Showing Teeth to the Dragons: State-building by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2002–2006

By Harvey F. Kline

 Explores the first administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, which marked a decisive break in a seemingly endless cycle of civil war in Colombia

Kline argues that the first administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez marks a decisive break in a seemingly endless cycle of civil war. Not only were the levels of homicide and kidnapping dramatically reduced, but the state took the offensive against the insurgents, strengthening the armed forces which in turn demonstrated clear support for the president's policy.

The civil war in Colombia has waxed and waned for sixty years, with shifting goals, programs, and tactics among the contending parties. Bursts of appalling violence are punctuated by uneasy truces, cease-fires, and attempts at reconciliation. Varieties of Marxism, the economics of narco-trafficking, peasant land hunger, poverty, and oppression mix together in a toxic stew that has claimed the uncounted lives of peasants, conscript soldiers, and those who simply got in the way.

Kline believes that the changes of the President, although dramatic, are not necessarily permanent. He discusses what challenges must be overcome for the permanent reduction of organized violence in this war-torn nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Nov 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817384555

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Preface

This book is the third in the series that I have written on the attempts of Colombian presidents to end the endemic violence in their country. State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994 covered the presidencies of Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria. Chronicle of a Failure Foretold dealt with the Andrés Pastrana government.

Although I am completely responsible for the contents of this book, I have many people to thank for their help in the project. In 2003, as I was finishing the interviews for the Pastrana book, I discovered something new during my tenth trip to Colombia: either because I had changed or it had, Bogotá had become a nice place to live. For that reason I first mention two departmental chairpersons who made the eleventh trip possible. Thinking of applying for a Fulbright-Hays teaching fellowship for 2004, I asked Ann Mason, Universidad de los Andes Departamento de Ciencia Política chairperson, what course the department would like to have in their vacation term the following year. She replied that a class on comparative peace processes in Latin America would be good. I had never taught that, and when I returned to Alabama I asked chair David Lanoue if I could offer an undergraduate course on that topic during the following spring semester to make my grant application stronger. He agreed.

My second thanks goes to the Fulbright-Hays program in Bogotá. The 2004 teaching grant was my third from the program. The first, in 1969, was to write my dissertation, and the second, in 1980, was as a senior researcher. The Fulbright program funded my three most important research trips, and I will always appreciate that. I am especially pleased that Ann Mason is the executive director of Fulbright Colombia as I finish this book, given her importance in the beginning.

The third message of appreciation goes to the Departamento de Ciencia Política of the Universidad de los Andes. In addition to the three Fulbrights taking me to teach and do research in the department, on five other occasions they have kindly furnished space for me, no matter who the current chairperson might have been. In addition, my colleagues there have always furnished both sage advice about my research and sincere friendship.

While those colleagues at the Universidad de los Andes are far too numerous to mention here, I must give thanks to three who have supported me in my work since my first appearance there forty years ago. Along with Francisco Leal Buitrago, Gary Hoskin, and Armando Borrero Mansilla, I have gone from the dissertation-writing stage of my career to near retirement, always benefitting incredibly from their insights and camaraderie.

I also thank the thirty people who gave me time for interviews, in many cases continuing to give information and viewpoints by e-mail. I suspect that one Colombian journalist, who has answered my follow-up e-mails four times since I interviewed him personally in July 2007, must think something along the lines of What does Kline want this time? when my name pops up on his computer screen. To him and all the others, whether you agree with this book or not, I did consider your views seriously as I wrote it.

Thanks to Ashley Kline, whose combination of artistic and computer abilities gave order to the figures in chapters 4–6. Gracias to Julio Pérez, wellspring of wisdom and remarkable friend for many years—and certain to be for many more.

Finally and most importantly, I am at a loss for words to thank Dottie, to whom I dedicate this book. I dedicated one book to her before (1987) and thanked her briefly in three others (1983, 1995, and 2007). She has always been the best critic of my manuscripts, as well as my excellent in-house copyeditor and translator. She also checked all of my translations in this book (the majority of my sources were in Spanish). In this case, she was even more valuable. When I was ready to give up on myself, she simply would not let me. The book is as much hers as it is mine.

¡Gracias, amor de mi vida!

I

Álvaro Uribe Vélez and Moving a Traditional State

In this book I argue that a fundamental political change took place in Colombia during the first administration of President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002–2006). Not only were homicide and kidnapping levels dramatically reduced, but there were also important qualitative changes in governance. As one interviewee put it, The state took the offensive against insurgent groups. The armed forces became stronger and gave clear support to the president. Plan Colombia continued furnishing weapons, munitions, equipment, airplanes, and training. The old Liberal and Conservative parties began disappearing (although they might come back). Different social groups supported the government. Foreign policy was obsequious to the U.S. government in everything, even supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.¹ In the chapters that follow, I describe how the combination of social forces and Álvaro Uribe led to those changes that, for better or for worse, made Colombian politics different from what they had ever been before.

I develop the study in four parts. The introductory section analyzes how the Uribe peace process fits into the general literature of what many, including Francis Fukuyama, have called state-building or nation-building.² I also analyze the origin and growth of political archipelagoes in Colombian politics before the Uribe presidency. This term means that private groups, instead of the government, made and enforced rules in areas of Colombia, including parts of cities as well as rural districts. I conclude the first part of the book with an examination of the extent to which Uribe’s peace process was different from that of his predecessors.

In the second part of the book, I review the changes of punishments and rewards during Uribe’s first term. These include the attempts to build the presence of the government in more of the country, with the goal of ending local and regional divisions. Those changes included increasing the size of the military and police forces, as well as making the presence of the government more visible through local meetings with the president (chapter 2). In chapter 3 I explore the fivefold bargaining process that led to the approval of the Law of Justice and Peace, the provisions of the law, and how it was changed by the Constitutional Court.

In the third part of the book, I analyze the Uribe government’s bargaining with the paramilitary and guerrilla groups, starting with the conversations with the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC) and their demobilizations (chapter 4). In chapters 5 and 6 I turn to the guerrilla groups, first considering in chapter 5 the peace conversations with the Army of National Liberation (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN) and the results. In chapter 6 I turn to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC), showing that in this case the Uribe government was unable to make progress, even for a humanitarian exchange of prisoners and kidnapped individuals.

The key question in chapter 7 is why a hurting stalemate was reached with the AUC, appeared close with the ELN, but was very distant with FARC. I. William Zartman defines that stalemate as "where each side is willing to change policies only if it believes that it cannot achieve its desired ends by violence at a tolerable cost and that its relative position will decline in the future. The hypothesis would be that a stable agreement is possible only if both sides believe this at the same time."³ This can be a tautological argument, having little value unless we explain why a hurting stalemate was reached with the AUC but with neither guerrilla group.

The fourth part of the book is the conclusion, with two major themes. In chapter 8 I first consider the overall effect of Uribe’s policies, both in the country as a whole and in selected parts. Second, I consider the extent to which there was a regime change from liberal to delegative democracy and end with considerations of what all this means for Colombia and for the literature on state-building.

Although I have determined that Álvaro Uribe’s first presidency did change the nature of the government’s response to violence in Colombia, I believe the changes are not irrevocable or irreversible. For that reason, in the final section of chapter 8, I deal with the considerable challenges of public order that the president will face in his second term. The epilogue describes specific cases of Uribe’s successes and failures during the first two years of that term (August 2006–August 2008).

1

State-building in the Twenty-first Century

The Government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2002–2006

When Álvaro Uribe Vélez became the Colombian president on August 7, 2002, violence was rampant in the country. Bombs set by the country’s largest Marxist guerrilla group exploded near the inaugural site, killing sixteen people. Although some scholars argue that the Colombian state had been at its lowest point in the early 1990s,¹ table 1.1 shows that violence was still worsening during the presidency of Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002). Comparing the averages during Pastrana’s four years with the averages of three years of his predecessor, Ernesto Samper, every single measure of violent behavior increased. The mayors of 420 of the 1,120 municipalities had been forced to flee because of the violence,² and 157 municipalities had no police officers, because guerrillas had expelled them.³ In addition, poor areas of large cities were not effectively protected under the national justice system.

The Colombian people elected Uribe on a law and order platform. Pastrana had attempted to be the good cop by giving concessions to the two major guerrilla groups to encourage peace negotiations, but his efforts produced no real results. In a previous book I argued that the failure was because of the lack of an effective state, although there were numerous other problems in the Pastrana negotiations.⁴

During the 2002 presidential campaign, Uribe promised that he would be the bad cop and negotiate only with insurgents who had entered cease-fires. He also proposed a major expansion of security forces to combat widespread crime and loosen the hold of two rebel groups and paramilitary squads in rural areas, troubling some human rights groups but offering others the hope that the Colombian people would elect a stronger leader.⁵ In good part, this was because of the failed Pastrana peace process. As the weekly magazine Semana put it, The Uribe phenomenon exploded at the national level in January 2002. The date coincided with the unpopular decision to extend the demilitarized zone. The country no longer believed in this.⁶

In this chapter, I place the Uribe government within the context of Colombian history and the literature on state-building. My argument is that Colombian history is one of political archipelagoes, that is to say, regions of the country in which the government does not make the rules and enforce them. Rather, private individuals or groups perform those functions. I begin with decisions about the system of law enforcement, followed by the complications that arose with guerrilla groups, paramilitary squads, and drug dealers. I conclude the chapter by showing how the political archipelagoes prevented the success of peace processes before Álvaro Uribe.

The Development of Colombia as a Weak State with Political Archipelagoes

The nation-state is not an automatic phenomenon. Just declaring that a nation exists does not mean that all people who live within its frontiers will accept the decisions of the central leadership. This truism led to a great deal of political science literature in the 1960s and 1970s as colonialism disappeared in Africa and Asia and new countries appeared. However, this state-building problem existed in Europe in earlier centuries and later in Latin America. As Charles Tilly describes this and the violence in state-making: At least for the European experience of the past centuries, a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing consumers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government.⁷ In similar terms, Francis Fukuyama argued, "The essence of stateness is, in other words, enforcement: the ultimate ability to send someone with a uniform and a gun to force people to comply with the state’s laws."⁸

During the first year of his presidency, Álvaro Uribe alluded to this weak Colombian state when he said, Sometimes I close my eyes and ask myself where my country is going. And I see that the country is tearing itself apart, everyone pulling on a little piece, stealing a shred. Anyone who has two guns, three coca plants, and four kilograms of explosives sets up a feudal state, changing Colombia into a collection of rags, something that cannot be allowed.⁹ In this study I define a political archipelago as an area in which more than one family resides and in which someone other than the national government makes and enforces the rules by which the people live. Every country has such areas (organized crime regions in large cities in the United States, for example). Yet rule making and enforcement can be based on tradition or legitimacy rather than force. In the Colombian case, neither tradition nor legitimacy was an advantage for the central state. The local archipelago had the advantage in both factors.

The history of the unsuccessful attempts to build a state in Colombia in the 172 years before Álvaro Uribe became president can be broken down into four periods: (1) the colonial period, during which the Spanish presence was weak and divided; (2) the early independence period, during which the challenges of topography were simply too great for there to be an effective state; (3) the sectarian period, during which law enforcement became a way for the dominant party to repress the other party; and (4) the post–National Front period, during which the Colombian state attempted to contain the latest sources of political archipelagoes. The state negotiated with leftist guerilla groups and drug dealers, and founded self-defense groups, organizations that in turn became powerful political archipelagoes in their own right. In this book I argue that during the Uribe government a fifth period began, during which the patterns of the past began to be broken and, finally, the national government began to have effective control of the entire nation.

Throughout Colombian history the country has had a number of political archipelagoes, with different control systems, based on the economic systems and social structures of the areas. I base the term on one used by Frank Safford, who argued that economic archipelagoes existed because all necessary products could be purchased close to major cities, due to the variations of altitudes. My argument is that political archipelagoes became common in the country because its geographic complexity caused the economic bases of the regions to be different.¹⁰ Without using the term political archipelagoes, Philip Mauceri in effect suggests them when he stresses that Colombian elites come from a heterogeneous economic base, which is a reflection of economic diversity. The economic groups based on mining, coffee, ranching, and petroleum are separate. Second, regionalism reinforces those economic differences and leads to different perceptions of society, politics, and economics. Third, this diversity has made it difficult for the economic elites to agree on a common political project and has prevented the development of a single hegemonic class.¹¹ The Mauceri reference was to legal economic elites. The position that Colombia assumed in the world drug trade after the 1970s led to another group of elites: those connected with illicit narcotics.

However, the political archipelagoes argument is more complex. They originated in the complex topology of the country. Colombian scholars have suggested that their country is either the second or the third most topographically challenged country in the world.¹² This is not to suggest that the topology of the country was the only cause of the violence. Very seldom, if ever, do social phenomena have a single cause. Later variations came from economic differences, partisan loyalty variations, and drug, guerrilla, and paramilitary occupations. Since typology was first in a chronological sense, it was a background characteristic that allowed other features to enter.

Vanessa Gray agrees that there are other important characteristics when she says, the main causes of organized conflict in Colombia are state weakness, unique landscape features, and powerful economic forces.¹³ In a similar fashion, Alfredo Rangel Suárez argues: Neither the guerrillas nor the paramilitaries arose in a vacuum. They were born and grew in determined historical conditions. In a country with the third most complex geography of the world, yes, but they were not a product of geography. In addition to being a product of our history, of social conditions, and very special political dynamics, it is necessary to recognize that the state did not do the necessary things to prevent their emergence and during decades; neither did it do enough to avoid their growth. Rangel continues to argue that the Colombian state, during the first administration of Álvaro Uribe, started taking actions to reduce guerrilla and paramilitary violence, All with the positive consequences of better security in the country and the recuperation of state sovereignty in many regions.¹⁴ In effect, Rangel is contending that Uribe was able to decrease the number of independent political archipelagoes. The extent to which this was the case is the subject of this book.

The implications of these archipelagoes are seen in the case of a president’s peace process. Any president is within his constitutional rights when he states official peace policy; however, that does not necessarily mean the national military or regional governmental leaders will follow his course of action. Rather, the military might ignore his policy while regional groups maintain de facto power in diverse parts of the country, the political archipelagos.

Before Álvaro Uribe became president, these archipelagoes became increasingly common and powerful. They already existed at the time of Spanish colonization and increased during the colonial period. They grew during the weak governments of the consolidation period, strengthened during the sectarian period, and were impossible to eliminate during the contemporary period, instead becoming stronger because of the emergence of Marxist revolutionary groups, paramilitary squads, and drug dealers.

The Colonial Period

As a Spanish colony, New Granada (comprising modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama), like all the others, had a governmental system that appeared to be centralized but functioned poorly. In theory, political authority in the Iberian colonial tradition came from the king. The Council of the Indies issued rules for the colony, which viceroys, audiencias (courts), and cabildos (nonelected town councils made up of rich, powerful citizens) were supposed to carry out. None of these were selected democratically. What on paper was an efficient, centralized bureaucracy, in practice functioned under the guiding principle, I obey, but do not comply. This phrase, John Phelan says, reflected a centralization of authority among the viceroys and governors that was more apparent than real.¹⁵

Likewise, the Spanish crown might have had substantial authority in Bogotá, but that did not mean it had authority in Medellín or anywhere else. David Bushnell argues, This political disunity was to some extent inevitable. Certainly no part of Spanish America had so many natural obstacles to unity, so many obstacles to transportation and communication per square kilometer, as New Granada, with a population scattered in isolated clusters in various Andean ranges, not to mention other settlements along the coast.¹⁶ Marco Palacios and Frank Safford contend that Colombia was different from other Latin American countries because of the three major regional divisions, and that as a result, the country had neither one dominant city nor a dominant region.¹⁷

During the colonial period the three major areas developed different economic bases, as well as ethnic and cultural characteristics. On the Atlantic coast and in the western Andes, large numbers of slaves arrived as the indigenous population died out; in the eastern Andes the indigenous groups were larger and remained. In Santander and Antioquia, colonizing movements led to new settlements in the numerous slopes of the mountains—seventy in Santander and many more in the Antioquian colonization. The result was small and dispersed communities.¹⁸ Given the lack of effective political integration of the colony and the need for someone to make and enforce rules, the task fell to local elites.

The Additional Development of Archipelagoes, 1830–2002

Nothing was done for most of the first 172 years of Colombian independence to fortify the state and to decrease the strength of the political archipelagoes. Indeed, governmental actions, or the lack thereof, generally increased the power of the subunits while leaving the national government weak. This can be seen through the consideration of the sectarian period (with a subperiod of federalism) and the post–National Front period.

The Sectarian Period, 1830–1958

By the mid-nineteenth century, Colombia had become a country of many cities, with rivalries that characterized the country. These rivalries were not only between the major cities (Bogotá and Medellín) but also between smaller ones (Cartagena and Mompoz, Popayán and Cali, Cali and Buga, Medellín and Rionegro), and even between towns (Rionegro and Marinilla). Census figures at mid-century showed the dispersion: only one city (Bogotá) had more than thirty thousand people; 30 municipalities had between eight thousand and fifteen thousand, while almost 150 had between four thousand and eight thousand; 230 between two thousand and four thousand; and 300 with less than two thousand. Rivalries among these settlements began during the colonial era and have continued since.¹⁹

The seminal event of the period was the entrenchment of two political parties, the Colombian Liberal Party and the Colombian Conservative Party, both established in 1838. After losing elections, the respective parties took up arms, almost always failing in their endeavor to prevail using force. The violence intensified when religion became part of the partisan conflict, even though nearly all Colombians were Catholic. The practice of granting amnesty for partisan violence began, making the consequences of using violence less serious for individuals at certain times (most recently in 1953 and 1958).

As a result, political competition in Colombia was never limited to peaceful means. There were eight civil wars during the nineteenth century, six of which pitted all (or part) of one party against the other party. In the course of these civil wars, the campesinos (rural people) participated in national politics and knew of the national political system. This participation did not mean the masses had influence on the policies of the elites. Most of the mass participation originally occurred because of their affiliation with a large landowner, who instructed them when and against whom to fight. In those civil wars, thousands of poor campesinos