Paramilitary politics and corruption talk in Colombia

ABSTRACT

The complex entanglements of organised crime, drug trafficking, paramilitary groups and clientelism continue to shape the political terrain of Colombia’s Atlantic Coast. This article examines how local elite assessments of how to ‘do corruption right’ were mobilised in the late 1990s by paramilitary commanders to legitimate their state building efforts, and were equally important to their project of territorial control. Here, I examine three registers of corruption talk. I first address anti-corruption claims public declarations made by paramilitary commanders decrying the corruption practices of the traditional political class. These same paramilitary leaders engaged in armed clientelism: using threat of violence, in addition to the delivery of state-funded projects, to gain both electoral loyalty and control of state agencies. The second register of corruption talk I consider are elite assessments of paramilitary. I argue that by approving of paramilitary governance as a means of reigning in excessive corruption, elites in the Monteria region of Colombia’s Atlantic Coast not only justified their own support for paramilitarism, but also exonerated themselves for their own ongoing corrupt practices. Finally, I consider how paramilitary links to drug trafficking have been erased in public discourse, in part through media portrayals of paramilitaries in telenovelas, nightly serialised television dramas.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Donna Goldstein and Kristina Drybread for their exceptionally thoughtful comments. The author also appreciates comments and conversations following presentations of early versions of this work at the at the Anthropology Department of Tufts University and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at the ‘Crimescapes in Latin America Conference’, University of Florida at Gainesville.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Winifred Tate is an associate professor of anthropology at Colby College, and the author of Counting the Dead: The Culture and Politics of Human Rights Activism in Colombia (University of California Press, 2007) and Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats: US Policymaking in Colombia (Stanford University Press, 2015). She is currently working on two book projects that draw on research over the past decade focused on paramilitarism, globalisation and community resistance, examining the forms, legacies, and deep histories of Colombian violence.

Notes

1 For a review of this historiography see Christie 1978 and Londoño 2002.

2 Macondo was the name of the invented costeño village immortalised in Colombian Nobel-prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and has become shorthand for the fantastical elements of Colombian political life.

3 The class power structure in the region was more dynamic than this summary suggests, with the descendants of los turcos creating new powerful networks. At the time, immigrants were prohibited from participating in political parties or holding public office in Colombia, so it was their children who marshalled their business networks and landholdings into campaigns based on promises of clientalistic rewards rather than the traditional family connections (Romero 2000).

4 As of June 2007, a much-reduced version of the ‘Colombialibre.org’ website was dedicated to the ‘National Movement of Demobilized Self-Defense Forces’, with empty pages and no links to regional groups. By the following month, the site was completely dismantled.

5 These declarations ended after the extradition of the paramilitary leadership to the United States for drug trafficking charges. This was widely viewed as a political move to prevent further testimony from emerging about the links between paramilitaries, politicians and businesses (Otis 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by grants from the U.S. Institue for Peace (Paramilitary Demobilization (2005)); the Drugs, Security and Democracy Program of the Social Science Research Council and the Open Society Foundation; and Colby College Social Science Research Faculty Development Fund.