Telling the Difference: Guerrillas and Paramilitaries in the Colombian War

Abstract

The effort to build a political economy of war without politics is finding its limits. The question now is what comes next. How to put politics back in? This article compares systematically two non-state armed groups that participate in the Colombian conflict, the main guerrilla (FARC) and the paramilitary. It shows that despite their similar financial bases, they appear to exhibit systematic differences— regarding both their social composition and their internal/external behavior—and claims that the key to understanding them is the set of organizational devices that each group crafts in its process of survival and growth. All this suggests that a main tenet of the early political economy of war, that all non-state armed groups can be understood as being strategically identical, is flawed. It also poses a classificatory challenge.

Moral Disengagement Mechanisms and Armed Violence. A Comparative Study of Paramilitaries and Guerrillas in Colombia

“…The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (farc) are the oldest and most prominent guerrilla group, which emerged in 1964 as an armed organization with a Marxist-Leninist orientation, mainly composed of young and low educated peasants (Gutiérrez, 2008). Their goal was to take power and change the structure of the state to bring about a fairer income distribution (Ferro & Uribe, 2002).…”

“…auc was comprised of ex-members of the Armed Forces, former common delinquents (Gutiérrez, 2008), security personnel of extinct drug cartels, small or medium sized drug barons and some regional elites of landowners (Saab & Taylor, 2009). auc adopted a national political discourse of counterinsurgency and protection of the status quo (Duncan, 2006;Pizarro, 2004), but in fact, they were "local responses to the guerrillas" (pnud, 2003. p. 29).…”

“…This task probably required more communiqués than for auc, whose members probably were not in need of being convinced about the morality of their actions, and whose actions were more tolerated by wide social sectors. Regarding composition, auc had mostly members with criminal antecedents (Gutiérrez, 2008), who received payment for their activities and perceived them as a job. They were, then, a sort of mercenaries.…”

Robber Barons Rising: The Potential for Resource Conflict in Ghazni, Afghanistan

“…In the post-Cold War era, state-funding towards terrorist and insurgent organizations has declined or, in many cases, shifted to new states, resulting in a 'new' conflict economy that seeks to gain from natural resource wealth and illicit businesses (Giraldo & Trinkunas 2007). For example, in Colombia, paramilitaries and leftist insurgent groups continue to benefit from narcotics trafficking (Felbab Brown 2010;Sanin 2008). And there are a variety of examples of Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and other states supporting insurgent or terrorist factions (Levitt 2007;Gamba & Cornwell 2000).…”

Pious Plans and Porous Borders: Rebel Governance and Cross-Border Sanctuary in the Syrian Civil War

“…Armed group ideology thus may empirically underpin the initial variations in material factors (organizational capacity, resilience, etc.) that are subsequently used to account for outcomes of interest, such as insurgent group success (Sinno 2008) and rebel behavior (Weinstein 2007, Gutierrez 2008, Gutierrez and Giustozzi 2010. Moreover, ideology itself can play multiple roles in the context of civil wars and insurgency.…”