Colombia: Toward an Institutional Collapse? (original) (raw)
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New Left Review, 2022
Petro became the first left candidate ever to win the presidency in Colombia, defeating the right-wing real-estate magnate Rodolfo Hernández by 50.4 to 47.4 per cent in the second round. 1 The turnout, at 58 per cent, was the highest for a quarter-century. Petro's electoral bloc, the Pacto Histórico, had already won 48 out of 268 congressional seats in the March 2022 legislative elections. To set these victories in perspective, it's necessary to grasp the nature of the power bloc that ruled Colombia for over 150 years under an oligarchic Conservative-Liberal duopoly, which then gave way to the hard-right counterinsurgency regime of Álvaro Uribe from 2002. With Washington's backing, Uribe intensified the Colombian Army's long-running war against guerrilla forces in the hinterlands; casualties, according to the country's Truth Commission, include some 450,566 dead and another 121,768 'disappeared', as well as 50,770 kidnapped and 8 million displaced, the vast majority poor peasants. Uribe and his successors-Juan Manuel Santos (2010-18) and, especially, Iván Duque (2018-22)-also backed harsh neoliberal measures against the urban poor.
Para el pobre no hay ley Violence and Neoliberal Change in Colombia20191210 126982 6i2d1s
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed an unprecedented upsurge in violence, both conflict related and criminal, in Colombia. The period also saw an expansion of conservative and neoliberal state policies and dramatic economic shifts in the country, particularly the rise of illicit industries and the dramatic land disposition experienced by peasants and small-holders. These developments were not unconnected; both the violence of this period and the structural change it facilitated and drove were instrumental to developing a political reality amenable to neoliberal developments. In particular, the “depoliticization” these developments sparked altered Colombian political life at the level of both political subjects and organizational and solidaristic units. This altered political reality, in turn, proved ripe for the expansion of “neoliberal governmentality”, to use Foucault and Brown’s conceptual language. Importantly, mechanisms at play in this shift worked at both the discursive and the visceral level. The increased salience of violence in Colombian social life gave rise to a security discourse which obscured and precluded political issues underpinning the conflict; simultaneously, the lived experience of targeted violence fractured communal, organizational, and political structures poised to resist these shifts, leaving in its wake communities and individuals who were atomized and even further marginalized. A tragic case in its own right, the Colombian experience also suggests the importance of violence to neoliberal change in poor countries, particularly highlighting a “problem of solidarities” which may provide an important lens for analyzing the violent and para-state forces at play in such change.
From War to Peace: Security and the Stabilization of Colombia
Foreword for the Special Collection Citizen Security Dialogues in Colombia: Controlling the territory and building security and justice in post-conflict contexts From war to peace: security and the stabilization of Colombia, gathers research form leading scholars and practitioners to discuss key topics regarding recent developments around the peace process, between national government and the FARC rebels, in Colombia. After taking into account the impact of security policies implemented during the first decade of the twenty-first century (demobilization of paramilitary groups, strengthening of national armed forces and the containment and weakening of guerrilla groups), this issue further explores challenges, as well as policy options, faced by the state during a post conflict scenario, given a positive outcome of the ongoing peace process. Specifically, and using a broad data analysis, issues such as the ability of organized crime to sabotage post-conflict policy implementation, the absence of state and the rule of law in isolated areas of the country or the importance of local justice as an institutional strengthening strategy for stabilization, are addressed in order to draw important conclusions regarding the problems associated to the persistence of ungoverned and unstable territories in post-conflict contexts all over the world.