Fighting Monsters in the Abyss: The Second Administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2006-2010
256
Fighting Monsters in the Abyss: The Second Administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2006-2010
256eBook
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Overview
Fighting Monsters in the Abyss offers a deeply insightful analysis of the efforts by the second administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006–2010) to resolve a decades-long Marxist insurgency in one of Latin America’s most important nations. Continuing work from his prior books about earlier Colombian presidents and yet written as a stand-alone study, Colombia expert Harvey F. Kline illuminates the surprising successes and setbacks in Uribe’s response to this existential threat.
In State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994, Kline documented and explained the limited successes of Presidents Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria in putting down the revolutionaries while also confronting challenges from drug dealers and paramilitary groups. The following president Andrés Pastrana then boldly changed course and attempted resolution through negotiations, an effort whose failure Kline examines in Chronicle of a Failure Foretold. In his third book, Showing Teeth to the Dragons, Kline shows how in his first term President Álvaro Uribe Vélez more successfully quelled the insurrection through a combination of negotiated demobilization of paramilitary groups and using US backing to mount more effective military campaigns.
Kline opens Fighting Monsters in the Abyss with a recap of Colombia’s complex political history, the development of Marxist rebels and paramilitary groups and their respective relationships to the narcotics trade, and the attempts of successive Colombian presidents to resolve the crisis. Kline next examines the ability of the Colombian government to reimpose rule in rebel-controlled territories as well as the challenges of administering justice. He recounts the difficulties in the enforcement of the landmark Law of Justice and Peace as well as two significant government scandals, that of the “false positives” (“falsos positivos”) in which innocent civilians were killed by the military to inflate the body counts of dead insurgents and a second scandal related to illegal wiretapping.
In tracing Uribe’s choices, strategies, successes, and failures, Kline also uses the example of Colombia to explore a dimension quite unique in the literature about state building: what happens when some members of a government resort to breaking rules or betraying their societies’ values in well-intentioned efforts to build a stronger state?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817388843 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Fighting Monsters in the Abyss
The Second Administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2006â"2010
By Harvey F. Kline
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 the University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8884-3
CHAPTER 1
The Concepts of the State and State Building
It is necessary to be clear on definitions in order to evaluate Álvaro Uribe's presidency. To that end in this first chapter, I will define state and state building, and I will present the criteria on which the government will be evaluated.
Different authors have defined the state in many ways over the centuries. In social sciences of the past several centuries, one of the first and most notable definitions of the state was by Max Weber, German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist. Weber defined the state as compulsory associations claiming control over territories and the people within them. For Weber, the core of the state included the administrative, legal, extractive, and coercive organizations. Alfred Stepan captured the Weberian perspective well when he stated, "The state must be considered more than the 'government.' It is the continuous administrative, legal, bureaucratic, and coercive systems that attempt not only to structure relationships between civil society and public authority within a polity but also to structure many crucial relationships within civil society as well."
Scholars also disagree on what the proper functions of this state are. Adam Smith, despite calling for it to be an "invisible hand," did consider that the state had three legitimate functions — to protect the society from other independent states, to protect every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of the society, and to erect and maintain certain public works and certain public institutions that it can be never be in the interests of individuals or groups to erect and maintain.
To a certain extent, there is consensus that a state makes and enforces rules. 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." Robert Rotberg makes the same argument in his introduction to State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror: "There is a hierarchy of political goods. None is as critical as the supply of security, especially human security. ... The state's prime function is to provide that political good of security — to prevent cross-border invasions and infiltrations, and any loss of territory; to eliminate domestic threats to or attacks upon the national order and social structure; to prevent crime and any related dangers to domestic human security; and to enable citizens to resolve their disputes with the state and with their fellow inhabitants without recourse to arms or other forms of physical coercion."
Malcolm Nathan Shaw presents the same idea in his definition of state from the standpoint of international law. He says, "A sovereign state is a nonphysical juridical entity of the international legal system that is represented by one centralized government that has supreme independent authority over a geographic area."
However, many scholars would insist that the state is more than enforcement. Charles Tilly states that he and his collaborators decided to compare "the organization of the armed forces, taxation, policing, the control of food supply, and the formation of technical personnel." They found those activities to be difficult, costly, and often unwanted by some parts of the population. Nevertheless, "All are essential to the creation of strong states." Tilly also says that the chief regret of the group was having omitted the judicial system.
One of the first questions is how unity comes to exist in a given territory where previously other smaller units existed. Those units might be based on religion, economic factors, language groups, or any number of other factors. State building is a term used in state theory for the process of bringing these diverse areas into a single functioning state. State building was first used in connection to the creation of states in Western Europe and focused on the power enforcement of state in society. Tilly described the advantages of state building in Europe. "State-building provided for the emergence of specialized personnel, control over consolidated territory, loyalty, and durability, permanent institutions with a centralized and autonomous state that held the monopoly of violence over a given population."
Although generally called "political development," there was a great deal of political science literature about state building in the 1960s and 1970s as colonialism disappeared in Africa and Asia and new countries appeared. Many times, state building was complicated by the arbitrary manner in which European powers had carved up areas into colonies, often combining different tribal or linguistic groups. In some cases, different religious groups were put together, their conflict perhaps controlled by the European colonizer but later erupting after independence.
Problems of state building 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."
The Iberian Concept of the State
States in Latin America have similarities coming from the colonization of the countries by Spain and Portugal, countries in which the king ruled by divine right, a doctrine that defended monarchical absolutism and asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament. The divine-right theory can be traced to the medieval concept of God's award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church.
The institutions that Spain brought to the New World reflected the institutions that had developed in the mother countries of Europe during their centuries-long struggles against the Moors and their efforts to form unified nation-states out of disparate social and regional forces. These institutions included a rigid, authoritarian political system, a similarly rigid hierarchical class structure, a statist and mercantilist economy, an absolutist church, and a similarly closed and absolutist educational system. As John Martz argued,
The Mediterranean and Latin American regions became notable laboratories for the nurturing of clientelism under conditions of paternalism. The Spanish and Portuguese colonizers of the New World recognized the utility of the system in terms of an indentured and subservient labor force. On large plantations and landed properties, the costs of production were minimized. Catholicism, in preaching the helplessness of mankind and the needs for benefactors, provided otherworldly justification for the acceptance of traditional values and practices. This also seemingly excused, or at least explained the practice of repression when employed by the patron. The coercive nature of the patron-client linkage was omnipresent, with the latter entrapped in a vicious circle of obedience, subservience, and impoverishment.
The Spanish conquerors brought this social system to the colonies; it took root, and its effects are still seen today.
To extend the political regime to the Spanish American colonies the king sent viceroys (or "vice kings"), first to Mexico and Peru and later to Nueva Granada (Colombia) and Argentina. In theory, the king said what policies were and the viceroys carried them out. However, given communication difficulties, many times the viceroys carried out policies as they saw fit. Nevertheless, whether the decisions were made in Europe or the Americas, a single person (no doubt with a small group of advisors) made them. There were no elective bodies in the colonies to operate as checks or balances to them.
There were at least two difficulties in the political aspect of this colonization model. One was that the rules made in the distant mother country did not work well in the colonies. This was to lead to a characteristic still common in Latin America today. What on paper was an efficient, centralized bureaucracy, in practice functioned under the policy "I obey, but do not comply." This phrase, historian John Leddy Phelan argued, reflected a centralization of authority among the viceroys and governors that was more apparent than real.
The second difficulty had to do with transportation and communication problems within the colonies. Studying what today is Ecuador, Phelan found that the coastal areas were never subjugated as intensively as the mountains. In fact, many coastal areas remained unconquered until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nor was the administration particularly centralized. Many administrative decisions were actually made in the Americas by several competing agencies; local conditions and local interest groups played a significant role. In chapter 2, I will show how similar difficulties existed in New Granada, the colony that would become Colombia.
State Building in Latin America
There are many studies of state building in Latin America, with different definitions used and different variables included. Most deal with only one country, such as Alfred Stepan's study of Peru. In 2012, Marcus J. Kurtz published a recent comparative study of Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kurtz points out that in the state-building literature the most well developed theoretical literatures are on countries that emphasize international conflict as the motor of institution building and those that stress resource wealth as the cause of institutional corrosion. However, the two have developed in near-complete isolation from each other. He also points out the great variety of states in the world, from the wealthy, massive, deeply penetrating, and comparatively honest governments of northern Europe to the impoverished states whose governmental institutions have failed altogether, as in Somalia, or have been little more than a form of loosely organized kleptocracy, as in the Haiti of the Duvaliers or the Zaire of Mobutu.
Kurtz poses his research question as one about institutional power, — the ability of the state to induce residents, firms, and organizations to act in ways they would not in the absence of its regulatory and administrative presence, and, in the absence of international threat or resource corrosion, his organizing question for his book is what makes a state strong, a question that "is a broad one that requires some delimitation to be theoretically and empirically tractable." The explanation put forward in his book is "a society-centric view of political development, linking long-run outcomes to underlying social and political dynamics at two critical moments: the initial consolidation of national political institutions after independence and the first large-scale electoral incorporation of nonelite civil society in the tumultuous decades in and around the Great Depression. This book contends that these two critical periods produced trajectories of political development that, once launched, became exceedingly difficult to alter in a fundamental way. These periods are also sequenced: the results of the first critical juncture powerfully condition the range of options available at the time of the second critical juncture."
Kurtz anticipates the empirical part of his study with the statement that Latin American state building seems paradoxical: the strongest of state institutions emerged in the impoverished, colonial backwaters of Chile and Uruguay. On the other hand, the wealthier colonial centers of Peru, Argentina, and Mexico, despite larger pools of literate, skilled individuals available to staff their bureaucratic structures and a legacy of much deeper institutional development from the era of Spanish colonialism, ultimately produced much less successful public administrations.
This brings up the question of where Colombia might fit into state building. As a colony it was not a center of Spanish colonization as Peru, Mexico, and Argentina were. Nor was it a backwater to the extent that Chile and Uruguay were. The conclusion of my book on the first administration of Álvaro Uribe Vélez was that it was able to increase that dimension of stateness in Colombia to a level higher than it had ever been before. However, this was because of the increased presence of the military and national police in more areas of the country, as well as their better arms and communications equipment. Most of this was made possible because of military assistance from the United States in a program called "Plan Colombia." The government also negotiated a cease-fire with paramilitary groups.
Those were no mean feats. One should not forget that before Uribe's inauguration in 2002 Colombians lived with the fear of traveling outside of the major cities, that the country led the world in homicide and kidnapping rates, and that murder was the most common cause of death. Paramilitary groups controlled vast parts of the country, many times had better weapons than the armed forces, and were far from being defeated militarily. The largest guerrilla group was the de facto state in many rural areas, had urban militias in the major cities and had troops near the capital city, Bogotá. One sociologist told me that control of the country was roughly divided in thirds, with the paramilitary groups dominating in the northern third, the guerrilla troops in the southern part, and the government only in the central area.
However, the policies of Uribe's first administration were not completely successful. In 2006, guerrilla forces still operated in parts of the country, and paramilitary demobilization depended on the Law of Justice and Peace, enacted in 2006 but not as of then enforced. New illegal groups surfaced, called "emerging criminal bands" (bandas criminales emergentes, BACRIM) by the government but sharing many of the personnel and tactics of the paramilitary groups that had demobilized.
Definitions and Variables in This Study
I mentioned above that Charles Tilly and his colleagues regretted not including the judicial system in their groundbreaking studies. Colombian scholars Mauricio García Villegas and Javier Eduardo Revelo Rebolledo, basing their studies and concepts on Tilly's works, do include the creation of judicial and administrative systems that work to protect the citizens, not only from each other but also from the state aspects of state building. Political scientist Ann Mason also argues that a successful state in Colombia would be more than just military and police control: "State strength in much of the developing world is not measured in terms of military capability to defend or project itself externally, but rather according to the empirical attributes of statehood: the institutional provision of security, justice and basic services; territorial consolidation and control over population groups; sufficient coercive power to impose order and to repel challenges to state authority; and some level of agreement on national identity and social purpose."
After acknowledging that most of the Andean states were not doing very well, in her 2004 publication Mason continued, "Although Colombia is in no immediate danger of collapse, most indications point to a state that has become progressively weaker: the basic functions required of states are poorly and sporadically performed, central government control is nonexistent in many jurisdictions, social cohesion is poor, and the fundamental rules of social order and authority are violently contested. Most importantly, the Colombian state fails the basic Weberian test of maintaining its monopoly over the legitimate use of force and providing security for its citizens."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fighting Monsters in the Abyss by Harvey F. Kline. Copyright © 2015 the University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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