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Home , Colombia, Colombians

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 country’s problems.” : Another 100 Years of Solitude? JAMES A. ROBINSON

decade ago Colombia was in a terrible mess. pings accompanied the military successes. In 2005, The country had the highest homicide rate also persuaded around 30,000 members of Ain the , and was the center of the in- paramilitary groups to demobilize and confess to ternational drug industry. was rife. A their crimes in exchange for reduced sentences. series of leading politicians had been assassinated, As the security situation improved, so did Co- and probably one-third of all the legislators elect- lombia’s international image. The country has ed in 2002 received “assistance” from paramilitary gone from being a potential failed state to joining groups. The combined fighting strength of non- CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, state-armed actors, left-wing guerrillas, and para- Turkey, and ), a group of dynamic and militaries was approaching 50 percent of the size newly emerging states ready to take an equal place of the national army, and the guerrillas had formu- at the world table. lated a plan to encircle and capture the capital city Foreign direct investment over the past 10 years . In high society something akin to a panic has risen from $1.5 billion to $13 billion. Invest- was setting in, as tried to move their ment has grown from 17 percent of GDP to 27 per- assets overseas and angled for foreign . cent, undoubtedly in response to enhanced secu- Things changed in 2002, when Álvaro Uribe rity and greater optimism about the future. Saving, was elected president on a platform of “democratic meanwhile, has increased to around 18 percent of security.” Uribe increased the size of the army from GDP. Government debt has fallen from nearly 60 203,000 soldiers in 2002 to 283,000 a decade lat- percent of GDP in 2002 to 43 percent today. And er. The army also began relying less on conscripts, the rate of economic growth has accelerated: Af- with the number of professionals in the ranks ris- ter averaging 3 percent per year between 1990 and ing from 59,000 to 87,000. Defense expenditures 1999, it rose to 4.2 percent on average between increased by 10 percent relative to GDP (from 3.7 2000 and 2011. Finally in 2011, US President to 4 percent) during this period. To help pay for Barack Obama signed a trade agreement with this, Uribe imposed on rich citizens a progressive Colombia. “ tax,” which averaged about Building on these developments since entering 0.35 percent of GDP per year. office in August 2010, President Juan Manuel San- A sustained military offensive pushed the princi- tos, while trying to maintain the military initiative, pal rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of has launched an ambitious attempt to resolve Co- Colombia (FARC), out of half of the lombia’s conflicts once and for all by restoring vast in which it was present in 2002, and led to the kill- amounts of land to people who have been dispos- ing of its leaders Raúl Reyes, Mono Jojoy, and Al- sessed of possibly 5 million hectares in the fight- fonso Cano, while the main leader, Manuel Maru- ing. This program of land reform, encapsulated in landa, died in 2006 of natural causes. A sharp drop the so-called Victims’ Law, went into effect on in the homicide rate and the numbers of kidnap- 10, 2011. And in August 2012, the Colombian government signed a six-page set of principles for JAMES A. ROBINSON is a professor of government at Harvard peace negotiations with the FARC, which are ongo- University and a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center ing in , , as I write. for International Affairs. He is co-author, with Daron Acemo- glu, of : The Origins of Power, Prosperity, Has Colombia finally turned a corner, and will and Poverty (Crown Publishers, 2012). peace with the FARC and possibly the other main

43 44 UÊ 1,, /Ê-/",9Ê UÊ iLÀÕ>ÀÞÊÓä£Î rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), mer presidential candidate and long-term kidnap represent the finishing touches to its resurgence? victim Ingrid Betancourt. Cossio, subse- The first step toward answering this question is quently interior minister under Uribe, knew ex- to consider where Colombia’s violence and disor- actly how to pile up votes—with the aid of Ramón der originated. It is tempting, and common, to at- Isaza, leader of a paramilitary group, the Peasant tribute such problems to the drug industry, but this Self-Defense Forces of the Middle Magdalena, is a mistake. The country’s status as the capital of whose help he solicited in “winning” elections. world drug trafficking reflected the prior dysfunc- So one explanation for the durability of peripheral tional organization of Colombian society. It is also chaos is that, by facilitating deals like the one Va- temping, and wrong, to blame Colombia’s woes on lencia Cossio tried to make with Isaza, the system the guerrillas. Like the drug industry, they are an makes it much cheaper for elites to garner votes, outcome of more deep-seated problems. The elites in any case view it as too costly to actu- Fundamentally, all the ills that Colombia has ally build state capacity in rural areas. experienced stem from the way it has been gov- A second mechanism showing the interests at erned. The best way to conceive of this is as a form stake is that the system makes Colombian democ- of indirect rule, common during the period of racy very elite-friendly. One salient theory of the European colonial empires, in which the national origins of democracy is that it results from a com- political elites residing in urban areas, particularly promise or a concession made by elites to avoid Bogotá, have effectively delegated the running of disorder, or in the extreme to limit revolution. In the countryside and other peripheral areas to local a nondemocratic system, the disenfranchised may elites. The provincial elites are given freedom to cause trouble, riot, or rebel because they have no run things as they like, and even represent them- say in how policy is determined. Such rebellion is selves in the legislature, in exchange for political costly to elites, so they create democracy as a way support and not challenging the center. of bringing people into the system, thus escaping It is this form of rule in the periphery that cre- social chaos. ated the chaos and illegality that have bedeviled This is not a good model, however, for explain- Colombia. Drugs, mafias, kidnappers, leftist guer- ing the origins of Colombia’s democracy. It was rilla groups, and “rightist” paramilitaries certain- not forced on elites by a threat from the masses. ly have exacerbated the country’s problems, but Rather, as the research of Eduardo Posada-Carbó the problems all have their source in the nation’s has shown, democratic political institutions pro- style of governance. As the Colombian writer R.H. vided a means for elites to share power among Moreno Duran put it: “In Colombia, politics cor- themselves in a way that would avoid infighting. rupts drug dealing.” An early version was the “incomplete vote” af- ter an inter-party conflict known as the War of STAKES IN THE STATUS QUO a Thousand Days between 1899 and 1902. This This system, such as it is, raises obvious ques- system, which Sebastián Mazzuca and I have tions. First, what interests keep it in place? Sec- studied, gave two-thirds of legislative seats to ond, how can a system that creates such disorder Conservatives, the dominant party at the time, in the periphery be stable? And third, why do pe- but guaranteed one-third to Liberals, however ripheral elites find it in their interests to have such many votes they polled, to keep them happy. The a chaotic society? system broke down in the . However, in None of these questions has a definitive answer, 1958, after another bloody inter-party civil war, but some of the mechanisms at play seem clear. a National Front pact provided more or less the First, it is easy to see at least some of the interests same arrangement, except that the parties shared involved in the system. The turmoil in Colombia’s everything 50–50. countryside lowers the price of votes. Instead of These agreements and their persistence reveal having to develop platforms and win support by one of the remarkable things about Colombian pol- offering policies or particular favors, politicians itics, namely the extent to which the nineteenth- get elected by winning the support of local bosses, century political parties remained in power during or perhaps become the bosses themselves. the twentieth century, a phenomenon unique in Consider the former senator Fabio Valencia . But to keep moving ahead with dif- Cossio, who in 1998 boasted the second-highest ferent schemes to cartelize politics, one thing was number of votes cast for a senator, after the for- critical: Entry of new political parties had to be Colombia: Another 100 Years of Solitude? U 45 avoided. This was achieved by various methods, fiting from the system if the country became some- including the form of the electoral system. thing like a sub-Saharan African country with far But another obvious contributing factor is the less wealth for everyone. But how could they stop ease with which new political forces could be this from happening? eradicated by and violence. In the , I think the reason is that the core and the periph- around two thousand members of the Patriotic ery have evolved into a stable equilibrium where all Union Party were murdered, along with two of the actors behave differently in different contexts. its presidential candidates, Jaime Leal and This is a form of what the political anthropologist . Carlos Pizarro, the 1990 Edward Banfield described as the root of poverty in presidential candidate for the demobilized guerrilla southern . Banfield pointed out that people ap- group M-19, was assassinated as well. And political plied very different criteria to behavior in different murder did not start then. It goes back at least to contexts: one within the extended family, another the assassination of the radical Liberal leaders Jorge one toward everyone else. Although the relevant Eliécer Gaitán in 1948 and in setting in Colombia is not necessarily the family, 1914, and probably far earlier. Thus chaos in the many examples suggest that Colombians also ap- periphery facilitated the persistence of the cartel- ply generalized or limited morality in different con- ized, oligarchic democracy which the traditional texts. The net result is to make the system stable. parties created in the nineteenth century. Two examples illustrate this phenomenon. The Another mechanism revealing the interests at first relates to one of the burning issues in Colom- stake in perpetuating Colombia’s system of gover- bia today: compensation for the perhaps 4 mil- nance is that conflicts in rural areas guarantee that lion people who have been displaced from rural the periphery is not able to cooperate against the areas in 15 years of conflict. Chapter three of the center. A common theory in African politics is that Victims’ Law establishes land restitution for peas- the center foments chaos in who were dispossessed the periphery in order to “di- of their land in the past two vide and rule.” Sudan and If the FARC and maybe the ELN do decades. Congo are the classic cases. In the Colombian Sen- decide to demobilize, the country’s And this idea can certainly be ate, one of this policy’s main applied to Colombia. Consid- problems will be far from over. proponents has been Juan er Rodrigo Garcia , a Fernando Cristo, originally rancher and civic leader a politician from the depart- in Córdoba, who was centrally involved in the cre- ment of Norte de Santander. However, in 2011 lo- ation of paramilitary groups in his department. In cal elections, he supported the bid of his brother 1990 he told a leader of the M-19 rebels: “I am sure Andrés to become of his hometown, Cúcu- that if the guerrillas had spoken to us, instead of at- ta, in alliance with the powerful local political boss tacking us, we would have had a common war, not and ex mayor of the city, Ramiro Suárez. Suárez, a war amongst us or against us. We would have or- who was arrested on August 12, 2011, was a well- ganized and had all risen against the central state.” known ally of paramilitaries responsible for mur- When another paramilitary boss, Rodrigo Tovar ders and thousands of crimes in the department. Pupo (nicknamed “Jorge 40”), was writing an au- A regional court has since sentenced him to spend tobiography before he was extradited to the Unit- 27 years in prison for the assassination of a former ed States in 2008, he recalled realizing “the great city legal adviser. When confronted by a journalist inequalities of the country and the lack of commit- with the contradiction, Senator Cristo simply said: ment of the few owners of power to work for the Local politics operates under a different logic. benefit of the large social majorities of the coun- A second telling example is the career of Con- try.” The “owners of power” Jorge 40 was referring gressman Víctor Renán Barco. Barco formed part to were in the national government in Bogotá. of what was known as the “” that ran the department of Caldas for 30 years until his retire- SITUATIONAL ETHICS ment from politics shortly before his death in 2009. The second question—how can a system that In Bogotá, Barco was often seen with the Economist creates such disorder remain stable?—is even magazine under his arm. He was a regular contrib- more difficult. The last set of arguments suggests utor to the business newspaper Portafolio. He was that it would not be in the interests of those bene- known as the “nemesis of the minister of finance” 46 UÊ 1,, /Ê-/",9Ê UÊ iLÀÕ>ÀÞÊÓä£Î for his unyielding advocacy of fiscally prudent mac- gangué, where La Gata is headquartered. La Gata, roeconomic policies. Yet back in Caldas, in his base supposedly a former girlfriend of Gonzalo Rodrí- at La Dorada, Barco had the reputation of running guez Gacha, one of the founders of the Medellin one of the toughest and most uncompromisingly in the 1970s, rose to power with the clientelistic vote-buying machines in the country, help of paramilitaries. She is accused of involve- a machine that would not tolerate opposition or ment with many massacres—such as one at El criticism. The fate of journalists who investigated Salado in in 2000, in which paramilitaries this machine, such as La Patria’s Orlando Sierra, murdered 60 people. was typically a bullet in the head. La Gata and El Gatico are not traditional elites These examples show that in different contexts by any stretch of the imagination. They are new, up- Colombian politicians apply different standards wardly mobile elites who have emerged thanks to and rules of behavior. Sometimes, when nationally their ability to manage and benefit from the con- advocating for sound economic policy or the Vic- flicts in rural Colombia. Although the system has tims’ Law, they appeal to universal principles. At a remarkable capacity to absorb such people, this other times, when involved in peripheral politics, does not imply that it generates very good institu- they apply much more parochial standards. That tions in rural areas. Rapid turnover of elites tends to people behave like this and have become condi- create incentives for predation, and it fosters poor tioned to do so is a big part of how the system property rights and investment incentives. The new reproduces itself without some grand design. elites prey on the old ones and are themselves in turn preyed upon. A complementary factor is that SHIFTY ELITES few Colombians have well-defined property rights, The third question—why do peripheral elites and much land has been acquired illegally, thus find it in their interests to have such a chaotic soci- making it difficult to legalize any particular status ety?—is also hard to answer. quo. You might think that local It is easy to think of para- elites would have little cause Colombia’s elites have little military leaders like Jorge to foment conflict and would 40 as , mafiosos— interest in financing efforts to do better economically with as some were and are. But stability. Take the case of for- establish order in the countryside. to think of them only this mer Senator Álvaro Alfonso way is to misunderstand the García Romero, now serving phenomenon. In one-third 60 years in prison for connections with paramili- to one-half of rural Colombia they are the state, taries and for masterminding a 2000 massacre in and can do anything they like. Colombians called Macayepo, in which 15 peasants were beaten to Jorge 40 “El Papa Tovar” (in Spanish, the Pope), death. He was a prime example of a regional land- and from his “Vatican” in the San Angel of ed elite whose family had extensive landholdings the in the department of Cesar he as well as important interests in tobacco and other ruled over his small empire of 20 armed fronts in agricultural crops. Why would he bother getting three departments. His authority in that region of involved with massacres? the coast was such that peasants whose The best way to think of this is as part of an land had been stolen by his men petitioned him as equilibrium that does not always serve the inter- if he were a government official. “With my usual ests of the regional elites who dominate at any par- respect, I write to you to authorize whomever it ticular moment. The key point is that there is a corresponds to return my land in the municipal- huge amount of elite circulation. In Bolivar, for ex- ity of San Angel to me. . . . I was evicted from this ample, the current senator who receives the most land four years ago and my family depends on it to votes is Héctor Julio Alfonso López, known as El survive. Today we wander from city to city looking Gatico (little cat). His nickname comes from his for ways to make a living,” wrote a woman whose mother, Enilse López, known as La Gata (the cat), was found by the police in Tovar’s headquar- who for the past decade has run a monopoly of the ters. Jorge 40 was the state in Cesar. gambling game known as “chance” in the coastal Other groups were just as dominant. Ramón departments. Héctor Julio’s brother, Jorge Luis, is Isaza’s “capital” was in the far east in prison, under investigation for irregularities, in- of the department of Antioquia, where he started cluding murder, during his tenure as mayor of Ma- his first paramilitary group, called “The Shotgun- Colombia: Another 100 Years of Solitude? U 47 ners,” in 1977. Isaza ruled the for almost 30 , who in exchange left him alone. His years. One of his key commanders was his son- mistake was to attempt to change sides in the 1968 in-law, Luis Eduardo Zuluaga (nicknamed “Mac- election. He backed the losing candidate, and the Gyver”—McGuiver in Colombia—after a US tele- winner finally let the army go after him. vision character). McGuiver commanded the José The system of governance in Colombia generates Luis Zuluaga Front (FJLZ), which controlled a ter- other phenomena that also tend to reproduce it. ritory of some 5,000 square kilometers. One is the remarkable extent to which the economy The FJLZ had a written (albeit very incomplete) is cartelized. Rich people in Colombia mostly make legal system of “estatutos” (statutes) that it (im- their money from monopolies in protected sectors perfectly) enforced. It allowed rudimentary equal- that are created and shielded by the government and ity before the law in the that the same laws enforced by predatory behavior and even violence. applied to members of the FJLZ as to civilians. The richest men in Colombia have monopolized The FJLZ also had a bureaucratized organization different sectors—Carlos Ardila Lülle, soft drinks with functional specialization among the military and sugar; Luis Carlos Sarmiento, banking and fi- wing, civilian “tax collectors,” and a civilian “so- nancial services; Julio Mario Santo Domingo, beer. cial team,” which appears to have been remark- Such cartelization arises easily from a political ably unpatrimonial. The FJLZ regulated trade and system that lacks accountability. And it extends social life. It had a mission statement, an ideology, from production to wholesale, where, for exam- a hymn, a prayer, and a radio station. It handed ple, “El Cebollero” (“The Onion Seller”—Alirio out medals, including the “Order of Francisco de de Jesús Rendón) used violence to establish a Paula Santander” and the “Grand Cross of .” monopoly of the domestic trade in onions. This The FJLZ taxed every landowner and business- economic structure creates large differences be- man in its territory. It even taxed drug dealers and tween domestic prices and those in neighboring laboratories, though it was not itself in- countries, which induce a vast flow of contraband volved in the drug business (indeed, it rather dis- across Colombia’s . Indeed, the famous approved of it). It built hundreds of kilometers of started his criminal career roads, and extended electrification in rural areas. smuggling cigarettes and other consumer goods It built schools, and paid for and musical before switching to cocaine. Thus the system of instruments in others. It started a health clinic, re- governance creates a comparative advantage for built an old-age people’s home, constructed hous- criminality, perhaps the main factor that made Co- es for poor people, created an artisan center, and lombia a global center of drug trafficking. built a sports stadium and bull ring. All of this is perhaps best summed up by the BABY STEPS ironic question a paramilitary boss, Ernesto Báez, Despite this history, the nation has seemingly asked of a judge in Bogotá: “How could a small in- changed in the past decade. Is this a new Colom- dependent state work inside a lawful state such as bia? Perhaps. Certainly, many believe this to be ours?” If you want to understand Colombia, you true. However, general signs and the logic of my need to understand how. argument suggest that it is not. There are many reasons for this, but the most fundamental is that, POLITICAL CARTELS despite all of the gains under the past two presi- The complexity of this system today is that it dents, neither administration has broken with the is not held in place by some grand Faustian pact fundamental system of governance that created or Machiavellian calculation, but has evolved over the country’s problems. a long period of time. There is considerable evi- The unreformed of governance has sur- dence for this duration. Take the career of Dumar faced many times during the past decade. Presi- Aljure. An army deserter and Liberal guerrilla dur- dent Uribe wasted vast amounts of time and politi- ing the civil war known as “The Violence” in the cal capital attempting to change the 1950s, he ran an “independent ” in the so he could remove a and stay in power. plains department of Meta for 15 years until the He succeeded once (with the politicians elected army killed him in 1968. From his “capital” in San with paramilitary support in 2002 heavily in fa- Martín, Aljure raised taxes and regulated trade and vor), but failed at his second attempt. society, just like Jorge 40 or Isaza. More impor- Also indicating a lack of change is the so-called tant, he also delivered votes for local politicians in “chuzadas” scandal, in which the Uribe govern- 48 UÊ 1,, /Ê-/",9Ê UÊ iLÀÕ>ÀÞÊÓä£Î ment used the Administrative Department of Secu- in 2008 to establish the presence of the state in rity, the Colombian version of the Central Intelli- areas from which the FARC had been driven, $237 gence Agency, to illegally tap the phones of a large million to fund the initiative had to come from the number of political opponents and anyone who US Agency for International Development. Colom- criticized the administration, including the local bia’s elites, accustomed to their politics of indirect director of . The government rule, have little interest in financing efforts to es- also phone-tapped members of the Supreme Court tablish order in the countryside. And this is not to find evidence to disgrace them. because they face high rates of taxation already: Even the Victims’ Law, President Santos’s flag- While the poorest 10 percent of Colombians pay ship policy to change the country, is widely re- 8 percent of their income in taxes, the richest 10 garded within Colombia as symbolic and basically percent pay just 3 percent. impossible to implement. In September 2010 Agri- Violence remains a remarkable and normal part Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo visited the of life in Colombia. In the local elections of Octo- of Necoclí in the region of Urabá, the ber 2011, 41 candidates were murdered—the tip northern part of Antioquia. He was there to start of an iceberg of intimidation and threats. Of 76 the process of land restitution. The same day one trade unionists slain in the world in 2011, accord- of five community leaders who had led the cam- ing to the International Trade Union Confedera- paign for , Hernando Pérez, was beaten to tion, 29 were killed in Colombia. In 2012 death. Four unused bullets were left at the scene: the transportation secretary of the city of , Al- one for each of the other leaders. The sixth, Al- berto Hadad, had to leave the country in the face beiro Valdés, had been murdered four months ear- of death threats. His “crime” was to propose the lier. construction of an integrated public transport sys- An interesting comparison is with the govern- tem for the city, which would have undermined ment of , which, between the rents that accrue to private bus operators. 1966 and 1970, launched an ambitious program of agrarian reform. Lleras Restrepo, probably the NO TIME FOR EUPHORIA most competent Colombian president of the twen- All of this implies that if the FARC and maybe the tieth century, possessed impressive technocratic ELN do decide to demobilize, though this will be a skills, and he operated in a cooperative interna- good thing, the country’s problems will be far from tional environment, in the context of the Alliance over. Like the drug economy, Colombia’s left-wing for Progress launched by President John F. Kenne- is an outcome of the style of indirect rule dy. Yet agrarian reform failed, mostly because Lle- that spawns violence and illegality in the periph- ras Restrepo could not get local elites to cooperate. ery. Indeed, the demobilization of paramilitaries in A series of articles in October 2012 in the news- 2006 led to a proliferation of new armed groups, for paper , regarding the northwestern example “Los Urabeños” and “,” the Urabá region, revealed that no land there has yet former of which showed its power in January 2012 been redistributed. It quoted a local peasant as say- by enforcing a two-day “armed strike” across the ing “it is easier to hold back the sea with a finger departments of the Caribbean coast, forcing many than return these lands to their legitimate owners.” businesses to close for 48 hours. The FARC’s demo- The same series pointed out that, while the para- bilization could have similar effects. militaries may have demobilized in 2006 and the Making a different Colombia entails tackling senior leaders are in prison, their actual number the basic way in which the country has been gov- on the ground has doubled in Urabá. Leaders such erned since its inception as an independent repub- as “El Aleman” (“The German”—Freddy Rendón lic in 1819. Uribe’s National Consolidation Plan Herrera) effectively exercise control from prison. represented a small first step toward that end, but, It is true that violence has declined in Colom- good though it was, its framing did not sufficiently bia, and there is now for the first time a police sta- acknowledge the politics behind the Colombian tion in La Danta, something McGuiver insisted state’s incapacity in the periphery. Unfortunately, on before he demobilized. But despite these un- rather than encouraging and intensifying agrarian deniable gains, the rich people in Latin America’s reform and state-building efforts, peace with the most unequal country remain unwilling to pay for FARC is more likely to lead to so much euphoria many public goods. When the Uribe government that all such plans will be canceled—precisely the launched its flagship National Consolidation Plan wrong thing to do. I