Democracy and Displacement in Colombia's Civil War

Abbey Steele

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501713736
• eBook ISBN: 9781501712395
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democracy and Displacement in Colombia's Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars' work in Spanish to provide an expansive view of the country's political conflicts. Steele shows how political reforms in the context of Colombia's ongoing civil war produced unexpected, dramatic consequences: democratic elections revealed Colombian citizens' political loyalties and allowed counterinsurgent armed groups to implement political cleansing against civilians perceived as loyal to insurgents.

Combining evidence collected from remote archives, more than two hundred interviews, and quantitative data from the government's displacement registry, Steele connects Colombia's political development and the course of its civil war to purposeful displacement. By introducing the concepts of collective targeting and political cleansing, Steele extends what we already know about patterns of ethnic cleansing to cases where expulsion of civilians from their communities is based on nonethnic traits.

1

Characterizing and Explaining Wartime Displacement

Residents of La Chinita, a neighborhood in the municipality of Apartadó, in humid northwest Colombia, were celebrating at a block party on January 23, 1994, when several men arrived and began to shoot. The final death toll was thirty-two. “Of course we thought about leaving,” the mother of one of the victims told me thirteen years after the event in the community center of the same neighborhood. “But we just couldn’t.” In spite of the gruesome violence, many of her neighbors also stayed. The massacre in La Chinita was one of many perpetrated in the region beginning in the late 1980s.

Less than a mile down the road, another neighborhood “was abandoned,” a former armed group leader told me.1 The neighborhood, Policarpa, was where the alleged perpetrators of the La Chinita massacre lived. Its residents, including Arturo, whom we met in the introduction, were mostly poor laborers on the surrounding banana plantations. They left the homes they struggled to build over the years and set off for other regions of Colombia in spite of the uncertainty.

We tend to think of civilian displacement during wars as a humanitarian crisis, which it certainly is. But this view ignores the political aspects of displacement and gives the impression that it is haphazard and cannot be systematically studied. Yet how can we account for why people in La Chinita stayed in town despite the gruesome violence, while so many from Policarpa opted to leave? The people who lived in these neighborhoods shared the same ethnic profiles, the same socioeconomic class, and the majorities of each even worked in the same sector, the banana industry.2

If the residents of the two neighborhoods had been members of different ethnic groups, we might attribute the variation to antipathy or a racist campaign. Ethnic cleansing tends to be perceived as a thoroughly orchestrated process, perpetrated by groups with strategic interests or hatred or both. Even though the basic observed outcome of what happened in Policarpa and ethnic cleansing are equivalent—a group of civilians leaves their communities after facing a targeted threat—their predominant characterizations are quite distinct. This book shows that even in the absence of a centralized campaign against ethnic groups, cleansing still occurs based on group identities. After spending years in Colombia, interviewing dozens of people and collecting original, fine-grained data from remote archives, I found that group identities and perceived loyalties do play a role in displacement, even in nonethnic civil wars.

In this chapter, I provide the conceptual and theoretical groundwork of the book. First, I argue that civilians’ decisions to stay in or leave a community depend not on the level of violence, but rather on the way armed groups target them. Armed groups target selectively, indiscriminately, and collectively. Each type prompts different reactions from civilians and different forms of displacement. I focus on collective targeting, which is when armed groups target civilians because of a shared trait. When faced with collective targeting, a household’s risk assessment depends on the decisions of other civilians who are also targeted: if everyone stays, it reduces any one household’s risk of suffering direct violence. Given sustained violence directed at their group, however, it is likely that households will decide to leave, triggering others to follow suit. The resulting form of displacement is what I term “political cleansing” and can be based on any group-level trait, such as ethnicity, perceived ideology, or neighborhood. Ethnic cleansing, then, is a form of political cleansing.

Second, I develop a theory for when and where armed groups are likely to employ collective targeting to cleanse a territory and thereby gain an advantage over a rival. When armed groups compete for control over a community, they seek to displace disloyal civilians because such displacement undermines the rival armed group’s presence and is more effective than killing or attempting to convert those who are disloyal. To eliminate nonsupporters, armed groups need to be able to tell who is loyal and who is not. Although information about civilian preferences is difficult to obtain in the context of civil wars (especially those without an ascriptive cleavage), elections conducted before or during a violent conflict are one way armed groups can identify those who are disloyal. Contemporary democratization politics promote elections at the earliest opportunity, which could expose civilians to violence. Colombia’s experience suggests that careful attention to electoral rules and institutions are necessary to prevent such a backlash.

A Definition of Wartime Displacement

The number of people displaced during war has climbed steadily since millions left their homes during and following World War II.3 In the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the UN defined a refugee as anyone who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (UNHCR 2010, art. 1). The convention did not originally include internally displaced people (IDPs), those who do not cross an international border. The UN eventually adopted “guiding principles” on the internally displaced in 1998, which defines IDPs as refugees aside from their location within their origin states.4 The number of IDPs and refugees around the world nearly tripled between 1980 and 1990 “to 22 million from 23 countries and about 17 million from 50 countries, respectively” (Vincent 2001).5 This book characterizes and explains wartime displacement, defined as civilian migration that is provoked, directly or indirectly, by one or several armed groups.6 This definition is distinct from the legal one adopted by the UN, which is concerned with identifying displaced individuals. Instead, the definition that anchors this book is displacement, which is fundamentally an interaction between armed groups and civilians. The focus of the book is on this interaction, rather than the ultimate destination of the displaced, whether within their home country or in a new one. The starting assumption is that the initial displacement shares common foundations regardless of the final destination of the displaced.7

The Context: Irregular Civil Wars

The contexts in which armed groups and civilians interact are crucial for understanding the nature of those interactions and the outcomes they produce. Civil wars are the contexts this book studies. Indeed, the growth of refugees and IDPs has coincided with the increase in the number of civil wars in the second half of the twentieth century. The dynamics of the Cold War led to an increase in a form of warfare known as “guerrilla wars” or “insurgencies,” as the Soviet Union and the United States supported politically friendly rebels that would otherwise have faced defeat by stronger states (Kalyvas and Balcells 2010; Hobsbawm 1996). These “irregular” civil wars (Kalyvas 2005) account for roughly half of all wars.8

This book aims to conceptualize and explain variation in forms of displacement within these irregular civil wars rather than the overall scale of displacement produced by them. The focus of this book is distinct from that of studies that explain large-scale campaigns like mass killing (Valentino 2004), deportation (Greenhill 2010), ethnic cleansing (Bulutgil 2016), or genocides and politicides (Harff 2003; Straus 2006).9 Though these types of victimization often overlap with forms of displacement, these phenomena require different explanations because they are typically centralized decisions. In contrast, the forms of displacement I document and explain here are related to armed groups’ strategies within ongoing wars, which I expect to vary across communities and over time.

In the context of civil wars, it is difficult to collect reliable information about war-affected communities, and this is often a secondary priority to providing assistance to the victims of violence. But as a result, we do not have a clear understanding of how displacement comes about, especially in nonethnic civil wars. To lay the groundwork for understanding it, we first need to understand the characteristics of these types of wars and how these characteristics influence the ways armed groups and civilians interact.

Irregular civil wars feature an imbalance between strong state militaries and any allied militias, and weak insurgents. In some contexts antirebel militias are also important (Jentzsch, Kalyvas, and Schubiger 2015). Armed groups, including state armed forces, are “formal organizations using armed force to influence the outcome of a stated political incompatibility.”10 Insurgents avoid military confrontations with the state, and front lines do not form as a result (Kalyvas 2006). This dynamic has dire implications for civilians: the competing armed groups rely on them and demand their participation in the war. The insurgents ply them for resources and use them for cover. (Mao famously quipped that guerrillas swim in a sea of civilians.) The central challenge for counterinsurgents is the “identification problem,” separating civilians from insurgents. To resolve the problem, they require information from civilians (Kalyvas 2006). Both sides attempt to establish territorial control where they are the only actor in charge. To this end, armed groups use several tactics to gain or retain control or to disrupt a rival’s presence or control, including various forms of violence against civilians (Kalyvas 2006, 124–32).11 Though both insurgents and counterinsurgents face similar incentives to use violence, they differ in when, where, and how they do so because of the different resources available to them. (I return to this below.)

Civilians are individuals who do not participate in the military activities of any armed group but who may be “part-time” affiliates or collaborators. To avoid violence, individuals continually assess their risk and weigh the actions they can take to reduce that risk. Civilians also have political preferences and resource constraints that shape the decisions they make. All things being equal, they prefer to stay in their communities and on their land. Unfortunately, armed groups often make this option impossible.

During irregular civil wars, “What armed groups fear the most is disloyalty, not exit” (Gutiérrez Sanín 2003, 22). Because the armed groups do not face each other for set battles, their ability to defeat one another hinges on civilians. The main basis of competition is for territorial control, and disloyalty by civilians can mean the difference between victory and defeat (Downes 2008, 36). Disloyalty could be informing a rival armed group where another is camped, or who is working for them among her neighbors. It could also be providing food, like the extra tortillas that some Salvadorans voluntarily gave to the FMLN (Wood 2003). Armed groups do their best to seek out and punish the disloyal.

Loyalty and Collaboration

Given the risks involved, why would civilians betray a powerful armed group? In other words, what explains disloyalty? Kalyvas (2006) shows numerous examples of civilians providing information to whichever armed group has relatively more territorial control, because the likelihood they will be punished for failing to comply with the stronger group is higher than the likelihood that they will be punished for defecting from the weaker group. This dynamic suggests that one important factor shaping civilians’ choices is the degree of control an armed group exercises, and it explains the amount of collaboration they receive from civilians. In other words, civilians respond to incentives like security, because collaborating with the stronger group is less risky than helping a weaker one.12

I argue that in addition to incentives, civilians also develop loyalties, to their kin, to their neighbors, to members of social networks, and to fellow ethnic group members. Loyalties can also be transmitted through generations, within households and clans. Darden (forthcoming) shows that nationalist education at the time of literacy led to lasting identities and loyalties in Ukraine. Identities can also develop based on loose ties: Skarbek (2014) argues that ascriptive differences between group members are useful in the context of large populations, in this case prisons, because it allows group members to generate trust. Two mechanisms for sustaining group identification are internal group norms and in-group policing; members know they are subject to the group’s rules and will be punished if they violate them (Fearon and Laitin 1996). Over time, the act of trusting other group members and relying on internal regulation seems to generate identification with the group and loyalty to its members.

These dynamics of identity formation and reinforcement structure wartime cleavages, or the “the salient system of group classification in a society and its conflicts” (Kalyvas and Kocher 2007n10). Gould (1995, 15) relates the dynamic process of collective identity formation to the concept of cleavage when writing about the mobilization of the Paris Commune:

The collective identity of workers as workers only emerges if the social networks in which they are embedded are patterned in such a way that the people in them can plausibly be partitioned into “workers” and “nonworkers”; but once this is possible, social conflict between collective actors who are defined in terms of this partition will heighten the salience and plausibility of the partition itself. The intensification of the boundary’s cognitive significance for individuals will, in other words, align social relations so that the boundary becomes even more real.

Similarly, Tilly and Tarrow (2007, 80) build on their idea of boundary formation: “Everywhere in identity politics we will meet the mechanism of boundary activation, in which an existing boundary becomes more salient as a reference point for collective claim making.”

“Boundary activation” can emerge from prewar cleavages and wartime dynamics (Balcells 2017; Bulutgil 2016). Lubkemann’s (2005, 2008) studies of wartime migration in Mozambique emphasize the importance of prewar society on wartime cleavages. Whereas in Machaze (and the larger central provinces), the extended family was the primary site of prewar conflicts, in the Gaza and Nampula provinces, ethnic cleavages structured social relations. Lubkemann finds evidence ...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on Pseudonyms and Translations
• Unsettling: Displacement during Civil Wars
• 1. Characterizing and Explaining Wartime Displacement
• 2. The Legacy of Displacement during La Violencia and the Origins of the Contemporary War in Colombia
• 3. The Contemporary Civil War in Colombia, 1986–2012
• 4. Democratic Reforms and the Emergence of Political Cleansing in Colombia
• 5. Political Cleansing and Resistance in Apartadó
• 6. The Politics of Displacement across Colombia
• Conclusion: Democracy, Displacement, and the State
• Appendix: Robustness Checks for Chapter 6 Analyses
• References
• Index