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An Honest Citizen
Briefing

Citizenship in a Contested State
by Mary Roldán
September 16, 2004

In a 2004 television ad campaign intended to raise people's awareness about the plight of two million Colombian citizens, black-and-white images of displaced people float like ghosts. A homeless mother asks an impassive, oblivious female driver for money, while business-suit-clad pedestrians barrel briskly along crowded city streets, indifferent to the pleas of these desperate wanderers, selling fruit, chewing gum, or cheap gewgaws. "Somos desplazados" (we are displaced) read the crude cardboard signs that bear silent witness to this humanitarian tragedy.

These people -- some five percent of Colombia's 42 million people -- make up the largest internally displaced population in the Western hemisphere, and the largest in the world in a country not officially at war. Many of the displaced are Afro-Colombians or people of indigenous descent, others simply farmers or small-town residents -- the majority women and children -- who had made their homes in areas marked by continuing struggles over land, resources and labor, where the government has historically exercised little control.

While rural Colombians have long suffered the consequences of an inequitable distribution of land and wealth -- at mid-century, half of Colombia's land was owned by three percent of its population -- the current situation has its roots in the period of extended civil conflict known simply as "La Violencia" (the violence), that grew out of a struggle for power between the country's Liberal and Conservative Parties in the 1940s and 1950s. Two hundred thousand Colombians died, more than a million lost their properties, and nearly two million were forced to migrate during the ensuing violence. La Violencia eventually came to encompass both criminal banditry and socially motivated peasant mobilizations, and in some cases, provided the nucleus for the emergence of armed guerrilla groups such as the FARC.

With the rise of the cocaine trade in the 1970s, newly minted narco-millionaires invested illicitly obtained profits in massive land purchases, often in the very areas where longstanding conflicts between guerrillas, ranchers, and multinational companies were concentrated, further destabilizing the lives of Colombia's peasants. To protect their assets from guerrilla extortion, traffickers recruited, armed and paid private security forces, many of whom evolved into paramilitary operatives. Rural inhabitants in particularly contested parts of the Colombian countryside became the unwitting obstacles -- or reluctant participants -- in the expanding territorial struggle between insurgent groups and government forces.

Not all of rural Colombia is awash in violence or poverty. With certain exceptions most of the worst violence is concentrated in areas that were historically considered frontier regions -- places with no roads at the country's geographical margins. For a long time the war was distant for most people, regardless of whether they were rural or urban. Whether or not you were close to violence simply depended on where you were in Colombia: Medellín was violent, but Cartagena was not; the Putumayo region was violent, but the coffee lands of Quindio were not. But there has always been a level of insecurity in the countryside regardless of the current situation, simply because the presence of the state varies quite considerably across Colombia -- think the Wild West versus Boston in the 19th-century U.S.

But the situation for Colombians living on those frontiers has, in some cases, worsened. Poverty rates, which have remained well above 50 percent, have been much higher in the countryside, with an estimated 70 percent or more of the country's rural population living in poverty. While the trend throughout Latin America has been to de-emphasize agricultural investment in favor of industrialization and speculation, the demise of the International Coffee Pact in 1989 -- which sent coffee prices plunging -- had a hugely negative impact on Colombia. Unlike other Latin American coffee producers, most Colombian coffee had been produced by small to medium sized growers, not large plantations.

This collapse in prices coincided with the U.S.-backed eradication of coca in Peru and Bolivia, and the cultivation of coca shifted to Colombia. Before that, Colombia had dominated only the processing and commercialization of cocaine. Coca cultivation had never been an important peasant activity in Colombia, as it had been in Bolivia and Peru, but with the disappearance of the market for their coffee crop Colombian farmers began to move to remote areas -- the very areas than have historically been conflict zones -- to grow coca. This migration is less than a decade old. Under current conditions, it remains difficult for small farmers to resist becoming involved in the drug trade, as coca has been left as one of the few available sources of income.

Meanwhile, the guerrillas and paramilitaries -- who have stepped up forcible recruitment of minors, and have increasingly relied on the narcotics trade to finance their activities -- have tended to treat anyone living in areas controlled by opponents as either collaborators or potential informers -- and have punished them accordingly.

Rural noncombatants have made up the majority of the casualties in the ongoing war, a war increasingly perceived as targeting unarmed civilians. While the armed groups initially enjoyed some popular support in the marginal areas they dominated in place of the state, civilian casualties have eroded this support significantly. Caught in the crossfire in a trilateral war, Colombia's peasants, even those without an ideological affiliation with one group or another, have had little choice but to join with one side or another, or to move on.

Typical of these migrants are the farmers from the area known as Oriente, the eastern towns of the northwestern state of Antioquia, wedged between paramilitary-owned estates to the west, hydroelectric dams to the east, and sitting squarely astride the Medellín-Bogotá highway, one of the main transportation routes for people and goods (licit and illicit) traversing central Colombia. Pressured by guerrilla-controlled economic blockades and paramilitary massacres, the former inhabitants of towns such as San Luis and San Carlos -- the descendents of squatters and colonists who a generation ago settled public lands-now top the list of Colombia's populations most severely affected by displacement.

The majority of those fleeing the violence of the countryside make their way to one of Colombia's three major urban centers: Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. Internal displacement has radically accelerated an already established national trend toward urbanization. Colombia has been predominantly urban since the 1960s, with some 75 percent of Colombians living in cities -- cities hard pressed since the 1970s to meet the most basic demands for shelter, public services, education, or employment. Here, rural migrants are crammed into shantytowns on the outskirts of urban centers. Having left behind their livelihoods along with the immediate threats to their lives, they face the indifference of overcrowded cities with unemployment rates of 15 to 20 percent [the estimated rate of unemployment at the end of 2004 was 13.6 percent], where their skills have little value and they may face discrimination and even exclusion for their race and ethnicity.

Most middle class and elite urban dwellers, on the other hand, do not experience the conflict similarly or with equal intensity. With little direct experience of the war itself, violence exists for them in the background, as a state of chronic of insecurity. They learn to use computerized radio cab companies rather than randomly hail taxis lest they be taken on an involuntary "paseo" (ride) of urban ATMs until their bank accounts are drained. At peak holiday times, they avoid traveling along roads suspected to be likely sites of "pesca milagrosa" (miraculous fishing) operations, when guerrillas throw up surprise roadblocks to nab potential ransom victims as they transit by bus or car along the nation's major highways.

The urban well-to-do pay private security companies manned by former military personnel to ensure their high-rise apartment buildings, businesses, and parking garages are safe, but these same security companies -- which become the repositories of the most intimate financial and logistical details of the very people they are hired to protect -- are sometimes complicit in kidnappings. Some government bureaucrats and professionals limit phone conversations to the banal because they suspect -- with good reason -- that their phone lines are monitored by security personnel, who may well have been infiltrated by individuals aligned with one or another of the armed groups.

A friend of mine, a professor and administrator overseeing student affairs at a university in Medellín, told me during my last research trip to Colombia in June 2004 that the head of university security had recently been killed and had been replaced by a female security chief. The new chief of security -- who was a retired military officer -- thoughtfully warned my friend not to discuss intimate details over the phone: "The boys can hear it all, doctora, so avoid embarrassment and keep your romantic life to yourself." My friend recounted this with relief: she was certain she had nothing to fear, since months earlier she had stopped calling her sisters (who were heavily involved in organizing women to lead peace marches all over Colombia), because she'd had the nagging feeling their phones were bugged.

But recently my friend learned that her sisters' headquarters had been broken into by paramilitaries who took all of their computer files and contact lists -- shortly before she'd instituted her own "no intimate details over the phone" policy. The "boys" may well may have been listening in on her line all along; her sense of relief had, ultimately, been misplaced.

Given the state of chronic unease that cuts across Colombians' economic, social, geographic, ideological and cultural differences, it's not surprising that a majority of Colombians voted for and continue to support President Álvaro Uribe Vélez's campaign to end violence. Uribe enjoys 74 percent approval ratings in national polls. Among the less well-off, support for Uribe is not the result of sympathy for the businessmen and ranchers who are Uribe's constituent base. Instead, war weariness, frustration with government indifference and ineptitude, and disillusionment with guerrilla forces have all contributed to President Uribe's general popularity. Uribe's charismatic, plain-speaking style and willingness to defy international criticism for his sometimes draconian policies to combat "terrorism" stand out in a country accustomed to national impunity rates of more than 95 percent.

Support for President Uribe and his policies, however, is neither unlimited nor unconditional. Even those who've supported Uribe's strong leadership have been uneasy about some of his programs -- particularly the "war tax" levied on wealthy Colombians, the institution of a network of civilian informers, and the creation of militias of peasant soldiers -- and it appears that this unease is being expressed at the polls. In recent mid-term elections, left-of-center candidates forming part of a loose coalition of progressive forces known as the "Polo Democratico" won control of the mayor's office in Bogotá and Medellín, as well as seats in the Senate and House of Representatives. Polo electoral victories reflect a growing sense among some Colombians that combating terror must be leavened by social and economic policies that redress the deep historical inequalities that have contributed to the nation's current situation and continue to be apparent in the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Paradoxically, but hopefully, the Uribe government's insistence on a largely military approach to conflict has catalyzed a healthy resurgence of democratic dissent.

Mary Roldán is an associate professor of Latin American history and director of the Latin American Studies Program at Cornell University. The Spanish edition of her book, BLOOD AND FIRE: LA VIOLENCIA IN ANTIOQUIA, COLOMBIA, 1946-1953 (Duke, 2002) won Colombia's Fundacion Alejandro Angel Escobar Research Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2003. She has written extensively about Colombia, violence, politics, and the impact of narcotics trafficking on Medellín. She was born in the U.S. to Colombian parents and has divided her time between Colombia and the U.S. for the past 20 years.