In/security in Colombia

Writing political identities in the Democratic Security Policy

Josefina A. Echavarría

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719079856
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847797506
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on geo- and biopolitical analyses, this book reconsiders how security policies and practices legitimate state and non-state violence in the Colombian conflict.
Using the case study of the official Democratic Security Policy (DSP), Echavarría examines how security discourses write the political identities of state, self and others. She claims that the DSP delimits politics, the political, and the imaginaries of peace and war through conditioning the possibilities for identity formation.

In/security in Colombia offers an innovative application of a large theoretical framework on the performative character of security discourses and furthers a nuanced understanding of the security problematique in a postcolonial setting. This wide-reaching study will benefit students, scholars and policy-makers in the fields of security, peace and conflict, and Latin American issues.

1

An overview of the Colombian context

THE PRESENT BOOK IS BASED UPON the assumption that discourses are living texts, which simultaneously describe and prescribe realities (Jackson, 2005; Weldes et al., 1999). In this sense, discourses are not just ‘mere linguistic artefacts’ but rather have material effects, constructing and producing identity categories (Hall, 1996a). At the same time, discourses come into being within contexts, positioned, constituted and constitutive of power relations (Said, 2003a). This is the reason why in this section concerning the DSP, I first set the Colombian context. I have tried to outline it as briefly but as completely as necessary to articulate the different modes in which the Colombian situation has been represented.

Trying to contextualise, grosso modo, the Colombian context is a major task. The great number of texts that deal with it evidences the difficulties of grasping the Colombian reality. The abundant literature about war and violence in Colombia also echoes the interrogations of peace researchers (Illich, 1988: 167; Muñoz, 2001) in the sense that Colombian history has been made a history of war. Especially in a country that has attested to high levels of violence for decades, the compilation of information and the great multiplicity of texts, from journalism to political programmes and academic publications, allows for a large assortment of versions or different modes of representation of the Colombian context. Depending upon the source, ‘Colombia’ can be represented as a new war (Kaldor, 1999), as a situation of violence fed by criminals in search for profit (Collier, 2000, 2001), as a society at war (Blair, 1999), as a fragile State (Piazza, 2008), or as an internal armed conflict (Franco, 2002). These different names and definitions actively shape the war itself.

My interest is in underscoring the multiple consequences that each of these naming practices produces. Thus, after considering the different depictions of the situation by academics, governments and the international community, I analyse the political consequences of adopting the current governmental definition of Colombia as a democratic nation-state under the threat of narco-terrorism (DSP, 2003; Uribe, 2005a). This perspective on the Colombian conflict also derives from the global war on terror in which the US and the Colombian governments project themselves as democracies under threat of non-political and illegitimate violence. If the enemy and its violence lack rationality, then a state of exception is justified in order to face such a threat (Butler, 2004; Jabri, 2006).

Naming the Colombian conflict

The first question that arises when dealing with the Colombian context is its definition. Various authors, schools of thought, governmental officials and international institutions categorise the high levels of violence characteristic of the country differently. This results in a plurality of definitions. What is important and usually forgotten is that definitions are powerful tools to qualify the actors involved, the character of their struggle and the ways of dealing with the situation (Jackson, 2005). In this sense, definitions are not just the result of objective tabulations, but are already embedded in the power to name, to qualify certain aspects as relevant and to disqualify others as such, and to value specific dynamics in a particular way. ‘Language has a reality-making effect; it is a way of constructing reality and not merely reflecting it’ (ibid.: 23). In other words, definitions are constituted by and constitute power relations. Moreover, in the case of an armed conflict, the way in which violence is represented (actors, dynamics, causes, among others) bears important consequences for the options considered to deal with the situation, ranging from an open military confrontation to annihilate the enemy to political solutions involving peace negotiations (Edkins, 2003; Jackson, 2005; Nasi and Rettberg, 2006).

Academic perspectives

In academic realms, there seems to be no consensus about the representation of the armed conflict. Some Colombian academicians have focused their attention on the causes for the war, privileging political and social explanations that mainly address injustice and inequality issues, as well as the inability of the state to accomplish its functions (Angarita, 2001; Comisión de Estudios sobre la Violencia, 1995).

Other academic currents have centred their attention on the characteristics of the armed struggle, first classifying the armed actors and, from there, inferring conclusions about the character of the conflict (Franco, 2002; Pizarro, 1990; 1991; Rangel, 2005). The financing of the guerrillas and paramilitary groups with drug money has marked economic analyses by denying much of the political character to the armed conflict (Deas and Gaitán, 1995). Several academics have tried to trace the development, evolution or transformation of the armed groups in the past four decades and to assign to each period a different characterisation (Nieto and Robledo, 2001). Finally, there are a considerable number of academics who comprehend the history of the conflict within a wider spectrum. They trace the causes of the current armed conflict to the day of independence in the nineteenth century as a way of highlighting it as a long and violent process of nation-building (Ramírez, 2002; Uribe de H. and López, 2006).

Since there is no specific typology of war concretely developed for the Colombian conflict (Nasi and Rettberg, 2006: 66), the discussion about it has made use of international armed conflict classifications and war studies developments. Three influential contemporary trends in scholarship currently inform many of the analyses of the Colombian conflict: new wars (Kaldor, 1999), rebel groups in search for profit (Collier, 2000, 2001; Collier and Hoeffler, 2001; de Soysa, 2000) and failed states (Lambach et al., 2003; Piazza, 2008). These three theses, as explained in more detail below, have changed the language of the Colombian armed conflict and are present in most of the academic understandings of the war, whether as criticisms of them or as their reconstitution.

The main thesis of Colombia as a new war finds its inspiration in Mary Kaldor’s work New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (1999), which has provided a prevalent framework of analysis for the Colombian context.¹ Kaldor’s main idea is that during the 1980s and 1990s, a new type of organised violence developed due to its occurrence in a globalised era, one characterised by the blurring of distinctions between war, organised crime and large-scale violations of human rights (ibid.: 1–5). The new wars are localised in a myriad of transnational connections, which obfuscate the limits between aggression and repression, and between local and global. This makes the new wars a typical globalised phenomenon understood as the intensification of global interconnectedness in the context of the erosion of the autonomy of the state (ibid.: 2–6). As if echoing the Colombian security policy, Kaldor proposes that the key to resolving new wars’ confrontations is to restore the legitimacy of the state and to reconstitute ‘the control of organized violence by public authorities’ (ibid.: 10). She points out how this ‘is both a political process – the rebuilding of trust in and support for public authorities – and a legal process – the re-establishment of a rule of law within which public authorities operate’ (ibid.).

Kaldor’s arguments have been echoed in Colombia, for her characterisation has proven especially useful for some analysts to describe the eroded role of the state and the blurred divisions between terrorist actions by the guerrillas and ‘traditional’ political violence. The conclusions to which Kaldor’s analyses have led in Colombia include that the war is not fought on ideological grounds (anymore). The armed actors and, above all, the guerrillas are denied political ideals. Their involvement in the drug business and organised crime further support this argument.

A second contemporary current of thought that has greatly influenced the analysis of the Colombian situation is the one portrayed by Paul Collier (2000, 2001). Collier sustains that, from an economic viewpoint, armed groups are all criminal organisations whose motives are not the same as those exposed in their discourses for obtaining popular support. Whether a government or a guerrilla, for Collier, each armed group needs to feed their warriors and the general population with ideas that legitimise fighting and dying for a cause. Injustice, oppression and grievances are mere parts of the discourse, and only serve to veil the real character of organised criminal activities. From this angle, rebel groups invest in public relations to maintain the support of the warriors and of international financial sources. The grievance they portray is largely a consequence of their own need for legitimation rather than the real cause for their struggle. From this point of view, the question ‘is there a just cause for the war?’ has no practical importance. If there were no grievance, the armed group would eventually dissolve. Therein lays the motivation for continuing to feed the grievance (Collier, 2001: 30).

This economic theory of conflict suggests that there will be an armed conflict as long as the armed organisation is financially viable. Since there might be social injustice everywhere around the world, Collier’s (2000, 2001) explanatory argument for the eruption of an armed conflict in a specific country and not everywhere, is that only in countries where the armed organisation can finance itself will war arise and continue. The author also identifies a short list of characteristics that make a country more prone to war, such as dependence on primary export goods, a small rate of economic growth and ethnic rivalries (Collier, 2001). To find a solution to an armed conflict, Collier (ibid.: 34–50) proposes reducing these potential risks factors – especially dependency from primary goods – which feed predation. In sum, whether social injustices are real or perceived, whether criminals want to access power for legitimate reasons or only to fill their personal pockets with money, is unimportant. Whether grievance or greed is the underlying motive has no significance (ibid.).

A third and quite influential thesis in the analysis of the Colombian situation underscores the inability of the state to exercise its functions as the cause for the emergence of armed groups. As James A. Piazza (2008) notes, recent literature about failed states has accentuated the connection between weak state functions of security and the emergence and continuance of transnational terrorism (Crocker, 2003; Fukuyama, 2004; Rotberg, 2003). Taking into consideration Max Weber’s definition of the modern nation-state as ‘that human community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate violence within a certain territory’ (Weber, 1994: 310–11), Piazza (2008) argues that studies of failed states and political violence try to establish a relationship between state failure and transnational terrorism along the following lines:

Failed and failing states are states that due to severe challenges cannot monopolize the use of force vis-à-vis other non-state actors in society and are therefore incapable of fully projecting power within their national boundaries. … As a consequence, failed states … continually face the threat of secession, civil war, and large-scale violent internal struggles for control between the government and one or more non-state actors. (Rotberg quoted in Piazza, 2008: 470)

As Piazza (ibid.) observes, theses about failed states’ policy proposals to address violence include ‘robust multi- or unilateral intervention to prevent state failure and proscribe a range of policy courses, such as building stable democratic institutions, increasing economic assistance, multilateral military intervention, and the creation of an American empire’ (ibid.).

In the particular case of Colombia, the thesis of state weakness is presented in a direct relationship to the emergence of guerrilla and paramilitary groups. First, the state is seen as a weak entity insofar as, in large parts of the national territory, non-state actors challenge the state’s monopoly on the use of force. ‘Colombia is showing signs of state failure (or state weakness) since the mid-1980s and this situation has been deteriorating since the mid-1990s’ (Lambach et al., 2003). Consequently, in those areas where the state has repeatedly failed, guerrillas and paramilitary groups have emerged to replace the state. They substitute for the state’s role regarding the control of territory and the monopoly on violence. Hence, these illegal armed groups function as alternative centres of authority. ‘In the vacuum left behind by the shrinking monopoly of violence still exercised by the state, a culture of violence, insecurity and disorder has emerged’ (ibid.). Since a main contributing factor to the continuance of war is precisely the inability of the state to exercise its authority in the whole of the national territory, a renewed call for sovereign power is made as a counterweight against the power of guerrillas and paramilitary groups.

In the following section, I have selected a few of the most diverse representations of the Colombian war made by Colombian political scientists to explain the violence in the country. I have done this to contextualise the DSP, since providing a comprehensive bibliographical review of the analyses of the Colombian conflict exceed the objectives of this section. As will become evident by reading the pages that follow, most of the analyses merge several explanations (new wars, search for profit and failed states), and do not affirm one and only one cause or characterisation of violence.

IS THERE A CIVIL WAR IN COLOMBIA?

The debate about whether or not the violent conflict in Colombia is a civil war has been the focus of heated academic discussion, especially since the middle of the 1990s. These arguments have coincided with the end of the Cold War, multiple demobilisations of guerrilla groups, the killing of the leaders in charge of the main drug cartels of Medellín and Cali, high levels of political violence and the continuance of the FARC-EP and National Liberation Army (ELN) as powerful guerrilla groups (IEPRI, 2006). Partly because the government insists upon defining the situation as a narco-terrorist struggle, since 2003 an important group of scholars has engaged in discussion of whether or not violence in Colombia can be classified as civil war, or whether the armed conflict could be better understood and handled as a society at war (Nasi et al., 2003a, 2003b).

For instance, in a vein similar to the thesis of state failure (Piazza, 2008), the lack of a social contract in Colombia is the investigative perspective adopted by the political scientist William Ramírez (2002). Ramírez portrays the national situation in the following terms:

La historia de nuestro país es la de un contractualismo coactivo nunca resuelto y, en consecuencia, caracterizado por el hecho de que desde varios ángulos del poder social dominante se han impulsado contradictorias alternativas de hegemonía nacional sin que desde ninguna de ellas se logre el monopolio legítimo de una fuerza que permita articular el inconexo tejido de la Nación. (Ibid.: 154)

As Ramírez points out, the history of the country is commonly divided into three periods of violence: the civil wars of the nineteenth century, ‘The Violence’ around the 1950s and the violence occurring from the last decades of the twentieth century through the present day. It has been argued that the violence of the civil wars of the nineteenth century was the form of doing politics par excellence. Political leaders, transformed into elites after independence from the Spanish Crown, manipulated their political quotes and armed peasants as their soldiers to guard their own particular economic interests. For Ramírez, it was the politico-economic elites who did not have a real will to overcome the obstacles to conform a social contract as a symbolic referent for state power which also constituted a primary cause of ‘The Violence’ in the middle of the twentieth century:

La incapacidad y resistencia de las capas dirigentes alojadas en el Estado para contener la descomposición campesina dentro de límites controlables y cohonestar, en consecuencia, la acelerada acumulación de factores de enfrentamiento dentro de un lenguaje y una práctica de liquidación física, social o política del adversario que se fue apropiando de mayores y nuevos recursos de guerra, incorporando cada vez más sectores de población y dificultando de modo creciente el desmonte de la beligerancia y la resolución de conflictos. (Ibid.: 156)

Therefore, the current situation cannot be classified under the same typology of the civil wars of the nineteenth century, nor of the violent period in the 1950s. In the 1960s, Colombian guerrillas were seen as an armed group of peasants excluded from the political pact of the National Front, which was founded between the liberal and the conservative parties in order to rotate the office of the Presidency of the Republic (Bushnell, 1994: 305–37). Under the influence of the logic of the Cold War, they were portrayed by the Colombian government as communist guerrillas, subject to the logic of the Doctrine of National Security (Leal, 1999). The successive governments exchanged the violence between liberal and conservative followers for a war against a social armed group providing their resistance with certain dignity and legitimacy (Ramírez, 2002: 157).

Between 1964 and 1982, the objectives of the guerrillas both elevated their strategic peasant struggle and intensified the official repression against them. By 1982, Ramírez (ibid.: 158) frames the Colombian war as a mass violent conflict, two or more fighting forces (at least one of them serving the state), and a minimally centralised belligerent organisation and combatants. Ramírez also refers to Kaldor’s (1999) arguments that the Colombian conflict represents a new type of civil war. Since 1982, the Colombian conflict – especially the war against drugs – has had vast transnational repercussions widened by globalised interconnections. The line between political struggle, organised crime and large-scale violations of human rights has been thoroughly blurred. Ramírez (2002) also recognises how the high financial viability of the rebel groups due to drug business enabled recognition of the Colombian conflict within the framework espoused by authors like Paul Collier (2000, 2001).

Nevertheless, Ramírez (ibid.: 163) emphasises that the violent conflict in Colombia is not reduced to left-wing guerrillas fighting right-wing self-defence groups and state forces; it is also a war in which the citizens fight each other and often support one or another of the armed groups. Ramírez calls attention to the fact that the Colombian armed conflict should not be understood as a civil war, but rather as a larger social conflict in which there is support for the groups in combat, including the state. This is why Ramírez pleads for a socio-political solution to the situation, which encourages peace negotiations, and why he distances himself from those who call for the annihilation of the adversary.

A SOCIETY AT WAR

The last remarks of Ramírez bring us to another dimension of the representation of violence in Colombia, one that goes beyond the reasons for illegal armed groups to perpetrate constant acts of violence against the institutionalised political power, and that opens spaces for analysing why the population at large has resorted to public and private violence (Lair, 2003; Pécaut, 2001). This type of research finds elements that serve as tools of study to comprehend the generalisation of violence in the construction of national identity.

In her reflection on symbols, Elsa Blair (1999: 13) examines violence as a problem of imageries that influence social practices through significant and affective mobilisations. Blair investigates cultural values that inform the violent situation in Colombia: cultural referents and the way they intervene in the practices of different actors. According to Blair, the normative background of Colombians had been characterised by the power of the Catholic Church. The church had been the structuring factor of the mestizo society: as a religious meta-narrative, Catholicism provided a sense of order to the colonial world and to most of the Republican Era. It imposed itself as the main moral, normative and political order; it ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1 An overview of the Colombian context
• 2 Theorising security discourses
• 3 The end of peace and the beginning of in/security
• 4 Identity categories constructed and produced by the Democratic Security Policy
• 5 Resistance and peaces
• 6 Final remarks: in/security, peaces, identities and politics
• References
• Index