Agrarian elite participation in Colombia's civil war

Abstract

Direct elite participation in civil wars remains unexplored terrain. It should be analytically telling, because it involves taking major risks and costs. Here, we consider the direct participation of one rural elite—big cattle ranchers—in the Colombian paramilitary saga. We claim that it was massive, locally specific, regulated by institutions, and riddled by permanent collective action issues. We focus on two important forms of direct participation: ranchers as leaders of paramilitary groups, and ranchers as promoters and beneficiaries of coercive land dispossession. This does not cover the full spectrum of potential elite participation in war, but it is a key starting point to sort out the ways in which extreme inequality is associated with political violence from above.

State, war, and land dispossession: The multiple paths to land concentration

“…We can envisage at least two routes: one in which coercion and accumulation went hand in hand, and were deployed by the same actors; and another in which coercion and accumulation did not coincide and were carried 13 The organizational characteristics of the paramilitary groups were highly varied. The Colombian paramilitaries did not consolidate a unified army but, rather, had a protean nature (see Gutiérrez & Vargas, 2017). 14 A list of his contacts with high-level politicians can be found online; retrieved April 14, 2016 from http://lasillavacia.com/ quienesquien/perfilquien/carlos-alberto-murgas-guerrero out by different coalitions (accumulating and coercive coalitions).…”

Rights in the Time of Populism: Land and Institutional Change Amid the Reemergence of Right-Wing Authoritarianism in Colombia

“…framework included clauses for protecting the interests of some rural elites who may have benefited from massive land dispossession and who had strong representation in Congress [40]. At the enforcement level, the land restitution policy has faced enormous challenges in terms of affecting large-scale landowners, agribusiness, or extractive industries [41,42]. However, the inclusion of those safeguards was insufficient for convincing the detractors of such an initiative, and both the enactment and the enforcement of the land restitution policy rapidly became the sticking point between the new opposition led by former president Uribe.…”

“…Specifically, the FARC-EP found their territorial expansion and founded social bases in areas of relatively recent border expansion, on which peasants expelled from other regions more integrated to the agrarian markets, found shelter and protection from the economic and social squeeze through their engagement, in some cases, as coca growers [49,50]. More recently, the forced displacement and land dispossession executed mainly but not only by paramilitary forces, or as a consequence of their territorial control in given regions, also had transformed the Colombian countryside, favoring political and economic sectors that supported such illegal armies [42].…”

Introduction: Land rights, restitution, politics, and war in Colombia

“…It is very clear, for example, that a sizeable and powerful section of the Colombian elite had a direct stake in the war. Many cattle ranchers, as Gutiérrez Sanín and Vargas () show, were much more than indirect beneficiaries of the massive displacement of people from their land during the war. Rather, they actively took part in the war, often leading paramilitary groups.…”

“…Much of this earlier evidence—corroborating evidence from studies elsewhere (including Kriger, on Zimbabwe; or Wood, on El Salvador)—focused on the complex motivations for participation in collective armed action. But new evidence (Gutiérrez Sanín & Vargas, ) focuses more unusually on elites, often thought to stand aloof from violent conflict and perhaps (Grenier, ) to orchestrate though not to get their hands dirty. Colombian evidence shows—to the contrary—that elites do not always shy away from very direct involvement.…”