlords. Beyond this, most knowledgable observers say that FARC does not represent "el pueblo." (18) Rather, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries are engaged in a power struggle over control of territory as a way to control people and resources. Where there are guerrillas and where there is retaliatory violence from paramilitaries or the Colombian army, there autonomous social movements find it very difficult to survive (see Ortiz 2001; Reyes Posada and A. Bejarano 1988; Archila N. 1996).

The Drug Traffickers and the Paramilitaries

Twentieth-century Colombia has been mostly known for coffee and, among literary aficionados, for bananas (because of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Nobel-prize winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude). But in the last 40 years, Colombia experienced the sudden emergence of entirely new export products--drugs (Tovar 1993; Betancourt and Garcia 1994). First came marijuana in the 1970s: potheads in North America created a big demand, the US sprayed the Mexican crop with chemicals, and Colombian suppliers moved into the void. Marijuana growing and trafficking concentrated on the Caribbean coast in the traditional contraband area of La Guajira, the Sierra Nevada Mountain, and the Santa Marta banana zone from which the United Fruit Company had just withdrawn. Marijuana in Colombia was a boom-bust industry: it was immensely profitable in the 1970s, but Colombia's advantage soon evaporated as North American producers began to supply their own markets.

Then came cocaine in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cocaine, then crack, emerged as the new drug-consumption fad in the United States (Bourgois 1995). Cocaine processors and overseas marketers from the big cities of Medellin and Cali eagerly stepped up to supply the demand. They began by processing coca produced in Peru and Bolivia by native Indian peasants. (Initially, only native people knew how to raise the coca plant, a pre-Columbian Andean crop used to treat colic, altitude sickness, hangovers, and hunger.) Before the 1980s, Colombians did not grow coca on a large scale, nor did they consume cocaine; domestic consumption is still negligible in terms of demand. The Colombian "drug lords" who emerged in the 1980s were mainly people of lower middle class origin, entrepreneurs who responded to international demand, seeking social and economic mobility within Colombian society (Leal Buitrago 1989; Roldan 1999).

In the late 1980s, as Peruvians and Bolivians began processing their own coca and the United States implemented eradication campaigns, Colombians began producing the coca plant commercially. Thousands of families in the late 1980s and early 1990s migrated out of the settled mountainous centre of Colombia into the southern regions (the northern Amazonian jungle), where they cleared the forest and began producing coca on small farms. Traffickers went with them to buy the coca, process it, and arrange transport to foreign markets. And the FARC guerrilla movement was already there in the new producing zones, or it soon expanded into the regions of new settlement. FARC was the local government; FARC taxed the growers, the traffickers, the truckdrivers, and the shopkeepers. Raising coca was a prosperous way of life for all concerned. The FARC guerrillas became the middlemen; it is estimated that FARC today makes about half of its income or between $200 and $500 million (US) annually by taxing coca production and cocaine processing.

In Colombia, drug trafficking relates to land in yet another way. The big drug lords in Medellin and Cali, smart entrepreneurs from humble backgrounds, were getting rich. They wanted to bring the drug money they made outside the country back to Colombia, and one of the major investments they made was in cattle ranching. From the early 1980s on, there is a clear pattern of cartel members investing drug profits in huge tracts of land for cattle ranching in the Middle Magdalena River valley region, the Eastern Plains, lowland Antioquia, and the department of Cordoba. Economists who study the internal impact of the drug trade on Colombia emphasize that the drug lords did not invest in productive agriculture; indeed, the economic resources of the drug producers have generally been used in non-productive and inefficient ways (Reina 2001). (19) Because of the narco-investments, a significant trend toward the concentration of landholding is distinguishable in cattle ranching regions since the early 1980s (Zamosc 1992).

Meanwhile, the guerrillas sought to get money by kidnapping the wealthy for ransom. And since the drug lords were becoming spectacularly rich, the guerrillas began kidnapping their relatives in Medellin and Cali. The drug lords and their families were, of course, terribly upset: in 1981, in retaliation for the kidnapping of Marta Nieves Ochoa, 227 narcos formed a paramilitary death squad called Death to Kidnappers (Muerte a Secuestradores, or MAS) to kill guerrillas. Also, the new drug-trafficking landlords, together with ranchers already there, formed private armies to protect their cattle ranches against guerrillas who tried to tax them and against peasants who contested their land claims. (These were former public land areas where social relations were conflictual [Romero 1994].) So, beginning around 1982, many paramilitary groups formed and took the law into their own hands. They adopted some of the methods and organizational techniques of the guerrillas to retaliate against them. The active involvement of civilians in the war as armed allies of the military was partially sanctioned by Colombian law from the mid 1960s until 1989 (Human Rights Watch 1996, 12-15). (20)

Where guerrillas were strong, the government stationed military brigades, and intimate collaboration developed among large landowners (cattle ranchers and, in some areas, palm oil and banana producers), paramilitaries, and specific military commanders who facilitated their activities. This ongoing collaboration is so close that some international observers call the paramilitaries "irregular forces of the state." There is evidence of intelligence sharing, and many men who participate in paramilitary abuses are former or off-duty military or police (Human Rights Watch 2000, 2001, 2003). The paramilitaries, however, are not directly controlled by the army or drug traffickers: they are an increasingly powerful force with independent financing from the expanding drug trade and large donations from local businessmen and politicians hostile to the central government's peace negotiations and the reforms emanating from Bogota that allowed the popular election of mayors (Romero 2000b).

During the 1990s, the paramilitaries have expanded greatly in size and have created a national organization called the United Self-Defence Groups of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC) that claims more than 10,000 men in arms, a significant number of whom may be guerrilla defectors. AUC is led by Carlos Castano, whose father was kidnapped and killed by FARC. Castano openly admits that AUC is mainly financed by money from the drug economy. The Castano family are drug traffickers themselves, operating through the jungles of Darien to Panama; Colombian judicial authorities have located paramilitary drug-processing laboratories in the department of Antioquia (Gomez Mendez 24 November 2000).

The paramilitary groups emerged out of the cattle-ranching areas of the middle Magdalena River valley and northern Colombia (the departments of Cordoba and Bolivar), but in the last few years they, like the guerrillas, have significantly expanded their radius of action. The paramilitaries are highly organized, have urban as well as rural operatives, and now carry out operations all over the country. In 2000 they boarded planes and flew into zones of guerrilla influence in eastern Colombia and south into Putumayo to massacre peasant villages there. They have wrested control of the oil city of Barrancabermeja on the Magdalena River from the ELN and are penetrating the poor barrios of Medellin (Semana 26 March 2002).

The paramilitaries (or "paras") call themselves anti-Communist nationalists and demand political recognition. Carlos Castano has given interviews to the national media and demanded representation at the peace negotiations (Castro Caycedo 1996; Kirk 1998; Aranguren 2001). Vehemently opposed to this, FARC says that peace negotiations cannot come to fruition until the government controls or disbands the paramilitaries. In 2002 AUC claimed success in another route to legitimate political influence: Salvatore Mancuso, military chief of the AUC, alleged that 35% of senators and congresspeople who won seats in the March parliamentary elections were close to the paras and represented their viewpoints (El Tiempo 13-14 March 2002). (21)

On the ground, the paramilitaries engage in extortion and struggle with the guerrillas for territorial control. The form this takes is constant attacks on civilians whom the paras allege to be guerrilla sympathizers. In the 1980s the paramilitaries were responsible in part for the extermination of the Union Patriotica party; in the 1990s they threatened and assassinated human rights workers, unionists, journalists, and teachers, and they carried out the great majority of massacres in the countryside (in recent years, one every two days). The paramilitaries are responsible for the displacement of thousands upon thousands of peasants as they carry out a dirty war against the civilian population in rural areas. (22) Without directly confronting the guerrillas, the paras seek to wrest control of territory from them by expelling the civilian population and then providing security for large estates, the vast cattle ranches that are consolidating there. The paramilitaries charge tribute for the protection they provide. So they are carrying out a kind of reverse agrarian reform, expelling peasants to take over land.

One final point is that although both city and countryside and all the social classes are affected by the escalating violence, they experience the situation in different ways. The paramilitaries are responsible for most brutal murders of civilians in rural areas and for 70% of the displacements that result as people flee in fear for their lives. In contrast, the urban population, including the large middle class and elites in both city and countryside, suffer from the threat of guerrilla kidnappings, roadblocks, and the cutting off of electricity, telephone service, and water. Provincial shopkeepers, small businessmen, and middle-size farmers are caught between the extortionist demands of both groups. The variety of ways in which the violence is lived--which also varies from region to region--must influence people's politics, but the long-term consequences are not yet clear. "Violentologos" (Colombian social scientists who study the violence) do agree, however, that Colombia is a society "held hostage," that the conflict cannot as yet be described as a civil war because most people do not side with either the guerrillas or the paramilitaries (see Leal Buitrago 2001; Pecaut 2001). There is, however, some concern that the decision of current President Alvaro Uribe Velez to form militias of peasant soldiers and to pay civilian informants may make these people guerrilla targets, thus drawing an increasing percentage of the population of the countryside and small towns into the vortex of the war.

The Military

What of the Colombian military? Historically the Colombian military has not played an autonomous political role. (23) The Colombian armed forces did not take national political power in the 1960s and 1970s as did so many other Latin American militaries. Because it was functioning within a stable, elitist, formally democratic political order, the Colombian military remained subordinate to the civilian government. But the organization, mentality, values, and behaviour of the Colombian military would be profoundly shaped by its very early involvement in guerrilla warfare. This is an army predicated on counter-insurgency.

For 50 years the Colombian army has been continuously embroiled in fighting a war within the country against guerrilla forces. In this situation of prolonged internal conflict, the military naturally became more and more influential in elaborating state decisions related to public order. Thus, over time, the Colombian military became a political actor, although it did not take direct control of the national government. It is also important to realize that since the Second World War, the United States has been the major foreign influence on the Colombian military; the Colombian army was the only army in Latin America to send troops to fight in the Korean War.

In the 1960s when the National Security doctrine, which focused on the threat of internal Communist subversion, was being elaborated (a doctrine that would profoundly affect all Latin American militaries), it made absolute sense to Colombian officers. They were fighting Communist guerrillas inspired by the USSR and Cuba, they were receiving instruction in US army schools, and in the 1970s they were reading training manuals produced by the militaries of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. From the 1960s on, as the Colombian government gave the military a carte blanche to fight the anti-guerrilla war, the state and army became increasingly intertwined. During the presidency of Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala (1978-82), some Colombian political scientists say that a partial military occupation of the civilian state occurred: progressive unionists, intellectuals, and students were labelled Communist sympathizers and roughed up, and both military and civilian officials expressed a polarized view of the world with great fear of "the internal enemy."

The government and the army agreed that, faced with a grave internal war, Colombia was experiencing exceptional times. So for decades Colombia lived under continuous and repeated declarations of state of siege. This does not mean that there were curfews. Rather, a legal state of siege legitimizes judgement of civilians by military tribunals when national security is threatened. In these years as well, the police were militarized, and the army became involved in state development projects: road-building, literacy programs, and public health initiatives.

Furthermore, the civilian government declared certain conflictual areas militarized zones with military mayors. This occurred, for example, in the middle Magdalena River valley around the oil town of Barrancabermeja. Often particular commanders and troops in these militarized zones forged very close relationships with landlords, drug traffickers, and paramilitaries. (24)

In the early 1980s, a significant change began. The National Security doctrine came under serious criticism throughout Latin America, and military governments in much of South America gave way to civilian, democratic regimes. Colombia is part of this trend in its own specific way. In 1982 President Belisario Betancur initiated peace negotiations; he expressed his desire to deal with the various guerrilla groups politically rather than militarily, that is, to incorporate them into democratic life as political parties. Thus President Betancur raised the state of siege, proclaimed amnesty for the guerrillas, and opened dialogue with them, and he denied the military a major role in the peace negotiations. Betancur also established a presidential commission for human rights; indeed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s some people in Colombia began to talk seriously about human rights. (25)

As the peace process got underway, discussion also began about the need to trace the line between legitimate military actions and military excesses, or what now began to be called military violations of human rights. The violation of human rights by the military, and the paramilitaries with whom it collaborated, stemmed from the military's embrace of the Doctrine of National Security and the fanatic anti-Communism it implied. For this reason, military officials opposed the peace process and this new talk of human rights because it limited their normal capacity for operations. They saw it as an underhanded way for "the subversives" to expand their influence and attack the nation.

With the end of the Cold War in 1989-91, President Cesar Gaviria made a concerted effort to bring the armed forces under civilian control by appointing a civilian to be minister of defence, among other measures. But given the increasingly chaotic conditions of the 1990s--the narco-traffickers' bloody war against extradition in the early 1990s, the expansion of the guerrillas and paramilitaries, and the escalation of the death rate to levels that rivalled La Violencia of the 1950s--the armed forces recouped a great deal of their freedom of manoeuvre. At the same time, they remained isolated from society; distrust and suspicion characterized relations between the army and civil authorities. In 1994-98, when FARC took the offensive, ambushing military patrols, over-running army bases and taking 500 soldiers hostage, the army was roundly criticized for being weak and ineffectual. But later, after 1998, strengthened by tactical reform and US equipment and training introduced to combat narco-trafficking, the army began to hold its own, resulting in a stalemate. Knowledgeable analysts say, though, that it is nearly impossible for a conventional army to win against a guerrilla war of sabotage; a ratio of 10 soldiers to each guerrilla would be necessary, and in 2002 the army had only 130,000 soldiers, 30,000 of whom were well trained in counter-insurgency warfare. One of the main aims of President Uribe Velez, who came to office in August 2002, is to strengthen the military.

A review of the military history of Colombia since La Violencia raises two important questions: how unified are the armed forces, and to what extent are they under civilian control? The major problem for state coherence and human rights, according to Colombian sociologist Francisco Leal Buitrago (1992), is that successive Colombian administrations have not had a real national security policy and they know little about military matters. As a result, national security has been seen purely from a military point of view, when it is a much broader issue and should be part of an integrated civilian strategy. Because of these problems, the Colombian government never clearly defined and enforced a role for the military that respects civilian legality, institutions, and human rights in a situation of ongoing internal warfare.

Furthermore, the fragmentation obvious in the multiplication of guerrilla fronts and paramilitary groups is also manifested to an extent in the behaviour of army brigades stationed in rural areas. What the guerrillas, paramilitaries, officers, and soldiers actually do and how they relate to each other and to local populations varies, depending on local socioeconomic and political circumstances. Especially in regions of violent competition over territory between paramilitaries and guerrillas, some army commanders tacitly ally with regional elites and the paramilitaries, giving rise to specific instances of, in Marc Chernick's words, "state forces ... unconstrained by rule of law or conventions of war" (Woodrow Wilson International Center 2001).

A number of prominent Colombian social scientists argue that to force FARC to negotiate seriously, to end the war, and to fortify democracy in Colombia today it is essential to strengthen the state, of which the military is an integral part. This may be realistic, but it is not easy to do and the sometimes contradictory authority and ill-defined relations between the civilian government and the armed forces are cause for concern. In the wake of September 11 and the breakdown of Colombian peace talks, new anti-terrorist statutes and a strong military presence in the most conflictive parts of the country (the socalled Rehabiliation and Consolidation Zones) reinforce the military's hand both in the judicial sphere and on the ground.

Final Comments

In closing, I want to emphasize a few crucial elements that must be kept in mind in order to make sense of the Colombian situation.

First, peace negotiations in Colombia have been going on--in fits and starts--for 20 years. In the late 1980s, President Virgilio Barco came to an agreement with the M-19 guerrilla movement, which turned itself into a legal political party. (26) Beyond peace talks, Colombian policy makers also have tried political reform as a way out of the violence. In 1990 President Cesar Gaviria called a constituent assembly to write a new constitution for the first time since 1886. The hope was that the Constitution of 1991 would bring peace by creating more decentralized, more participatory institutions, thus strengthening and legitimating the state by making it more inclusionary. Despite the best intentions, it did not work (see Betancur 1998; Posada-Carbo 1998; Cepeda 1998; A. Bejarano 2000, 2001). Ironically, efforts at peace negotiations and at constitutional reform to provide the legal base for a more pluralistic, democratic Colombia were taking place in the same years that the leftist insurgency and the paramilitaries gathered strength and the Colombian state became more and more unable to cope.

Second, I want to emphasize that the regions where new commercial crops and export products have developed over the past 40 years are the most violent places in Colombia today. These include areas of coca production in the southern jungles (Guaviare, Caqueta, Putumayo) that are the bases of the FARC guerrilla movement and targets of paramilitary incursions and aerial fumigation, the cattle ranching zones of the Magdalena River valley and the Atlantic coast, the oil areas of Arauca and Casanare in the Eastern Plains, the new banana zone of Uraba near the Panamanian border, and gold and emerald mining zones. Most are recently colonized public land areas without a history of effective state presence. They are also areas of Indian, black, and mixed-race people who seem to have experienced more death and displacement than other Colombians (CODHES 2003). (27)

Finally, over the past few decades we have seen the emergence of many interesting new social movements: a national peasant movement that later fell apart, a national Indian organization, various regional initiatives of Afro-Colombians, civic strikes (paros civicos), coca unions, movements of urban squatters, refugees' movements, human rights organizations, and peace movements. (28) Thus, we may ask: what is Colombian civil society? What role has it been playing, and what role can it play in bringing the conflicts to an end? Much of the Colombian writing indicates that civil society is very weak, fragmented and lacks influence in Colombia. (29) One major question is whether the violence of the last 20 years has undermined social movements and made them impossible to sustain or, alternatively, whether it has generated new movements, new kinds of concern and unity essential to bringing the violence to an end. Can local initiatives make a difference? What are the effects of the drug economy on popular mobilization? What are the effects of the economic recession? And what effects do Plan Colombia and evolving US policy have?

To conclude, in this article I have tried to explain the current Colombian situation by focusing not solely on drugs and hardly at all on the United States, but rather by conveying some insight into the internal complexity of the situation and its historical roots.

What we have in Colombia is a weak state trying to deal with increasingly strong private forces who are using violent means to accumulate economic resources (money, land); to establish control over whole regions or territories; and to seek political advantage. The guerrillas are playing on anti-imperialism and nationalism; the paramilitaries play on anti-communism and nationalism; the Pastrana government asked for foreign aid, said it wanted to negotiate, yet at the same time militarized. The government has no workable judicial system, nor does it control force in the country or even its own military, and it is losing control over many regions. The worsening Colombian crisis is generating great nervousness in the neighbouring countries of Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, and Panama, all of which express concern that the war and its human devastation may be expanding into the Amazon basin and into the Darien rainforests of Panama.

The nature of the violence has changed a great deal since the 1950s. Although some observers maintain that war in Colombia has been going on for 50 years, it is important to recognize that there was no drug trade in the 1950s, no left-wing guerrilla movements, and no paramilitaries as there are today. (30) The drug economy did not cause the conflicts, but certainly fuelled them, stimulating an ethic of materialism and individual advancement through illegal means, providing unheard-of resources to illegal armed groups, and contributing in a myriad of ways to the weakening of the government. The onset of cocaine trafficking and in the same decade the development of the oil export economy largely coincide with the transformation of the rural, peripheral insurgencies of the 1960s and 1970s into the amorphous, multifarious, and much more lethal violence of the 1980s and 1990s. (31) Today's violence is combined with a serious economic recession and high unemployment, which contribute to the recruitment of young people by the paramilitaries and the guerrillas.

The responsibility of the Colombian state for the situation is not entirely clear. What is clear is that the state is in crisis--an institutional crisis and a crisis of representation and legitimation. The political class in Bogota is perceived to be self-interested and corrupt, lacking the vision of socioeconomic reforms necessary to appeal to popular groups and the financial means to carry them through. Meanwhile the Liberal and especially the Conservative parties are losing influence and, with it, their capacity to structure Colombian political life. Although still major players, they are discredited, candidates for elective office prefer to show an independent face, and tiny upstart political organizations compete for votes. At the same time, disaffected regional elites resist the implementation of state reforms that threaten their interests by allying with violent armed right-wing groups. State institutions cannot reach many areas in a positive way, and the state funds that do arrive, given the strong presence of guerrillas or paramilitaries in those regions, are often funnelled into private armed groups' coffers or programs they sponsor in the zones they control. Obviously it is difficult for this state to deal with what is an intractable situation. Indeed, the Colombian state seems to be experiencing in some ways the disaggregation that at present characterizes the whole country.

Ironically, whereas public opinion in 1998 strongly supported seeking an end to the violence through negotiations with the guerrillas, four years later the majority of the population, exhausted by war and angered by FARC, favoured an all-out offensive to defeat the guerrillas or at least wear them down to make them surrender through future negotiations. The election of hard-line president Alvaro Uribe Velez in May 2002 signalled a rightward shift in Colombia as public security and winning the war against FARC and the ELN took precedence over his predecessor's failed peace initiative. President Uribe states that he aims to revive the economy, modernize and strengthen the state, and build up the military to pressure the guerrillas, by levying a domestic war tax and getting more US support. He has indicated his willingness to demobilize the paramilitaries (who favoured his election) by negotiating with them; meanwhile, Colombian and international human rights organizations express concern that some of Uribe's civilian militias will collaborate with and perhaps reinforce the paramilitaries. President Uribe's declaration of a "state of internal commotion" early in his administration and his creation of counterinsurgency "rehabilitation zones" and citizen militias seem to have led to growing confidence on the right and an increasing number of threats against human rights organizations and others. Uribe argues that coca production is shrinking because of US-sponsored aerial fumigation and that FARC is reeling under the brunt of his offensive, but many knowledgeable observers say that what is really occurring is an escalation of the war (Revista Foro 2002-2003, ICG 2002). The April 2003 bulletin of the Consultoria para los Derechos Humanos y el Dezplazamiento (CODHES) indicates that in 2002, in the wake of the breakdown of peace negotiations, 412,550 people (or an average of 1,144 per day) were displaced in Colombia, 20% more than in 2001.

There is no obvious solution to the Colombian crisis. This is a grave situation of tragic proportions, the end of which is not yet in sight. Some Colombians have asked for international help, but a simplistic reading of the Colombian situation that focuses on "the drug problem"or "the terrorist problem" (32) at the expense of everything else does not create understanding or generate solutions. It is important to attend to the valiant efforts of Colombians of all walks of life to reconceptualize citizenship, community, region, state, nation, and development in ways that will overcome exclusion and bring peace and prosperity in a period when neo-liberalism and globalization limit the parameters of what is possible. At this point, it is essential that international observers who would act ethically and consciously in Colombia attend to the internal causes, domestic interpretations and debates, (33) and the evolving complexity of the conflicts. The Colombian crisis requires sensitivity to the fragmented, privatized, multidimensional realities of the struggle for resources, territory, and political power that informs contemporary violence in Colombia and makes it so immensely difficult to resolve.

Notes

I thank Nancy Appelbaum for suggesting the structure of this essay and for co-authoring the first four pages. I am grateful, too, to Claudia Leal and Daniel Bonilla for many helpful comments.

(1.) See Cubides et al. (1998), Sanchez Gomez (2001), The Economist (2001); The New York Times (10 April 2001); El Tiempo (23 April 2003); US Department of State (2000, 2001, 2002); CODHES (2003); Chernick (in press); and the reports of the Colombian Vicepresidencia de la Republica, Programa Presidencial de los Derechos Humanos y DIH, Observatorio, available at <www.derechoshumanos.gov.co/observatorio/> or <www.humanrights.gov. co/observatorio>. A massacre is defined as the killing of four or more people in the same place at the same time.

Detailing the terrible things that are happening in Colombia may leave the impression that it would be impossible to live in a place like this, that Colombians only think about the violence. However, millions of people live in Colombia and most lead the same kind of normal life that the majority of Latin Americans do. Violence is an important part of Colombia's reality, but so are many other things. To understand how people experience such a situation, one must grasp the duality between awareness of the violence that is reported daily by Colombian newspapers and TV news and that occasionally touches people one knows, and the fact that, for most people, everyday life goes on.

(2.) An excellent source of information on current US aid to Colombia and the relevant debates is the Centre for International Policy's Colombia Project at <www.ciponline.org/colombia>.

(3.) Major Colombian research centres that study the causes of the violence include the Instituto de Estudios Politicos y Relaciones Internacionales (IEPRI) at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Jesuit Centro de Investigaciones y Educacion Popular (CINEP) in Bogota and the Instituto de Estudios Regionales (INER) at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin. Important journals that provide insight into Colombian interpretations of the current situation include Analisis Politico (IEPRI), Revista Foro, Controversia (CINEP), and Estudios Politicos (Universidad de Antioquia).

(4.) The only export of significance in the colonial period was gold, mined in the province of Antioquia around Medellin, and panned by African slaves in the streams of the rainforests along the Pacific coast and the Atrato river basin (Twinam 1982; Sharp 1976). Useful overviews of Colombian history include Safford and Palacios (2002), Bushnell (1993), Deas (1985), Abel and Palacios (1991), and J. Pearce (1990).

(5.) The only area where the formation of large private properties did not occur was central Colombia--in the departments of Antioquia, Caldas, northern Tolima, and northern Valle--which became a coffee smallholding frontier, symbolized by Juan Valdez (the emblem of the Colombian Federation of Coffee Growers). The classic study of the anomalous "democratic" colonization process in Antioquia is Parsons (1949).

(6.) On Colombian regionalism, see Zambrano Pantoja (1998); Uribe de Hincapie and Alvarez (1987); and Borja (1996, 2001).

(7.) Colombia's only military dictatorship of the twentieth century was that of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla from 1953 to 1957. Brought to power by a consensus of Liberals and most of the Conservative Party during La Violencia, his right to rule was confirmed by the Colombian congress, his administration was mostly civilian, he gave women the vote, he advocated social reform, and he left office quietly when Liberal and Conservative elites turned against him. This was a mild dictatorship, or "dictablanda" as Colombians say, completely unlike the later repressive military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. In the 1960s Rojas Pinilla left military life, founded the populist ANAPO party, and nearly won the presidential elections of 1970. The M-19 guerrilla group came out of the left wing of this party.

(8.) On the historiography of La Violencia, see Sanchez Gomez (1985); Roldan (1992, chapt. 1); Penaranda (1992); and LeGrand (1997).

(9.) This was the dominant interpretation of Colombian intellectuals in the 1980s (see, for example, Ramirez Tobon 1988; Restrepo 1988; Archila N. 1997; and Chernick and Jimenez 1993).

(10.) The ELN website is <http://www.eln-voces.com>.

(11.) On the agrarian conflicts of the late 1920s and early 1930s and the involvement of the Colombian Communist Party, see Medina (1980, 1986); G. Gaitan (1976); Sanchez Gomez (1977); Marulanda (1991); and Jimenez (1985, forthcoming).

(12.) See Sanchez Gomez (1988); Sanchez Gomez and Meertens (2001); Ramirez Tobon (1981, 2001); Molano Bravo (1981, 1989, 1990, 1992); Alape (1985); and Pizarro Leongomez (1991). On the history of the guerrilla movements, see Pizarro Leongomez (1996); Braun (2003); and on FARC more recently, Rangel Suarez (1999); Ferro Medina and Uribe Ramon (2002); Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (n.d.); and FARC's websites <http://farc-ep.org> and <http://resistencianacional.org>.

(13.) On the history of Colombian peace negotiations, see Chernick (1999); Bejarano Avila (1999a); and Nasi (2002).

(14.) An excellent collection on the 1980s is Leal Buitrago and Zamosc (1991).

(15.) On women in the Colombian conflict, see Guillermoprieto (2001); Lara S. (2000); Meertens (2000); and Grupo Mujer y Sociedad (2001). Vasquez Perdomo (2000) is a fascinating testimony by a woman guerrilla who spent 15 years with M-19.

(16.) French sociologist Daniel Pecaut (2000a) argues that since the 1990s FARC no longer aspires to take power at the national level but rather to a powersharing arrangement, both institutional and territorial: he suggests that a workable peace accord would involve coming up with a "consociational" formula through which a new kind of National Front could be put into place. Meanwhile PNUD (in press) hypothesizes that since FARC has failed to take central state power over the last two decades, it is now engaged in constructing "embryonic states" in local regions.

(17.) See Richani (1997, 2002). Marc Chernick (2000) and PNUD (in press) argue in part against this position. Also see Murillo and Maldonado (1997).

(18.) See, however, the forthcoming PNUD report, which presents an innovative, nuanced explanation for popular support for the armed groups, focusing on the workings of the illegal economy in Colombia. Also, two recent PhD dissertations explore how specific social movements function within either paramilitary- or guerrilla-controlled zones. See Ramirez de Jara (2001) and Mauricio Romero's forthcoming PhD thesis from the New School for Social Research, chapt. 4 (on the banana workers' union in the paramilitary-dominated region of Uraba).

(19.) Good studies of the impact of the drug trade in Colombia include Gutierrez Sanin (2000); Camacho Guizado and Lopez Restrepo (2000); and Salama (2000). Also see the Rocha article in this issue.

(20.) On the paramilitaries, see Medina Gallego (1990); Medina Gallego and Tellez Ardila (1994); Atheortua (1995); Richani (1997, 2002); Cubides C. (2001); Romero (2000b); Estrada Gallego (2001); Corporacion Observatorio para la Paz (2002); and the website of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, <www.colombialibre.org>. Mary Roldan (2002) explores the origins of paramilitary groups in the 1950s.

(21.) Some observers noted that this percentage of supposed paramilitary supporters elected to congress in March 2002 corresponded to the number of representatives elected from Uraba and the Atlantic coast where the paramilitaries are strong.

(22.) On displacement, see Carrion (2000); Meertens (2001a, 2001b); Pecaut (2000b); Segura Escobar (2000); and CODHES and ACNUR (2001).

(23.) Much of the following section on the Colombian military is based on Leal Buitrago (1992). See also Leal Buitrago (1994, 2002); Davila Ladron (1998); Pizarro Leongomez (1988, 1995); and Aviles (2001).

(24.) For an excellent analysis of the situation in the mid-1980s, see Fellner (1986).

(25.) For a fascinating analysis of human rights discourse and its uses in Colombia, see Restrepo M. (2001).

(26.) Although the M-19 was influential in the constituent assembly of 1990, thereafter it lost political support rapidly and is not now a serious contender in Colombian elections (Boudon 2001). Clearly, guerrilla groups concerned with what will happen if they lay down their arms are very aware of the somewhat divergent experiences of the M-19 and FARC's Union Patriotica.

(27.) Although the Colombian conflict is not an ethnic or religious one, Mary Roldan (1998), Margarita Serje (2001), and Clara Ines Garcia (2003) emphasize that regional imaginaries, which are also racial imaginaries, shape Colombian conceptualizations of place and government perceptions of danger and threat. On region and race, see also Wade (1993, 2000) and Appelbaum (2003); also relevant is Rojas (2002a). For other new approaches to the current Colombian violence, see Riano Alcala (2002).

(28.) See Zamosc (1986, 1990); Avirama and Marquez (1994); Escobar (1997); Medina (1984); Jimeno (1997); Villareal Mendez (1997); Wade (2002); Revista Foro (2000-2001); Gow and Rappaport (2002); and NACLA (2000) on the Colombian "Nunca Mas" project.

(29.) See, for example, Uprimny Yepes (2001) and Urrego (2001). Daniel Pecaut (2000c) describes the social and psychological impact of terrorism and how violence makes it hard for people to come together. See also Pilar Riano Alcala (2000). For other takes on Colombian "civil society," see Archila Neira (1995); Bejarano Avila (1999b); articles by Francisco Santos and Miguel Ceballos in Florida International University (2001); interview with Marco Palacios (Semana 9 April 2001); and Rojas (2002b).

(30.) Stimulating efforts to explore continuities and changes between the civil wars of the nineteenth century, La Violencia, and the present conflicts include Sanchez Gomez (2000b), Deas (1997), Bergquist (2001), and Roldan (2002, 281-298).

(31.) The discovery of major oil deposits in the department of Arauca made Colombia an important petroleum exporter for the first time in the 1980s. For an insightful explanation of the impact of oil on the Colombian conflict and US policy toward Colombia, see Dunning and Wirpsa (forthcoming); also S. Pearce (2002) and Leech (2003).

(32.) FARC, the ELN, and AUC appear on the official US and Canadian lists of terrorist groups around the world.

(33.) Ricardo Penaranda's review articles (1992, 2001) and Montenegro and Posada (2001) open a window on the interpretations and debates among Colombian intellectuals trying to make sense of the violence of the past 50 years and possible resolutions.

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