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.” Colombia: 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 Uribe also persuaded around 30,000 members of A in the world, and was the center of the in- paramilitary groups to demobilize and confess to ternational drug industry. Kidnapping 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 South Africa), 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 Bogotá. In high society something akin to a panic has risen from $1.5 billion to $13 billion. Invest- was setting in, as Colombians tried to move their ment has grown from 17 percent of GDP to 27 per- assets overseas and angled for foreign passports. 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 free trade agreement with this, Uribe imposed on rich citizens a progressive Colombia. “democratic security 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 municipalities 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 June 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 Havana, Cuba, as I write. for International Affairs. He is co-author, with Daron Acemo- glu, of Why Nations Fail: 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. Valencia 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 1930s. 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 Latin America. 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.