Journal of International Development J. Int. Dev. 18, 137150 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jid.

1267

POLICY ARENA INTERNAL CONFLICT, TERRORISM AND CRIME IN COLOMBIA

RREZ SANI N* FRANCISCO GUTIE ticos y Relaciones Internacionales Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Instituto de Estudios Pol Colombia

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between terrorism, civil war and crime in Colombia where the internal conict is both highly criminalized and low to medium in intensity. One of the main tenets of the new wars thesis is that the civilian/combatant ratio in civil conicts has worsened dramatically, said to be associated with the increasingly violent or terrorist behaviour of the groups that participate in the conict. However, in Colombia the new wars thesis does not hold, despite the very strong link between the guerrillas, the paramilitary and the narco-economy. This argument is supported by an exploration of the methods used and factors motivating the actors involved in the conict. In constructing a political economy of internal conicts and terrorism and in the context of territoriality, it is further argued that the political part of the equation is often under-estimated, due not least of all to the lack of a working notion of governance. The policy relevance of the argument is that terrorist acts need to be located in political context and understood in relation to the political content of the challenge they pose and the response they elicit. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: Terrorism; criminality; new wars; states; bounded violence; internal conict

INTRODUCTION

Based on the Colombian experience, this article discusses the relationship between terrorism, civil war and crime. Colombia represents a puzzle for the researcher. On the one hand, its internal war is highly criminalized. On the other, it is a low-medium intensity conict (Pizarro, 2004). In other words, with all its horrors it has only produced limited destruction. This paradox appears to contradict present theories about war, terrorism and criminality, or at least constitutes a grey area not taken into account by
rrez San n, Instituto de Estudios Pol ticos y Relaciones Internacionales *Correspondence to: Francisco Gutie Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia. E-mail: fgutiers2002@yahoo.com.

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them. To understand this mismatch between a criminalised but bounded conict, it is necessary to tinker with the basic denitions and current theoretical statements concerning terrorism. As pointed out in Section 1, one of the many problems with the word terrorism is that one persons terrorist is somebody elses freedom ghter. Here terrorism is not seen to relate to a distinct or stable category of people. Rather it is regarded as a political and military method that is used by different agents in given circumstances. In fact, this is a standard denition, widely accepted by both academics and the military establishment, in which terrorism is: a form of warfare in which violence is directed primarily against non-combatants (usually unarmed civilians) rather than operational military and police Neill, 1990, p. 24). Thus, we are facing forces or economic assets (public or private) (O terrorism when a force launches attacks on civilians to obtain political objectives (see also US Army 1984). Hence, terrorists are people who systematically use violence against noncombatants to produce some kind of political and/or military effect. Any analysis that, in an ad hoc fashion, includes some agents and excludes others is simply an exercise in double standards, with little potential for advancing our understanding of terror. Concentrating on the method, though, requires that we understand what factors trigger its use. Contemporary theories of internal conicts (ICs) posit that their degradation (for example, in terms of the greed of its leaders) is directly proportional to the use of terrorist techniques. In other words, todays ICs are more criminal and thus more terrorist. For example, Mary Kaldor found that war is not what it used to be (Kaldor, 2001). She has argued that since the 1980s ICs have become new wars (NWs), which are a product of the last phase of globalization. They are directed against civilians and implemented by forces in which political and criminal motives blend. That is, they are increasingly terrorist and criminal. According to Kaldor, the leading gures of contemporary ICs react against globalization by way of identity politics that in turn are intrinsically exclusionary. In the past, a politics of ideas aspired to convince and incorporate. Identity politics are by contrast built upon an insurmountable we-them gulf. Against a strong counter trend in the literature, Kaldor accepts that NWs are ultimately political. However, she points to their being built upon depredation and criminality and the disappearance of differences between the economic and political realms, alongside an increase in the role of gangsters (Kaldor, 2001, p. 138). Not only is Kaldors prescription accepted and shared by many practitioners, journalists, and academics, but some writers go much further. According to Collier, for example, rebellion is a form of criminality and greed is the fuel of organized violence (Collier, 2000). This article considers whether such perspectives capture the actual evolution of internal warfare. Kalyvas (2001) has shown that the contrast between old and new wars does not hold for an important set of cases: based on a description of the post WW2 Greek conict, he has suggested that perhaps always, or at least during very long periods, combatants have extorted, attacked, killed and maimed civilians. Other factors that are identied by Kaldor as typically new might better be described as very old. For example, the relation of warriors with criminality predates the 20th century, and the period in which warfare and looting were not associated may have been quite short and fragile.1 The dual character of the Colombian IC puts into further question the association between criminality and terrorism because even when many of the characteristics of NWs are present, the increasing use of terrorist methods may not be. Kaldors global analysis was informed by the Yugoslavian conict. Does this hold up as a good empirical example,
1 The case is made brilliantly by Polanyi (1992); while a very good example of an important specic case (Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s) can be found in Brian (1995).

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and as a viable analysis of contemporary ICs? Does it explain adequately the evolution of terrorist practices? Based on the Colombian case, I suggest that a negative (or at least sceptical) answer to all three questions is appropriate. It is true that Kaldor explicitly stated that her model was devised mainly for the East European and African experience, and in consequence any criticism based on other cases ought to be prudent. On the other hand, Kaldor builds her analysis on her fundamental claim that NWs are the product of global dynamics; and her discussion certainly intends to capture strong global trends. Furthermore, Colombia does appear to be the epitome of a greedy NW.2 Many of Kaldors descriptions seem to apply to it quite well. For example, the links between the narcoeconomy and (counter)-insurgency exhibited by the Colombian conict are stridently obvious. However, despite this intimate relationship and high levels of criminalization, I would suggest that the monotonic template of Kaldor and othersthe newer the war, the more criminal, the more anti-global, and the more terrorist it isdoes not t well the Colombian IC. Nor does it account for the complex mechanisms that allow for the onset of systematic and large-scale violence against civilians. This point is important in its own right. However, a policy dimension comes into play as well. The idea that more criminal implies more terrorist has been extremely inuential among journalists, decision makers and academics. Furthermore, terrorist practices pose a challenge to hard-nosed rationalist explanations of organized violence. For example, the attempt to explain suicide bombings as utility-maximizing acts very rapidly becomes preposterous and/or naive, as Euben (2002) correctly notes.3 Nevertheless, purely impressionistic descriptions of the events are not a good alternative either. A careful consideration of the social mechanisms that trigger large-scale terrorism is necessary. In this sense, the Colombian IC poses a quite interesting question: How is it that low intensity (that is, with bounds to the use of violence) has coexisted with high levels of criminalization? In the rst section of this article I present a short account of the Colombian IC. Due to the nature of the conict and the gaps in knowledge about it, this is inevitably a sketchy and simplied narrative. The second section is dedicated to an analysis of the evolution of its repertoire of violent acts. I show that in terms of one of Kaldors key criteriathe civiliancombatant casualty ratioColombia has evolved in the direction of a heavier combatant toll: exactly the contrary of the trend that would be expected by adherents of the NWs thesis. The third part is dedicated to the mechanisms involved: how can greed or rent seeking increase, or tame, terrorist violence? In the conclusion I discuss the complex relationship between greed, war and terrorist violence, and point to some of the consequences of the shifting perspectives about how to prevent terror. 2 COLOMBIA: A TYPICAL NEW WAR

Colombia has suffered two main cycles of political violence (approximately 19481962 and from around 1980 to the present).4 The rst cycle was a civil war proper, pitting the
rrez 2004), as have Collier (2000), Azam (2002), and others. I have argued this elsewhere (Gutie For example, supposing that suicide bombers literally believe that if they kill themselves for the cause they will here comes from at least two enjoy paradise for centuries to come (Endler and Sanders, 2000). The naivete sources. First, it is a very poor cultural description of the mindset of believers. Second, it does not explain why such a belief may be acquired by so many people in the rst place. A rationalist model cannot take for granted beliefs that push people to behaviour that, for non-believers, appears obviously self-hurting. 4 According to standard quantitative criteria, Colombia has been at war from 1983. A more contextual view might choose an earlier date, though I would suggest not before 1978.
3 2

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countrys two main political parties against each other. As a typical Clausewitzian continuation of politics by other means, this conict, known as La Violencia, involved broad chunks of the populationespecially the peasantsin violent acts and divided the population into two according to political preferences. An important part of the war consisted of feuds and raids against the enemy. Despite the extensive and rich literature produced on the subject, there are still several key knowledge gaps, especially regarding the count of victims. The qualitative narratives however highlight a routine use of terrorist methods against the enemy. In La Violencia as probably in almost any other war (Keegan, 2001)political motives and greed coexisted (Keegan, 2004). However, as the conict unfolded, peasant nchez and Meertens 1983). The combination resistance turned into political banditry (Sa of resentment, thirst for vengeance and economic motivations triggered extremely hideous forms of violence against civilians (Henderson, 1985). Both the Liberal and Conservative jaros, respectively) indulged in systematic brutality against partisans (bandoleros and pa their adversaries, even after 1957 when the party leadership reached an agreement and rebuked violent activities in their name. From 1958 on, civilian governments were able to jaros had some inuence, and by 1964 pacify the regions in which bandoleros and pa these had practically disappeared. They were replaced, however, by new armed groups: revolutionary guerrillas associated with the communist party or with some of its competitors to the left (Maoist, pro-Cuban, jaros had been and in the 1970s the M19, a nationalist group). If the bandoleros and pa tagged by the government and journalists as exponents of a process of criminalization and de-politicization of violencewhich explained their gory methodsthe guerrillas represented a conscious effort to retrieve politics. At the beginning the guerrillas were marginal, and from 1965 until around 1975 their impact on national politics was negligible. One of them (the pro-Cuban ELN) was nearly destroyed in 1973, and the others played no signicant political role. The M19, however, was capable of nationalizing the war; this, plus the very fast and strong development of the narco-economy in the second half of the 1970s, pushed the problem of widespread violence to the centre stage of political life. If the M19 was the great innovator of the Colombian conict, the guerrilla that was most favoured by the hike in its intensity was the FARC. In the 1980s a fulledged IC was being fought in the country, with some extremely brutal events taking place. The guerrillas became deeply involved in the narco-economy, as did the counterinsurgents (though in quite different forms). The Colombian government claimed that in many cases an implicit or explicit alliance between narcos and guerrilleros had taken place. Indeed, in the second half of the 1980s the narco-trafckers declared a terrorist war against the state. This other war was waged planting bombs in the countrys main cities, blowing up a plane full of passengers, kidnappings (more often than not followed by assassinations), and shooting against state ofcials, policemen and politicians, among others. While attacking the state, the narcos were still enthusiastically funding paramilitary groups. In the meantime, the latter were growing even faster than the guerrillas. Following the standard strategy of such groups in Latin America, to dry the pond so as to be able to catch the sh, they exercised systematic terror against civilians. They routinely massacred the peasant population in the guerrillas areas of inuence, triggering huge displacement waves. The paramilitary groups in the eld constituted a de facto coalition that included army ofcers, cattle ranchers, agro-industrialists and big-time criminals rrez and Baro n, 2005). Their murderous activities (Medina, 1991; Romero, 2002; Gutie
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continued throughout the 1990s, reaching a peak in the 19982002 administration when they carried out an offensive against civilians through quotidian massacres, in order to create a climate of terror and sabotage the peace talks between the FARC and the government. However, from 2004 onwards, paramilitary groups have been in a process of demobilization, though they remain a deeply criminalized force.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE REPERTOIRE OF VIOLENCE

The narrative above appears fully to coincide with the NW paradigm: increasing criminalization, greed and terrorism, at horrendous human cost. It is worthwhile reexamining some of the diverse forms in which illegal armies attack populations, often as a way of nancing their wars. Kidnapping is key and has acquired industrial proportions. Moreover, Colombia is a country where the majority of such events have taken place. Massacres are common and in Colombia have occurred from the very beginning of the conict. Although they are committed mainly by the paramilitary (CINEP, 2005) the guerrillas also resort to such practices. Displacement, another common outcome, in Colombia has acquired the dimension of a humanitarian tragedy; no less than two million people (by a conservative estimate) have lost their homes and assets. Narco-trafckers and n guerrillas have planted bombs in residential places. Whole political parties (the Unio tica, Esperanza-Paz-y Libertad) have been wiped out. Intimidation and threats are Patrio caut (2001) speaks about a banalization of violencenot to mention routineDaniel Pe the collateral damages inicted in the course of combat. The amount of human suffering inicted on civilians during the Colombian IC has been enormous. However, the match between the standard association (the newer the more criminalized and the more terrorist) and the actual evolution of the Colombian conict is rather poor.5 Indeed, it is difcult to evaluate the association precisely because of the fuzziness of the term terrorism. For example, according to a database on terrorism held by the n (National Department of Planning), between Departamento Nacional de Planeacio 1993 and 2001 there were 11 152 events, all of them related either to the use of explosives or to res caused by illegal armies. Here terrorism boils down to the instrument used. If one is focusing on the method instead, then possibly the best indicator is the one used by Kaldor herself: the civilian-combatant casualty ratio (Figure 1).6 The indicator is extremely important in Kaldors conceptualization, as she argues that one of the most important observable differences between old and new wars is the transition from a 1:8 ratio to an 8:1 in contemporary wars. This is actually Kaldors most important piece of evidence in favour of the NW thesisa clear advantage in Kaldors analysis, as many others are awed by a very poor operationalization of what terrorism
5 Note that I am not analyzing a cross-national database, so the standard counter-argument (that the case is an outlier) is not pertinent here. The discussion is simply about the social mechanisms: how are criminality (or alternatively, anti-globalism) and terrorism inter-related? 6 According to the IEPRI database of lethal political violence. The database starts in 1975, but in the context of a Crisis States Programme project William Acevedo and I pushed it back until 1957. From 1949 to 1957 there were in the country strong restrictions on press liberty, and since the source of the database was newspapers, for the time being it is not possible to go back beyond 1957. The database captures the death toll caused by political organizations, not the direct activity of exclusively criminal associations. However, this is a good entry point to evaluate the quantum of increase of lethal violent activity against civilians triggered by the criminalization (in this case, narcotization) of rebels and counter-insurgents.

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Figure 1.

Civilians-combatants casualty ratio 19571975

or a terrorist event may mean.7 The indicator captures quite explicitly the quantum of terrorist methods relative to standard military activity used by a given army during a conict. Thus, Figure 1 tells an important story. It can be divided into several periods. Between 1957 and 19621963, the Colombian war was newer than today, with more or less eight civilians for every combatant killed. As pointed out above, the Liberal and Conservative groups were remnants of a civil war proper, engaged in punitive expeditions against their political adversaries. Yet at the same time they were deeply nchez and Meertens, 1983). criminalized and devoid of any clear military structure (Sa The substitution of these irregular forces linked to the two main political parties by revolutionary guerrillas took place in the mid-sixties. As can be seen in Figure 1, the ratio fell to more or less four, and oscillated around that level with a peak just before 1980, and then gradually dropped to below two. It has remained there until today. There are several anomalies here. The traditional rural violence of the late 1950s resembles much more the new wars description than the contemporary conict. The former was much more terrorist, identity-based (the main identities being the two main political parties) and localist than that which is taking place today. Despite the criticisms made by the revolutionary guerrillas of the old practices and the ritual killings associated with them, the civiliancombatant ratio remained at a high level until the 1980s, precisely when all the armed groups were becoming associated with the narco-economy. What has been happening? Or is all this an optical illusion? In the rst violent cycle, the explicit objective of the combatants was the carrying out of punitive expeditions against political adversaries, to persuade them into the correct
7 For example, in many papers and databases US-sponsored terrorist activities in Latin America simply disappear. In Enders and Sandler (2000), to pick one among literally hundreds of cases, though terrorism is dened as a method, in practice it is operationalized as a method used by the enemies of the United States (or of Western countries). No serious analysis can be built with such an obviously biased starting point. The advantages of Kaldors clear cut criterion appear very clear when compared with such practices.

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political convictions or to chastise their obstinacy. These waves of aggression took the form of a macro-feud. Despite (or because of) the huge criminalization of the armed organizations that acted in the name of the Liberals and the Conservatives, vengeance loomed large as a core motive, and brutal attacks against civilians fullled the double objective of settling scores and intimidating the survivors. Ostentatious cruelty was a rule and a tool of war. The Marxist guerrillas that appeared in the 1960s went, many a times explicitly, against this pre-modern mentality. All the same, the improvement of the civiliancombatant ratio was limited. The guerrillas were small, very weak, roving organizations, extremely vulnerable to information leaks, and thus very much concentrated on the activity of murdering those who they considered to be informants. In the case of some guerrillas, the assassination of informants and internal purges were the central activity of the organization, with combats taking place only very occasionally. By the 1980s, the paramilitary had come into the scene. As noted above, their core strategy was to force the peasants to withdraw their alleged support to the guerrillas, and to take the water away from the sh, a standard strategy of Latin American paramilitary forces. This implied the systematic use of terrorism, a strategy if not applauded at least accepted by US military analysts. Valentino cites Lindsay who comments: When two forces are contending for the loyalty of, and control over, the civilian population, the side which uses violent reprisals most aggressively will dominate most of the people, even if their sympathies may lie in the other direction, adding that in any case it worked (Valentino, 2004, p. 200). Counter-insurgents engaged in mass killings of civilians, employing the same use of intimidatory writings on the bodies of the victims as had jaros and bandoleros. While the ritual aspects of killing had been been used by the pa banished by the guerrillas both out of ideological conviction and due to technological change (for example, the machete disappeared as a key weapon in combat), criminals and paramilitaries reintroduced them. By the mid 1980s, the situation had begun to change in three crucial respects. First, the intensity of combat activity was increasing on the part of the guerrillas. The FARC has remained a fairly army-like force, and the fall in the civiliancombatant ratio is due mainly to the ever-growing number of combat-caused casualties. Second, several forces (including the paramilitary) were harbouring real expectations of reaching some peace accord with the government, which forced them into rational calculations over the costs of massacring given the increasingly severe international environment. Indeed, between 1998 and 2002 the paramilitary engaged in an extremely vicious campaign during the peace process with the FARC, which implied a crescendo of massacres and atrocities committed against the population. However, regarding the civiliancombatant ratio this was offset by the ever-growing combat activity of the guerrillas, especially the FARC.8 Third, each force was playing its own global political game. For complex reasons that lie beyond the scope of this paper, the FARC discovered that it could play a new role in Latin American geopolitics. As a result it started to redirect its discourse, both rhetoric and actions. The paramilitary were intent not only on their reinsertion into the milieu but also on being incorporated as acceptable actors in the US War on Terror. These political readjustments had a direct impact on the calculations and expectations of the leadership of all the illegal armies.9
The peace process did not imply a truce. There is much evidence of these rational calculations amongst even the most genocidal types about an eventual return to legality. See for example Aranguren, 2001.
9 8

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In sum, the evolution of the civilian-combatant ratio is in part an optical illusion and in part a genuine anomaly. The optical effect is caused by the increase in combat activity, especially by the FARC. Civilian deaths have increased,10 at least until the reinsertion of the paramilitary. However, combat casualties have increased even more as the war has simply become more intense. This suggests, though, that other diagnoses, such as that of Collier (2000), are wrong. The genuine anomaly is a result of the capacity of the armed actors in general, and the illegal armies leaderships in particular, to make rational calculations according to a given set of restrictions and opportunities, and their engagement in global dynamics. This has changed not only the repertoire of violent methods but also the structure of benets and costs of the actors. There appear thus to be two contradictory trends. On the one hand, the ongoing IC appears to be the best predictor of the worst forms of violence against civilians (politicides and mass killings, a point already established by Krain, 1998). This is clearly observable in Colombia, for example n Patrio tica, by the paramilitary in the implacable destruction of a political party, the Unio and narcotrafckers in collusion with state agents in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, the prediction of an increasingly terrorist warbecause it is more intense, and/or more criminalizedsimply does not hold.

THE MECHANISMS

So why do groups oriented towards systematic terrorism against civiliansand even created to implement thisnd that they cannot act without limits? Why do deeply criminalized groups develop mechanisms, however limited of self-control? There are various possible answers. It could be argued, for example, that urban war is more (or less) terrorist and criminal than rural war, and that the territorial ebb and ow of the Colombian IC has determined the level of violence against civilians. In effect, the rst wave of the Colombian conict, La Violencia, started as a highly urban confrontation, only to become rural in its second, more prolonged phase. On the other hand, the second wave (the present war) started as a rural conict, had very strong urban manifestations in the 1980s, and ruralized once again. Nevertheless, it is difcult to identify any association between these changes and the dynamics of terrorist methods. More to the point, it may be argued that in the discussion of the previous section I did not take into account the actions of organized crime; I focused exclusively on groups that are mainly political in their discourse and organisation. This does not eliminate all sources of ambiguity, though: criminal organizations used violence systematically against civilians to obtain political objectives (for example, the repeal of the extradition of Colombian nationals). Especially between 1988 n Cartel) declared a war against the and 1991, narco-trafckers (headed by the Medell state, and during long periods they have acted as terrorists according to the denition used ` -vis strictly here. However, exactly the same objection pertains here as I have raised vis-a political actors. Some criminals indulged in terrorist methods, but many others abstained from them. Many have noted publicly the obvious point that violence can be very bad for business. A good example is the peace pact struck by the main Dons of the emerald economy in 1990. In the 1980s, the Dons engaged in an extremely brutal series of mutual aggressions, with a strong territorial base. People of each municipality were attacked by
10 By 2003 they had started to fall, a phenomenon that is directly correlated with the negotiations between the government and the paramilitary.

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the armies of the criminal leader of a neighbouring one. When they nally found that the costs of war were prohibitive, they strived to reach a pact among themselves. In the process they were able to obtain the support of the Church, as well as the local, regional and national authorities (Ocampo et al., 1993). The pact has lasted from 1990 until today and has been able to prevent open confrontations between the Dons, despite continued occasional brawls. All this reminds one that greed is solid ground for the building of standard rational calculations. These can cause but also limit violent behaviour against civilians. A greedy, exclusively self-regarding agent will have no scruples in killing somebody if this goes in his or her own interest, but if s/he has no incentives s/he will refrain. Actually, in certain circumstances a greedy actor can have strong incentives not to escalate the level of violence. In some forms of criminality the victim becomes a commodity, and his or her captor is interested in preserving life, at least while it is not evident that adequate payment will not be received. Kidnapping (one of the most brutal forms of aggression against civilians during the Colombian IC) is a very good example. It is an extremely brutal experience for the victim but, at the same time, ties the hands of the kidnapper to a specic economic interest. In medieval war, kidnapping and ransom were devices to establish selfenforcing upper bounds in the use of violence against the higher ranks.11 Precisely because it was self-enforcing, it was seldom violated (Keegan, 2004). In the other direction, the alleged de-ideologization of the guerrillasor in any case their movement from an ecumenical discourse to a much more local onecan not only trigger terrorist activities against civilians (for example, killing people for not paying their quotas) but also limit them. For any comparative study of war it should be quite obvious that ideology can lead to worse consequences than pure greed. Agents focused not on their individual gain but on the victory of their universal cause can treat terrorism as an indispensable toolthe proverbial mentality that the end justies the meansand as an actual method for saving lives. Here a quote from Trotsky comes in handy: Terror can be very efcient against a reactionary class...Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignicant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands (cited in Taber 2002: 95).12 In Colombia, forces informed by the most diverse doctrines have shot against deviants, enemies, and transgressors.13 Identity qua ideology deserves specic comment. In Kaldors version, NWs pit cosmopolitan universalists (the defenders of democracy and peace) against identitarian particularists. As the above narrative shows, the general landscape of wars appears to be much more muddled. Global forces and actors, the purest cosmopolitans imaginable, have boosted and promoted terrorist activities. At the same time, the bad guysthe
11 Reading judicial proceedings of kidnapping one sees in action similar social mechanisms: extreme brutality, the humiliating commodication of human beings, and at the same time the establishment of objective relational bounds to the use of violence. 12 Note that an important argument used to support the invasion of Iraq had exactly the same structure: think how many lives we will be able to save if we topple the repressive dictator and neutralize his aggressive plans. 13 The same, of course, can be said of other historical experiences.

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identitarianswere not only globalized from the very beginning, informed as they were by the motives of the Cold War, but also strive today consciously and politically, to become once again global actors and to develop global skills (not to mention their being linked to a global market). One of the main activities of the FARC is to extract rents in the territories under its inuence. However, FARC membersat least those that are not planning to desertdo not have the intention of returning shortly to legality. The paramilitary, on the other hand, do. First, they have been speaking about the issue for a long time (Aranguren, 2001). Second, unlike the guerrillas, their members do not break with their immediate social entourage and therefore may come under greater pressure to conform. Third, since they are paid a salary, it is in their nancial interests to do so. These monetary calculations have been the source of brutal offensives to expropriate peasants in the name of counterinsurgent policies.14 Can they trigger micro-mechanisms that limit violence? The following testimony is all the more interesting as it was uttered by a member of a group created explicitly to develop terrorist activities against the population: . . . no, exactly, I did not agree with the practices [of the organization] from the rst day I was there, because they had told me that I would only be a watchman in a house...they hadnt told me about the trainings, the weather, the lack of friendliness erismo), the smallest pretext and then they [the other paramilitaries] started (compan to ght between them, they threatened each other, they shot each other, they had not told me that I had to patrol in the nights, they had told me nothing of that, and then I thought, I am becoming an enemy not only of the guerrilla but also of the legal authorities of my country.... then I started to behave rather prudently, because I knew that in any moment they would re me, and I was afraid of spilling blood in this organization, I asked God every day not to allow me to spill blood and he helped me to retire without danger and with money so that I would not need to go back to manual work and instead could put a small business in a place where the guerrilla n de la declaracio n would not threaten me (Judicial Proceeding - Rubio/Ampliacio a, 02/08/1990). s Escobar Mej or Rogelio de Jesu del sen There is a lot of self-justication in such discourse and it should not be forgotten that the strategy of the paramilitary consisted in applying murderous violence against civilians, often without any obvious economic incentive. Nevertheless, it does suggest that members of an illegal organization, who have the rational expectation of gathering some money in illegal activities and then returning to normal life, may sometimes hesitate before committing irreparable acts. Actually, I am tempted to claim that similar reasoning has come into play in the process of reinsertion of the paramilitary in 2004. The highly criminalized leaders of this force were the same people that directed a wave of massacres between 1998 and 2002. Nowadays, however, they have reached the conclusion that the indiscriminate use of violence is counterproductive: for business, for the protection of the assets they have accumulated through war and narco-trafcking, and for avoiding jail. Particularistic territoriality, one of the culprits of Kaldors story, is also associated with terrorism in complex ways. Indeed, building control and maintaining it not only entails shooting civilians but also demands establishing some form of governance. This can be seen empirically as well. Though the death toll of the Colombian conict has increased
14 During its conict Colombia has witnessed a huge agrarian counter-reform, of which the protagonists are the paramilitary.

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19841998 Figure 2. Homicides in Occidente de Boyaca o, Buenavista, Caldas, Coper, La Victoria, Maripi, Muzo, Municipalities: Chiquinquira, Bricen Otanche, Pauna, Quipama, Saboya, San Miguel De Sema, San Pablo De Borbur, Tunungua, Total Source: Police Department of Boyaca

gradually since the 1980s until today, regionally there is a sequence of heating up and rrez, 2003). The heating-up phase takes place when the given cooling down (Gutie territory is disputed by two or more armed actors that engage in a bid to terrorize the population into acquiescence. Once there is a victor, both economic and political calculations come to the fore. Governing entails establishing minimum rules of the game and some limit to the arbitrariness and discretion of the warriors concerning the lives of the civilian population. Certainly, the study of some emblematic cases of heating up and cooling down shows that the levels of homicidal violence do not regress to normality at the end of the cycle. Governance falls into the hands of a force that lacks any semblance of institutionalized checks and balances, and that has a homicidal tradition to build upon. As Figure 2 shows, the rates of homicidal violence remain at a high level. The same can be and neighbouring said about the territorial control of the paramilitary in Puerto Boyaca municipalities. Here the hot-cool sequence appears in its purest form: the paramilitaries appeared to contest the predominance of the guerrillas, and while doing so, they engaged in hideous forms of violence against the population. After they evicted the FARC, they established very strong alliances with drug cartels and continued exercising coercion, this time economic. However, with time the political costs of this were so great that restructuring processes took place and a very thin veil of self-control fell over their territorial hegemony. The centrality of forms of territorial governance highlights the limits of a political economy of war and terrorism in which the political part of the equation is weak due, among other things, to the lack of a working notion of governance. Governance rules are key mediating structures between the act of organizing violence and interacting with civilians in any form. They are also ideal entry points by which to understand why certain social mechanisms and motivations sometimes act as a catalyst, and sometimes as a limit to violence against civilian populations. For example, instead of the quaint psychological proposition that suicidal bombers expect innite benets from the act of blowing others and themselves into pieces (Enders and Sandler, 2000), one can focus on strong chains of command in organizations that are able to mobilize and structure anger and hatred and transform combatants into non-individualist agents of a cause. In the case of Colombia,
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particularistic armies have had to develop broad rent-seeking and governing capacities that force them into a format of sustained but bounded coercion against civilians. It is precisely this that allows for Colombias IC to be both highly criminalized and low to mid-intensity.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

I have agged some of the mechanisms that have allowed two characteristicslow intensity and high criminalizationto coexist in the Colombian IC. Nevertheless, the point should not be exaggerated. The links between organized crime and terrorism are obvious in the Colombian case and feuds between illegal or semi-legal economic groups have been extraordinarily brutal (Guerrero 1986; Ocampo et al., 1993). Hardened criminals have few normative concerns and not much empathy with their victims, showing an eerie resemblance to the typical psychopath (as well as with at least the most simplistic versions of homo economicus). However, if they are business-oriented they need not necessarily act as unbounded terrorists. One of the great merits of Kaldors thesisbesides having noted genuine changes in the way organized violence is carried outis underscoring the continuing importance of politics in contemporary ICs. Where her new wars study is limited is that it lacks any exploration of the micro-foundations of organised violence, reected in both the description and the analysis. It is open to several other criticisms. First, the newness of contemporary ICs is questionable. Kalyvas (2001b) shows that many of the traits described by Kaldor as new were already present in ICs in the aftermath of the Second World War, and long before. On the other hand, this article has shown that in some crucial respects (the civilian-combatant ratio) a quite criminalized war like the Colombian has evolved precisely in a direction that runs contrary to that prescribed by Kaldor. Second, the mechanisms suggested by Kaldor as the explanation as to why wars have evolved from old to new do not always work well. For example, the idea that global forces and actors are normatively superior to particularistic warmongers simply does not hold. Globalism and terrorism intermingle in multiple ways; sometimes they limit each other, sometimes they are related through positive feedback.15 Third, exclusionary, fragmented and even criminal projects need not be oriented towards the wiping out of populations. When for one reason or another there is an economic project behind extremely brutal forms of violence, these may fall short of genocide because once any given group has rmly established its territorial control it faces the challenge of governing, and thus of establishing explicit rules of the game for the population under its control (Kalyvas, 2001). Fourth, the argument in favour of the politics and war of ideasthe source of the good old wars of the pastis blissfully optimistic. For different reasons, ideologues and strategists endorse terrorist methods. In this article, three different examples of how terrorism has been justied have been offered: saving lives; defeating the enemy; and disciplining the population. The same logic applies with regard to the universalismfragmentation dichotomy. Historical experience shows that universalistic drives can be extraordinarily violent (see, for example, Giddens, 1987). In reality, the main limit of the NWs discourse and similar stories about war, violence and terrorism is an almost complete absence of any analysis of states, governance structures, and political regimes. They are frequently absent from view in two crucial
15

And particularism need not be violent. J. Int. Dev. 18, 137150 (2006)

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forms. First, they are invisible as propitiators of terrorist actsonly rogue states, the proverbial bad guys, appear in that capacity. Yet as the Colombian case shows, once the conict has commenced, a limited but obviously not completely sham democracy can engage in sustained terrorist acts against the civilian population. State terrorismoften publicly tolerated, endorsed, or sponsored by the democracies of the developed countriesis an indispensable part of the picture of post-1945 terrorism. Second, states are not often recognized as actors in broader social processes. From different perspectives, several analyses of state building coincide in stressing the critical role that particularistic territorial control has played in different phases of the process. Challenging, de-constructing and reconstructing the state does not occur in an institutional vacuum: on the contrary, it entails the development of a whole set of governance devices and organiza` -vis the tional structures, whose interplay within the dynamics of civil war is decisive vis-a onset of systematic violence against civilians. All this has certain policy relevance. Intellectually, the global War on Terror has been associated with the conscious effort of denying terrorists (conceived of as distinct actors, not as a method) their political character. This is something that has also occurred in Colombia. Though the concern with terrorism is not new, the notion of the non-political character of the terrorist is; and this has both important legal (Franck, 2004) and political implications. During the Cold War, when combat against communist terrorists was prevalent, the main concern was to impede them from winning the hearts and minds of the masses. It thus involvedat least in principlea very wide set of socio-economic and institutional reforms. Such a perspective was explicitly stated, for instance in the Alliance for Progress and possibly other similar endeavours. The advantage of stating the problem in such terms is that it identied terrorist acts as embedded in organizations, chains of command and governance structures. Curiously, todays formulation weakens critically the political content and context of the challenge and the response. This is clearly reected in the Colombian ofcial discourse on the roots of political violence, and the methods to eradicate it. For more than four decades from 1958 on, despite all its limits, this discourse took into account both the military and economic-political dimensions of conict, and produced recipes (public policies) to face both. Today, an extremely one-sided perspective has replaced this point of view.16 REFERENCES
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