Decentralisation, security consolidation and territorial peacebuilding: is Colombia about to close the loop?

Abstract

In November 2016, the Colombian Government and the insurgent FARC signed a final peace agreement. Central to the accord is what the parties call ‘territorial peacebuilding’, a long-term strategy to integrate Colombia’s vast (rural) hinterlands into the nation’s legal political system and economy. ‘Territorial peacebuilding’ follows on from decentralisation and security consolidation, both of which experienced problems, however, ultimately falling short of integrating Colombia. To be more effective now it is imperative to devise a governance strategy for territorial peacebuilding that includes the subnational political and administrative entities, enhances citizen participation and protects local governments from capture by criminal interests.

Keywords:

• Decentralisation
• security consolidation
• peacebuilding
• local government
• territory
• Colombia

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank three anonymous reviewers and the following colleagues at Universidad Icesi for their useful comments on previous versions of this article: Luis Fernando Barón, Juan José Fernández, Juan Pablo Milanese, Carlos Moreno and Vladimir Rouvinski. As always, we are solely responsible for any faults in interpretation and errors of fact the reader might encounter.

Notes

1. Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn,” 763–83.

2. "Local Government and Decentralization."

3. See, for instance, Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn.”

4. Schultze-Kraft and Morina, “Decentralization and Accountability in War-to-Peace Transitions,” 92–104.

5. Jackson, in this collection; Eaton, “The Downside of Decentralization.”; 533–62. Kent Eaton too has warned about the fallacy of adopting decentralisation as a peacebuilding tool without paying sufficient attention to the historic, political and security context of the country transitioning away from armed conflict.

6. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio,” 11–54.

7. On Colombia see, for instance, García et al., “Introducción,” 13–18.

8. Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State.”

9. Centeno, Sangre y deuda.

10. See, for instance, Centeno, Sangre y deuda; González, Poder y violencia en Colombia; and Robinson, “La miseria en Colombia,” 9–90.

11. These problems are particularly evident in relation to the state monopoly on the use of violence and the administrative effectiveness of the state. A third key attribute of stateness, as the term is defined by Andersen et al. (2014, 1204), ‘agreement of who are the citizens of the state’, is of less relevance in the case of Colombia.

12. The 1991 constitution replaced the one of 1886.

13. Pécaut, “Hacia la desterritorialización de la guerra,” 25. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.

14. Tilly, The Formation of National States, 42.

15. Centeno, Sangre y deuda.

16. González, Poder y violencia en Colombia.

17. Risse, Governance Without a State?

18. Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State,” 123.

19. Robinson, “La miseria en Colombia.”

20. World Development Indicators 2013, http://data.worldbank.org.

21. Deas, “Colombian Prospects.”

22. Rodríguez, “Ideas para construir la paz,” 10. Needless to say, this ‘stability’, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘Colombian paradox’, has come at a high cost for many sectors, particularly the most vulnerable groups of society.

23. Aguilera, “División político administrativa de Colombia.”

24. This political constitution created 34 departments, but reforms in the period 1944–1981 reduced their number to 23. The constitution of 1991 created nine additional departments. Today Colombia has 32 departments.

25. Departments were divided into two ‘intendencias’ and seven ‘comisarías’, two territorial subdivisions (national territories) dependent on the executive. Upon the enactment of the constitution of 1991, these units were changed to departments and 1059 municipalities were created as new subdivisions of the departments.

26. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio,” 19. While the centre held the ‘winning ace of having the capacity to designate’ the departmental governors and through them the municipal mayors, the subnational authorities were not entirely powerless. For instance, the departmental assemblies and municipal councils were mandated to set the salaries of governors and mayors, not infrequently making use of this power and leaving them with nothing but a symbolic amount of pay. More importantly, regional politicians actively participated in factional infighting within their parties, making it clear to their counterparts at the national level that regional support for them could be withdrawn at any moment.

27. Hartlyn, La politica del regimen de coalicion.

28. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio.”

29. Múnera, Rupturas y continuidades.

30. Franco et al., “Mortalidad por homicidio en Medellín,” 3211–2.

31. Faletti, “A Sequential Theory of Decentralisation: Latin American Cases in Comparative Perspective.”

32. Ibid., 338.

33. Molano, “El Paro Cívico Nacional,” 115–7.

34. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio.”

35. For detailed treatments of Colombia’s decentralisation and its causes and consequences see, for instance, Castro, “¿Cómo salvar la descentralización?”; Eaton, “Downside of Decentralization”; Faletti, “Sequential Theory of Decentralisation”; Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio”; Garay and Salcedo-Albarán, “Crimen, captura y reconfiguración cooptada”; García et al., Los estados del país. Instituciones municipales y realidades locales; and Serpa, “Balance y retos del proceso descentralizador.”

36. Castro, “¿Cómo salvar la descentralización?”

37. Constitución Política de la República de Colombia de 1991.

38. As Tulia Faletti writes, ‘Article 357 [of the 1991 constitution] established that the transfers to municipalities would increase form a level of 14% of the current national income in 1993 to 22% in 2002. This reform expanded not only the rate but also the base of the automatic transfers, which included thereafter both tax and non-tax revenues. As a consequence, the total transfers to subnational governments (both departments and municipalities) passed from 38–52% of the current national income between 1991 and 1997,’ 340.

39. Bird, “Fiscal Decentralization in Colombia.”

40. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio.”

41. Garay and Salcedo-Albarán, “Crimen, captura y reconfiguración cooptada.”

42. Ibid.

43. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio,” 31. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.

44. Eaton, “Downside of Decentralization,” 537. Here it is worthy to note, however, that Eaton overestimates the point that it was the ‘worsening security situation [that] best explains why decentralization proposals were adopted under Betancur’. The mix of reasons was broader, as we show above. Ibid, 542.

45. Gutiérrez, “Instituciones y territorio,” 16. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.

46. Eaton, “Downside of Decentralization,” 546.

47. Unidad Administrativa para la Consolidación Territorial, “Lineamientos de la Política Nacional.”

48. Palou and Arias, Balance de la Política Nacional, 16–19.This link works in two stages. The first phase re-establishment of government control in the territory, proposes an intensive military deployment in order to expel armed groups and eradicate illicit crops, as well as dismantling the drug-trafficking structures. Only after these objectives have been achieved can the second stage of transition and construction be contemplated in which the rights of citizens are re-established along with the proper operation of government institutions and conditions for regional, social and human development are created.

49. Isacson, “Consolidating ‘Consolidation’,” 5.

50. Palou and Arias, Balance de la Política Nacional, 20–1.

51. Ibid.

52. Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up, 83–5.

53. Palou and Arias, Balance de la Política Nacional.

54. Ramírez, Entre el Estado y la guerrilla; and Ferro, “Las FARC y su relación con la economía de la coca.”

55. To the Colombian and international publics this framework accord came as a surprise for it had been hammered out during several months of clandestine talks that took place in undisclosed locations outside of Colombia.

56. The question that Colombians were asked was: ‘Do you support the final accord on the termination of the conflict and the building of a stable and lasting peace’ (¿Apoya el acuerdo final para la terminación del conflicto y construcción de una paz estable y duradera?).

57. Schultze-Kraft, “Peace in Colombia.”

58. In total, the ‘no’ camp submitted more than 500 proposals for changing the accord to the government.

59. In the past 15 years, Sergio Jaramillo has built a distinguished career in Colombian Government. In the periods 2002–2004 and 2006–2009, respectively, he held the posts of advisor on political and strategic affairs and vice minister for human rights and international affairs in the ministry of defense. From 2010 until 2012 he served as President Santos’ High Counsellor for National Security and in 2012 he was appointed High Counsellor for Peace. Jaramillo has played key roles in both the conception and design of Colombia’s security consolidation strategy and the peace process with FARC.

60. Office of the High Commissioner for Peace, Learn about the peace process, 4. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.

61. See, for instance, Jaramillo, La paz territorial; Jaramillo, ¿Cómo construir la paz en los territorios?; Jaramillo, Intervención; Jaramillo, Hacia el posconflicto.

62. In effect, there is likely not another peace accord in the world that would be as painstakingly detailed in its treatment of the threat of organised crime and criminal-political networks and on how that threat should be mitigated.

63. Acuerdo de paz, 3. The accord reveals a subtle yet significant difference in the stance of the two parties regarding the causes and drivers of the conflict. The government puts the emphasis on the armed conflict, sustaining that it is the conflict itself that is responsible for exacerbating the structural problems that affect many of Colombia’s regions and that it is therefore necessary to transform the prevailing conditions that ‘facilitate the persistence of violence in the territories’. FARC, in turn, focuses on the ‘historical causes of the conflict, such as the unresolved issue of land ownership and concentration, the exclusion of the peasantry and the backwardness of the rural communities’, thereby implicitly justifying the armed struggle as a means to overcome just those structural problems. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.

64. Acuerdo de paz, 3. Translation from the Spanish by the authors.

65. Among other instances this is evidenced, for example, in the work that one of the authors of this article (Markus Schultze-Kraft) is as of this writing conducting in the context of the Master in Government programme at Universidad Icesi in Cali with a group of 36 social and civic leaders, many of them of Afro-Colombian heritage, from the Pacific seaboard departments of Valle del Cauca, Cauca and Nariño.

66. Oficina del Alto Comisionado para la Paz, “Occidente del Caquetá dialogó sobre paz territorial,” 17 April 2016. Translation from Spanish by the authors.

67. Departamento Nacional de Planeación, Estrategia de preparación institucional.