Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico (Transforming Capitalism) 153815109X, 9781538151099

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Selective Security in the War on Drugs

TRANSFORMING CAPITALISM Series Editors: Ian Bruff, University of Manchester, UK; Gemma Edwards, University of Manchester, UK; Simon Springer, University of Newcastle, Australia This book series provides an open platform for the publication of path-breaking and inter­disciplinary scholarship which seeks to understand and critique capitalism along four key lines: crisis, development, inequality, and resistance. At its core lies the assumption that the world is in various states of transformation, and that these transformations may build upon earlier paths of change and conflict while also potentially producing new forms of crisis, development, inequality, and resistance. Through this approach the series alerts us to how capitalism is always evolving and hints at how we could also transform capitalism itself through our own actions. It is rooted in the vibrant, broad and pluralistic debates spanning a range of approaches which are being practised in a number of fields and disciplines. As such, it will appeal to sociology, geography, cultural studies, international studies, development, social theory, politics, labour and welfare studies, economics, anthropology, law, and more. Titles in the Series The Radicalization of Pedagogy: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt Edited by Simon Springer, Marcelo de Souza and Richard J. White Theories of Resistance: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt Edited by Marcelo Lopes de Souza, Richard J. White and Simon Springer The Practice of Freedom: Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt Edited by Richard J. White, Simon Springer and Marcelo Lopes de Souza States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order Edited by Cemal Burak Tansel The Limits to Capitalist Nature: Theorizing and Overcoming the Imperial Mode of Living Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen Workers Movements and Strikes in the 21st Century Edited by Jörg Nowak, Madhumita Dutta and Peter Birke Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle Edited by Neil Gray

Renewing Destruction: Wind Energy Development, Conflict and Resistance in a Latin American Context Alexander Dunlap Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth Edited by Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Alexander Paulsson and Stefania Barca Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Dialogues Edited by Julie Cupples and Tom Slater A Sense of Inequality Wendy Bottero Neoliberal Transformations of the Italian State: Understanding the Roots of the Crises Adriano Cozzolino Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico Alke Jenss

Selective Security in the War on Drugs The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico Alke Jenss

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jenss, Alke, 1981– author. Title: Selective security in the war on drugs : the coloniality of state power in Colombia and Mexico / Alke Jenss. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, [2023] | Series: Transforming capitalism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022039791 (print) | LCCN 2022039792 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538151099 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538151105 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Drug control—Colombia. | Drug control—Mexico. | Drug traffic— Colombia. | Drug traffic—Mexico. Classification: LCC HV5840.C7 J46 2023  (print) | LCC HV5840.C7  (ebook) | DDC 362.2909861—dc23/eng/20220901 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022039791 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022039792 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Acronyms and Abbreviations

xiii

Chapter 1: Selective Security, the Coloniality of State Power, and Dispersed Coercion Chapter 2: Wielding Power: Class, Race, and Politics



1 23

Chapter 3: Supporting Repression: The Coloniality of Dispersed Coercion 53 Chapter 4: Blurred Boundaries: A Continuum of Legal-Illegal Practices 81 Chapter 5: Security Narratives: Generals, Patrones, and Criminals

105

Chapter 6: Selective Security: Unstable Alliances, (Il)Legal Lawmaking, and the Silencing of Dissent

131

Chapter 7: The Law, the Land, and the Gun: The Coloniality of State Power in Making Private Property

161

Chapter 8: Enduring Violence

191

Notes

209

Bibliography Index



215

263

About the Author



279

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Acknowledgments

A book is always the work of many. I thank the anonymous interview partners and many other contacts in Colombia and Mexico who opened their doors to me. In Colombia, I owe a great deal to Carolina Galindo Hernández, particularly for her invitation to the Del Rosario University in 2020, where I was able to discuss part of this work. I thank Alirio Uribe Muñoz, who repeatedly shed light on the social conflicts with impressive clarity since my first stay in Bogotá seventeen years ago, and whom I had the privilege of interviewing several times. In Mexico, I particularly thank Gabriel Diazmercado for his perspectives on the “monstruous city”; Víctor García Zapata, who allowed me to quiz him about political tensions; and Lucio Oliver for introducing me to classics as different as Sergio Bagú and mole de almendras. Colleagues from various disciplines who work on violence in the Americas have been incredibly important in making sense of the brutality, the motives, and power relations, and I have learned so very much from them (recently, Inés Durán Matute, Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, Lerber Dimas Vásquez, Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, Claudia Brunner, Marcela López, Daniel Inclán, Carolina Galindo, Diane Davis, Verónica Gago; thank you to Börries Nehe, Timo Dorsch, and Jana Flörchinger for bringing some of us together to discuss Geographies of Violence in 2019, and many others). I am deeply indebted to Ian Bruff who encouraged me to write this book and accompanied my slow writing process throughout. Ian, Burak Tansel, Mònica Clua Losada, Chris Hesketh, Adam Morton, and others of the Critical Political Economy Research Network at the European Sociological Association and the European International Studies Association have supported me significantly, have strengthened the way I think about political economy, and have had more impact on this book than they may think. I am incredibly grateful for colleagues at Assoziation für Kritische Gesellschaftsforschung (particularly, Simone Claar and Nikolai Huke) who have shared the ride through German academia from the very early stages. ix

x

Acknowledgments

I thank my current and former colleagues at the ABI Freiburg for the many discussions of drafts, joint articles, jointly organized lectures, workshops and seminars, and the constructive atmosphere (Rosa Lehmann, Franzisca Zanker, César Bazán Seminario, Fabricio Rodríguez, Benjamin Schuetze, Amya Agarwal, Hugo Fanton, Dilshad Muhammad, Viviana García, Helga Dickow, Julia Gurol, Cita Wetterich, Alessandra Bonci, and Lewis Turner), and my “council of no” for putting priorities straight. Many other colleagues and friends have shown me how research integrity and political activism are intertwined, and I am indebted to them (for instance, Ioanna Menhard, Hanna AlTaher, Maria Hammes). My thanks for valuable discussions and conversations on political conjunctures in the Americas beyond the scientific context go to Katrin Planta, Aldo Rabiela, Irena Kern, César Bazán, José Cárdenas, Jimena Salazar, Johannes Schulten, Kristy Schank, and Robert Gather. To survive in this crisis-ridden and violent world, you absolutely need comrades-in-arms like you. I thank Dieter Boris (Marburg University) for the years of guidance, his demand for conceptual clarity and precision, and his generous feedback. I would like to thank Mabel Thwaites Rey, director of the Instituto de Estudios para América Latina y el Caribe (IEALC) at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) and Manuela Boatcă, professor of sociology at the University of Freiburg, for their wonderful mentorship and support. Collaborating with Stefan Pimmer during the years of my PhD helped my work be much more precise; without him many questions about the state in Latin America would never have become clear to me. I had the opportunity to present and discuss drafts of this work at different universities (i.e., Kassel, Vienna, Giessen, Bonn, Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, and several times at the Latin American Institute at Free University of Berlin) and am grateful to Patrick Eser, Tobias Boos, Stefan Peters and Hans-Jürgen Burchardt, Carlos Pérez Ricart, Antje Gunsenheimer, and María Cárdenas for the invitations. I am grateful to Ian Bruff, Simon Springer, Robert Gather, Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, César Bazán, and Markus-Michael Müller for providing valuable, constructive comments to earlier chapter versions. I thank Rachel Kantrovitz, Rebecca Schmid, and Frederik Hermle for their editing assistance, as well as Dhara Snowden, my editor at Rowman & Littlefield, for her interest in this book; Katelyn Turner and Mary Wheelehan for acompanying it into existence. Robert, Matteo, and Merle, simply: thank you. Marce and Nury, thank you for all that I have learned from you and laughed about with you, and for your courage. This book is dedicated to those who stand against the normalization of violence and remain politically active, despite the circumstances.

Acknowledgments

xi

I cite a range of Aníbal Quijano’s different texts from the 2014 collection, edited by Danilo Assis Clímaco and published with the Latin American Council for Social Sciences (CLACSO). Parts of chapter 5 appeared as “Criminal Heterarchy and Its Critics: Governance and the Making of Insecurity in Colombia,” Global Crime 19, no. 3–4 (2018): 250–70; chapter 7 is an elaborated version based on the article “A Criminal Commodity Consensus: The Coloniality of State Power, State Crime and the Transformation of Property Relations in Mexico,” State Crime 7, no. 2 (2018): 306–28.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

ACCU:

Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá (SelfDefense Groups in the Department of Córdoba and the Region of Urabá, Colombia) ACDEGAM: Asociación Campesina de Ganaderos y Agricultores del Magdalena Medio (Association of Magdalena Medio Ranchers and Farmers) AFI: Agencia Federal de Investigación (Federal Investigative Agency, Mexico) AI: Amnesty International ALCA: Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas (Free Trade Area of the Americas) ANDI: Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia (National Business Association of Colombia) APPO: Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) ASPAN: Alianza para la Seguridad y la Prosperidad de América del Norte (Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America) AUC: Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) BCB: Bloque Central Bolívar (paramilitary Organization in Bolívar Department, Colombia) CAI: Centros de Atención Inmediata (Immediate Attention Centers, Colombia) CAMIMEX: Cámara Minera México (Mining Chamber, Mexico) CANACO: Cámara Nacional de Comercio, Servicios y Turismo (National Chamber of Commerce, Mexico) CANACINTRA: Cámara Nacional de la Industria de Transformación (National Industry Chamber, Mexico) xiii

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CASEDE: CCAI: CCE: CDH Frayba: CISEN: CMDPDH: CMH: CMHN: CNC: CNDH: CODHES: CONCAMIN: CONVIVIR: COPARMEX: CRIC: DAS: DFS: ELN:

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Colectivo de Análisis de la Seguridad con Democracia A.C. (Security with Democracy Analysis Organization, Mexico) Centro de Coordinación de Acción Integral (Integral Action Coordination Center) Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (Corporate Coordinating Council, Mexico) Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Human Rights Center Bartolomé de las Casas, Mexico) Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (National Investigation and Security Center, Mexico) Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos (Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights) Centro de Memoria Histórica (Center for Historic Memory, Colombia) Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocio (Mexican Council of Businessmen) Consejo Nacional Campesino (National Peasants Council, Colombia) Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (National Human Rights Commission, Mexico) Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement, Colombia) Confederación de Cámaras Industriales de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos (Confederation of Industrial Chambers Mexico) Militia cooperatives legalized in 1994, Colombia Confederación Patronal de la República Mexicana (Mexican Employers Confederation) Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca Region) Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (Administrative Department of Security, Colombia) Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate, Mexico) Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army, Colombia)

Acronyms and Abbreviations

EPR: ESMAD: EZLN: FARC-EP: FEDECAFE: FEDEGAN: FEMOSPP: HCHR: HRW: ICG: INCODER/ INCORA: INEGI: JEP: MOVICE: MPJD: OAS: ONIC: PAN: PF: PDA: PFP:

xv

Ejército Popular Revolucionario (Popular Revolutionary Army, Mexico) Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (Mobile Anti-Riot Unit) Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Mexico) Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia— Ejército del Pueblo (Armed Revolutionary Forces, Colombia) Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (National Federation of Coffee Growers, Colombia) Federación de Ganaderos (Livestock Breeders’ Federation, Colombia) Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado (Special Attorney for Social Movements and Politicians of the Past, Mexico) United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Human Rights Watch International Crisis Group Instituto Colombiano de Desarrollo Rural (Colombian Institute for Rural Development, formerly Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria, Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform) Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (National Statistics and Geography Institute, Mexico) Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction of Peace, Colombia) Movimiento de Víctimas de Crímenes del Estado (Movement of Victims of State Crime, Colombia) Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, Mexico) Organization of American States Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (National Indigenous Organization of Colombia) Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, Mexico) Policía Federal (Federal Police, Mexico) Polo Democrático Alternativo (Alternative Democratic Pole, Colombia) Policía Federal Preventiva (Federal Preventive Police, Mexico)

xvi

PGN: PGR: PJF: PNUD/UNDP: PND: PRD: PRI: PRM: REMA: RUV: SAC: SEDENA: SEGOB: SEMAR: SHCP: SNTE: SRE: SSP: TPP: UACT:

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Procuraduría General de la Nación (Office of the Inspector General, Colombia) Procuraduría General de la República (Office of the Mexican Attorney General) Policía Judicial Federal (Federal Judicial Police) Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (United Nations Development Program) Plan Nacional de Desarrollo (National Development Plan) Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, Mexico) Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico) Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution) Red Mexicana de Afectados por la Minería (Mexican Network for Those Affected by Mining) Registro Único de Víctimas (Single Victims Register, Colombia) Sociedad de Agricultores de Colombia (Colombian Agricultural Society) Secretaría de Defensa Nacional (Secretariat for National Defense, Mexico) Secretaría de Gobernación (Secretariat of the Interior, Mexico) Secretaría de la Marina (Secretariat for the Navy, Mexico) Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público (Secretary for Finance and Public Credit, Mexico) Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (National Educational Workers Union, Mexico) Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (External Relations Secretariat, Mexico) Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (Public Security Secretariat, Mexico) Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos (Permanent People’s Tribunal) Unidad Administrativa para la Consolidación Territorial (Administrative Unit for Territorial Consolidation, Colombia)

Acronyms and Abbreviations

UAF: UNHCR: UNODC:

xvii

Unidad Agrícola Familiar (Unit of allowed hectares per household in land distribution, Colombia) United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Chapter 1

Selective Security, the Coloniality of State Power, and Dispersed Coercion

In May 2011, twenty thousand people took to the streets of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatista support movement had called for a “march of silence” against the government’s so-called war on drugs. Women, men, and children walked in silence, holding up banners saying “no more blood” and “we are fed up” (“estamos hasta la madre”). Their clarity about the violence not only by so-called cartels but also by state institutions exposes what much state theory of the “war on drugs” has lacked—an idea of the state’s role. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN; (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) communiqué read at the march points out how everyday life—for instance, the daily commute—had become infused with fear, places of leisure having mutated into military objectives. It says how the primary victims of the “war” were citizens who neither had business with the drug trade nor the state. Calling for a stop to violence, the EZLN condemned accumulation strategies based on violence and dispossession (EZLN 2011). The protest was remarkable because no police were present. It was as if the Mexican state wanted to reiterate the invisibility of Zapatista communities, even in protest. In fact, however, during 2008 Zapatista support communities had suffered so many military attacks that they temporarily retreated from public engagement (La Jornada 2008). Since 1994, the EZLN has denounced paramilitary violence and counterinsurgency practices (López y Rivas 2002). Additionally, illegal and arbitrary detentions, torture, and even enforced disappearances of grassroots activists and human rights defenders had all become frequent in Mexico in the 2000s. Activists argued that “political repression” was such that it “causes an accelerated decomposition of the social fabric. [. . .] The terror has caused a social silence which cuts the ties of solidarity” (interview with Alejandro Cerezo, 2012). In effect, police absence 1

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Figure 1.1. Zapatistas march against President Calderón’s war against drugs, San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, May 8, 2011. Source: Photo by the author.

in San Cristóbal may have simply been a gesture conscious of the presence of international observers at Zapatista mobilizations. Although the strategy seemed diffuse at the time, it is now documented that “security” in Mexico or, rather, disciplining, contributed to reproducing power relations based on class, race, and gender. For instance, in August 2006, Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI; Federal Investigation Agency) agents seized merchandise from street vendors at the Santiago Mexiquititlán market in Querétaro, claiming it was pirated. When the three female Hñähñú indigenous traders, Teresa González, Alberta Alcántara, and Jacinta Francisco Marcial, retained six AFI agents to protest against their merchandise being taken away, the women were detained on the grounds of abduction and spent ten years in jail. In 2017, the Mexican state had to apologize for the excess (Carrión, Alba, and Ibarra 2019). The forced disappearance of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa in Mexico in 2014 even more vividly illustrated that Mexican authorities were intimately and systematically involved in criminal violence against civilians. Routinely, in Colombia, riot police would use similarly repressive tactics. For instance, when in Bogotá, a demonstration honoring victims of

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paramilitaries and the state on March 6, 2008, that mobilized up to three hundred thousand participants (MOVICE 2008), riot police Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (ESMAD) presence was indeed intimidating. Moreover, however, on March 11, individual and collective organizers of the march received death threats signed by a so-called Bloque Bogotá of the Águilas Negras paramilitary group (El Espectador 2008a). Indigenous groups experienced more open state repression. In 2008, from mid-October to the end of November, indigenous communities mobilized up to thirty thousand people to participate in a popular minga. Mingas, a collective organizing process including rural and urban marches and road blocks, have become part of Colombia’s protest repertoire since the 2000s (i.e., in 2009, 2017, and 2019). In 2008, riot police repression resulted in at least three dead during the first days of mobilization (Minga Indígena 2008; El Espectador 2008b). When Minga spokespersons  succeeded in holding a dialogue with government representatives after weeks of pressure, the interior minister argued their demands were not viable and warned that security forces could enter their territories when they suspected “armed groups” there (Ministerio del Interior 2008)—a hardly veiled threat. The Minga exposed the government’s coupled policies of abandonment and acceptance of violence. Its demands fundamentally opposed the dominant project based on the availability of territory for extraction. In different ways, these instances illustrate how coercive mechanisms shaped the state policies of the conjuncture of the 2000s. Critique of the “war on drugs” is not new; former presidents, policy advisors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots organizations have all repeatedly argued for more demand-oriented drug policies. Conventional critiques, however, often foreground success or failure. Both hinge on the militarized response to what is perceived as an external threat to the state. Looking more closely, existing narratives of escalating violence are often alarmingly superficial. Proponents of liberalism see the effects of the “war on drugs” as extreme anomalies, instead of recognizing how the coercion of parts of society is integral to existing democracies’ dealings with dissent and the “lived experiences” (Weaver and Prowse 2020) of large social groups. The problems at hand are reduced to organized crime. “Selective security” moves beyond these narratives. Only judging how well state security policies fared against crime risks legitimizing excessive state violence and militarization as a “necessary” collateral and potentially underestimates the entanglements among coercion, illegal practices, and capital accumulation. This book instead offers a detailed analysis of the role of the state in violence. The challenges lie in carving out the actors and motives involved, the actual power relations in specific conjunctures, and the ways in which security policies are contested while they simultaneously complicate contestation. To what extent and for whom do states produce

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order and disorder, by devising security policies within the “war on drugs”? Which social forces support and drive change in security policy? Ultimately, this book is a contribution to (postcolonial) state theory—which foregrounds that colonial patterns of power relations continued to define the sociopolitical formations emerging from centuries of colonialism, and frequently reproduced similar logics of violence. Far beyond these institutional setups, colonial social classifications have permeated all dimensions of social relations (i.e., Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2012, 127). While this book builds on a wealth of research on security, sovereignty, and policing in Latin America, it addresses the lack of perspectives that think political economy approaches to security in conjunction with coloniality. “Selective security” accounts for the highly disparate experiences that people with different socioeconomic backgrounds have with state coercion and security. By zooming in on security policies in the 2000s, the book foregrounds the links between neoliberal accumulation and disciplining in Colombia and Mexico. The empirical contribution is an analysis of social power relations in state security policies, by looking at security discourses, the contested nature of such policies within and without the state ensemble, and the role of property relations of land. The book studies security in Colombia and Mexico, at a moment in time when both governments put the topic of security at the center of their agenda, in the first decade of the twenty-first century. To understand the conjuncture in which such security policies unfolded, the book offers historical context on key underlying processes such as changing property and power relations, embedded in the global economy, and the historical relation between criminal capital and the state. Taking systemic criminality into account as an integral part of social relations, organized crime is not external to society, illegal capital not isolated from legal capital accumulation. My argument in this book is threefold. First, security policies became the heart of state policies, and security apparatuses became protagonists within the state ensemble to an unprecedented extent. The two “security projects” essentially transformed the state, beyond a single conjuncture. This prominence, however, and the violence against potential criminals that this entailed, were also integral to a rollout of neoliberal policies. In both contexts, these ranged from the flexibilization of the job market to the radical privileging of private property over communal property and strategic economic sectors such as coal and oil extraction and agro-industrial exports over alternative economic projects. The core issue of security rallied a range of social forces behind these policies and at times obscured their motives. Second, security and state coercion were organized in disperse ways. State-nonstate relations were flexibly institutionalized and informalized at the height of the so-called war on drugs in both Colombia and Mexico. Paradoxically, state-crime collusion and the cooperation among the state,

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para-political, and openly irregular forces have become enmeshed in the arguments for mano dura policies, the military solutions to social and public health problems, and strengthened antidemocratic political imaginaries. In short, the disciplining around the specific, export commodities–led economic project turned criminal, through neglect, lack of action, and direct activities by state institutions and other more or less autonomous forces. And third, the security projects in both contexts entailed a highly selective provision of security with brutal material effects. Different social forces enjoy differentiated access to the state and influence the state discourse on crime to a very different extent. Selectively, security policies targeted activists as dangerous and brushed away the distinction between civilian victims and “criminals” deemed unworthy of rights. I speak of “selective security” to account for how police and military forces routinely killed those constructed as criminals, lower class, and/or racially inferior. This “security” entailed protecting private property to the detriment of communal and collective property, the latter represented as inferior and hindering progress. Racial hierarchies in the representation of property translated into hierarchies of protection. More than securitization (as in the discursive framing of all sorts of things as security related), this is about the material bases and effects of such practices, their actual modes of governance. In tendency, these selective practices enabled capital accumulation. Why study security in Colombia and Mexico? The choice is not arbitrary. Let me say a few words on comparison and juxtaposition. What is deemed comparable changes; when I began the research, frequently people would suggest the two states were not comparable. Colombia’s experience with a long war in the twentieth century, and the more prominent trajectory of drug production and trafficking (Britto 2020), contrasted with the routine presentation of Mexico as a “stable,” if autocratic state, without the experience of internal war or high levels of national homicides for most of the twentieth century, at least after the 1910 revolution (see Pansters 2012 and Kloppe-Santamaría 2020 for unpacking this imaginary). Nowadays, Colombia and Mexico are often compared or likened in their experiences. Widely, there is an argument of the convergence of two national cases: In that reading, Mexico has become “Colombianized,” with armed actors multiplying and extraordinary rates of homicides, while Colombia has been partly “pacified.” I disagree with that reading and argue instead that there is much more complexity to the “war on drugs” in both contexts. Both have become striking examples, albeit very different ones, of its failures. Yet additionally, we should understand the war in terms of an hemispheric reading, similar to Hooker’s (2019) suggestion of reading different theoretical traditions alongside each other. What may seem to be two distinct, national security projects were, in fact, also shaped in relation to and in temporal

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overlap to another. Instead of a classical comparison of two national cases, I read them in relation to a hemispheric frame, juxtaposing two contexts that are evidently interrelated. Following Hooker (2019, 11, 12), comparison “assumes, or constructs, an illusion of coherence and distinctness of the units being compared” and often “tends to overlook moments of exchange or overlap, as in when ideas travel.” Opting for juxtaposition as method allows me to analyze two possibly disparate experiences without assuming that they are “most-similar” or “most-different” cases. In this “historical-interpretive approach” (Hooker 2019, 13), the “cases” are the struggles around security policies (see Weber 2007), prioritizing controversies over fixed policies, contradictory social relations over institutions (see also Bruff 2021). A GLIMPSE AT BOTH CONTEXTS Security as a project took place in both states in a context where legal and illegal accumulation strategies blurred more than ever. Trade and finance sector liberalization after the 1980s facilitated the growth of the cocaine trade and the upward social mobility of those involved in the illegal economy, both in Colombia and Mexico. I observe a convergence between the “war on drugs” and a particular development paradigm—or, we might say, a particular shape—capitalist production took in Colombia and Mexico during the 2000s, aggravating not only tensions around extractivist sectors but also around urban redevelopment pressures and commodification. That “war” is a response not only to new polarizations resulting from the commodity supercycle of the 2000s (new demand for land, growing social inequality in one of the most unequal regions in the world, and further shifts in social stratification) but also advanced that wave of demand for investment opportunities. Colombia, having been defined as a “failed” or “weak” state at the turn of the century via the contradictory indicators of political institutions such as the OECD/INCAF (2012) or the US Political Instability Task Force (2003), illustrates the speed with which discursive attributions change. From a “failure” in 2000, the country quickly turned into what was perceived as a “rising star” or even a “coming of age” (Semana 2011a; Financial Times 2013), after President Uribe took office in 2002 and pushed economic growth and direct investments to new heights. His military offensive, such media reports enthusiastically claimed, made the roads safe again so that urbanites could return to their rural fincas for the weekend. Yet the discourse of a state that had lost and was now “reclaiming” territories “under the domination of illegal groups” (Presidencia de la República Colombiana 2002, 33; Uribe Vélez 2002, 4) materialized by generating deaths, mainly of people whose disappearance was not investigated with

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much vigor. The executive defined security success via body count strategies. Selective insecurity remained high for rural communities and oppositional activists. We now know, army officers in the North where paramilitaries had consolidated hegemony said they had a problem, [. . .] that they had no dead bodies to present for the statistics, because there was no guerrilla there, you see? There was no guerrilla! Now some military generals have confessed that to present guerrillas who died in battle, they had to create fictitious feelings of insecurity and even kill some—innocent—people. This then brought complaints from the population and created this climate of insecurity, which in turn allowed them to make falsos positivos [to present civilians as killed guerrillas]. This is what they called “heating up the area.” (interview with scholar-activist, October 18, 2011)

Mexico in 2006 was enmeshed in a political crisis. In the climate of a highly aggressive election campaign, the governing, right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN; National Action Party)—having succeeded against state party rule only in 2000—failed to legally exclude left-wing opposition candidate López Obrador (PRD; Partido de la Revolución Democrática [Party of the Democratic Revolution]) as a presidential candidate (who important economic associations repeatedly described as a “danger to Mexico”) (El Economista 2006; 2011). Urban middle classes, formal and informal employees grouped around the PRD candidate, who, at the time, seemed the only possibility to achieve real democratic transition. President Calderón’s mandate, when decided, was much more disputed than Uribe’s in Colombia. When after the start of his military campaign “against drugs,” homicide rates rose rapidly—they had consistently fallen to a historic low in 2006 (Our World in Data 2020)—interpretations similar to those in Colombia were quick to appear. Mexico was “losing control” over “large parts of the national territory” (Boyer 2012) or experiencing “Colombianization.” In both countries, security policies were harnessed through their framing as a necessary restoration of the monopoly of the use of force (while legitimate in Max Weber’s sense only to a select few of society). Both Uribe’s and Calderón’s governments, however, were built on promises of economic growth and attractiveness for investors, combined with conservative imaginaries of family and masculinity and a limited scope for democratic contestation. In fact, a new quality of governing diverse topics via crime discourses combined with the highly selective treatment of actual crime. Both acted as elements of order-making. While awarding crime particular protagonism in political reasoning and policy making, this mode of governance obfuscated, neglected, and downplayed the violence perpetrated (or incited) by some social groups. In Colombia, governance through crime

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has hardly targeted the excessive violence by former paramilitary forces, more so their subsequent structures. In Mexico, militaries of higher rank hardly feared prosecution; they are subject only to military courts. In some areas, what appeared as diffuse social violence was actually functional. Violence opened areas up to investment that had been the realm of mainly agricultural communities with small-scale production, and state security institutions had an active role in this. In other cases, actors from the openly illicit economy increasingly invested into the capital-intensive sectors of mining and agro-industries, activities that the “war” hardly ever addressed. In some locations, it was precisely the intimate relations between politicians and the illicit economy that enabled emerging players to take advantage of both growing international demand and the state’s incentives for these extractive economies. Simultaneously, both countries experienced a return to primary exports within the context of the commodities supercycle of the 2000s, and the military offensives are not independent from that. During Uribe’s time in office, Colombia’s primary goods exports began to account for more than 60 percent of all exports and concentrated on a few commodities such as oil, coal, nickel, and a smaller share of coffee (Bonilla González 2011, 50; CEPALSTAT 2020). Coal exports, which were only 0.1 percent of all exports in 1980, amounted to 10 percent in 2004; crude oil and derivatives exports grew from a similar 2.5 percent in 1980 to 25.2 percent in 2004 (CEPAL 2010, 13). In Mexico, the primary sector steadily increased its share of export value again from 14.8 percent in 1998 to 24.3 percent in 2006 and 29.3 percent in 2011 (CEPALSTAT 2020). Eight new mines opened in 2010 alone. Not always, but frequently, military operations coincided precisely with the spaces of economic boom, contributing to pressures on those protesting extraction, resisting land appropriation, or campaigning for redistribution (interview with land activist in Guerrero, Mexico, May 23, 2011; interview with grassroots activist in Antioquia, Colombia, November 11, 2011). The state’s receptiveness for political articulation shifted with the renewed economic focus. In line with such institutional selectivity, the tax burden on the sectors driving this growth was extremely low. In Mexico, although the state still owns the subsoil (subsuelo), mining companies did not pay royalties to the treasury, but between 5 and 111 pesos per concession and licensed hectare; in 2010, according to the daily Jornada (2012a), no more than US$20 million was paid in taxes on an extraction value of US$15 billion. In Colombia, similar extractive sectors were able to push for fiscal reforms in their favor. Tax write-offs under Uribe became so high that they amounted to twice the royalty payments that companies made between 2005 and 2010 (Contraloría: Garay Salamanca 2013, 148). In 2011, the Auditors Court complained that transnational mining companies such as Drummond

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or Prodeco/Glencore had paid US$150 million too little in royalties in 2007 and 2008; however, there was no way of verifying whether the royalties actually corresponded to production volumes, as the information was “based on trust” (Contraloría: Garay Salamanca 2013). Not only are royalty payments deducted from taxes on profits, but tax breaks allowed another 30 percent to be deducted from taxable income (Kalmánovitz 2008). In short, in both countries, despite their differences, the war did not mean economic demise, but was integral to politics that prioritized capital accumulation and growth. The analysis of the “war on drugs” offers particularly interesting insights into the postcolonial state for three reasons. First, the “war on drugs” has become a fundamental element in some of the region’s dominant state projects and accompanied the export commodities–driven economic models. As an entry point to understanding postcolonial states, the topic of security is less studied than resource extraction, for instance, but inseparable from the latter. Postcolonial states have a particular relation with extraction, as the state’s financial resources depend on business “going well,” but simultaneously, dominant forces, as state intermediaries, were frequently able to fend off more intense taxation of that extraction (Bobrow-Strain 2007). The actual social and political dynamics of struggles around land, taxes, benefits, and the role of the state at large, however, differed through time and space. The relationship between the (colonial) naturalization of social classifications, on the one hand, and contemporary contexts of perpetuated violence in Latin America, on the other hand, remains under researched. Second, organized crime, the declared object of such security policies, is often represented as a structural problem, inherent to the so-called Global South. Through its empirical focus, this book complicates such assumptions, contributing to complex understandings of the postcolonial state in Latin America. The state remains relevant for both global arrangements and for segmenting political space into national units (see Aronowitz and Bratsis 2002, xxi). The book is not, however, a return to state-centric accounts of (illicit) global economy. Instead, it aims for understanding the so-called war on drugs in relation to multiple scales of political action and global entanglements. For instance, the 2000s boost in industrialization in East Asia fueled the demand for land and resources in Latin America, contributing to disciplining modes of governance (Arboleda 2020), and the transregional connections wrought in the business of coercion shaped these at least in part. Third, the “war on drugs” is essential for understanding political relations beyond state-nonstate binaries. While criminal groups and political administrations may indeed have conflict-ridden relationships—for instance, mayors in Mexico indeed risk being killed (Trejo and Ley 2021)—understanding the state as heterogeneous complicates the binary idea of “good, but weak

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state” or “bad guys” corrupting the state. In sum, this contribution attempts a fundamental critique of implicit but dominant assumptions about liberal democracy’s protection of citizens. DISPERSED COERCION: AUTHORITARIAN PRACTICES AND FLEXIBLE ARRANGEMENTS Who is protected in the “war on drugs,” and who is most affected by violence in Colombia and Mexico? Who really shapes security policies? To answer these questions, this book connects two streams of thought. It combines a critical political economy lens on coercion with decolonial perspectives on the Latin American state. More precisely, it starts from a neo-Poulantzian relational conceptualization of the state—the state is a strategic terrain for dominant forces, but not only for them (Poulantzas 2002, 182). Rather than institutions set apart from society, social power relations permeate the state. Aníbal Quijano’s (2014, 777–832) notion of the coloniality of state power then allows for a nuanced analysis of these social relations (e.g., class, race, and gender, among others), to identify which social forces actually drive security policies. Stuart Hall’s (1980) notion of “articulation” and his work on state coercion help me conceptualize the interrelation between the two. The conceptual approaches I am indebted to have “traveled” (Said 1983) between Latin America and Europe, and ideas that influenced state policies in Latin America traveled from Colombia to Mexico (not only from the United States southward). State violence and the state-crime nexus are contested conceptual fields particularly in Latin America. While some post-Weberian approaches are quick to observe state failure (see the original, Esty et al. 1998) and dysfunctional states in need of repair, scholars of the field (from sociology, political science, and social anthropology) have told more complex stories of how illegal economy, legal economy, and the state have frequently intersected and produced powerful state-crime relations at various scales (i.e., Gutiérrez Sanín 2019; Britto 2020; Grajales 2021; Maldonado Aranda 2012; Trejo and Ley 2020; Arias 2017, 21; Barnes 2017, 968; Abello Colak and Guarneros Meza 2014, 3272; Fuentes Díaz 2012, 36; Aretxaga 2003; Davis 2010). Already in the 1960s, in the debate on Colombia’s La Violencia (The Violence) phase (1948–1958), Colombian sociologist Fals Borda (2009a, 139) observed “an impressive collection of dysfunctions in all basic institutions [. . .] but when looked at closely, the phenomenon reveals aspects that the widely accepted definition of dysfunction has not provided for.” Contrary to the image of liberal democracy defending rights by regulating and penalizing crime, its relation to crime is highly complex. Corruption does

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not adequately describe the collusion of some state institutions with criminal organizations. Rather, such arrangements are part of a greater setup of criminal capitalism. Frequently, diverse social forces provide security and/or exercise violence alongside, in cooperation with, or confronting state institutions (Arias and Goldstein 2010, 5; Auyero 2007; Roldán 2003; Jaffe 2013; Ballvé 2020; Davis 2010). Most recently, the Noria Project has produced excellent studies of local social relations (i.e., Morris 2020; Farfán and Porter 2020), and Muñoz Martínez (2020) adds how legal and illegal activities alike influence politics and have facilitated capital accumulation (see also Vargas and Uribe 2017; Hristov 2021). The role of state violence targeted against protest is similarly contested. Discourses on the hard-handed governments needed to combat criminal violence are usually blind to the implications of states themselves in violence. Scholars from diverse fields, however, have framed the need of state coercion or outright violence for (neo)liberal governance as “disciplining” (Gill 2003) or “authoritarian liberalism” (Iturralde 2016), as the convergence of authoritarianism and democracy (Cavatorta 2010), “securitized democracy” (Pearce 2010, 269), or “neoliberal war” (Paley 2020). Work on counterinsurgency and racialized policing in and from the United States analyze how national security doctrines of the 1970s resurface in today’s governance of crime (i.e., Schrader 2019; Müller 2012) and interpret violence by criminal groups and state forces as integral to or even an objective of governance arrangements (LeBrón 2019, 15; Correa-Cabrera 2017, 222). Even critical security studies, however, frequently still ask how to better “manage” security instead of criticizing the liberal assumption of security as the basis of freedom and modern society itself (Neocleous 2008, 4), while state security systematically violates the rights of the broader population (Caldeira and Holston 1999, 693; Paley 2018; Gledhill 2015). This book instead puts dynamic social relations, the alliances that enable specific actors to shape security policies, and the heterogeneity of institutions within the state, center stage. It calls for both historicizing coercion and deconstructing the idea of a monopoly of force necessarily located with the state. What if, to study security, we think about the state as an even more flexible, constantly changing ensemble, on the one hand, and an entity even more contrarian to deeper change in ways that could limit capital accumulation, on the other hand? Colombia and Mexico are prime examples of authoritarian neoliberalism (Bruff 2014) before the term was coined. I rely on that literature in that it foregrounds the protagonism of security and disciplining policies prevalent in contemporary capitalism. It conceptualizes the normalization of openly coercive forms of statecraft as a longer-term response to crises, for instance, to the contradictions triggered by the European financial crisis of 2008–2009

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(Bruff 2014, 116; Bruff and Tansel 2019). While Poulantzas’s (2002) coining of the term authoritarian statism based on state-led capitalism in France, and Hall’s (1985) later response on authoritarian populism in (pre-)Thatcherite Britain anticipated the rise of what we routinely call neoliberalism, the specific postcolonial contexts limit their power to explain the “war on drugs” in Colombia and Mexico. I draw from this work the recognition that this is not about state withdrawal but, rather, about its transformation. Recent projects in Colombia and Mexico go beyond the “political economy of punishment” (Iturralde 2018, 472), bringing to the fore coercive practices against dissent, and a restructuring of the institutions themselves. The resurgence of authoritarian practices, which enable an “authoritarian enshrinement of neoliberal accumulation regimes” (Tansel 2016, 4), is not necessarily surprising. State coercion has always been key in economic liberalization. These practices, however, remind us “that security and political economy are far more deeply linked to each other” (Best 2019) than conventional thinking suggests. In Colombia and Mexico, the close relationship between economic policies and a military offensive predates the 2008–2009 crisis. The structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America frequently paralleled democratization processes and were not perceived as explicitly authoritarian. At least in Colombia in the early 2000s, the “security project” was “to some extent legitimated by a populist groundswell below” (Hall 1985, 116). Yet, contemporary, expanding repressive security strategies encounter a terrain in which decades of economically liberal (social and economic) policy weakened the social fabric and constrained more emancipatory visions (Hall 1986, 42; Mora 2013, 177–78). Increasingly, pre-emptive economic, financial, and corporeal discipline is enacted “in the name of necessity” (Bruff 2014, 123). The coercion integral to both security projects is dispersed. It seems disorganized and messy. A range of actors exercise coercion, to advance personal power, to claim territories for certain groups, or as outsourcing from the state. In consequence, and to do justice to decolonial conceptualizations of the relation between the state and coercion, I introduce the idea that a state monopoly of force may be the exception rather than the conceptual norm, to such state theory discussions. I use the term dispersion to nuance what the actual coercive practices of an authoritarian neoliberal state look like, and build on Liliana Franco Restrepo’s work (2009) on the continuous, active outsourcing and reintegration of the exercise of coercion. Providing one of the most persuasive (and overlooked) theorizations of seemingly diffuse state-nonstate violence, she overcomes binary categories (private/state actors, political/economic motivation, functioning monopoly of violence/failing state) and argues that, although there are limits to the state’s use of force, state action goes beyond legal regulations and by no means always takes on regulated forms. Routinely, instead, “state practices and techniques that elude

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legal systematization and order” can come to the fore, even if their production of insecurity seems to clash with state practices of legibility like surveys, territorial ordering, IDs, or economic development plans (Poulantzas 2002, 113; see Aretxaga 2003, 399). The reorganization and dispersal of coercion including formally nonstate actors does not necessarily challenge the state but remains within a unified order. State institutions may allow this “displacement of its coercive function” and authorize it openly or covertly. They then no longer organize the exercise of violence as a monopoly, since the groups involved in shows of force do have the tendency to become autonomous (or are autonomous and may be integrated into state practices). The favorable institutional selectivity for such groups—their access to political circles—illustrates that they do not negatively affect dominant alliances of interests or even help stabilizing the existing order (see Franco Restrepo 2009, 495). Recognizing that the concept of the centralized monopoly of the use of force is not neutral, timeless, or without context is long overdue. In Latin American state theory, it is not a marginal proposition (Bolívar 2010, 96; Franco Restrepo 2009; García, Vargas, and Uribe 2018, 193; Maldonado Aranda 2012; Tapia 2015, 156; see Davis 2005 for an overview of sociological approaches to the Latin American state). From a decolonial perspective, from the different historical trajectories of actual societies, the centralized monopoly over the use of force as the goal of state formation and an essential characteristic of the state, appears as clearly normative (Franco Restrepo 2009; Bolívar 2010, 96). Like any concept in social science, this notion is context-bound and arose in specific European discursive contexts of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it became a powerful tool structuring our knowledge about states (Jenss 2016, 99). THE COLONIALITY OF COERCION: ARTICULATING CLASS AND RACE The security that results from dispersed coercion is highly selective, frequently based on racist and class-based conceptions of crime. Literature that informs a decolonial perspective on the state in the “war on drugs” is still scarce, however. As I study the contradictory social relations around security projects in Colombia and Mexico, I understand the state as a strategic terrain (Poulantzas 2002, 170). This neo-Poulantzian, relational notion of the state allows me to analyze how state institutions in Colombia and Mexico simultaneously provide a favorable space for dominant social factions (and, for instance, their shaping the security policy field), but are no unitary actors (Poulantzas 2002,

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166). Rather, different state institutions can assume varying and at times contradicting policies, depending on alliances, institutional history, and knowledge production. The state’s underlying, stabilizing function for capitalism, often enacted to a limited extent, does not result in permanently coherent, hierarchic policy making. Set apart from more schematic Marxist approaches, this conceptualization allows for the dialogue with decolonial perspectives; however, it is in letting Poulantzas travel to Latin America that we most clearly encounter the boundaries his class-based notion of social relations comes up against (see Salem 2020 for similarly engaging with Gramsci). Despite foregrounding social contradictions, he only partially grasps the particularities resulting from the intertwining of colonialism and capitalism. This fruitful tension helps me develop my understanding of the postcolonial state in contexts of insecurity. To spell out in which ways security in Colombia and Mexico was and continues to be selective, I employ the notion of the coloniality of state power (Quijano 2014, 777–832). First, power relations in the “war on drugs” depend on articulated, contextualized hierarchies of class and race—categories that exist separately but overlap in context-specific interplays. Security and anticrime policies do not apply to everyone in society in the same way. The shape, face of, and experiences with the state may be disparately different for one or another person. People who are read as indigenous and Afro–Latin Americans are particularly vulnerable to state crime and criminalization—a variety of critical policing studies and criminology establish the data for this (i.e., Alves 2018; Alves and Vargas 2017; Moncada 2009; Carrington, Hogg, and Sozzo 2016; see Offe 1972 for discussing violence as a mode of selectivity). Class, race, and gender interact with the social production of crime (Barak, Leighton, and Cotton 2018) and, thus, with the shaping of security and anticrime policies. This intersection of class and racial power relations with crime, disciplining contestation, and social control makes Quijano’s coloniality of state power a vital concept for understanding coercion. Fundamentally, for Quijano, in the historical process based on the Spanish conquest and subsequent dominance in the Central and Southern Americas, those in power consolidated (and needed) the construction of people as naturally superior and subordinate, reducing the Americas’ diverse societies to a single, subordinate “Indian” identity within barely three hundred years (Quijano 2000a, 551). Colonizers hierarchized difference and made up new classifications (“blacks,” “Indians,” “whites,” “mestizos”) deeply entrenched with the power relations and labor regimes of the time (Quijano 2014, 304, 611; Santos 2010, 43; Bhandar 2018, 8). The central idea is that attributing hierarchized identities became constitutive for the power relations the

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conquista imposed, the intersubjectivity required to legitimize the colonial organization of labor and production (Quijano 2014, 552, 778). The historical interrelation between colonialism and capitalism (Quijano 2014, 302) reshapes coercion in the postcolonial Latin American state I study. For instance, race became a quintessential element for justifying colonial violence. Dispossession, robbery, imprisonment, killings, or slavery—in a nutshell, the ubiquitous colonial violence—were naturalized and legitimized through racial hierarchies (see Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2012, 421). Industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century metropoles advanced precisely through employing state coercion and private violence in those areas imagined primarily as resource reservoirs and, later, as markets (see Beckert 2014; Carrington, Hogg, and Sozzo 2016; Bhambra 2020, 313). The postcolonial state is a “rearticulation of the coloniality of power over new institutional bases” (Quijano 2000a, 567). Constructed racial hierarchies and class relations determined who could be coerced and punished in which ways. Southern epistemologies (Santos 2010, 32) argue that race attained special significance, as a social grammar that permeates public and private space, culture, and mentalities. In consequence, I need to recognize that social grammar when analyzing the “war on drugs.” Today’s criminalization of poverty and race in Colombia and Mexico are in part reproductions of earlier cycles of violence. To assess how someone can access the state and is impacted by its policies and how this changes over time depends not just on their position in relations of production but also on racialization and gender, global economic relations, and the historical shape of coercion. Stuart Hall’s (1980) notion of articulation helps me get at the interrelations of class and race that shape who is affected by the “war on drugs” in Colombia and Mexico, and who is able to shape it. In fact, Quijano’s (2014, 291–92) concept of “historical-structural heterogeneity”—notably different from earlier “structural heterogeneity”— resembles an alternative description of Hall’s (1980) image of articulation as a lorry. To grasp the complex reality of Latin American societies, I emphasize the context-specific, organic articulations between class and race (Quijano 2014, 291). The articulated effects of historically grounded coloniality constitute a complex web of forms of domination and exploitation “that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and the production of knowledge” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243) in locations as different as Colombia or Mexico. Similarly, through articulation, Hall (1996) asks about practices that become interconnected as structuring principles of societies (see also Hart 2007, 89). In contemporary social relations in Colombia and Mexico, clearly, identity constructions have not remained the same in the postcolonial period, and neither has everyone’s relation with the state; however, an identification as “white” allowed a privileged positioning in relations of domination

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(Bobrow-Strain 2007, 35; Jenss 2016, 108). As analytical categories of social classifications, class and race are never isolated or fixed, clear cut or static, but are historically articulated (Hall 1996); they are, in short, “relational inequalities” (Boatcă 2015) that come into being in relation to other categories of differentiation, in context- and conjuncture-dependent ways. For understanding coercion in the postcolonial state in this book, then, the coloniality of power turns out to be essential. It shapes the language and practices of coercion. For instance, when I ask who shapes security policies, coloniality impacts the state’s structural selectivity in Colombian and Mexican contexts. Ultimately, “white Creole elites” succeeded in making their social classification become hegemonic during historical colonial rule (Quijano 2014, 816), yet the differentiated, unequal access to state decision-making and public goods, depending on social positions along the axes of class, gender, and race, remained. In Mexico, for instance, the narrative of a postcolonial mestizo identity never erased racial distinctions and structural racism that defined social hierarchies (Mora 2017). In short, for some, access to political decision-making is easier than for others. The notion of state structural selectivity, a term Poulantzas (2002, 173) borrows from Claus Offe (1972, 65–67, 165), is a complex set of institutional mechanisms and political practices that prioritize the interests of certain factions and tend to push others back. Part of that bias is because the state’s financial resources depend on the “good course of business” (Hirsch 2005, 24). Institutional selectivities act as frameworks for conflicts, rules of inclusion and exclusion and filter what social demands find echo in state policy programs, apparatuses, and laws. They frequently isolate and fragment political articulation (Poulantzas 2002, 171–73; Quijano 2000a, 541) by “indigenous” or “Afro-Latin” citizens; selectivity impacts their possibilities to articulate and enforce their interests by means of their access to and control over state authorities. Selectivity shows not only in mechanisms such as the selective filtering of information and the systematic inaction of state authorities on certain issues (“Nicht-Ereignisse”; Offe 1972, 74) but also in conflicting priorities or varied forms of implementation of one and the same policy. Discourses of crime in both Colombia and Mexico have been selective in who they construct as perpetrators. Such selectivities in discourses structure the ways in which official, institutional narratives take up and reproduce societal discourses. Through the second meaning of articulation (to express, to give meaning), Hall (1986) similarly asks about how ideas become political discourses, shaping political subjectivities and, thus, political practice. Narratives of large-scale crime and cycles of political violence in Latin America usually suffer some degree of coloniality. Stubbornly, media coverage portrays the governance of crime in Colombia and Mexico as the state confronting a

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menacing “other,” the so-called cartels, and exceptional violence as an endogenous (i.e., Latin American) problem. Frequently, they applaud hard-handed governments that claim to combat criminal violence but turn a blind eye to violence exercised by state forces themselves in the name of this combat. When observers do that, they not only obfuscate state violence but also are othering violence itself, adding to an international dimension of coloniality. Coloniality alters my understanding of the state’s role in regulating the property of land in the context of the “war on drugs.” The centrality of land across Latin America, highlighted by scholars such as René Zavaleta (2009a) but salient in much recent work on the state (Ballvé 2020; Bobrow-Strain 2007; Baquero Melo 2014), makes me think coloniality in Colombia and Mexico in terms of property relations, combining Quijano’s (2000b; 2014) conceptualization with Brenna Bhandar’s (2018) work on property. The latter again relies on the concept of articulation. I write precisely against the idea that the “central function played by territoriality in colonization” (Bhandar 2018, 25)—namely, appropriation—has been overcome in postcolonial times. CUMULATIVE RESEARCH FOR JUXTAPOSING TWO CONTEXTS I began research for this book in 2010, when the Uribe government had just been replaced by Uribe’s former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, whose family held shares in one of Colombia’s large publishing houses (which publishes the daily El Tiempo). In 2011, I spent several months each in Mexico and Colombia and collected a large part of the material, while criticism of Mexico’s President Calderón’s militarized “war on drugs” was on the rise, as homicide rates were escalating. It was the time when the first mass graves were found in Tamaulipas (many more were to follow), but also when, in April 2011, the Zapatistas mobilized rural communities to gather in the town of San Cristóbal in Chiapas to protest the “war” in an impressive, entirely silent demonstration I was able to witness. In Mexico City, only a day later, another large protest took place against the “war,” which united a broad range of people. Since then, I have carried out several subsequent research visits to Mexico and was able to incorporate into this book what I learned during frequent stays in Colombia since 2005. Much information only became publicly accessible later, such as WikiLeaks cables released during the past years. I realized quickly that I would not be able to say anything meaningful by depending on a single method of data collection or reduced packages of data. Rather, I rely on a range of data that, in their multiplicity, help me build my argument and validate it by cross-checking different sources. Research

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becomes cumulative, not just complementary (Philipps 2017, 117). My arguments are based in part on qualitative interviews held between 2011 and 2014. The interviewed were human rights experts, journalists who had by then begun to work on different aspects of the “war on drugs,” party politicians, and NGO workers, whose work context were the military operations “against drugs” and the challenges to democratic mechanisms in both Mexico and Colombia. I interviewed activists, some in the context of land conflicts in several regions of both countries (Mexico City, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Bogotá, Antioquia, Arauca). I traveled with colleagues who moved between academia and human rights activism, which enabled me to include participant observation in meetings with clients who planned to demand the state for abuses, at sessions where mothers of disappeared persons organized their legal and political struggle, or in the larger fora on alternatives for the current model, for instance, the Foro Mesoamericano de los Pueblos in 2011 in Minatitlán, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, or the National Land, Territory, and Sovereignty Congress held in Cali, Colombia, in September 2011. I analyzed newspaper articles based on topic-related readings of the daily El Tiempo and the weekly newspaper Semana in Colombia and the daily La Jornada and the weekly Proceso in Mexico. All those circulate nationwide and cover political events comprehensively. Their coverage of the political transformations underway was often contradictory, shaped by both their concentrated ownership structures and the extent to which different media distanced themselves from official discourses or reproduced them. I turned to archives for corroborating data and for access to original documents from the period under study. While I am no historian, the work with primary sources was indispensable for building my argument. Particularly, documents published by WikiLeaks, the Colombian digital archive Verdad Abierta, and the Gregorio Selser Archive, an archive based on private collections, hosted by the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), contained decisive evidence for specific details. Human rights organizations provided essential documents. They assume a corrective function when the state is implicated in human rights abuses. They are sometimes the only bodies that collect any information on sensitive issues; for example, initially only NGOs collected figures on violently disappeared or displaced persons in either country. It was after pressure and demands by civil rights groups that state institutions began collecting that data. Documents such as presidential speeches or position papers by economic representatives or grassroots organizations, which allowed me to analyze which social forces supported, drove, altered, or criticized state security policies at the time, expressed the position of political agents from different social sectors in relation to social conflict.

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My own positionality quite obviously influenced the way I interpreted documents and interviews. I was not an objective observer looking at what happened from a distance, yet I had the privilege to leave. I did not encounter the places I studied from empty space, but I have a specific institutional, geographical, class, racial, and gender background as a white European person, so I myself moved within specific power relations. Coercive practices hardly affected me in direct ways, even if I frequently encountered security forces. In qualitative interviews and participant observation, a researcher can never completely discard her own preconceptions and positionality. Simultaneously, position papers by different groups and the ample academic and journalist work from both respective contexts complemented—and sometimes corrected or even contradicted—my own interpretations, allowing permanent reflexivity in the research process. CHAPTER OVERVIEW I argue in this book that the continuous coloniality of power—the emergence of the category “race” and dynamics of racialization as distinctive for sociopolitical relations at large—was central to the exercise of coercion at the height of the “war on drugs.” Chapter 2, which follows this introduction, provides context for this, tracing how power relations emerged historically. The impact the “war on drugs” had on Colombian and Mexican social formations must be understood in continuity with the central, historical role of racial hierarchies; property relations of land; and the intense conditioning by global economic relations. Historically, race relations in Latin American societies, and their materialization in land ownership, intersected with the power relations of the emerging world market. For the decolonial approaches this chapter builds on, the connection between the naturalization of social power relations and political economy is particularly evident in land ownership. In consequence, the chapter, albeit very briefly, explains how social relations and, particularly, property relations took very different shapes in both contexts in the twentieth century. Chapter 3 analyzes which social forces historically pushed for and supported the exercise of coercion against specific groups, reproducing class and racial hierarchies. The chapter deepens the argument that states allowed and promoted the dispersal of coercion (see Franco Restrepo 2009) and asks how coercion has continuously worked in conjunction with the coloniality of power. I am interested not just in the problematic effects of punitive policing in conjunction with racialization but also in the coloniality of state power in shaping such security policies. It is in the support and contestation of specific political projects, social forces’ acceptance or reluctance to use coercion and

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(political) violence, that state coercion is reshaped. Postcolonial state agencies routinely arranged political projects in cooperation with intermediaries that served as their local agents but wielded considerable autonomy and often united judicial, executive, and coercive functions. This chapter calls for historicizing coercion and for deconstructing the idea that a monopoly of force is necessarily located with the national state. Unpacking the dispersal of coercion, I sketch longer-term continuities and shifts in social relations in Colombia and Mexico, and the recent support for two political projects, almost exclusively based on “security discourses” and the ready use of coercion against (political) deviance. Chapter 4 analyzes the fluidity between legal and illegal economic practices in global capitalism and traces the emergence of criminal capital factions between the 1980s and 2000s in Colombia and Mexico, even if the export of illegal products—and the performative fight against it—have a long history in both contexts. Based on a differentiated concept of crime in global economy, and the relational understanding of the state I develop throughout the book, I question the assumed binary between legal and illegal economies. State selectivity in both Colombia and Mexico has indeed been favorable for illegal economy forces—if not directly, then through unmediated free-market policies that ultimately were in the interest of both legal and openly criminal capital. Simultaneously, hemispheric relations and factors such as US antidrug operations in particular localities from the end of the 1970s onward influenced how this truly global economy operated in each country and, in turn, the social position such illegal social forces were able to assume. The chapter traces how these deregulations and transnational connections unfolded in Colombia and Mexico and shaped how legal and illegal economies intertwined. Chapter 5 treats the traveling and transnational convergence of particular concepts of security, and the means to achieve it in the Americas (i.e. through security cooperation with the United States), but particularly the transfer of concepts from Colombia to Mexico (“democratic security,” definitions of war and crime). The latter was possible, for instance, as Colombian police and military served as consultants in Mexico. Through the lens of selective state representations of security and crime, this chapter analyzes turning points during which the construction of Colombian and Mexican society’s criminal enemies became a driving force in security policies. In Colombia, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC; Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia), Colombia’s oldest and biggest guerrilla organization, had long been constructed as the country’s public enemy. This was central to a broader turn toward criminalization in Colombian politics. A similar process happened in Mexico with organized crime as the principal criminal actor. The

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chapter argues that the “war” assumed a productive role for Colombia’s and Mexico’s formal democracies. Chapter 6 focuses on the actual, material change in security policies that social forces supporting an authoritarian project were able to implement (or not), translating their interests into state policies. For instance, mass arrests and (arbitrary) imprisonment became an unwritten but integral element of the selective security project, and both governments measured success by counting dead “criminals.” I ask how state-nonstate alliances evolved during the 2000s, and who was able to shape the institutionalization of legal and illegal security practices. The so-called law of justice and peace (regulating the “demobilization” of paramilitaries) in Colombia (2005) and the unsuccessful security law in Mexico (2009) reveal complex contradictions and ruptures of temporary alliances of social forces. Again, I think of state violence as frequently dispersed and dynamic. In Colombia and Mexico in the 2000s, coercive practices far beyond the legal sphere enabled a neoliberal state project while in tendency disabling its contestation. The focus on security against a poorly defined “other” brought consensus and narrowed down state selectivity for opposition. Beyond that, the “war” converged with the repression, harassment, and killings of activists who were critical of each government’s economic project, even if the perpetrators were not necessarily state forces. Both the Colombian and Mexican governments presented security policies within the “war on drugs” as the precondition for economic dynamism. Chapter 7 examines conflicts between private property and communal land tenure as different property regimes promoted by social forces with differential political power. The lens of relational state theory and the notion of coloniality of state power (Quijano 2014, 777–832) allows the mapping of the hierarchization of different property regimes, which responds to both requirements of capitalism and to racist constructions of difference, frequently involving state violence. In the particular conjuncture of the 2000s, the commodities boom—the wave of global demand that refocused Latin America’s economies on extraction—fell into one with the “war on drugs,” fueling the radical transformation of property relations. Parallel to the security offensive, states removed legal protection for communal tenure and mobilized legal as well as illegal means to force the change of communal lands into private property. In Mexico, this priority has led to the commodification of land in communal tenure or state management. In Colombia, repeated cycles of land appropriation even more clearly led to greater inequality in the property of land and loss of communal and small-scale property, particularly during the period studied. The conclusion, chapter 8, returns to the aim of providing a state theory analysis of security policies in Mexico and Colombia, summarizing the main findings. It offers a brief outlook into the very different paths Colombia and

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Mexico have taken. Both states had undergone an institutional reorganization of state architecture, shifting competences and allocation of resources to security institutions such as the army and navy, and policing. Coercive practices received a clear boost in both countries from 2002 and 2006, respectively, onward, linked to very similar discourses and narratives. Juxtaposing both contexts, in Mexico after 2006, similar to Colombia in 2002, the core issue of security allowed various social forces to rally around violent state strategies that combined legal and illegal state measures. In fact, both governments legitimized the increased military presence with the increase in violence, which they in part actively brought about. In both Mexico and Colombia, crime proved to be central to the exercise of authority across a heterogeneous set of institutions, aligning them around a single policy, even if these alliances within and outside of state institutions were only temporary. If anything, the violence exercised by multiple actors facilitated the concentration of economic means, forcing small businesses to close shop and small-scale agriculture to give up rather than affect large flows of investment. Crackdowns in Colombia on widespread protests against neoliberal policies in 2021, and the continued reliance on the military and the expansion of military competences and presence in Mexico (despite the electoral victory of a political project framed as progressive), confirm that the effects of the “security projects” of the 2000s have not been reversed, and legal-illegal practices of coercion continued to shape politics in both contexts.

Chapter 2

Wielding Power Class, Race, and Politics

THE ROLE OF GLOBAL ECONOMY AND RACIALIZED SOCIAL RELATIONS During President Uribe’s term, Colombian state institutions denied the existence of racism altogether. Colombia, politicians stated, was a multicultural nation. In fact, to voice concerns about racism was “sectarian” (Uribe Vélez 2005; CERD 2006, 169). After his mandate, in February 2012, Colombia’s widely read news magazine Semana (2012c) published that “abuses” of “the requirement to consult ethnic minorities have been the real sticking point in the wheel of the country’s development,” slowing down large-scale projects. Similarly, Germán Vargas Lleras, a senator close to Uribe, who became interior and justice minister and vice president under Juan Manuel Santos, famously argued prior consultation was an obstacle to development, enabling indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities to “blackmail” the government, and should be cut back or limited (Grupo Semillas 2015, 37). In fact, the gradual international recognition of collective rights in the 1980s and 1990s did little to change the mind-set of Colombian elites, and the antagonism between commodities export–based economies and indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities runs like a red thread through Colombian history. “They perceive collective rights as a threat to their privileges,” award-winning Afro-Colombian environmentalist, vice president since 2022, Francia Márquez (2021) explains. Márquez and others have long exposed how the nation-state project that Colombian dominant classes pursued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rested on racist hierarchization, which placed indigenous and Afro-Colombians outside their imagined community (see Britto 2020, 7–8). International rights recognition came with identifying “different” groups of citizens, simultaneously leading to the partial disenfranchisement of indigenous groups (Bocarejo 2011). 23

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The coloniality of power in the form of racial hierarchies defining access to political power is fundamental for understanding the state in Colombia and Mexico, as well as the countries’ different paths during the twentieth century. Ethnic and cultural studies, Afro–Latin American studies, and critical race theory have contributed much to our understanding of racial hierarchies and racialization more broadly (i.e. Viveros Vigolla 2021; Alves 2018). My specific argument in this book is that the continuous coloniality of power—the emergence of the category race and dynamics of racialization as distinctive for sociopolitical relations at large—were central to the exercise of coercion at the height of the “war on drugs.” The impact the “war on drugs” had on Colombian and Mexican social formations must be understood in continuity with the central, historical role of racial hierarchies, property relations of land, and the intense conditioning by global economic relations. We need to pay attention to racial power relations and land ownership—more so than Marxist state theorist Poulantzas did to explain social conflict and state formation. Yet these intertwined with global commodity cycles. Which continuities shaped social relations over time? Which shifts in power relations hinted at state transformations? RACIALIZATION, LAND OWNERSHIP, AND GLOBAL ECONOMY In Colombia and Mexico, naturalized racial hierarchies shaped the political power of social forces, emerging and changing in a long historical process (Quijano 2000a; 2014), producing “layered inequalities” (Baquero Melo 2014). Velázquez and Hoffmann (2007, 3), for instance, argue that historical racial relations in Mexico were more fluid during the early Spanish colony than “later when color, status, and social position were closely linked, imposing severely codified barriers and relations of domination.” For others, racial fluidity existed in both periods (Telles and PERLA 2014; Villarreal 2010). The unifying narrative of mestizaje, prominent in Mexico, had the effect of rhetorically assimilating, even disappearing difference (Cohen 2020, 34). In Colombia, coloniality as a social grammar (Santos 2010) took the form of spatial differentiations imagining “whiter,” “more civilized” Andes, and “darker” tropical lowlands without a history (i.e., Britto 2020, 7–8). In foregrounding a global perspective, Quijano’s (2014, 777–832) notion of the coloniality of state power goes beyond earlier notions of “internal colonialism” (González Casanova 1990). Race relations in Latin American societies, and their materialization in land ownership, intersected with the power relations of the emerging world market, illustrating their multi-scalarity (Morton 2011, 131). Spanish (and Portuguese) colonial rule established

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patterns of economic dependence in Latin America, which, as global asymmetries, still impact state formations today, albeit under constantly changing circumstances. Constructing new identities “contributed to giving that cycle [of capitalist trade] colossal vigor, making possible the initiation of industrial capitalism years later” (Bagú 1992). Capitalist modernity was ultimately based on the opening and European control of the Atlantic trade routes (see Bhambra 2021, 308). Race, likewise, continued to condition political action in Latin America, both in Colombia and Mexico (Hooker 2020; Telles and PERLA 2014). Understanding race as “a discursive system, which has ‘real’ social, economic and political conditions of existence and ‘real’ symbolic and material effects” (Hall 2002, 453; see Tilley and Shilliam 2017 for this material reading of race). The coloniality of power thus points to the dimensions of subjectivity and institutional racism as much as to world market asymmetries (see Lao Montés 2014 for similar arguments). In very material terms, the postcolonial Latin American state as a strategic terrain provides a favorable space for white creole elites (Quijano 2014, 816–18), and racial hierarchies continue to structure access to the state and public goods today, intersecting with class relations. For decolonial approaches, the connection between the naturalization of social power relations and political economy is particularly evident in land ownership. Land as a prism can “move Eurocentric concepts out of the center, which reduce development to a dialectic between capital and labor” (Coronil 1996, 65–66). Both state theory (Zavaleta 2009a, 322) and conflict theory (Cramer and Richards 2011) highlight the decisive role of agriculture in Latin American conflicts. Recent work on land-grabbing highlights the importance of state strategies on land ownership, property regulations, and seed production in capitalism (Grajales 2020; Blomley 2008; Kelly and Peluso 2015). Legal sociology points out the paradox between the recognition of land owned and administrated by indigenous groups and employing the very notion of territory to enclose and spatialize difference (Bocarejo 2012, 3). The lens of coloniality particularly highlights the tensions among global agro-industries (which require clear ownership titles and large areas of land) and small-scale farming, collectively organized communities, and collective land titles. The commodities boom of the 2000s, apart from contributing to disciplining modes of governance, renewed the dependence on resources-based exports. This scramble for resources is inextricably linked to ongoing practices of coloniality: the quest to open up resources for exploration, which will ultimately allow capital accumulation, disproportionately affects communities that consider themselves indigenous or claim their intimate relationship with territory, for instance, by establishing a hierarchy of different forms

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of property. To account for this link, this book’s understanding of global relations in which security is embedded, gestures to Morton’s (2011) and Hesketh’s (2017) studies of passive revolution. Far from observing that states were no longer relevant, superseded by transnational constellations, the study of security in Colombia and Mexico shows how capitalism is articulated across spatial scales (Morton 2011, 131; Hesketh 2017), and the geographical distinction into states is a basis for disciplining practices. There is no differentiation into “external” economic relations and “internal” security, but security policies always relate to global contradictions; stated differently, the global is not external to self-contained entities (states) but is a social relation, both economic and political (Bieler and Morton 2018, 10). Colombian and Mexican state formation was and is thus embedded in uneven capitalist development, while always conditioned by existing social relations (Bieler and Morton 2018, 91, 96). Historically, world market asymmetries persisted even if they changed shape (for an accessible overview, Cupples 2013). The enormous concentration of capital and the weight of external capital inflows in industrialization favored the European south’s dependence (Poulantzas 1976, 10) in ways similar to those observed by Latin American dependency approaches (Zenteno et al. 1998, 145). The global economy’s heavy conditioning of social relations frequently contributed to large landowners’ continued political power, shaped labor relations, and fueled social conflict through cycles of boom and bust. SHIFTING POSTCOLONIAL POWER RELATIONS Social Relations in Postcolonial Colombia As in large parts of the continent, after 1819, Spanish colonial rule left behind fragmented, regionally and locally anchored “oligarchies” in Colombia that enjoyed relative autonomy (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 266). The imposing discourse of state absence in a country of fragmented regions, used for legitimacy by both paramilitaries and the security project of the 2000s (see Ballvé 2020, chapter 4; Serje 2012), stems from this time. Subaltern, indigenous, and peasant groups were involved in independence struggles but seldom in leadership roles; in that sense, decolonization was not an emancipatory struggle. After independence, rural power relations became ever more fixated on property of land; the hacendado landowner and his family became an imposing paradigm of social order and economy (Uribe Hincapié 2001, 101). Independence struggles, however, modified social relations; through trade and smuggling, some sectors experienced upward social mobility, and others experienced decline (Uribe Hincapié 2001, 82–83). Afro-Colombian

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enslaved people gained freedom in some regions, while in other regions, “racially configured class antagonisms” (Safford and Palacios 2003, 178) intensified. Land and mine owners resisted and fought against the abolition of slavery from 1821 onward. While anti-Spanish liberals in Mexico imagined Mexico as antislavery in the early nineteenth century (Cohen 2020, 39), Colombia abolished slavery only gradually (Barragan 2021): Congress did so in 1851, paying indemnization bonds (!), but Colombian conservatives violently defended their right to own slaves, which delayed the actual abolition. Particularly in Western Cauca, where Afro-Colombians are today the majority of the population, fierce conflicts over slavery continued into the 1840s, and “white immigrants” from Antioquia could acquire land titles more easily than the Afro-Cauca population (Safford and Palacios 2003, 183). Hacendados’ refusal to pay free labor continued well into the twentieth century. Afro- and Indigenous Colombians did not necessarily share the same social positioning in Colombia’s dominant imaginary (Viveros Vigolla 2022). Dominant classes such as landowners, frequently undermined, sought to influence or contest central state decisions when their interests were questioned, remaining “skeptical of the state’s capability and willingness to protect their class interests” (Richani 2007, 406). Nevertheless, they remained regionally fragmented.1 A democratically legitimized state was decidedly not the criollo oligarchy’s priority. As early as 1849, the two-party system emerged—to remain dominant until around 2000—channeling conflicts between the Partido Conservador (Conservative Party) and the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party). Such conflicts depended on regionally different processes of legitimization (Roldán 2003). In each region, central state power coincided with one party’s aspirations for hegemony, or with power-sharing arrangements between both parties (Uribe Hincapié 2001, 93; González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 267–69). The central state did not resolve actual social contradictions or provided a political space for an overarching societal project (see Uribe Hincapié 2001, 81). However, no uniform class of landowners existed, either. Power relations differed starkly between regions (Uribe Hincapié 2001, 82). Dominant factions had greatly disparate approaches to economic production and collective imaginaries. An export-oriented landowner from the Atlantic Coast shared few interests with a Cauca landlord growing crops for the surrounding markets, or with those who held titles over immense areas in Antioquia, who aspired to control gold deposits and valorization through regulated settlement, road construction, and ports. Tobacco exporters in Cundinamarca and Boyacá near the capital Bogotá opposed the landowning Catholic Church, advocating for a secular liberal state, while conservatives in Antioquia’s financial center thought such modernization projects were unnecessary.

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Advanced by liberals but with support from conservatives in 1850, the free trade paradigm became a common project among dominant class factions, particularly radical liberals from Cundinamarca and conservatives from Antioquia. Its institutional expression, the Federation, intensified regional fragmentation. The state hardly intervened in the economy but guaranteed labor availability and provided temporary cohesion (Palacios 1986, 133). Each federal state had its own electoral system, currency, and armed forces, which could contest central government decisions by military means, allowing private militias from 1854 onward. An 1867 law even prohibited the central government from intervening in regional armed conflicts (Palacios 1986, 119). Dominant factions continued to struggle for political and economic dominance amid fluctuating world market demand for Colombian products. The problems inherent in the free trade project (low diversification, lack of internal infrastructure, imbalances) made it possible in 1886 to subordinate the federal states to a new constitution and conservative president Núñez’s government. The global-local tensions came to the fore in several civil wars, however, particularly in those regions that suffered from a harsh decline in demand (Safford and Palacios 2003, 253). Highly heterogeneous power relations based on a diversity of economic regions thus limited political projects with hegemonic aspirations (Pécaut 2001, 45; Uribe Hincapié 2001, 88–90). The War of a Thousand Days (1899–1901) brutally illustrated such struggles. Only afterward did the conservatives achieve greater fiscal standardization and centralize institutions. Economic growth and industrialization led to a growing urban working class in the early 1900s, as in other Latin American countries. Emerging trade unions organized a wave of strikes and rural protests in the mid-1920s, to which the political exclusion of people read as indigenous or Afro-Colombian contributed greatly. They were usually met with hard-handed repression (Safford and Palacios 2003, 281–82). One political expression of changing social relations was the so-called Liberal Republic (1930–1948). Its program Revolution in Progress may have been a short phase of relative state autonomy from the rural dominant classes, although far more modest than in Mexico (Richani 2002, 23; Roldán 2003, 16). President López Pumarejo (1934–1938) remained committed to economic liberalism but limited restrictions on representation; he introduced universal suffrage in 1936 (Pécaut 2001, 133–34) and made serious attempts at agrarian reform, supported by peasant movements and growing trade unions. Law 200 (1936) intended to improve the precariousness of smallholder settlers, making the land they had made arable—formally state-owned—their property. This law, however, never questioned private property as such (Roldán 2003, 17); it ignored the reality of communal property.

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López Pumarejo’s promise of social ascent failed to succeed against conservative and liberal fears of progressive politics. It represented too radical a change of racialized and classed social relations. The entire progressive project seemed abhorrent to the dominant sectors of both parties (Pécaut 2001, 71; Roldán 2003; Viveros Vigolla 2022); they feared something similar to the Mexican Revolution might happen in Colombia. Social policies, attempts at introducing secular schooling, and giving union leaders access to state decision-making faced violent resistance from conservatives and the church (Roldán 2003, 18; Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 9). The relative weakness of social movements was furthered by the state’s minimal economic regulations, which never inhibited repressive production regimes. While much has been written about clashes between the two parties’ elites, there were sufficient grounds for informal arrangements between those with shared economic interests (Roldán 2003). Urban and international commerce, emerging industry, and the hacienda model now formed a symbiosis. In the 1930s, “there was no industrialist, commercial entrepreneur or politician who was not also a landowner” (Pécaut 2001, 60; Braun 1985). In the mid-1940s, the liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán became a symbol of hope for leftist, subaltern forces and parts of the Liberal Party. He aimed to open up the political arena, promising a stop to power based on violence, and the exclusive structural selectivity of the state. This “non-white urban answer to a closed system” elicited violent responses, however. Existing elites perceived these political mobilizations as a threat from the “peripheries” and tropical lowlands perceived to be culturally different, in other words, less “respectable” (Roldán 2003, 19, 38). Gaitán was murdered on April 9, 1948 (Fals Borda 2009b, 156). State authorities, especially conservatives, responded to the ensuing mass protests with extreme repression (Braun 1985). In the subsequent period known as “The Violence,” around two hundred thousand people were murdered (Fals Borda 2009a, b; Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 12). State violence, however, was routinely used in struggles over the use of land and in capital-labor relations; it was directed against organized peasants, workers in coffee haciendas and banana estates, and Afro-Colombians with communal land (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 283; Safford and Palacios 2003, 350; Uribe Hincapié 2001, 111). With this in mind, “The Violence” is a logical result of a sociopolitical crisis that contained broader attempts for emancipatory change, and served to silence racialized populations (Wabgou et al. 2012; Richani 2002, 23). Rural guerrillas formed against repression in the sparsely populated southeastern plains. Independent from the Liberal Party, such groups supported land struggles by forming practically self-sufficient peasant “republics” in hard-to-reach areas, as conservative senators labeled them (i.e., Sumapaz near Bogotá; see Richani 2002, 68). Given the rigid social structure and the

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government’s attempt “to change the preferences of at least half the population by force” (Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 14; Safford and Palacios 2003, 349–50), they did receive support from the civilian population. Through and after “The Violence,” the interests of cattle-breeding and plantation landowners converged with agro-industrial actors and large coffee producers. In continuing repressive labor regimes, they asserted themselves against those they perceived as culturally different from an entrepreneurial Colombian core, for instance, in Antioquia (Roldán 2003, 37; Safford and Palacios 2003, 269). This included the violent appropriation of land. Labels such as non-Antioqueño, “costeño,” “negro,” and “cosmopolita”—that is, nonwhite—were used to legitimize marginalization and exclusion. They were coded as a series of attributes or patterns of behavior that might or might not characterize peripheral inhabitants but which had come to constitute a frame of reference that Antioquia’s core inhabitants, authorities, and elite used to describe the “other.” (Roldán 2003, 38)

Colombia’s only military coup took place in 1953 during “The Violence,” staged by General Rojas Pinilla in agreement with both parties’ leadership. But when Rojas showed signs of an autonomous political project, dominant segments of both parties arrived at a consensus. They dismissed the military government in 1958 and formed the National Front, a union of the Liberal and Conservative parties that lasted until 1974. This union again channeled tensions between different dominant factions; their arrangements made greater concessions to subordinate groups less imperative (Archila Neira 2012, 80–81). Society, however, did change. The Catholic Church still shaped society, but the control mechanisms and symbolism of the two-party system were less successful among the strongly developing urban industrial middle classes (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 316; Uribe Hincapié 2001, 118; Safford and Palacios 2003, 330–32). Again, the imbalance between racialized and lower-class factions demanding change and the political arrangements excluding them from decision-making required authoritarian mechanisms. For instance, after the 1970 elections, radio broadcasts on the election polls were interrupted. Exit polls had predicted a victory by a third party, ANAPO (founded by Rojas Pinilla). When broadcasting resumed, it announced the conservative Misael Pastrana as president. In the 1980s, the first in a series of peace processes with guerrillas, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC; Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia), and M-19, took place. It failed miserably, opposed by military generals, Sociedad de Agricultores (SAC; Society of Agricultural Entrepreneurs) and the Asociación Nacional de Industriales

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de Colombia (ANDI; National Industry Association), who increasingly pressured president Belisario Betancur. When the M-19 occupied the Palace of Justice in downtown Bogotá in 1985 and demanded serious negotiations, this opened the arena for military intervention. The military bombed and stormed the building without official orders; the president’s responsibility remained unclear. Everyone inside the building died—judges, canteen workers, and guerrilla fighters. The military killed several people after bringing them out of the building alive (Gómez, Herrera, and Pinilla 2010). This traumatic experience also ended the peace process; the military assumed a prominent role in security policy. Despite that, the Unión Patriótica (UP) party was founded as the FARC’s first step toward becoming a parliamentary force, and in 1986, this third party entered the parliamentary elections; however, an estimated three thousand UP members were murdered within a few years. Earlier attempts at positioning new parties had either dissolved or gained little weight (Uribe Hincapié 2001, 94). A second conflict axis paradoxically opened the floor for new actors. At the end of the 1980s and independent of the armed conflict between state and guerrillas, violence erupted between the relatively centralized Medellín network under Pablo Escobar and the liberal Barco government (1986–1990). Escobar and his group Los Extraditables targeted the civilian population and state authorities in selective killings, most prominently social-liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, and bomb attacks, for example, on the progressive newspaper El Espectador in 1989. They did not offer a political project, strictly speaking, but primarily aimed to prevent legislation on extradition to the United States (Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 24). Adding complexity, in 1990, a broad political coalition, including student organizations, called for a constitutional assembly; the M-19 guerrilla surrendered its weapons. This constitution, passed in 1991, is widely celebrated as one of the most progressive in Latin America. It did, in fact, prohibit extradition. Escobar subsequently turned himself in, ending the “war” (Semana 1996). For organized Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, the constitutional achievements had contradictory effects. The UN human rights conferences presented an opportunity to demand fundamental rights and relative political participation. The constitution formalized their rights to autonomous, self-governing territories and specific minority rights (developed by Law 70, 1993). The state established the National Commission for Indigenous Territories in 1996, tasked with expanding collective land titles (Castillo 2010, 152). But economic policies increasingly put the agricultural communities among them under pressure.

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A State Project in Mexico? Quite unlike Colombia, the Mexican Revolution is broadly understood as a fundamental constitutive moment for a project to which a wide range of social forces consented (Gilly 1971; Katz 1982; González Casanova 1981), even if it eventually severely limited the agency of subaltern actors (Morton 2011; Hesketh 2017; Joseph and Nugent 1994). In the nineteenth century, however, conservatives and anticlerical liberals similarly fought over several potential state projects. Mexican liberals linked the abolition of slavery to their rejection of social categories according to the Spanish caste system as early as 1813 (Cohen 2020, 30). Due to Mexico’s strategic location for trade, conflicts involved European and US interventions. Between 1862 and 1867, the liberal government under Benito Juárez—symbolized as the republic’s national hero—had no permanent government seat, while conservatives and the Catholic Church supported the French Habsburg Empire. This changed with Mexico City’s occupation by liberals under General Porfirio Díaz in 1867. Although this relegated the conservatives to a secondary level, various liberal projects struggled for dominance, all sharing the goal of a “modern republic” and capitalist modernization through private ownership, dissolution of communal structures, and centralization. In 1876, Díaz succeeded in creating a “constitutive pact” (Roux 2005, 79). Díaz’s model is often characterized as caudillismo with personal armies, economically anchored in large estates. Clientelist networks exchanged personal loyalty for protection (Katz 1982, 24–26; Roux 2005, 46). Numerous peasant and indigenous rebellions ran counter to these liberal projects (Roux 2005, 62), while criollos perceived nonwhite subalterns as a threat to their own social status. In Yucatán, repression against Mayan forces striving for independence in the 1890s hardly delegitimized the governor, since his accountability lay primarily with Díaz (Meyer 1977, 6). Repression against that part of society was routine. Díaz’s economic strategy based on foreign investment caused far-reaching changes in class dynamics (Roux 2005, 98–100; Brachet-Márquez 1994). Small segments of wage-dependent workers emerged. The Porfiriate, however, made no concessions to labor; real wages even fell in the early twentieth century. The state criminalized leaving workplace and employer. Vagrancy was a criminal offence frequently punished with forced labor (Falcón 1994, 123; Hesketh 2010, 387). Income inequalities worsened between urban and rural areas and between the resource-rich North and resource-poor South. A new generation of export-oriented, agricultural entrepreneurs, mining and financial businesses, and international investors, who came to own up to 22 percent of Mexico’s territory during Díaz’s dictatorship (Wasserman 2015, 77), began to displace small landholders and the landed oligarchy, although

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in regions such as Chiapas or Michoacán, the hacienda model remained the norm (Bobrow-Strain 2007; Maldonado Aranda 2012). The state favored investment, such as selling water rights; 65 percent of the Yaqui River went to a US construction firm at the turn of the century (Wasserman 2015, 105–6). Urban, dominant factions emerged with the raw materials boom (OvermyerVelázquez 2007), but the channels for upward social mobility were narrow (Meyer 1977, 7). The liberal Porfiriato and the conservative Regeneración phases in Colombia are similar in that many production branches emerged then that shaped the economic export model for decades to come, for instance, coffee in Colombia and mining in Mexico; in Colombia, however, no revolution violently replaced the dominant forces, the internal market remained small, and foreign investors were much less interested. The Mexican Revolution had serious consequences. The population declined by more than one million people who died or emigrated, of a total of around fifteen million (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 71). The revolutionaries destroyed the old coercive apparatus and pushed some political elites out (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 72–73). Ultimately, the revolution redefined social identities and reshaped property relations through (limited) land redistribution (Roux 2005, 141; Salas Landa 2015). It shifted accumulation strategies toward industrialization in a modified project of (dependent) capitalist modernization, yet while it rejected the exclusive social base Diaz’s project was built on, there were limits to the demands subalterns could hope to achieve (Hesketh 2017, 78; Meyer 1977, 4; 2007; González Casanova 1981, 41). Initially, many remained landless, and the high concentration of property in a few people’s hands remained largely intact. By no means was there a monolithic postrevolutionary dominant class. Only in the North, such as in Sonora, did different class factions, including dissatisfied middle classes and urban workers, actually unite in fighting Díaz (Katz 1982, 37), which partly explains why they later formed central circles of the revolutionary elite, consolidating political power. Many Porfirian elites lost their wealth, but some persisted and rearranged their political loyalty. Three currents—the sonorenses, an emerging upper-middle class segment whose success was based on their arrangements with subaltern sectors, the left-wing constitucionalismo, for whom land distribution was central, and a right-wing military-prone current—continued to wrestle over political directions (Roux 2005, 141). The sonorenses around Álvaro Obregón strongly influenced the 1917 postrevolutionary constitution. The revolution did not radically overturn old property relations or racial power relations, nor did it incite rapid upward social mobility. The individuals in power changed. Some fought for collective land rights and the right

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to strike, and set impulses for Mexican capitalism that had been impossible under Díaz (Hesketh 2010, 389). Yet the revolution ultimately became the political formation able to co-opt and integrate more radical expressions of struggle. The fundamental postrevolutionary political project did not restrict personal power but, instead, aimed to regulate struggles between different forces within the emerging state party. The absorption of radical left-wing forces into the state party Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party, originally named PRM [Partido de la Revolución Mexicana/Party of the Mexican Revolution]), founded in 1929, and the inclusion of moderate and right-wing forces (while having fought the more radical Catholic Cristeros) prevented more radical policies during the 1930s (Hamilton 1983, 253). Existing workers’ organizations and channels cemented corporatist representation, while dominant factions pacified and coerced what could have led to more autonomous labor movement organizations (Díaz Cayeros 2012, 250; Gilly 1971, 347–49). Those outside the modernization model continued to experience regional state apparatuses as violent enforcers of capitalist development, such as in the war against the Yaqui in Sonora in 1926 (Pansters 2012; Roux 2005, 178). While racial relations and the “access to power and property” dependent on them did formally change (Knight 1990b, 72), assumed identities remained. Occupational shifts and social mobility allowed “transitions” between identities such as from being read as indigenous to mestizo, and wealth allowed social whitening, but racism limited occupational choice (Villarreal 2010). The revolution’s effects legitimized the capitalist state. In the post-revolution decades, what became the PRI was less a political party than a central agency that embodied the Mexican state as a whole. It was able to present itself as the one party encompassing all the revolution’s successes (Ávalos Tenorio 2009), balancing between moments of repression, concessions, and partial participation, with moments of stability, inertia, and flexibility. The integrative elements and symbolic inclusion of broad working-class sectors, peasants, and informal workers stabilized the postrevolutionary project for a long time. “Carefully coordinated material concessions were an integral part” (Knight 1990, 30) of this institutionalized arrangement. The material concessions, however, could hardly be maintained without incurring debts, given the asymmetrical trade relations, particularly with the United States. The project of land redistribution took center stage. Yet approaches to private property were contradictory, given the national government’s aim to rebuild agriculture after the armed conflict (Hesketh 2010, 395; Wasserman 2015, 90). Neither was the Díaz government generally as favorable toward foreign investors and landholders and maintained such close connections as is purported, nor were the postrevolutionary governments necessarily investorunfriendly (Wasserman 2015, 78). In the 1930s, on the one hand, a segment

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of national entrepreneurs consolidated by producing consumer goods for the domestic market, closely aligned with state institutions (Anguiano 2010, 150–51), on the other, such alliances limited the chances of progressive alliances to incite political change (Hamilton 1983, 255). The state’s functional logic lay in an asymmetrical relationship (Boris and Sterr 2002). Elections did not confront the government with a real opposition (Meyer 1977, 4–7). For decades, the main discourse was nationalist, rather than pluricultural, promoting “national development” and “modernity,” objectives that legitimized state authoritarianism. Against the construction of mestizaje, indigenous demands for self-determination held no power, although the colloquial phrase “many Mexicos” illustrates the existence of extremely different lifeworlds (Cohen 2020). The demarcation between an industrializing North with Monterrey at its center, and a relatively marginalized agricultural South, a distinction set during the Díaz dictatorship and related to the US economy, is still formative today. It translated into a spatially tangible coloniality of power (Quijano 2014, 777–832). Access to capital, justice, and political decision-making circles were structured according to racialization. Clearly, racialized social sectors in Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Chiapas were disadvantaged, integrated by the PRI mainly through ejido administration. From the 1950s onward, trade union bureaucracy functioned partly as a direct channel among capital, the state, and the unions. Such “yellow union” arrangements cemented corporatist representation while state veto rights in the 1950s Labor Law made an independent labor movement impossible (Díaz Cayeros 2012, 250; Gilly 1971, 347–50). Instead of grassroots representation, state practices bound unions closer to party structures. Initially, the consolidated PRI was highly successful during the 1960s. Living standards greatly improved (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 107–8). Between 1960 and 1970, the number of television sets, telephones, and cars in households multiplied, and the poverty rate fell from 64.3 percent (1956) to 24.3 percent (1968) (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 111–12). Nevertheless, real wages did not grow accordingly. Long-term shifts in social relations, such as the growing, increasingly educated urban middle class, demanded changes in government; the PRI was unable to respond to this other than through coercion. The Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, when state and para-police forces killed politicized students, famously demonstrated this. The founding myths of the “revolutionary family” and the developmental state had failed. The economic success likewise ended with rising global interest rates and the subsequent 1982 debt crisis. Increased unemployment, and the stagnation and fall in income fueled protests. Consent crumbled as the regime’s promise to, in principle, offer everyone in Mexico a piece of land, a place in a school, drinking water,

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medical care, and housing became exposed as highly selective (Boris and Sterr 2002, 25). THE STATE AND WORLD ECONOMY RELATIONS Colombian Social Dynamics and the World Economy The three Andes mountain ranges that divide Colombia have served a narrative that tells Colombia’s economic history as one of fragmented, strictly separate local economies, hardly connected by a functioning rail and road network and difficult to integrate for a state with limited reach and negligible income (Safford and Palacios 2003, 161–62, 227–28; Zinecker 2007, 144). The federal free trade project from 1850 onward elicited crises whenever world market prices for Colombia’s export products fell. In 1890, it was more expensive to transport things from Bogotá to Medellín than from Medellín to London (Pécaut 2001, 54). Remnants of colonialism, in terms of property, large-scale latifundia, dependent peasants, and partially coerced labor continued to shape the country. Small-scale minifundia, often combining subsistence with selling produce at nearby markets (Palacios 1986, 113), predominated in the more difficult mountainous regions and latifundia in the fertile plains, and on the Andes’s slopes both coexisted uneasily (Molano 1992). The loss of Panama in 1903 incited central elites to put more effort into unifying Colombian regions (i.e., Ballvé 2020). The conservatives’ government, at the turn of the twentieth century, is best explained by the feverish growth of coffee cultivation. Others stress that the coffee sector’s accumulation strategies partly relied on small- and medium-scale production, opening up possibilities for more diverse political actors. In any case, coffee exports strengthened an upwardly mobile social class in the trade. Within a few decades, it became so central for the state that Mario Ospina Pérez, former conservative president and director of the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FEDECAFE; National Federation of Coffee Growers), boasted in an interview with El Tiempo in 1930: The coffee industry [. . .] could trumpet in all directions: I am the fiscal equilibrium, because the customs revenues, the basis of our budgets, depend on coffee exports; I am the external credit of the nation and the departments, because the coffee remittances pay both public and private external debts; I am the Banco de la República, because if, at a given moment, coffee exports ceased, the Banco de la República would go bankrupt in less than three months; . . . the possibility of importing machines, tracks, scientific books, foreign teachers, in one word: the civilization of Colombia in material terms, I represent and depends on me. (El Tiempo, December 23, 1930; Pécaut 2001, 203).

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For decades until the mid-twentieth century, state regulation of accumulation strategies allowed a degree of industrialization but never endangered the interests of export-oriented rural sectors (coffee, bananas, livestock farming). Infrastructure investments as well as the expanding construction and transport sectors and oil and banana cultivation often depended on foreign ownership. These sectors hardly contributed any taxes, which would have enabled social policies, and frequently ignored workers’ rights. As different products dominated in different regions, regional dynamics shaped the domestic market well into the twentieth century (Zinecker 2007, 154–56); coffee dominated in Quindío and Risaralda, oil in Arauca, coal in Guajira, and gold in Bolívar. Unlike other Latin American countries with a single metropolitan region, one spatial consequence was that four large urban centers emerged (Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla) (Safford and Palacios 2003, 302). It was precisely during the political violence of the 1950s that the coffee and industry sectors struck a certain balance of power. It was simultaneously a period of economic growth, and both parties’ dominant factions accumulated large profits (Fals Borda 2009a, 160). Industrialists now received state subsidies—though not very substantial—and relatively high taxes were imposed on cafeteros when prices were high. Agriculture, including coffee, even declined their shares of the gross domestic product (GDP) after the 1940s, and the industrial sector grew from below 15 percent of GDP in the 1940s to more than 21.1 percent in the 1960s (Kalmánovitz and López 2006, 7). Colombia had one of the weakest tax systems in Latin America, with a tax rate of 10 percent of GDP (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 255). The constantly recreated subordinate relation with the world market and exporters’ power based on primary goods exports severely limited the leeway of fiscal policy. The fiscal base was never broad enough to institutionalize even a selective welfare state. Quite the contrary, regional dominant sectors prevented the central state from ever completely controlling the Fondo Nacional del Café, which bundled tax revenues from exports for investment (López Restrepo 2004). To establish an actual tax monopoly, the state would have had to control this and similar “para-fiscal” funds in cattle farming and other sectors (Kalmánovitz and López 2006, 24). Yet in the 1970s, key sectors, agro-industry and cattle, accounted for 32 percent of national income but only 4 percent of the tax burden (Pécaut 2001, 74). Income taxes and social security contributions still accounted for less than 10 percent of current revenues in the state budget at the end of the 1990s. Neither capital nor immigrants, who could have formed larger labor movements to stretch these limits, came in greater quantities. As a result, the domestic market was clearly secondary for economic policy, more so even than elsewhere in Latin America. Backed by institutions like the World Bank, the two-party alliance National Front promoted technocratic personnel in state apparatuses. Irrespective

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of whoever held the presidential office, since the 1960s, the Departamento Nacional de Planeación (DNP; National Planning Department), the Junta Monetaria (Monetary Council), and the Consejo Nacional de Política Económica y Social (CONPES; National Council for Economic and Social Policy) were consolidated as decision-making centers for economic policy (López Restrepo 2004, 15). The early 1980s were a final protectionist phase. When Mexico slid into the debt crisis of 1982, it became difficult for other Latin American states like Colombia to obtain foreign loans, but although both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) lobbied for dismantling import regulations and intervening in the export economy, they were initially unsuccessful in convincing the conservative government of Belisario Betancur (1982–1986) (López Restrepo 2004). In 1984, however, the Finance Ministry heralded a definitive shift toward an orthodox macroeconomy. Staff close to capital groups aimed to significantly reduce the state’s role, reduce emphasis on the domestic market, and place even greater emphasis on “outward-oriented development” (López Restrepo 2004, 22–24). Illegal trade had gained importance since the 1970s. Marijuana, cocaine, oil, nontraditional products, and industrial assembly-line production slowly replaced coffee’s central place among Colombia’s exports (Palacios and Safford 2002, 576). Importantly, capital generated from marijuana and the cocaine trade cushioned the entire economy’s volatilities during the 1980s, and regional political forces increasingly benefited from the foreign exchange from this first drug trafficking wave (Britto 2020). Members of Congress, regional politicians, and the military, and legal and illegal entrepreneurs, established increasingly close ties, labeled as “narcoclientelism” or the “criminalization of politics” (Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 23). In the early 1990s, economic policy decisions were the neoliberalizing counterpart to the progressive constitutional process mentioned earlier. The Barco government (1986–1990) had already pushed for this economic opening, relatively late by Latin American standards (Bonilla González 2011, 426). The technocratic economic council CONPES adopted the so-called Apertura program in 1990; only a fraction of state personnel was involved (López Restrepo 2004, 31, 34). Market-oriented forces in state institutions, increasingly assertive, made sure economic liberalization, driven by the Washington Consensus, meant more incentives for direct investment in agribusiness and raw materials extraction. The Banco de la República gained autonomy in the 1991 constitution. World Bank pressure accelerated the reduction of import restrictions and intensified discourses of macroeconomic balance (Bonilla González 2006). The consolidation of large economic conglomerates with significant financial reserves had enormous impact on economic and social relations since the 1990s (Estrada Álvarez 2010; Orjuela 2010, 372–73). The tendency

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was to buy up existing companies and branches instead of creating new companies. The biggest economic conglomerates—similar to Mexico, these were family-owned business groups with diverse investments, concentrating economic power and growth—in the late 1990s all sold their subsidiaries and regrouped around core branches, when Colombia went through its 1990s economic crisis (Semana 2001). In total, fourteen economic groups consolidated, generating 25 percent of GDP in 2000 (Richani 2002, 139), and concentrating different branches, from insurance to media, agroindustry to construction, into one family group. These have since become multilatinas, transnational corporations of Colombian origin. Ultimately, economic restructuring meant not only relative deindustrialization and the renewed dependence of particular regions on global boom and bust cycles but also a radical reorganization of land ownership and rural areas in general (Grajales 2011; Gutiérrez Sanín and Vargas 2016). The number of forcibly displaced small farmers rose sharply, reminiscent of Escobar’s “violence of development” (CODHES 2005; Escobar 2003). The state mediated structural imbalances less, for instance, by dismantling agricultural credit banks. Increased food imports weakened smallholder families; their purchasing power declined, and they frequently switched from smallholder agriculture to wage labor on plantations or started as suppliers to the agricultural industry (Fajardo Montaña 2002). For indigenous and smallholder communities, the market orientation of agricultural policies gave rise to new conflicts around seed rights, increased resource extraction, and the drive for industrial land use. Large, transnational agricultural companies were better able to accommodate market demands and drove them forward. Dynamic Relationships between the Mexican State and Capital Economic relations during the Díaz government in Mexico were very different from Colombia—considering the possibility for infrastructure investment, the broadened tax base, and the role of the state. The rapidly expanding railways, first firmly in the hand of US investors, but quietly acquired by the Mexican state (Wasserman 2015, 58–76), are the most symbolic element of Porfirio Díaz’s economic project. They were instrumental in connecting internal markets and granted access to the US market, expanding capitalist relations of production (Gilly 1971; Hesketh 2017, 75, 386). Rapidly increasing and state-subsidized foreign investments were key to late nineteenth-century economic strategy (Wasserman 2015), effectively transforming production, trade, and financial cycles. Social forces surrounding Díaz ultimately strengthened the state’s fiscal capacities, entrenched the legal priority of private property, and consolidated central state regulation

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(Katz 1982; Meyer 1977; Roux 2005, 89). Good relations into state institutions allowed entrepreneurs to reduce taxes (i.e. by downscaling the estimate of private property) (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 48). Likewise, after the revolution, the dynamic relationship between the state and capital groups gave the state a much more fundamental role in capital accumulation than in Colombia. Conservative forces within the PRI founded the employers’ association Confederación Patronal de la República Mexicana (COPARMEX; Mexican Employers Confederation) in 1928 to mediate demands within the state party. Rising real wages and the actual implementation of the labor rights the constitution guaranteed reshaped capital-labor relations. On the one hand, with the Federal Labor Law of 1931, the state limited trade unions’ leeway. On the other, the unions could often count on state support (i.e. when demanding the implementation of negotiated labor contracts) (Brachet-Márquez 1994, 66–67). Simultaneously, governments consistently sought to achieve capitalist development through support for capital accumulation, visible, for example, in the rapid reconstruction of the financial system after the revolution and infrastructural support for agriculture (i.e., Hamilton 1983, 250–51). It was with the 1930s world economic crisis and during the Lázaro Cárdenas presidency (1934–1940) that the Mexican state ensemble, in contrast to Colombia, initiated the project of a Mexican developmental state. Nationalist segments of the dominant classes, strengthened after the revolution, initially favored a combination of primary goods exports, agricultural exports, and internal state-coordinated industrialization, at least between 1935 and the 1970s. The 1930s postrevolutionary balance of power within the Cardenista alliance allowed state agencies to impose restrictions on capital and overcome obstacles to its restructuring (Hamilton 1983, 250). The one radical decision the Cárdenas government took was to expropriate oil companies in 1938. When Cárdenas took office, the Mexican oil industry had been almost entirely (98 percent) in the hands of sixteen foreign companies, including Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil (Roux 2005, 196). In a very specific constellation of forces, the government, with the declared support of trade unions, financial groups close to the government, the judiciary, and even the Catholic Church, nationalized the entire oil sector and railways (Hamilton 1983, 210; Gilly 1971, 356–57). The United States tried to cut Mexico off from international financial markets. In these particular circumstances, the state party quickly succeeded in gaining control over strategic economic sectors, changing world market relations, and integrating import substitution into accumulation strategies through intense state infrastructure investment programs (Maldonado Aranda 2012). The centralization of oil exports allowed for partially redistributing revenues.

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Yet it was precisely this alliance that integrated unruly trade union sectors into the dominant arrangement. The phase of relatively greater latitude for state autonomy was brief, leading to realignments in the following decade. Ávila Camacho (1940–1946) consolidated capital groups and foreign investors. Right-wing political projects came to the fore; for instance, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN; National Action Party) was founded in 1939. The Second World War, however, ended the dispute over oil production. When the United States entered the war in 1942, it bound Mexico to its war industry with a trade agreement, sourcing copper, mercury, lead, zinc, and other raw materials from Mexico. Financial markets reopened. One consequence was a sixfold accumulation of foreign exchange between 1942 and 1946, which hardly found sufficient productive channels; and after 1945, trade with the United States again accounted for three-quarters of Mexican foreign trade (Loyola Díaz and Martínez 2010, 36, 47). The following phase was even more clearly marked by a strategy of import substitution industrialization (ISI). Both the state and dominant class representatives were concerned with creating ideal conditions for Mexico’s private sector. Miguel Alemán (1946–1952) sought to consolidate a group of national entrepreneurs tied to the state and a domestic market-oriented industry, located in northern Monterrey, among other places (Loyola Díaz and Martínez 2010, 50; Servín, Reina, and Tutino 2007). Some expanding conglomerates had existed since the Porfirian dictatorship. The Law on the Executive’s Competences in Economy, passed in 1950, has been interpreted as the most far-reaching legislative instrument for executive intervention in the economy (Loyola Díaz and Martínez 2010, 58–59). It legally enshrined import and export restrictions, set price ceilings, and reserved raw materials primarily for the domestic market. High growth rates and rapid industrialization in the 1950s became known as the milagro mexicano.2 Under Echeverría (1970–1976) and López Portillo (1976–1982), the newly founded Department for National Property, which coordinated stateowned enterprises, and from 1976 onward the Secretaría de Programación y Presupuesto (SPP; Secretary for Planning and Budget), again briefly weakened the position of the Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público (SHCP; Secretary of Finance and Public Credit) and curtailed its authority, especially since the SPP allocated the funds to all other ministries (Heigl 2011, 135). Dissatisfied, capital groups established the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE; Corporate Coordinating Council) in 1975 and sought closer alliances with the right-wing conservative party PAN. The tensions between the Keynesian planning minister Carlos Tello and the monetarist finance minister Julio Moctezuma illustrate particularly well how this dissatisfaction permeated the state. The subsequent resignation of both ultimately strengthened the

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Finance Secretary (Heigl 2011, 137–38; Rousseau 2010). From at least the mid-1970s, the import substitution strategy showed signs of exhaustion and provides one explanation for the PRI’s dwindling power. Despite effective trade barriers, it was unable to boost the production of and meet the growing demand for capital goods. The sociopolitical consensus fell apart in the 1980s when the import-substituting model lost another base with the drastic fall of oil prices (Brachet-Márquez 1994, 132; Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 121). It was precisely the high interest rates in the United States that attracted Mexican capital, on the one hand, and the parallel disproportionate and rapid rise of interest payments for loans taken by the Mexican state, on the other hand (Imhof 2003, 99), that made the unbridled lending of the 1970s a problem. In 1981, foreign debt amounted to 72.2 billion, with a problematically large proportion of short-term loans (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 136). Worsening terms of trade for unprocessed products, which resulted in falling foreign exchange earnings and rising demand, and the trade deficit following import liberalization of high capital goods and rising food imports were signs of crisis.3 Mexico declared bankruptcy and a debt moratorium in 1982. Import substitution industrialization finally ended. The subsequent far-reaching government programs based on the IMF’s structural adjustment opened the arena for financial market forces and externally oriented capital factions including from Mexico. This reshaped the structure of production and exports, trade, industrial and investment policy, wage relations, and social security. As a political project, it went far beyond solving a debt crisis, but international paradigms made foreign debt payments a priority. Debt servicing necessitated further loans, at now very poor conditions, including debt-for-equity swaps (Imhof 2003, 106). Orthodox stability and austerity policies allowed for only slow economic recovery. Mexico’s structural adjustment under President de la Madrid (1982–1988) stood out in Latin America because of the particularly drastic reduction of public spending and withdrawal of domestic investment capital by 40 percent (Imhof 2003, 106; Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 148). Even before 1982, financial- and world market–oriented groups gained prominence and enjoyed privileges like free currency convertibility, anonymous share ownership, tax breaks, and investment guarantees. After 1988, governments were even more openly committed to these capital-bearing groups (Anguiano 2010, 150–51; Imhof 2003, 104). The dissolution of the SPP in 1992 was another sign of an irreversible shift in monetary and economic strategy. Unsurprisingly, it handed over its tasks to the Finance Secretary. Additionally, government declared the Central Bank’s constitutional autonomy in 1994. State personnel was increasingly recruited from within the circles of the Finance Department (Heigl 2011, 140; Teichman

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1995) and trained abroad, with a neoliberal-technocratic orientation. In party politics, the “power of the winners of economic crisis” (Imhof 2003, 104) reflected in the rise of PAN conservatives. It may seem contradictory that the nationalization of banks accompanied the harsh austerity policies. President López Portillo announced it in 1982 and seemed to squarely oppose financial groups’ interests. Yet relations between the López government and capital groups were actually close. The bank nationalization was initially an affront but was soon defused by generous compensation negotiated with bank owners (the reprivatization enforced only ten years later) and an emerging parallel financial system. The rupture of ties between the executive and capital groups was short-lived and partial (Anguiano 2010, 126–27; Imhof 2003, 2). Instruments such as the newly founded FICORA, the Fideicomiso para la Cobertura de Riesgos Cambiarios (Trust for Covering Exchange Rate Risks), and the privatization of the casas de bolsa aided the economic dominance of financial groups. The crisis years preceded broader socio-structural shifts across several Latin American countries. Between 1984 and 1989, income inequality grew. Middle classes became relatively poorer; the number of poor households rose by roughly ten percentage points to 48 percent (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 265). For Hesketh (2010, 385) or Anguiano (2010, 59), the neoliberal turn was a passive revolution, a reorganization from above that “first weakened, then changed the material basis of rule.” The state’s alliance with large corporations reduced its scope for autonomous regulation. Based on the debt crisis, a sign of the “old” Mexico failing, financial forces pushed ahead with transforming production in Mexico, solidifying their ideas about economy and governance. Decades of PRI rhetoric had centered the state in the economy; now the project was to make the state retreat as an economic agent (Rousseau 2010, 254). That project was controversial even within the dominant party institutions (Fazio 1996, 27; Rousseau 2010, 263). Between 1988 and 1994, struggles over the state’s role and institutional setup ensued. A traditional corporatist faction formerly dominating the PRI opposed the authoritarian-neoliberal technocrats, even if the boundaries were not always clear-cut. None of these factions pursued democratization; personal influence persisted (Fazio 1996, 27; Flores Pérez 2009, 91). Under President Salinas (1988–1994), the official modernization discourse prioritized companies separate from a supposedly inflated state bureaucracy and replaced the promise of prosperity with one of freedom and civil rights (Rousseau 2010, 265; Vázquez Castillo 2004, 86). The PRI’s demise led to rivalries, political murder, and the perception that change must be imminent. Restructuring did not result in stabilization. Despite rising exports, radical trade liberalization could hardly remedy the Mexican economy’s problems,

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such as the lack of long-term investment, or act as a catalyst, because it never created internal value chains, and about 80 percent of net capital inflows since the beginning of the 1990s flowed into volatile bonds and portfolios (Teichman 1995). This limited the vision of Mexico as an export platform to the assembly of temporarily imported parts that entered tax-free, only to be re-exported after assembly (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 166; 181–83). LAND AND PROPERTY Property plays an essential role in defining the selectivity of Latin American states. This role is illustrated in tax regimes that are frequently reluctant to tax property, and property defines much of what is possible in the domestic economy. States most commonly promoted ownership regimes based on private property, while subaltern property regimes which may include communal property, rotating, collective land use, and imaginaries around land beyond land as a means to cultivate crops, had a less supportive state environment. Cycles of Appropriation: Struggles for Territory in Colombia Colombia’s history is a sequence of interrelated processes of land colonization and repeated cycles of violence (Hobsbawm 1983), and property relations continue to be a central cause of conflict. Rural, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian movements were repeatedly subject to extreme strategies of violent dispossession. Their resistance often remained locally rooted and rather isolated (LeGrand 1992), as Quijano (2000) observes for all of Latin America. Land was the state’s principal security for paying its debts. In the 1800s, the state paid internal debts by allocating state and church land, often above one thousand hectares at once, to landowners. It legally privatized and expropriated indigenous autonomous areas, not even recognizing them as citizens, to enable settler movements (Machado 2017). Haciendas often swallowed the resulting small plots of land a little later (Pécaut 2001, 56–57; Safford and Palacios 2003, 184). The state’s omission to protect small plots was political impulse for the emerging export agriculture. The free trade project significantly impacted land ownership. While in 1850, 75 percent of Colombia’s territory in the Andes and on the Caribbean Coast was considered public land, this changed considerably. Central state policies perceived the export economy as a “development engine,” prioritized private titles, and tried to extend the agrarian frontier into the lowlands and border regions, by offering land titles to potential immigrants, relatively unsuccessfully (Machado

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2017). In contrast, for plots of less than fifty hectares, the costs for an evaluator needed for titling generally exceeded the land’s value, so small farmers could hardly ever prove their ownership (LeGrand 1992, 45). This way, the Colombian state “privatized” roughly 3.2 million formally fallow hectares, which in reality peasants had been cultivating (LeGrand 1992, 35). The availability of land impacted the wage relation. Settler movements were an escape valve for agricultural workers from the rigid, concentrated agricultural structure, sometimes benefiting from the state awarding them untitled land. Such movements led from the populated centers such as the towns and villages founded in the early years of the colony, most intensively integrated into economic and cultural life and directly subject to the control of the colonial authorities and the Catholic Church, to hardly accessible peripheral areas with a low presence of civil and ecclesiastical institutions. (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 260)

Control over large areas of land, in contrast, tied workers to haciendas. Similar to Mexico, then, subaltern political projects existed as self-governing territories, such as the Afro-Colombian Palenque or Sumapaz near Bogotá, still defended in the 1950s and 1960s as “independent” territories (Wabgou et al. 2012; Navarrete 2008). Peasant settlement movements, however, did not take place in empty spaces but instead partially displaced populations racialized as inferior. In some areas, however, indigenous and small-scale farming communities combined forces in fighting landowners for access to land. For the growing export-oriented plantations, labor was scarce; few workers immigrated. LeGrand (1992, 32–34) traces how the increased importance of rural export products such as coffee and bananas, from around 1880 onward, again massively modified the land ownership structure; free settlers became rural wage laborers and tenants through expropriation. Agrarian reform—demanded by left-wing, peasant, and indigenous organizations—was never seriously implemented. A first serious attempt at a distributive land reform emerged in 1936 under López Pumarejo, but it was ultimately unsuccessful due to the fervent and violent opposition of conservative forces. Landowners frequently shifted from labor-intensive food production to extensive livestock farming, which withdrew jobs and occupied land that otherwise could have been subject to redistribution. López Pumarejo had to withdraw the reform during his second term in 1942. “The Violence,” the conflict-ridden decade between 1948 and 1958, illustrates the intimate relationship among land, paramilitary violence, and selective social mobility. Violent practices, highly similar to those of later paramilitaries, modified production and ownership relations between mini-, midi-, and latifundia, particularly in regions with contested property relations

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and racialized populations that contradicted a private property–oriented model (Roldán 2003). Regional caudillos, intermediaries for the state in areas of settlement expansion, frequently appropriated land and violently expelled those cultivating the plots (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 315; Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 20; Reyes Posada 1997, 286). This continuously concentrated land ownership in fewer hands (Molano 1992). The displaced would see themselves cut from their territory, while romanticized imaginaries of territory risked reducing their social identity to that (Oslender 2008; Wabgou et al. 2012; Bocarejo 2012). Along with other scholars (Braun 1985; Fajardo Montaña 2002), I emphasize that, in Colombia, land has remained decisive for creating and sustaining the dominant classes. Land-grabbing becomes a means, albeit not exclusively, of constituting and valorizing capital, as the constantly rising land prices show. In Colombia, land has a much stronger effect on price increases than in other Latin American countries, so Colombian agricultural products can be more expensive than elsewhere. Producers cut wages and non-wage labor costs to counteract this (Fajardo Montaña 2002, 11). In 1972, the state withdrew another proposal for agrarian reform due to the violent resistance of landowners on the Atlantic Coast. Those in state decision-making centers that saw a need to redistribute land as a means of production repeatedly came up against the resistance of regional dominant

Figure 2.1. Landholders on a parade, Salento, Colombia, March 2008. Source: Photo by the author.

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forces. In this case, rapid capitalist transformation again led to fewer, larger properties, and technological innovations allowed less labor-intensive production methods. The owners regarded the reform proposal as a rupture with earlier agreements (Richani 2002, 31). The Chicoral Pact of 1973 between state and agricultural entrepreneurs finally rejected any redistributive agrarian reform and even retracted earlier reform efforts. Instead, settlers were supposed to extend the agricultural frontier and cultivate undeveloped lands in state ownership. The state remained firmly committed to capitalist development through private property. In the 1990s, like in Mexico, the World Bank promoted market-oriented land reforms. Yet attempts to establish a dynamic market for land failed, ignoring the major asymmetries in access to credit, equity, and distribution. In the 1990s, 1.3 percent of all landowners owned 48 percent of the fertile land, while 68 percent owned only 5.2 percent (Reyes Posada 1997, 186). For some, this reform meant “capitalism entering rural Colombia with force” (interview with journalist, November 4, 2011). The restructuring of rural areas, however, not only responded to world market requirements for flex-crops and vertically integrated distribution mechanisms but also culminated in a catastrophic counterreform, when paramilitaries violently displaced hundreds of thousands of people (Fajardo Montaña 2002, 8; Ibañez and Muñoz 2010). Even in the face of historical cycles of land colonization and violent appropriation, this cycle of dispossession represented something new, considering its extent, its brutality, and its interdependence with world market requirements, to which emerging modes of agro-industrial production and increased mining responded. The True Mexican Exception: The Postrevolutionary Ejido Model Land ownership is a social relation hardly separable from processes of racialization in the Americas, and it was at the core of Mexican state formation. Afro-Mexican and indigenous communities repeatedly fought for and defended autonomous territories before and after independence (Vinson 2009, 3–6), for instance, San Lorenzo de los Negros in Veracruz, the Maya territories in Quintana Roo, or communities in Guerrero’s and Oaxaca’s Pacific regions are examples. State-spatial strategies, especially during the Porfiriate, made land a tradable commodity, which could attract foreign investment. In return, the state handed thirty million hectares in ownership titles to landowners between 1878 and 1908 (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 63–64; Roux 2005, 88). The allocation of land in state ownership (terrenos baldíos) to individuals and companies included land that was actually under collective municipal

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ownership (propiedad comunal), which the state did not recognize anymore. Debt peonage persisted during Díaz’s rule, but contract and wage labor also shaped rural social relations (i.e., Morton 2010). An intense process of dispossession took place under Díaz; rural property relations were completely reshaped (Katz 1982, 26–32; Roux 2005, 95; Morton 2010). The 1894 Law of Baldíos (fallow land) allowed the fragmentation of existing communal land administrations (ejidos), particularly in Sonora, Coahuila, and Chihuahua. The Porfiriate no longer recognized the collective administrative unit of the corporaciones civiles as a legal entity, making their land ownership impossible (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 77–79). Depending on the dominant industries, this pushed peasants into wage labor, for instance, in Morelos, where industrial sugar production emerged, or in the North, where a sector of wage-dependent seasonal farm workers formed. Between 1884 and 1910, more than 95 percent of indigenous communities lost their collective land titles (Katz 1982, 26–32). Again, the social role of land goes far beyond a simple means of production, not only for indigenous communities. Fighting against the Porfirian dictatorship, heterogeneous forces all took a stand on the issue of land ownership, despite widely different political projects. In difference to the idea of agrarian development based on private property (the 1913 project by interim president Carranza), the anticapitalist project of the southern Zapatista peasant uprising aimed at returning land to municipalities and autonomous local administrations. For their anticlerical, nationalist project, a more just distribution of land and diverse forms of land ownership were central to the revolution; their 1911 Ayala Declaration proclaimed a radical rupture with the logic of capitalist exchange. In the Zapatista imaginary, land has no exchange value, only a utility value, and cannot be sold. Locals decide whether it is collectively or individually managed (Roux 2005, 110–11). The progressive constitutionalism project in turn never offered an anticapitalist agenda, only social property relations. Despite the rejection of Zapata’s Ayala Plan and the murder of Zapata in 1919, agrarian reform became the main discursive element of the postrevolutionary era (Mallon 1994, 73). An exception in the Americas (and in contrast to Colombia), Mexico started to regulate land relations through ejidos and communal ownership, complementing private property. Both legal figures at least partially withdrew and protected peasant land from capitalist accumulation cycles; the regulation partially prevented violent appropriation (Roux 2005, 190–92). In fact, land distribution was far less unequal than in most Latin American countries for several decades. Although its implementation differed greatly from region to region, it undermined landowners’ ideas of production based on intensive cultivation and capital accumulation through agriculture—for in their own

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narrative they themselves were the ones who transformed “nature,” which “no one used,” into “productive” land. It was the “others” who remained “unproductive,” for cultural reasons (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 161–62). Land was racialized. The contradictions of postrevolutionary Mexican politics became apparent precisely in the ejido, a form of hybrid ownership without many of private property’s characteristics. The ejido mixed forms of (capitalist) cooperatives, pre-Hispanic elements, and peasant ideas of management (Gilly 1971, 362). Yet collectively farmed ejidos and communal land were a small minority; 95 percent of ejido land was individually farmed and integrated into capitalist economic cycles (Gilly 1971, 362; Vázquez Castillo 2004). While loans and newly built infrastructures catered to ejidos, large landowners often retained their local political influence and the best land (Gilly 1971, 362–63). Expropriation often exempted export-oriented haciendas (e.g., in the sugar industry); large landowners were able to diversify their activities toward the financial sector, construction, or industry (Hesketh 2010, 393). Power relations and dependence remained the same when ejido households improved their income through additional wage labor in larger agricultural enterprises. Ejidos were indeed an integrative governance moment. Rather than fomenting political articulation and participation, however, they became the site that legitimized an encroaching state. Every ejido member automatically became a member of the Consejo Nacional Campesino (CNC; National Peasants Council) founded in 1936. Like agro-industry, ejidos satisfied part of the growing food demand (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 172–73; Mallon 1994, 89). Given the weak tax base, funds for import substitution industrialization came from agricultural exports by both ejidos and private agriculture. From the 1940s onward, ejidos were subordinated to the logic of capitalist industrial accumulation. Neo-latifundia emerged as agro-industrial estates. In Chiapas, Veracruz, and Yucatán, as in Colombia, the transformation of haciendas into booming cattle farms served not only the urban population’s growing meat consumption but also responded to land reforms that made labor more expensive for haciendas (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 109–10; Salazar 2014). However, until 1990, more than half of Mexico’s territory was distributed into ejidos.4 The rupture of the ejido model came in 1992 under President Salinas. The constitutional amendment of Article 27 turned the idea of a social land sector upside down and opened agriculture up for ownership transformation and capitalization, whether through purchasing and leasing land, mergers with individual landowners, or the open displacement of small farmers and communities (Anguiano 2010, 154; de Ita 2006; Lozano, Lozano, and Vázquez 2009). Land as the material base of social and political power relations, more important for some than the wage relation (Roux 2005; Zavaleta 2009a), changed fundamentally. Ejidos and state land, formerly essential for

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stabilizing the domestic market strategy, “now became spaces through which the capital relationship could be expanded” (Hesketh 2010, 401). There was, however, little interest in the subsequent PROCEDE program to register and delimit property in ejidos among small-scale farmers, ejidos, and agrarian communities (de Ita 2006, 158). Recognizing how indigenous communities perceived this rupture of constitutionally fixated land rights is fundamental to understanding contemporary power relations and race in Mexico. The Zapatista movement and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN; Zapatista Army of National Liberation), their armed branch in Chiapas, have repeatedly stated that this valorization of land was an essential “catalyst in the communities” for their armed uprising in 1994 (Subcomandante Marcos, cited in Fazio 1996, 132). The government immediately employed counterinsurgency measures against the EZLN, aided by the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISEN; National Investigation and Security Center) secret service and paramilitary groups (Fazio 1996). In this complex constellation, some forces pushed for a radical economic restructuring project, while simultaneously, the emerging insurgency movement attracted international attention and explicitly criticized the restructuring. Simultaneously, state party rule showed cracks and signs of fatigue, and a new liberal-left party (PRD) emerged as a political force despite political violence directed against it (Fazio 1996, 35; Combes 2021). Article 27, its amendment, the consequences of market openings, and the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada radically changed the conditions of land ownership. Price guarantees for many basic foodstuffs were abolished, and import liberalization caused a massive food influx from the United States. Subsidy programs such as PROCAMPO and small investment programs to increase productivity hardly cushioned the effects of these changes (Anguiano 2010; Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 171–72). Large sections of the peasantry could no longer survive on the fragmented plots of land, forcing many to move to the United States or into complementing income with remittances from relatives. Only in Chiapas did the mid-1990s indigenous struggles for land partially result in the regulated expropriation of large unused private areas (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 139–41). CONCLUSION This chapter is a brief historical summary of the relation among three important aspects for understanding contemporary state violence and crime in both Colombia and Mexico: social relations, economic policy and capital groups, and property.

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I argue that to understand the “war on drugs” and its impacts, we need to recognize the fundamental historical role of racialized and class relations, changes in property, and transformations in the global economy as they relate to state formation. In a persistent turn of historical racist discourses, it is the “other,” racialized Colombia where contemporary violence takes place, in distance to the metropolis. In both contexts, racial power relations historically translated into constructions of privilege, inferiority, and invisibility (Maya Restrepo 2009; Wabgou et al. 2012). Processes of racialization and class dynamics were intimately linked to each other, and to the possibilities of wielding political power. In consequence, racial property relations are fundamental for understanding state selectivity, and the potential for influencing state policies, including security. In Colombia and Mexico, land ownership partly defined the structural and strategic selectivity of the state, meaning that the access to state institutions, and the capacity of different social sectors to influence state decision-making over time, in part depended on their ability to use land ownership as a form of power. This worked mainly through the appropriation of private property. The structural discrimination of communal forms of property, in turn, illustrates racist elements of state power, connected to the specific type of appropriation and disposal of labor, world market integration, and land ownership (Mariátegui 2007; Quijano 2014, 320–22). This history, which we can understand through the coloniality of power, is an important prerequisite to understanding coercion at the height of the military offensives.

Chapter 3

Supporting Repression The Coloniality of Dispersed Coercion

THE COLONIALITY OF COERCION Coercion is deeply intertwined with the coloniality of state power—the socioeconomic hierarchies of those that state coercion targets, often perceiving racialized subjects as criminals, and the exclusivity of those able to influence state policies in the field, shape practices of coercion. In this conceptual chapter, I make a link that, despite excellent existing work, is only emerging (LeBrón 2019; Alves 2018; Barak, Leighton, and Cotton 2018; Hall et al. 1978). I articulate the analyses of class and race in state coercion and its dispersal. This speaks to recent conceptualizations of a “global authoritarian turn” (Murakami Wood 2017; Chacko and Jayasuriya 2018), which Colombia and Mexico clearly precede, and the literature on differentiated, even extraterritorial authoritarian practices (Koch 2017; Glasius 2018; Jenss and Schuetze 2020), surveillance (Arteaga 2017; Graham 2011), and punitivism in Latin America (Iturralde 2016; Müller 2016; Willis 2015). It builds on the wealth of Colombian literature on the coercive cooperation between the state, para-political, and openly irregular forces, and the role of specific actors such as elite forces in supporting diverse forms of organizing coercion (Gutiérrez Sanín 2019; Leal Buitrago 2006; Camacho 2009; Ramírez 2015; Pearce 2010). Ultimately, this chapter calls for historicizing coercion and for deconstructing the idea that a monopoly of force is necessarily located with the national state. I draw on Franco Restrepo’s (2009) work on the continuous, active outsourcing and reintegration of the exercise of coercion, and on the work of Aníbal Quijano, Stuart Hall, and Nicos Poulantzas.1 Read together, these thinkers offer compelling and complex conceptualizations of the state, the mechanisms of reproduction of social power relations and struggles to transform them, and a level of abstraction that allows me to take these 53

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conceptualizations beyond the specific contexts I studied. Far from being incompatible, the frictions that arise between Poulantzian and decolonial studies are fruitful for thinking about the state and violence. I argue that not only is coercion exercised through racialization and class, but it frequently works through the dispersal of the exercise of that coercion. Both Poulantzas and Hall are instructive for analyzing the critical conjuncture of the early 2000s in Mexico and Colombia. In conjunctural terms, social forces actively pursue specific projects, and their acceptance or reluctance to use coercion and (political) violence constantly shifts, as does their access to different state institutions. It is in the support and contestation of political projects that state coercion is reshaped. Conversely, the political security projects I study can only be adequately grasped when recognizing the historical role of coercion in contexts that change over time. For a contextualized notion of the authoritarian and neoliberal state, however, it is not only necessary to articulate class and race but also to scrutinize more clearly notions of coercion and state violence—this chapter situates the contemporary forms of coercion in security policies discussed in the following chapters in the long-term continuities of class and racial hierarchies (Axster et al. 2021). I draw on Quijano’s (2014, 285–327) sociohistorical understanding of the naturalization of social classifications to analyze how coercion has historically affected people differently according to class, race, and gender. To grasp the continuities and the shifts and messiness in political relations around the use of coercion, I first conceptualize what I call the coloniality of coercion and unpack the dispersal of coercion as more than a deviance from the alleged norm. Understanding political projects as conflictual processes depending on specific actor constellations and practices helps me identify those coercive practices that become state policies. Then, I sketch longer-term continuities and shifts in social relations in Colombia and Mexico. Last, I juxtapose those that supported and pushed state transformation projects in Colombia at the turn of the century, with those in Mexico from 2006 onward. HISTORICIZING DISPERSED STATE COERCION To better understand the story of the not-so-convergent contexts of Colombia’s and Mexico’s variants of the “war on drugs,” I place Quijano’s (2014) coloniality of state power in dialogue with a Poulantzian reading of state coercion at the core of statecraft. This form of coercion appears in dispersed form, executed by a whole range of actors who are not all recognized as state representatives and who may stand for localized power relations or struggles for regional political power. The aim is to overcome conceptual weaknesses in

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Eurocentric tendencies, which define state violence in Latin America simply as deviant from the ideal of statehood. I am interested not just in the problematic effects of punitive policing in conjunction with racialization but also in the coloniality of state power in shaping such security policies. For historical analyses of colonial power and decolonization (Lao Montés 2014), violence is not only constitutive for modernity but also continuously present in everyday practices that entangle racialized, sexualized, and class-based power. Recognizing the coloniality of state coercion helps me ask who is actually affected by state violence and provide nuanced answers to that question. Introducing the notion of coloniality of power into the literature on state coercion and crime makes three fundamental contributions. First, coloniality highlights who distinguishes (state) coercion from state crime. In critical criminology, a relative consensus is that those dominant social forces with most influence on agenda setting in law enforcement and on definitions of crime are least likely to suffer from state coercion (Michalowski 2016, 195) and even less from state crime. Even if dominant sectors do not control lawmaking, they usually try to make their interests appear as universally beneficial. Coloniality highlights not just the influence of wealth and power on legal definitions but that of structural racism embedded in postcolonial states, for instance, in US-influenced Latin American legal systems. The formerly colonized are often the marginalized majorities (or minorities) of today. Because their interests are not seen as universally beneficial, the coloniality of state power makes it less likely that the state exercises coercion in their interest. This approach goes beyond recognizing race as a variable, as some strands of criminology have done (Agnew 2011, 2). Second, the approach highlights that the postcolonial state exercises coercion disproportionately against its marginalized majorities. The boundary between state coercion and state crime partly depends on their acceptance in society. The coloniality of state power implies that state coercion—and even crime—against some (the formerly colonized) is more readily accepted than coercion against those social forces that perceive themselves to be closer to the state and to hegemonic thought. The latter benefit from hierarchized social classifications, naturalized for centuries. These imply subtly or openly expressed perceptions of people according to their differentiated value. What became known as the “modern nation state”—which purportedly guarantees equality before the law and the protection of the interests of all—developed only as exceptions (Quijano 2014, 610–13). The enslavement of Africans in the Americas and the subordination of indigenous peoples enabled an economic model of extraction and exploitation. The colonial ideology of differentiation also reinforced social cleavages after independence. Racial hierarchies were not dissolved as part of the efforts to

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construct postcolonial national unity. On the contrary, they frequently served to justify state crime against indigenous populations (Zavaleta 2009a, 346). The naturalization of a hierarchical relationship between presupposed identities (i.e., “irrational” indigenous vs. “rational” Europeans) and the alleged otherness of the colonized served to deny them rights and exempted European legal philosophy from recognizing certain crimes as such. Exemplifying Iberian and European views of the unconditional legitimacy of colonial expansion for the purpose of trade, Francisco Fray de Vitoria, considered by many the founder of international law, explicitly saw only Europeans as legal subjects at all, and denied the indigenous peoples of America the right to prohibit the colonizers’ presence, trade, or appropriation of goods, including land (Dussel 2005, 52–53). This mind-set legitimized and legalized dispossession and continued to do so. Crimes committed by Mexican or Colombian state forces, be they legally prosecuted or not, cannot be understood without an analysis of global relations. So, third, Quijano’s coloniality of power (2014, 777–832) contextualizes coercion in two ways. It recognizes the conflictive nature and global structure of social relations and the centrality of coercion to state power (Poulantzas 2002, 109; see Green and Ward 2004, 3) beyond the postcolonial state, where it is nonetheless particularly visible. On a meta level, the notion of the coloniality of state coercion changes the way we speak about postcolonial states and their supposed vulnerability. Much scholarship on violence in the Global South puts forth post-Weberian state theories, which in different iterations stress how the modern state centralized and monopolized the exercise of coercion, safeguarding a “common good.” Instead, I rely on Colombian social scientist Franco Restrepo (2009, 391). Franco Restrepo criticizes the Poulantzian understanding of the state’s mediating role and monopoly on the use of force, even if she otherwise adopts and develops Poulantzas’s relational understanding of the state. She argues that it is indeed not constitutive for the state or the reproduction of the capitalist system whether coercion is organized as a state monopoly or not. The concrete historical organization of state violence in European states, which developed specific regulatory mechanisms for economic activities, a tax monopoly, and restrictions on state power, is an exception. Latin American states gained independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century before other colonial projects had even begun. In trying to understand their particular trajectory, scholars have frequently attributed the high prevalence of private violence to the lack of centralization of coercion and its active delegation (Centeno 2002; González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003; Pearce 2010, 298). Yet dominant factions never pursued the centralization and monopolization of force as an actual political project. European states also repeatedly outsourced and sometimes reincorporated violence

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(Thomson 1996, 54); a shared “moral and political space” between politicians and criminal groups that exercises violence may exist to different degrees (Auyero 2007, 33; see Davis 2010). Feminist scholars (Walby 2009) have argued how states temporarily forego their monopoly of force when not taking action against domestic violence. The variability of the exercise of coercion, which Franco Restrepo (2009) foregrounds, is key to analyzing the relationship between the coloniality of power and relations of violence in the Colombian and Mexican “wars on drugs.” What did provoke an answer by their executive powers, repeatedly, was the long-term existence of independent republics where former enslaved people governed and defended themselves from a state threatening them with coercive labor and death (Navarrete 2008). This continues up to the present. Today, the state offers only selective protection in a permanent conflict—that is, it protects some parts of society more than others. In Colombia, this took the form of legalizing paramilitary units and thus legitimizing the decentralization of the function of violence in parliament. They were made illegal, however, when stronger forces objected to them. Overlaps between so-called state and private coercion that contradict a state monopoly develop due to contradictory social relations. Understanding these contradictions and struggles as the basis of state coercion, I return to Poulantzas’s relational reading of the state as a “material condensation of power relations of social forces”; a strategic terrain, as Poulantzas (2002, 159, 170) calls it. This reminds us of the relational nature of coercion. By no means is there an objectively established legitimacy of this state power; social forces judge state authority differently, and the exercise of coercion reflects their differing interests. Franco Restrepo’s arguments, however, are rigorous in their twofold criticism: both of liberal and post-Weberian state theories, and of the centrality that the state monopoly of violence assumes in materialist state theories. Even the latter remain firmly based both on class analysis and on Weberian ideas of the state monopoly of violence. Yet in contrast to Weberian accounts, Poulantzas (2002, 108–9) recognizes that the state remains rooted in physical violence (accordingly, Poulantzas heavily criticized Foucault, 2002, 105–7). Physical violence is at the core of the Colombian and Mexican (capitalist) states. Formal monopolization does not make violent relationships disappear from society.

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COERCION AT THE CORE OF POSTCOLONIAL POWER RELATIONS For this next section, I argue that, historically, the extent to which the Colombian and Mexican states consolidated a monopoly on the use of force depended in part on contradictory social forces. Whether the state actually exercises direct and monopolistic control is an empirical matter, not constitutive for the state (Franco Restrepo 2009, 391), remaining relative and highly variable over time. From this perspective, I ask which social forces supported the expanded use of state and nonstate coercion, in a context where formal state institutions were never the only ones exercising coercion. I recognize the interplay between, and coexistence of, consent and coercion, and thus ask about both long-term continuities (context) and about actual projects driven by specific social forces and actors (conjunctural analysis). In seeking to understand the role of the state in coercion in the case of the “war on drugs” in Colombia and Mexico, I foreground social groups’ interests, tensions, and contradictions. While neoliberalizing processes in Latin America prefigured those in Europe and the United States, the exclusive selectivity of those enjoying social services akin to experiences of Fordism, make Colombia and Mexico differ starkly from Europe. Additionally, as explored in chapter 2, the historical condition of postcoloniality in conjunction with specific global economic relations has indeed shaped social relations. To grasp both context and conjuncture, I roughly model the following chapters on a “historical-materialist policy field analysis” (Brand 2013; Claar 2018). The concept of a project serves “to analytically aggregate the immense variety of practices, tactics and strategies relevant to the conflict under study” (Kannankulam and Georgi 2012, 38), understanding state policies as part and result of social struggles. Specific political projects, presented as solutions to urgent social, economic, and political problems, are the terrain for analyzing concrete practices, depending on the messy politics and specificities of place. “State projects” capture whether state institutional practices are relatively coherently grouped around a set of policy strategies. I understand the “security projects” of the 2000s in Colombia and Mexico in that way. Social forces rally around broader, contested projects of society. Examining projects struggling for hegemony as conflictual historical processes means looking for relevant actors, repertoires, and practices (Bruff and Tansel 2019). Through a bundle of practices—not as a conscious, coordinated alliance—actors seek to realize their interests in social disputes, to make them universally valid principles, but cannot always know which practices will prove politically successful (Kannankulam and Georgi 2012, 20, 34–35), even if they are simultaneously functional for capital accumulation. My

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relational reading of the state (Poulantzas 2002, 159) helps me understand politics as an expression of such contradictory relations,2 which in turn are inscribed into the state’s material organization (Hirsch 2005, 16). To identify the competing political projects and, ultimately, the practices that facilitate or counteract the security projects in Colombia and Mexico, it is valuable to remember Hall’s cautionary words: No project achieves hegemony as a completed project. It is a process, not a state of being. No victories are permanent or final. Hegemony has constantly to be “worked on,” maintained, renewed, revised. Excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose interests have not been taken into account, form the basis of counter-movements, resistance, alternative strategies and visions . . . and the struggle over a hegemonic system starts anew. (Hall 2011, 26)

Consensus by some and violence against others cannot simply be shifted against each other (as if more consensus corresponded to less violence). Rather, they coexist as their relations constantly shift. State coercion in the Colombian and Mexican security projects permanently included “techniques of power” and “mechanisms of consensus”; “repression is thus never pure negation” (Poulantzas 2002, 109, 112). Instead, fears triggered by authoritarian violence are a productive affirmation. If successful, coercive state activities against certain groups appear widely legitimate, much like Hall et al. (1978) observed when crime began to play a prominent role in creating consent for state coercion within the broader project of restructuring of social relations in 1970s Britain. If not, this consent may come only from small, yet influential social groups. Everyday state disciplining and, indeed, brutality, in Colombia or Mexico, does not apply to everyone in society. The shape and face of the state may be disparately different for one or another person. People who are read as indigenous and Afro–Latin Americans are particularly vulnerable to state crime.3 This is where class, race, and gender come in, and why Quijano’s coloniality of state power is such a powerful concept for understanding coercion. The State-Nonstate Coercion Continuum in Colombia Often invoked in historical work on Colombia, the regional fragmentation implied by the topographical, geographical characteristics of the Andes and the Amazon, the Pacific and Caribbean coasts impacted sociopolitical relations over time (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 266). After independence, sociopolitical regionalism manifested itself in provinces, which even used different currencies up until the 1930s. Linked to socioeconomic hierarchies inherited from colonialism, the central state repeatedly made

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arrangements with locally and regionally anchored ruling groups. In this state with formally democratic institutions and consolidated administrative apparatuses, visible informal power structures were institutionalized within the traditional two-party system. Dominant forces struggled over political projects, but hardly allowed subaltern factions to seriously question entrenched power relations (Leal Buitrago 2006; Uribe Hincapié 2001, 88–89). Progressive forces were only selectively able to shape legislative changes in this context (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 316). The police, a small force based in Bogotá and subject to political changes of the beginning twentieth century (Llorente 2005, 194), have always been under military command, ultimately under the authority of the Defense Ministry. Centralized as the National Police only in the 1960s after having been briefly dissolved during La Violencia, its members’ careers were modeled after the military. Its mission was seen as assisting the military in “pacifying” the countryside—which in 1928 meant a documented involvement of police in the massacre against strikers at United Fruit banana plantations. Mechanisms of consent, central to government in capitalism, were limited to some. The “organized physical violence” against bodies targeted others (Poulantzas 2002, 109, 58). Fittingly, the so-called Heroic Law in 1928 enshrined censorship and penalized acts of protest. While violent police forces may appear dysfunctional, state institutions and politicians frequently applauded violent practices. On police violence, Fals Borda (2009a, 140–41) writes, “[t]he policeman is no longer a guardian of order but an agent of disorder and crime.” La Violencia (The Violence; 1948–1958), often presented as a conflict between conservatives and liberals, frequently included state repression and social cleansing; some invoke genocidal dimensions (Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 11; Montesinos Coleman 2013, 172). Official numbers show how violence was indeed highly concentrated (Roldán 2003, 10). The regional state acted as a punitive force against “unruly,” defiant populations at the tropical peripheries—a project “based on the maintenance of hierarchies of difference” (Roldán 2003, 37, 39). The following National Front (Frente Nacional) period with alternating governments between conservatives and liberals, while stable, was not free of coercion. Indeed, a growing imbalance emerged between the strengthened state coercive apparatuses and stagnation in regulatory institutions (González, Bolívar, and Vázquez 2003, 295). Rather than strictly along party lines, polarization ran between closely intertwined party leaders and diverse social sectors. In the context of state crackdowns on the independent “peasant republic” of Marquetalia, a radical counter-project emerged: the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC; Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) were founded between 1964 and 1966 (Richani 2002, 60–62).

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In the 1960s, governance increasingly relied on state-of-emergency declarations. A 1968 constitutional amendment allowed the executive branch to suspend laws deemed problematic for that exercise (Franco Restrepo 2009, 232–33). To some extent, the military served as a guarantor of political stability and thus gained weight and autonomy, for instance, in determining its own budget (Richani 2002, 41–43). This margin of maneuver spared Colombia the many coup attempts known in other countries (Zinecker 2007, 1038). State coercion relied on private militias, frequently coordinated by the military. Laws in 1965 and 1968 legalized paramilitaries or militias to “support” the military in fighting the emerging guerrillas (Richani 2002, 33; Zelik 2009). Already in 1963, after US “Special Survey” visits in 1959 and 1962, Colombian military handbooks suggested to employ paramilitary forces, and perceived civilians as the potential social base of guerrillas, thus a military objective (Army Handbook 1963; cited in Zelik 2009, 87). Nevertheless, in contrast to Mexico, the judiciary repeatedly opposed and challenged the executive (Palacio and Rojas 1990, 90, 84), retaining some institutional autonomy and speaking out against military jurisdiction (i.e., interview with human rights defender, November 10, 2011). While its institutions were not a real counterweight to dominant factions, judiciary representatives that spoke out often became targets of assassination attempts. The continuous use of coercion to contain independent political projects and to enable capital accumulation frequently relied on the dispersed use of force. Integrative measures for broad sections of the population were mostly lacking. Populist projects such as those of Gaitán or Rojas Pinilla were quickly stopped and never constituted a national popular hegemony project, which could have mitigated the unequal distribution of land ownership by including broader society as had been done in Mexico. Nevertheless, the expansion of repressive strategies was not linear but, instead, subject to political conjunctures. Indeed, liberal president Turbay Ayala (1978–1982), clearly influenced by the National Security Doctrine, made the military a pillar of his security paradigms. He allowed it jurisdiction over civilians through the Security Statute of 1978, suspended political rights, and redefined some acts as criminal, based on counterinsurgency arguments. Private violence and state coercion or a mixture of both often replaced conflict mediation. The central government repeatedly dissolved the monopoly of physical violence in arrangements with powerful networks that facilitated population access. Contradictions within and between social forces and their conflicting economic strategies repeatedly manifested in rural class conflicts and violent displacement. Such practices once again exposed how state institutions tolerated and even promoted private violence. Repeatedly, state representatives would openly defend private security, arguing, for instance, that “the self-defense groups exist because the Marxist guerrillas exist [ . . .

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and because of] the ineptitude of the state to guarantee their life, honor, and property, which is exactly what the state exists for” (Interior Minister Londoño Hoyos 2006). In the 1980s, the police established small urban police stations called Centros de Atención Inmediata (CAI; Immediate Attention Centers), allegedly making police more visible across urban space as an early form of community policing (which failed due to widespread distrust). Concurrently, they formed the first elite units to “fight the drug trade” (Llorente 2005, 199–200) alongside the military. Large sectors of society perceived the police to be part of the problem. One prominent example was the confrontations between Pablo Escobar’s illegal economy network and the Barco government (1986– 1990). While Escobar’s network boasted about the number of killed police, studies document that city dwellers perceived the same police as corrupt and violent (Llorente 2005, 200). In parallel, President Barco declared the rural paramilitary “self-defense” groups such as those of the cattle association ACDEGAM illegal, but without a mechanism for effectively disbanding the legally created groups (Romero 2006, 365). In fact, these groups expanded more rapidly than the guerrillas (Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 24; Richani 2002, 55) and merged in 1997, forming the national organization Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). AUC commanders very often came from rural upper-class society (the case of Salvatore Mancuso in Córdoba, the Castaños in Antioquia, or Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, Jorge 40, in Valledupar) and defended its specific interests as part of a politically right-wing, economically ultraliberal state project. However, although the AUC conveyed a racist worldview, there were of course Afro-Colombian paramilitary soldiers, only underscoring Colombia’s class and racial tensions (La Silla Vacía 2011c). Alliances coincided with dominant classes’ fears of losing accumulated capital or experiencing a downturn, and rising forces benefiting and consolidating their new position. The practical invisibility in public state discourses of paramilitaries’ willingness to use excessive violence against civilians (Franco Restrepo 2009, 130–31) increased their social acceptance (García Marrugo 2013). The AUC’s self-definition as a “politicalmilitary movement of anti-subversive orientation, which exercises the right to legitimate self-defense and demands transformations from the state, but does not oppose it” (AUC; cited in Valencia 2007, 24), shows its state-affirmative character, with a clear idea of social control and ideal development paths (Gutiérrez 2009; Franco Restrepo 2009, 48–50, 111–12). While paramilitaries claimed their legitimacy precisely because of the state’s absence or inaction, they invoked state authority, and their political violence became core to “the drive toward privatization, free trade, flexible, labor markets” (Montesinos Coleman 2013, 173). Particularly in Urabá, alto

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Sinú, and Córdoba in the northwest, paramilitary forces established authoritarian order by practically eliminating political opposition after strikes in the banana sector in the early 1990s. They systematically weakened the trade union movement (Zelik 2009, 210–12), thus disorganizing subaltern forces. The AUC were responsible for massacres, throwing bodies into rivers or into unmarked mass graves. They dislocated existing socio-spatial dynamics, subjecting citizens to coercive rules. The AUC violently displaced people on a large scale and subsequently appropriated the land they left behind. Those who stayed were often no longer able to express themselves politically and were subject to new dress codes and conservative moral concepts. Diverse actors were able to preserve their interests through this dispersed organization of violence. Particularly, economically dominant factions close to the Sociedad de Agricultores de Colombia (SAC; Colombian Agricultural Society) and the Federación de Ganaderos (FEDEGAN; Livestock Breeders’ Federation) scrambled to reposition themselves within the changing export economy and actively founded and supported paramilitary groups; their class background often overlapped with an emerging illegal economy upper class. The former’s economic importance was declining; they increasingly felt their privileges questioned by guerrilla groups and an active civil society and were particularly concerned about an agricultural reform looming behind potential negotiations with the FARC at the end of the 1990s (El Tiempo 2006c). This enabled the AUC paramilitaries to prepare and sign the Ralito Pact document (El Tiempo 2007b; Pacto de Santa Fe de Ralito 2001) with parliamentarians of the future Uribista coalition, bringing together common interests of different class forces. Anti-progressive violence remained a “source of structural coherence” (Franco Restrepo 2009, 389). Cooperation between paramilitaries and state forces consisted of logistical support. For instance, before the Mapiripán massacre in 1997, paramilitaries flew to the region in military planes; civil society requests for state intervention in the days before remained unanswered (for the course of events, see Verdad Abierta 2011b, e). The provision of vehicles or helicopters, the sudden inactivity of local police stations, and administrative support by regional politicians are signs of collusion in many regions (Franco Restrepo 2009; HRW 2001; López Hernández 2010). In Urabá, Antioquia, AUC member and banana farmer Raúl Hasbún claims the AUC used barracks directly adjacent to the Seventeenth Army Brigade. “I was in command. Not directly, but indirectly. The army, the public prosecutor’s office, the police, DAS, Sijín, all institutions listened to us. We received all the information, we usually put together a report that we sent to everyone” (Semana 2012d). Emancipatory projects that relied on state policies, and thus, its relative autonomy, such as the one put forward by Gaitán in the 1940s, or by later forces who took up arms as demands for inclusionary politics failed (Ramírez

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2015, 43), had extremely narrow margins of maneuver in Colombia. The numerous abandoned peace processes in particular illustrate this, not without conflicts within the state ensemble, particularly between the executive and the military (Palacio and Rojas 1990, 89). The discrepancy among violent social practices, formal democracy (repeatedly highlighted as a Colombian achievement), and formally enforceable rights tended to undermine those practices of consent that targeted a more diverse set of social groups. For instance, the fight against threats such as “terrorism” or organized crime frequently and primarily targeted those parts of society that already confronted unfavorable conditions in terms of access to the state. Illustrating the coloniality of law, in 1990s Colombia, a special criminal law regime designed to punish “terrorist” acts with long prison sentences was applied to ordinary offences, making hardly any distinction between these and more serious crimes. In consequence, courts frequently found those guilty who “belonged to underprivileged sectors, with low education, whose subsistence is endangered by aggravated economic and social precariousness” (Aponte 1999, 54–55). Indigenous communities, Colombians working informally, and women were disproportionately affected. Dispersion of Violence in Mexico One of the Mexican state’s colonial legacies is the informal mediating arrangements established during Spanish rule, which linked autonomous regional power centers to the colonial center in Mexico City, and to each other. Intermediaries were essential local “agents of state-territorial projects,” who often combined functions of the judiciary, executive, and (selective) security provision, and simultaneously pushed back against state regulation, such as being taxed themselves (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 78). In nineteenth-century southern Michoacán, for instance, five large haciendas with their own armies, concentrated both the means of production and political rule (Maldonado Aranda 2012, 11). The Porfirian dictatorship was successful in projecting the appearance of pacification to international observers, although actually, much violence remained (Piccato 2017). For instance, the jefaturas políticas, part repressive forces, part intermediaries between state institutions and individuals, were essential to the efficient state machinery and supported existing property relations, thus benefiting specific social forces with private property. They not only contributed to organizing (central) state governance in rural societies but also exercised personal, often openly violent rule and acted as behavioral regulators on the micro level (Falcón 1994, 110). This state personnel combined executive and law-making tasks and was key “for integrating, channeling or repressing those who made demands or refused to accept the

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rules of the game imposed” (Falcón 1994, 110). The Porfiriate crushed the Yaqui struggles for land in Sonora, a unique expression of peasant-indigenous mobilization (Knight 1990b, 77), exercised repression against mining workers in Sonora, and described such sectors as uneducated and unproductive (Mallon 1994). Scholars have routinely highlighted Mexican exceptionality due to the Mexican Revolution. Analyses of the revolution as a prolonged phase of upheaval that “rejected the economic and political logic of Porfirian Mexico” (Hesketh 2017, 80) show that—while not a unitary movement—social relations were reorganized. Yet there were severe limits to change in that it largely continued a project of (dependent) capitalist modernization. Indeed, with the revolution, rising social forces deconstructed the Porfirian institutions of coercion (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 72–73). The new army included some, but not all, forces that had participated in the fighting. The police’s role was ambiguous. Reduced in size, its “general inspector” remained a military close to and named by the president (Pulido Esteva 2017). In the long run, however, Mexican police remained highly decentralized, much more similar in structure to the US police than to the Colombian police (Sabet 2012, 6). The continued “dispersion of violence” meant local powerful actors could more easily counter dissent (Müller 2012, 34). Class and race were essential in shaping the relationship of different social segments with both the local and national postrevolutionary state. The key element was an executive branch with far-reaching powers. The dominance of the executive over the judiciary and legislature had not changed with the revolution. Violence was consistently used against those constructed to be “outside” the revolutionary family (Pansters 2012). For example, the Supreme Court, with few exceptions, never contradicted the measures of the postrevolutionary presidents of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party), as the president partly determined the judiciary’s personnel (Flores Pérez 2009, 89). In practice, then, there were hardly any checks and balances. The presidency, a paternalist institution practically above the constitution, was integral to the model (Ávalos Tenorio 2009). Regional and local dominant factions frequently operated across the alleged legal-illegal divide, benefiting from the flexibility of their coalition with the metropolitan PRI, which let them govern rural areas with a high degree of autonomy (Knight 1990a, 4–6; Maldonado Aranda 2012, 7). The central state tolerated their individual accumulation activities, illegal practices, and the use of selective violence throughout (Müller 2012, 35). Yet incarceration did not necessarily correspond with actual crime, nor did impunity mean there was no legal culpability (Piccato 2017, 4). Similar to Colombia, the recourse to formal legal resources allowed state representatives to shape informal relations with crime to their

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favor. The legal sphere in turn constituted a “terrain where illegal practices produce laws and extra-legal solutions are transferred into the legal process” (Müller 2012, 36; see Pansters 2012). In other words, laws did not guarantee the containment of coercive state practices. Even if the Mexican Revolution routinely served as a discursive argument for the inclusion of subalterns, political violence remained an instrument to disarticulate oppositional forces particularly at the local scale, and PRI politicians systematically devalued contestation. The decentralized police forces played a fundamental, if highly ambiguous, role as intermediaries with criminal groups and repressors of opposition, although they were portrayed as fighters against criminal groups (Sabet 2012, 5; Müller 2012; Smith 2021, 39). Until 1968, the use of violence never responded to or brought about a fundamental challenge to the PRI model. Yet from the 1940s and 1950s onward, the repressive elements for controlling dissident groups came clearly to the fore (Flores Pérez 2009, 92). Under President Alemán in 1947, the newly created Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS; Federal Security Directorate) assumed the role of an antisubversive police—“one of Latin America’s first Cold War police forces” (Smith 2021, 128) primarily targeting leftists. Trade unions increasingly became intermediaries for capital interests, while those “trade union leaderships that rejected co-optation [. . .] were crushed and persecuted” (Anguiano 2010, 43). While political violence existed against activists and politicians, trade unions became coercive institutions themselves, organizing grupos de choque, writing blacklists and coordinating punishments for and excluding dissident unionists. Members could be legally stripped of their membership (Anguiano 2010, 43). Some such coercive organizations loosely tied to the state are still relevant in contemporary political violence (Bautista Martínez 2010). State coercion against opposition, then, was not new, but state forces drastically displayed it in 1968, during the Díaz Ordaz presidency (1964–1970), shooting student demonstrators in Mexico City (Tlatelolco). They demonstrably employed irregular forces like the Batallón Olimpia. This became a turning point in the perception of the state ensemble (Anguiano 2010, 19–21). In the 1970s under Luis Echeverría, the Mexican state employed a low-intensity war against rural activists and guerrilla groups in places like Guerrero, Veracruz, and Chiapas. Armed movements served to legitimize the army’s and the police’s reinforcement. Counterinsurgency logics became pervasive in all security apparatuses. Death flights, disappearances, and selective killings took place at about the same time in Mexico as during the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone (Aviña 2014; FEMOSPP 2006). Activists started fearing the DFS building in Mexico City as a place where hundreds of disappeared students endured torture (Proceso 2001a, 14). Yet the 1970s

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also saw the founding of popular organizations initiating politicization around class and race, such as the Oaxacan COCEI in 1973 (Hesketh 2017, 116). Similar to Colombia, many scholars see a phase of police professionalization in the 1990s under President Zedillo (1994–2000). Police corruption, however, was the norm taught in police academies; police themselves often committed petty crime, and coercing dissent remained the priority (Arteaga and López 1998; Sabet 2012). Despite the establishment of the National Security System, a coordinating effort, the multiplication and internal divisions of security organs had led to “a tangle of half-measure reforms, forgettable acronyms, and bitter rivalries” (Smith 2021, 338). The Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISEN; National Investigation and Security Center), having replaced the DFS in 1989, was involved in intelligence on the activism by PRI dissidents; and the newly created Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP; Federal Preventive Police), the predecessor of the Policía Federal (PF; Federal Police), spied on the organizers of the major strike in Mexico’s renowned National University in 2000—led by Genaro García Luna, who would become President Felipe Calderón’s public security secretary. Army protagonism had returned: The military-led PFP integrated five thousand soldiers. Those who retook the university campus in February 2000, were essentially soldiers in PFP uniforms (Centro ProDH 2009, 15; CorreaCabrera and Payan 2021, 24). Operation México Seguro in 2005 marked an even more significant upgrading of the armed forces. In Nuevo Laredo, military command effectively subordinated civilian authorities. Political violence is not a new phenomenon in Mexico. In the shape of at least 265 murders against PRD members, the opposition party emerging from a split from the PRI, it was widespread in the 1990s, above all during local election campaigns and in states like Michoacán, Oaxaca, or Guerrero. In some cases, perpetrators would openly boast “they could kill as many PRD members as they liked” (victims foundation, cited in Combes 2021). In Chiapas, paramilitary groups were a systemic part of counterinsurgency against the Zapatistas in the 1990s but emerged even before the 1994 rebellion, during Patrocinio González’s mandate as governor (1988–1993). The then director of the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH; National Human Rights Commission), Jorge Madrazo, said in 1995 that to speak of paramilitaries (who went by the name of guardias blancas) and local powerful politicians (caciques) was “almost the same” (cited in Fazio 1996, 201). Between 1994 and 1996, during the height of low-intensity conflict against the Zapatistas, six hundred peasants and activists were killed. The most notorious massacre was committed in Acteal in 1997, a so-called Abeja community supportive of the Zapatistas (Fazio 1996, 297). The paramilitary group Máscara Roja killed forty-five, demonstrably acting with state involvement (Bellinghausen 2008). Simultaneously, the military launched antidrug

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operations against an alleged “cartel” near the Zapatista-influenced town of Oventic in Chiapas and the guerrilla Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo Insurgente (ERPI; Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People) in Guerrero. The relationship between the Mexican state, law, and violence is surprisingly similar to Colombia, inasmuch as the structural recourse to extra-legality and coercion (Poulantzas 2002, 113–14) has repeatedly affirmed a contested state (Olvera Rivera 2019). For instance, special units employed counterinsurgency tactics when the Zapatista movement occupied towns across Chiapas and demanded an end to “bad government” (La Jornada 2005). Counterinsurgency measures and para-legal violence have been recurring particularly in the Mexican South. Contrary to the belief that PRI hegemony made violence obsolete, extralegal violent actors such as paramilitary groups emerged with practically guaranteed impunity, whenever state actors seemed to consider it necessary (Anguiano 2010, 70–71). In general, the seemingly more and more diffuse “social’ violence was actually a multifaceted but systemic phenomenon (see Kloppe-Santamaría and Abello-Colak 2019). SECURITY PROJECTS IN THE 2000s: SUPPORT FOR COERCION The political projects of the 2000s in Colombia and Mexico preceded another wave of adjustments that took root in Europe only after the multiple crises of 2008. I am interested in those social groups that support such state transformations. Their consent to the use of coercion against others is essential to understanding the political expressions of social relations. Indeed, it can be traced back to urban middle and dominant class factions in the late 1990s in Colombia, and the political uncertainty that came with Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s highly contested mandate in 2007. Approaching the two countries’ security policies through bundles of strategies and practices highlights the continuum between coercive and consensual practices. It highlights how political projects are contingent on social power relations, constellations of actors, and specific contexts. Neoliberalizing processes across different contexts are never quite the same and, instead, are place based, uneven, and multilinear. Who, then, pushed for security policies that, as I argue, ended up transforming the entire state ensemble? I briefly sketch the relation of social forces to state and nonstate coercion in the months preceding the implementation of the security offensive in 2002 in Colombia, and 2006–2007 in Mexico. Neither the Uribismo in Colombia, nor the militarized response to crime in Mexico achieved hegemony. In Hall’s (1985, 119) words, they are “hegemonic” in their conception and projection.

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What unites the social forces supporting the government of President Uribe in Colombia in 2002, and that of Calderón in Mexico in 2006, is their acceptance of state coercion toward what they perceived to be “others.” In fact, both governments were ultimately premised on the use of state violence, and its acceptance was part of the political project. This legitimization of coercive practices, I argue, takes place in a wider conjuncture where neoliberal economic policies are “shielded” from political dissent (Bruff 2014, 114; Chaco and Jayasuriya 2018). Colombia: A Political Project with Broad Support? To understand the complex constellations of forces in 2001 and 2002, when Álvaro Uribe Vélez was an independent presidential candidate in Colombia, we must acknowledge the role state coercion, violence, and nonstate actors played for different members of society and how they conceived of the state’s role. In the aftermath of the failed 1990s peace process between the state and FARC guerrillas, Uribe presented his project as an alternative to the two-party system. The same sectors that feared a possible negotiated outcome had contributed to the process’s failure. Influential landowners and cattle breeders, in particular, favored a military solution. In contrast, trade and services-oriented sectors tended to see the conflict itself as a threat and were initially prepared to make concessions to a peace process (interview with lawyer, May 5, 2008). The armed conflict between the state and the FARC (and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN; National Liberation Army) became noticeably more acute in the 1990s and was accompanied by an economic crisis (Richani 2002, 47). During this time, the defense budget increased (Ministerio de Defensa 2009; CEPRI 2016); Colombia recorded negative growth for two consecutive years (CEPALSTAT 2020); unemployment climbed; the poverty rate increased to almost 60 percent; and foreign direct investment decreased sharply (Richani 2002, 135; CEPALSTAT 2020; Bonilla González 2011). When the crisis affected the richest Colombians—Julio Santo Domingo, Luis Carlos Sarmiento, and Carlos Ardila Lülle saw their assets fall by between 27 and 36 percent (Richani 2002, 137–38)—the urban-, industry-, and services-oriented dominant factions briefly changed their political stance and supported a peace process with the FARC, which President Pastrana (1998–2002) initiated. In February 1999, in a survey conducted by the two largest newspapers, El Tiempo and Semana, 84 percent of the top executives of the largest commercial, financial, and industrial companies supported a peace process, and only 16 percent were against a land reform the peace process would imply; 86 percent preferred to finance peace, yet few were prepared to invest their personal capital (El Tiempo 1999).

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Sectors of the military, the media, and the Pastrana government itself were all afraid of a negotiated solution to their disadvantage and the concession of the Pastrana government to the FARC to create a demilitarized zone. Sectors with large land holdings such as the Sociedad de Agricultores (SAC; Colombian Agricultural Society) and Federación de Ganaderos (FEDEGAN; Livestock Breeders’ Federation), and regional bodies like the Asociación de Bananeros de Colombia (AUGURA; Banana Farmers’ Association of Colombia), in particular held this view. The latter saw their fears confirmed that “they would bear the costs of an agreement” (Richani 2002, 141)—namely, the redistribution of land, which the FARC guerilla demanded repeatedly. Representatives of the shrinking coffee sector organized around the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FEDECAFE; National Federation of Coffee Growers) seemed to rely on much more consolidated property relations and a more differentiated ownership structure, at least in the central coffee regions, and did not oppose the deal as fervently. Military administrative posts allowed members of the military to move up the social ladder; soldiers often came from middle-class farming families (Richani 2002, 57; Semana 2003b). Government discourses and measures were highly contradictory. Pastrana sent two generals to retirement due to links to paramilitarism (Zelik 2009, 122), seemingly pursuing the peace process even against internal resistance. Pastrana, however, initiated the professionalization and strengthening of the armed forces, introduced the so-called Fuerzas Unidas de Despliegue Rápido (FUDRA; United Fast Deployment Forces) advised by the United States government (interview with social Scientist, November 28, 2011) and signed Plan Colombia, drawn up under US leadership, which I describe in chapter 5. The state seemed to be under pressure from several sides but not responsible for violence. Pastrana seemed to lose control of the situation shortly after starting the negotiations. Overall, the rates of violence rose rapidly during the peace process, mostly due to massacres and targeted murders executed by paramilitaries loosely assembled under the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) since 1997 (US Colombia Embassy 1997a). In 1999, 24,358 people were murdered. In 2000, the number rose to 25,660 (Richani 2002, 132; Romero 2006, 359). Often, it turned out, paramilitaries were less autonomous from the state than they initially seemed to be. Only a day after initiating the state-FARC dialogue, paramilitaries killed eleven people in the community of Curumaní (IPS Agencia de Noticias 1999). In December 2000, two hundred AUC men occupied seventeen indigenous and Afro-descendant villages located around the Naya River Valley, and between 2000 and 2001, the AUC allegedly killed one thousand people in Buenaventura, Colombia’s main port on the Pacific Coast (Mundubat and Justicia y Paz 2015, 13). In the years prior, Buenaventura had received thousands of forcibly displaced persons from the surrounding rural

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areas, then became a hotspot of violence itself. Simultaneously, business representatives present at public assemblies and talks with FARC representatives had wildly different ideas about what was good for Colombia (El Tiempo 2000b). Accordingly, the support of capital groups for the peace process, including the industry association Asociación Nacional de Empresarios (ANDI; National Business Association), dwindled to only 11 percent by the end of 2000 (Economist 2000). Paramilitary violence, while widely condemned, served a purpose. Social forces and state representatives seeking to inhibit any more than timid attempts at tackling land concentration and income inequality through a peace accord with the FARC were quick to argue that such violence made radical policy changes impossible. The violence, by seemingly diffuse perpetrators, prepared the grounds for the military offensive against the FARC, which Colombian politics placed its bet on in the years to come. Presidential candidate Uribe’s promise to “rebuild the failed state,” to “re-establish” the monopoly on the use of force (Uribe, in El País 2002) by military means, elicited broad support from urban entrepreneurial and middle-class factions in the run-up to the 2002 elections. The appeal of a new political force outside the traditional parties even cut across class divides. Security had become a “daily obsession” (El Tiempo 2000a). Many urban, middle-class Colombians emigrated, not only because of the lack of economic perspectives due to the marked economic decline but also because of the armed conflict during the 1990s. The roads became so unsafe that the main road between the two largest cities, Bogotá and Medellín, was sometimes unusable for weeks. This partly explains the discursive success of the new right (interview with social scientist, November 28, 2011; interview with lawyer, May 5, 2008). The decisive factor, however, was the increasing convergence of interests among segments of the military, some representatives of the executive, senators, members of the representative chamber, and the rising narco-paramilitary and regional dominant class factions. Many of these actors were prepared to assert their interests by force and extralegal means, and this is what they did. In addition to the wave of violence, the AUC intervened massively in the 2002 election process and openly supported Uribe’s candidacy. Candidates they supported achieved up to 90 percent of the regional vote (Semana 2005b). Local and regional actors, AUC, and politicians falsified election lists and threatened local councils. The buses [. . .] drove through barrios, villages, and parishes in San Onofre to pick up people. This was for the 2002 elections and according to some residents of this district in Sucre, hundreds of peasants were taken to the Plan Parejo municipality to see the faces of the candidates who they had to vote for in the

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general elections, Jairo Merlano for the Senate and Muriel Benito Rebollo for the Chamber of Representatives. “Cadena put the names of all the councillors in a bag, pulled out two and said he would kill them and other arbitrarily chosen people if Muriel didn’t win,” says a local farmer. The threat seemed to be effective: Each candidate received 40,000 votes across Sucre. (El Tiempo 2006d)

The essential support structure for Uribe’s government (2002–2010) is found in the links between his coalition and those sectors, once again fundamentally shifting the complex relationship between state agencies and paramilitaries, translating their economic power into political articulation at the national scale (interview with lawyer, May 5, 2008). They were “the real foundation for exercising political power in this country” (interview with social scientist/ activist, October 18, 2011). The most fundamental and best known of the documents supporting this assertion is the Santa Fe de Ralito Pact (Pacto de Santa Fe de Ralito 2001; El Tiempo 2007b). Initially kept a secret, in 2001, regional politicians of the later Uribe coalition and leading AUC members agreed on a “re-foundation of the fatherland,” with the protection of private property (e.g., protection against state expropriation in the redistribution of land or similar) as the central issue (El Tiempo 2007a; Verdad Abierta 2012a). While regional politicians who signed the document later claimed that paramilitaries Salvatore Mancuso, Diego Murillo (Don Berna) and Diego Vecino pressured them to sign, a number of such documents existed for regional “state projects.” Paramilitary commander Rodrigo Tovar Pupo (Jorge 40) and dominant factions in Chivolo and Pivijay signed one in the Magdalena region in September 2000; Freddy Rendón (El Alemán) and politicians signed a “pact for a great united Urabá”; Martin Llanos promoted a Coordination Pact in the Casanare region (López and Sevillano 2008, 67; El Tiempo 2007b; El Espectador 2008c; Verdad Abierta 2009b). Paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso, by contrast, claimed that politicians defined and dominated their relation. Pedro Juan Moreno, former interior minister of Antioquia, had asked them to stop the massacres to avoid damaging Uribe’s presidential campaign, and they did (Verdad Abierta 2014). The former Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS; Administrative Department of Security) information technology department director, Rafael Garcia, testified that intelligence, politicians, and the AUC performed large-scale electoral fraud in the 2002 elections by deciding who would lead the regional lists for senate candidates, and the DAS gave a 5–10 percent commission of the contracts it landed to the AUC (El Tiempo 2006e). When relations among the Uribe coalition, the AUC, and parts of the army became the object of judicial investigations in 2006 (see chapter 6); the signed pacts served as evidence (Verdad Abierta 2012a; El Tiempo 2006d).

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In addition to state personnel from the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches, numerous business sectors supported the authoritarian neoliberal turn from 2002 onward. The agricultural factions of the traditional business associations (FEDEGAN, Asocaña, SAC) were the first in this coalition. Gradually, however, the industrial association ANDI and the financial sector, including business groups such as the Sindicato Antioqueno (GEA), the Ardila Lülle, Bavaria or Sarmiento Groups joined in support of Uribe (Media Ownership Monitor Colombia 2021a; 2021b). The supermarket chain and media conglomerate Olímpica, held by the coastal Char family, supported Uribe and expanded considerably during his mandates. Transnational companies, some of which have faced international legal action for direct financial support of paramilitarism and the murder of trade unionists—especially oil and mining companies such as Drummond, British Petroleum, and Oxy, as well as private security companies such as Blackwater and DynCorp—benefited from the open market stance. Within the state, top military commanders fervently supported Uribe’s political project (HRW 2001; Ministerio de Defensa 2008). Their economic success in return, fueled by the government’s focus on the military campaign against the FARC and ramped up military spending, is less well known. The Grupo Social y Empresarial de la Defensa (GSED; Social and Corporate Group of the Military) became a leading conglomerate in Colombia, ranking eighth among the one hundred most important companies in 2006 in terms of revenue, employing a large number of workers (Ministerio de Defensa 2009, 36); its subsidiaries produce defense software, invest in logistics, and include services such as airplane maintenance. Nevertheless, social movements outside parliamentary channels, whose political identities are not party bound, simultaneously demanded democratic participation, without being able to constitute a real counterweight to the authoritarian neoliberal turn (interview with trade unionist, May 7, 2008). In 1996, before the failed peace process between the state and the FARC, peasant organizations mobilized for nationwide demonstrations against the militarized spraying of coca fields, which, for many smallholders, were simultaneously potato or banana fields. In 1999, this movement founded the Consejo Nacional Campesino (CNC; National Peasant Council) (2003). Peasant, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian organizations in Colombia, though weakened, continued to resist despite targeted killings, violent expulsion, and criminalization.

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Figure 3.1. Soldiers posing for photographer, rural Colombia, April 2008. Source: Photo by the author.

A Political Project? Supporters in Mexico Felipe Calderón Hinojosa represents a segment of society that benefited from economic policies since 1982, and was considered part of a growing political Right (Dawson 2011; Rodríguez Rejas 2010; SERAPAZ 2007, 3). In the Finance Ministry and the Central Bank, PRI-based economists from the 1990s period of reconstruction retained their influence on government decisions, and a group around former president Ernesto Zedillo with representatives of banks BBVA Bancomer and Banamex supported Calderón (Hernández Vicencia 2006, 638). For Calderón’s inner circle and networks of state personnel, contacts made in private universities played a role (Ai Camp 2002, 40–42). In 2006, the interests of the PAN, the PRI, and the entrepreneurial council CCE converged in a joint media campaign against the PRD candidate. Ultimately, in this convergence of state apparatuses, government circles and business associations, political agents used more than just legal means to prevent a candidate that central economic bodies, such as the CCE, the chamber of commerce CANACO, or the open-market-prone council of businessmen Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocio (CMHN; Council of Businessmen), had repeatedly described as a “threat to Mexico” (El Economista 2011). While negatively affected by free trade, the industry chamber CANACINTRA followed the CCE and likewise supported

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Calderón’s election (Fairbrother 2007). This is noteworthy because Calderón never presented an innovative economic agenda, despite structural problems. For instance, excluding the maquila industry, the trade deficit in 2006 was at an enormous US$30 billion (Gutiérrez et al. 2009, 62). In the climate of this highly aggressive election campaign, however, the governing party failed to have Andrés Manuel López Obrador (PRD) disqualified as a presidential candidate. Significant numbers of urban middle classes, workers, and informally working people rallied around the candidate of the PRD in hopes of a truly democratic transition. At the time, the poorest 10 percent held 1.1 percent of income, and the richest 10 percent held 39.6 percent of income, which was a considerably larger share than the 32.7 percent they held in 1984 (Dussel Peters 2004, 71). About 50 percent lived below the poverty line; nineteen million were unable to afford sufficient food. The Mexican minimum wage had lost up to 79 percent of its purchasing power since the mid-1980s (Centro de Análisis Multidisciplinario 2012). Calderón as a candidate of the “old” religious PAN was not uncontroversial even within the party, which had supported a pragmatic-entrepreneurial right-wing candidate, Santiago Creel (“bárbaros del norte”). However, the party’s organized Right around Grupo Guanajuato and “secret” associations such as El Yunque were able to occupy leading positions and marginalize liberal currents within the party after 2000. These ultra-right groups brought together entrepreneurs, politicians, and clergy, and appeared publicly via organizations such as the Frente Universitario Anticomunista (Anticommunist University Front) and conservative-entrepreneurial sections such as Comité Nacional Pro-Vida (National Pro-Life Committee) or Desarrollo Humano Integral (Integral Human Development). These were able to partly reshape business associations such as the employers’ association COPARMEX (Hernández Vicencia 2006, 643). In this context of strengthened right-wing forces in regional political decision-making, and increasingly so at the federal scale, neither then president Vicente Fox nor the PAN leadership succeeded in consolidating broader agreements and pacts (Hernández Vicencia 2006, 645). The PAN governments’ economic policies differed little from those of previous PRI governments, and the alternancia had not led to the hoped-for democratization. Rather, “with the transition, areas of power opened up” (SERAPAZ 2007, 1), for which different dominant factions now competed, both within core state organs and within the three major parties: the PRI, PAN, and PRD; however, conflicts often seemed to result from personal animosities. The Fox presidency had not hesitated to employ police and military forces in counterinsurgency tasks against guerrilla movements such as the Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR; Popular Revolutionary Army), whose small-scale attacks reached Mexico City in the early 2000s (Proceso and Gil Olmos 2001).

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The traditional PAN members who Calderón represented were no less conservative. After initial conflicts, clerical and right-wing groups such as El Yunque supported Calderón’s candidacy so that, for instance, PAN chairman Espino of the ultra-right led the negotiations for the deputies lists, instead of Calderón’s group. Although Calderón and Creel belonged to different interest groups within the PAN, their differences were not seriously programmatic (Nava Vázquez 2009, 203). Social inequality and poverty played no role for the campaign. The PAN’s promise was to attract investment and provide open markets, combined with a reactionary agenda in terms of family and cultural politics. Around one-third of the PAN was composed of radical right-wing (church) organizations (Hernández Vicencia 2006, 643). Many PAN members lead trade and service companies; they do not, however, have the same means of exerting pressure as large conglomerates that integrate financial market activities and the manufacturing sector. Although they are well networked in the employers’ organization COPARMEX, none of the party members who were decisive in the 2006 elections belonged to the CMHN or a similar level elite association (Hernández Vicencia 2006, 648–49). The election itself on July 2, 2006 sparked political tensions. Only two months and numerous complaints of electoral fraud later, the election supervisory authority IFE announced Calderón’s official victory by 0.56 percentage points and refused to conduct a second count. For 147 days, the progressive coalition of PRD, Labour Party (PT), and the Convergencia Party blocked traffic on one of Mexico City’s main streets, Paseo de la Reforma. Its candidate, López Obrador, dismissed the official results and declared himself the legitimate president. When the coalition demanded a recount, supporters such as the entrepreneur Carlos Slim, who had briefly declared his sympathy, quickly started criticizing the “radicalisation and weakening” of the Left (El Economista 2006). Instead, such forces seemed to hope that a slightly transformed government discourse by Calderón would diffuse the situation. Simultaneously, within the progressive coalition, different factions increasingly quarreled. Among those who had left the PRI at the end of the 1980s and founded the PRD as a progressive parliamentary force, the currents López Obrador represented, and PRD founder Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas fell out (Cárdenas team members, personal communication, March 2011). López Obrador’s urban-popular parliamentary coalition and the indigenous, more antistatist movements of the Mexican South had already been estranged. The Zapatistas’ Other Campaign explicitly did not support López Obrador and denied the state as a terrain for Zapatista struggles, due to the movement’s experiences of continued state counterinsurgency in Chiapas. The PRD, however, shied away from a fundamental critique of Mexican parliamentarism. López Obrador in turn accused the Other Campaign of playing into the hands of the PRI and PAN (Cárdenas team member, personal communication,

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March 2011; interview with former party member [PRD], March 22, 2011). According to Zapatista spokesperson Marcos, it was clear that the small reserve that the IFE had, served to let Calderón catch up and take half a million [votes] when the PREP [preliminary election results] closed. With the polling stations’ counting, the opposite happened, AMLO was frontrunner the whole time; when one-fifth of the polling stations were left, his lead was reduced to less than two points, and in the end he was defeated. The discrepancy between the PREP and the polling station count suggests that something rather dirty happened. (Subc. Marcos, quoted in La Jornada 2006b)

Marcos went on saying that the problem was not the 15,000 votes which the Other Campaign may have influenced, but the inability of the parties to convince the population to participate politically. How is it possible that someone who has less than 40% of the vote governs? [. . .] This will eventually lose its foundation. [. . .] we have to organise ourselves to present a left alternative in the crisis that is coming. (Subc. Marcos, quoted in La Jornada 2006b)

The tensions around the elections promised the onset of a long-term political crisis. Local mobilizations by various social movements before the elections, which were recognized nationally, indicate how tense the moment was in which Calderón took office. Their demands found no echo in state institutions; instead, the executive branch took a highly repressive approach, for instance, against protests over the planned airport construction in San Salvador Atenco. Female indigenous protestors in Atenco claimed they were detained for speaking up and judges had dismissed their indigenousness as unfounded (La Jornada 2006a). Some protestors then joined the Other Campaign. Various organizations and movements outside parliament (i.e., Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca [Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, APPO], the National Indigenous Congress [CNI]), especially with indigenous participation, maintained and expanded their networks despite internal contradictions and regional fragmentation (SERAPAZ 2007, 4). They frequently invoked the defense of land or indigenous territory in the broader sense (Foro Mesoamericano de los Pueblos 2011). Dominant factions supported a PAN presidency even if not based on the majority of votes. Such antidemocratic sentiments surfaced when the federal state began stepping up efforts to privatize the educational system in the southern state of Oaxaca, and this met growing resentment. Oaxaca city became a site where protests, first led by the teachers’ union dissident local branch sección22, condensed into political action federal forces felt threatened by. The teachers had occupied the city’s main square in June 2006, a

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popular form of protest in the city. Teachers demanded a recalculation of their wages, which did not reflect the rising costs of living in tourist-attracting Oaxaca (Stephen 2016, 119; Hesketh 2017, 128). The Oaxacan state government under PRI governor Ulises Ruiz violently evicted them from the square. The broad discontent with PRI and PAN governments and a truncated democratization process was publicly displaced in large marches, mainly in Oaxaca, but eagerly observed by progressives in other parts of Mexico. Teachers and others discontent with authoritarian Oaxacan governance created the APPO movement. APPO included a range of movements in Oaxaca but was soon plagued by political differences between moderate (sección22) and more radical demands (groups close to the EPR guerrilla) (Nava Vázquez 2009, 221–22). In response, Oaxacan business associations sought to persuade the federal government to intervene by threatening to suspend their tax payments (Bautista Martínez 2010). In contrast, they did not criticize paramilitary involvement in Governor Ruiz’s tactics against protestors. But it was not until October 27, after the federal elections, and when US journalist Bradley Will was shot dead in Oaxaca, that federal troops violently drove the APPO mobilization out of downtown Oaxaca (Nava Vázquez 2009, 221–25). Like President Fox’s Mexico Seguro Operation in Nuevo Laredo, the crackdown jointly organized by federal and state forces provide a glimpse on what was to come in terms of military protagonism and the intertwinement of antiriot and antidrug operations (CVO 2016, 524). While the Oaxaca mobilizations, partly driven by the sección22, illustrated the potential of discontent, the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (SNTE; National Educational Workers Union) itself became a “strategic actor in the elections” in support of the PAN (Hernández Navarro 2011, 408). Many trade unions in Mexico are considered to be largely co-opted since state-party rule, particularly the teachers’ union SNTE. Its members have access to social services such as health care, which others do not; in management, SNTE amassed large assets (e.g., by rededicating housing programs to teachers) and political power. In contrast to the APPO, this union has long become an entrepreneurial network of political representation whose “field of action is always the state” (Hernández Navarro 2011, 40). Nevertheless, at the grassroots level of such unions, autonomous political movements have repeatedly emerged similar to the one in Oaxaca, often driven by bilingual indigenous teachers. In 2005, the SNTE created its own party, Nueva Alianza (PANAL; New Alliance Party) and presented it as autonomous from PRI party politics (Hernández Navarro 2011, 407). PANAL existed until 2018. In the 2006 elections, SNTE and PANAL supported Calderón. The related Red de Maestros en Acción network, founded by former PAN president Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, illustrates its openness to the authoritarian turn (Hernández Vicencia

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2006, 641). Allegedly, SNTE president Esther Gordillo herself organized the PRI’s defeat in talks with governors of the states of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas in 2006 (Contralínea 2013a; Hernández Navarro 2011, 410). Indeed, in Tamaulipas, the PRI had never suffered greater losses before, and the PAN had hardly been a relevant force. Such fraud allegations show the mechanisms available to those political actors in support of Calderón’s authoritarian neoliberal project. CONCLUSION In both Colombia and Mexico, state coercion that aimed at disciplining and preventing dissent was organized in dispersed and decentralized ways throughout the twentieth century, exercised through racialization and class. Coercion as a political tool has been deeply intertwined with the coloniality of state power. In order to grasp both the continuities and the actual shifts and messiness in political relations around the use of coercion, I conceptualize the coloniality of coercion based on intersections among Poulantzas, Quijano, and Hall in state coercion and violence. Unpacking the dispersal of coercion, I sketched longer-term continuities and shifts in social relations in Colombia and Mexico, and the recent support for two political projects particularly, and almost exclusively, based on security discourses and the ready use of coercion against (political) deviance. The support or contestation of political projects by different social groups reveal the effects of shifting state readiness to use violence. The convergence of interests among parts of the middle and dominant classes, armed sectors with capital, the military, and state personnel constitutes a political arena that considerably limits the options for progressive change and the spaces for a reconstruction of the social net. Paramilitaries did not infiltrate the Colombian state from the outside, as a “rural, quasi-feudal ‘elite’” (Franco Restrepo 2009, 398); rather, already dominant class factions partially merged with these emerging sectors, both transformed in the process. Instead of the result of a dichotomy between “traditional,” “backward” forces and modern economy, paramilitaries drove the emerging combination of latifundia with global investment and high-tech farming, such as in oil palm or flowers production. Neither did illegal economy in Mexico grow behind the back of the state (see also Le Cour Grandmaison 2021), violence erupting when the state dared to start fighting “cartels,” but both are a product of highly asymmetrical state policies and shifting social relations in the face of global change. Coercion is and has been a longtime companion integral to Mexican

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politics, and its exercise against specific groups running counter to dominant economic and political strategies, such as the Zapatistas during the 1990s, illustrate the coloniality of coercion still prevalent today.

Chapter 4

Blurred Boundaries A Continuum of Legal-Illegal Practices

CAPITAL ACCUMULATION, ILLEGAL PRACTICES, AND THE STATE State selectivity in both Colombia and Mexico were favorable for criminal capital groups around the turn of the century—if not directly, then through unmediated free-market policies. These policies drew support from legal and openly criminal capital—a structural convergence of interests. Simultaneously hemispheric relations and factors such as US antidrug operations in particular localities from the end of the 1970s onward influenced how this truly global economy operated in each country and, in turn, the social position such illegal social forces were able to assume. In the chapter, I then trace the emergence of criminal capital factions between the 1980s and 2000s in Colombia and Mexico, and the frequently performative fight against them, based on secondary literature and archival material (i.e., WikiLeaks cables and diplomatic documents). This chapter combines a differentiated concept of crime in the global economy, foregrounded by anthropologists such as Carolyn Nordstrom (2004), geographers such as Gregson and Crang (2017), and criminologists such as Ruggiero (2009), with the relational understanding of the state I develop throughout the book. Such literature questions the assumed binary between legal and illegal economies. Conventional analyses frequently assume a connection between the weight of illegal accumulation and a “weakened” or “failed” state. Rising crime rates have been explained as prosperity driven, through the demand for illicit goods (Bergman 2018, 9), or through territorial competition between organizations (Yashar 2018). A wealth of literature (Gutiérrez Sanín 2019; Jenss 2018a; Ramírez 2015; Morris 2020; Le Cour Grandmaison 2021; Aretxaga 2003), however, points out that the idea of the state as a uniform constitutional structure confronting criminal networks 81

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often does not work. There may well be interaction among the state, legal business, and illegal entrepreneurs (i.e., Abello Colak and Guarneros Meza 2014; Jaffe 2013; Andreas 2011). Urban studies and economic geography scholars (Goldstein 2016; Gregson and Crang 2017; Hudson 2014), but less so security studies scholars, have recognized the continuum among legal, informal, and illegal economies. The export of illegal products—and the performative fight against it—have a long history in both contexts. Definitions of crime are dependent on social relations and political struggles. In the context of the “war on drugs,” premised on highly selective and deliberately vague definitions of crime and criminal groups, the politics of defining crime becomes more apparent than ever. Official discourses on crime in the “war on drugs” focused on homicides presumably committed by local organized groups, rather than on the white-collar crime, transnational financial crimes, and criminal land appropriation that the “war” policies indeed tolerated, if not enabled. This attention to “the crimes of the socially excluded, overlooks, or normalizes, violence and harm elsewhere” (Carrington, Hogg, and Sozzo 2016, 9), while punishment continues to serve as the state’s preferred form of disciplining (Iturralde 2016, 152). This book follows the critique of alternative criminologies that the state’s presentation of crime as its negative “other” is frequently a tool of legitimization by implying a distance between the state and this “other,” often embodied by racialized and classed social groups (Carlen 2017). Crime thus assumes a necessary task for order-making and is inseparable from relations of inequality (Carlen 2017). Indeed, crime constructions are an essential place where such inequalities are recreated (Barak, Leighton, and Cotton 2018, 1). Class, race, and gender intersect in defining who is perceived as prone to committing crimes and which crimes are legitimized or scandalized by whom, and shape the social production of crime itself (Barak, Leighton, and Cotton 2018, 5; Ciro 2020). Indeed, indigenous incarceration and criminalization are excessively high in Latin American countries (Carrington, Hogg, and Sozzo 2016, 3; Mora 2013). FREE TRADE AND CRIME Economic liberalization policies and state deregulation accompanying neoliberalism since the 1970s have become a basis for transnational companies of criminal capitalism to flourish as never before. I build on work that thinks through “habitual practices of illegality,” an integral, if often obscured part of global economy (Gregson and Crang 2017, 2; Estrada Álvarez and Moreno Rubio 2008), rather than on the simple distinction between “legal” and “illegal” products (Naim 2006; Shelley 2018). Nordstrom (2004, 36–37)

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famously argued that what is often called a “shadow economy” forms an integral part of everyday life; legal and illegal economies “intertwine.” In the waves of structural adjustment during the 1980s and 1990s, states actively reduced their regulatory role in terms of sanctioning possibilities of illegal economies, according to their dependence on loans, investments, and patterns of corruption (Friman 2009, 13). In Latin America, this radical regulatory restructuring transformed social orders down to the micro level, even if the relative loss of autonomy to regulate accumulation, conditional loans, or prescribed economic recipes was not new (Thwaites Rey and Castillo 2008, 27). What is more, economic liberalization encouraged illegal forms of accumulation with high profit margins, such as drug trafficking. Vice versa, the trade in illegal drugs generates global flows of goods and finance—free trade par excellence (Dick 2009, 98). International financial and trade organizations promoted and demanded the transnational rollout of financial and trade deregulation, regionally shifting global production. States actively restricted their roles in the economy. Profit transfers to the investors’ countries continued, only the latter diversified. It became easier not to declare profits, or to declare less than the actual volumes if they can be transferred to offshore financial centers. The growth of extralegal economies has therefore depended on shifting accumulation regimes and (global) regulatory patterns (Friman 2009)—although illegal trade has always been part of global capitalism. From a critical political economy perspective, interrelations between legal and illegal forms of accumulation should come as no surprise. We can refute the classical idea that economic activity requires stable, legally organized (but not highly regulated) environments. Investment figures in Mexico during the last years of the “war on drugs” or gold mining in Colombia, which did not shrink except during the US crisis year 2009, show that this need not be the case at all. Critical perspectives argue against the frequent “loss of state control” argument in the face of globalized crime (Andreas 2011, 405; Friman and Andreas 1999). Instead, they argue the contemporary illegal economy ultimately became part of governments’ crisis resolution and integral to accumulation strategies based on expansive, capital-driven openings of new investment opportunities and production (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2002; Estrada Álvarez and Moreno Rubio 2008). The logic of accumulation explains illegal capital’s tendency to partially invest in “safer” sectors with lower profit margins, such as production and services, to diversify and legalize. Profits also go into legal consumer goods. Illegal economy by its functional logic does not fundamentally endanger regular markets, since profits always also flow into the legal realm. Growing illegal trade is paradoxically dependent on the worldwide restrictive handling of psychoactive substances. Illegality distorts profit margins

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and prices in relation to production costs (Estrada Álvarez and Moreno Rubio 2008, 34; Franco Restrepo 2009, 417–18). Whether an economic activity is considered illegal depends on the definitions in legal texts. The international legal basis of today’s antidrug policy is the 1961 United Nations Single Convention and the 1971 Vienna Convention, designating psychoactive substances as illegal. In the cocaine trade, for example, it is precisely the potential criminal prosecution that maintains prices at such extraordinary levels and makes the sector so profitable (Nordstrom 2004, 112; Estrada Álvarez and Moreno Rubio 2008, 34; Andreas 2011, 410). Practices of illegality (Gregson and Crang 2017) are intimately woven through the global economy. Legal companies rely on human smuggling as a service when they employ migrants without work papers; other companies base their production on slavery-like working conditions either directly or via their suppliers (Ruggiero 2009, 118–19). Legal products are knowingly sold to criminal groups (such as for unregistered export), just as illegal products are traded, knowingly or unknowingly, via companies that sell legal products (such as the banana trade). Legal and extralegal actors are involved in the illegal arms trade. For instance, German arms producers have frequently and routinely outflanked arms trade regulations to Colombia and Mexico, with little to no oversight from the Ministry of Economy (Pérez Ricart 2013). Despite the many efforts to estimate the size, importance of, and shifts within a perceived illegal economy, the narratives about this have remained relatively simple. An imposing narrative locates the drug trade in the socalled Global South, a structural problem of postcolonial states. Yet official estimates of the illegal economy are based on data that are both difficult to obtain and change rapidly (for a critique, see Andreas 2011, 408). Above all, such numbers define the illegal based on lists of products (cocaine, counterfeits, or trafficked species) and run the risk of reproducing a perspective that collapses illegality with the localities that produce such illegal items, making them an “other” to what economy “should look like” (Gregson and Crang 2017, 3). Locals in the trade are frequently presented as intrinsically violent. Both in Sinaloa in Mexico (Farfán and Porter 2020) and the Colombian Guajira (Britto 2020), the illegal economy is presented as a result of a culturally preconditioned mentality. As an economic sector, drug trafficking, too, follows a colonial legacy of production, trade, and consumption. Coca is mainly cultivated in South America; consumption of crack, cocaine production’s waste product, takes place in the production areas, and the greatest profit is made from selling cocaine in US and European markets—a chain based on global social inequalities (Boatcă 2015) and asymmetrical trade relations, reproducing identical attributions of consumption patterns. A colonial pattern, illegal trade routes run parallel to legal trade flows; the routes

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serve legal, smuggled, and illegal products like drugs, as well as weapons, cigarettes, or counterfeit brands. The fight against illegal exports has frequently seemed to be performative rather than real. Offshore financial centers as a legal environment facilitate the legal-illegal interdependence within the world market and enable “global actors to pursue their not always legal business” (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2002, 310). In fact, state personnel and financial service providers are necessary actors for money laundering (Ruggiero 2009, 118). A number of seemingly highly regulated economies (i.e., Germany) have long been an operating space for money laundering, heavily criticized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2002, 215–17; 239). Money laundering is only possible by deliberately leaving open gaps in national banking systems for the inflow of illegally generated capital (such as the so-called ventanilla siniestra in Colombia), the toleration of import smuggling, and the registration of fictitious exports, circumventing official exchange rates (see Serrano and Palacios 2010, 119). In consequence, measures against money laundering usually impact legal investments and transactions as well (Altvater and Mahnkopf 2002, 215–25). Despite the continuities, contemporary global economy has shaped “new patterns of transnational criminal activity” (Ruggiero 2009, 117). Official figures do not usually perceive the licit/illicit overlap but are widely used, so they tell us about estimated shifts. Cocaine, according to figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), generated less value in the 2000s than in the 1990s, and US consumption declined by up to 50 percent after 2006, in contrast to the opiate upsurge (RAND 2019, 37; Smith 2021). Despite around 67 percent still destined for US and European markets in 2010 (UNODC 2010, 70), countries like Mexico have increasingly become both markets themselves and transit countries. There is no clear demarcation between crime and legitimate activity. To describe certain acts as criminal not only depends on legal attributions but also is a political, social, and economic distinction, which may shift (Estrada Álvarez and Moreno Rubio 2008, 17–18; Altvater and Mahnkopf 2002, 145). The boundaries between licit and illicit are, in part, conceptual; “[a]s concepts change, so too do borders” (Nordstrom 2004, 85). The distinction only makes sense if society at large fundamentally recognizes it as illegitimate and criminal (Agnew 2011). For instance, governments striving for competitive advantages provide incentives for investment. Latin American economies posited low labor costs as their prime competitive advantage, continuously trying to attract transnational, highly mobile companies at labor-intensive steps of the supply chain. A logical consequence is capital influx from offshore finance, subject to little or no controls (Friman 2009, 10). Organized crime is not simply a “counter power” to states. The same states that fight organized crime

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also permanently mediate spaces of legality and illegality with one another. States employ legal and extralegal practices alike (Poulantzas 2002, 113–14). EMERGING FORCES OF ILLEGAL ECONOMY Criminal groups are part of society, not its underworld. Their routine depiction as shadowy counter powers to the state, isolated from the legal economy, is oversimplifying at best. Understanding criminal groups as unified, pyramidal entities that the state more or less successfully fights against may reduce the complexities of the matter, but it is relatively blind to the actual relations between such groups and the larger political picture. They make use of opportunities and access to the state, and they are subject to restraints imposed on them by laws and public policies. Some may be locally embedded entrepreneurial networks familiar with local conditions of production or smugglers’ crossings, but contemporary cocaine trade, for instance, needs intermediaries with access to financial centers, who can organize global distribution chains, understand and produce descriptors and data for cargo, and forge alliances necessary for obtaining customs documents. By definition, these “polymorphic” networks are international (Nordstrom 2004, 107), change and (re-)align themselves, and depend on flexibility and information about producers, protection entrepreneurs, clients, distribution channels, and money-laundering opportunities. Debates on violence in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America depict emerging illegal economy forces as major players who ensure their access to state decision-making centers through corruption; however, corruption falls short of grasping the phenomenon of a favorable state selectivity for such forces. Also, these groups did not appear out of nowhere in the 2000s. Rather, the development of extralegal economies is linked to long-term shifts in accumulation regimes, the rise of logistics, and its financial counterparts. In both contexts studied, illegal-legal entrepreneurial forces have plugged into and become relatively important actors in the export-oriented economy and within societal power relations at large. With little social mobility, these actors have a noteworthy, if difficult to quantify, social base. During Latin America’s 1990s, middle classes shrank where they existed. Savings rates remained low, as did the tax base (Portes and Hoffman 2003, 46; Seidl 2017), and social mobility through education became less of an option. Income inequality increased. After 2000, Latin American stratification became more diverse. In Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil, poverty rates and the Gini coefficient on income inequality decreased due to some redistributive and partially Keynesian economic policies (Seidl 2017). In Colombia and Mexico, however, income inequality and poverty remained high (CEPAL

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2010, 189–91; 2012, 17, 19–25). Relatively broad segments of the population in the 2000s hovered below or just above the poverty line (CEPAL 2012, 64). Extralegal activities have become all the more valid as social mobility channels waned after structural adjustment (Estrada Álvarez and Moreno Rubio 2008, 45; Aguilar Rivera 2012). When governments reduced the public sector, privatized state corporations, and deregulated the labor market, they pushed a growing labor force into services and informal employment (Klein and Tokman 2000, 18). When they dismantled policies with a balancing effect between social forces, small-scale and informal economies hardly provided perspective. Large corporations did not absorb the labor force; they reduced their share of employment (Klein and Tokman 2000, 13; Portes and Hoffman 2003, 55). Structural adjustment radically reversed the weight formal employment had had in Latin America (an average of 60 percent of newly created jobs since the mid-century): Between 1990 and 1996, the formal sector created only two out of ten new jobs (Portes and Hoffman 2003, 19). Real wages fell to 26 percent below the 1980 levels in 1999 (Klein and Tokman 2000, 11), with many jobs outsourced to subcontractors. Illegal trade, in contrast, offered dreams. Power formations of the twenty-first century—understood as global, local, and embedded in state transformations—include illegal economic networks but do not inevitably result in institutional instability. The recognition that the illicit is “integral to the workings of the capitalist economy rather than a marginal and unusual anomaly” (Hudson 2014, 775), if not an “essential” part of globalization, enormously influences how we conceive of the state (Friman 2009, 1; see Castells 2010, 172; Gregson and Crang 2017; Ciro 2020, 30). A relational notion of the state reveals that actors in the illegal economy take legislative action. Like other social, political, or economic actors, they attempt to influence state practices and distort or circumvent regulations to shape the perception of such regulations and to violate norms. In doing so, they do not necessarily “hijack” and destabilize the state but, rather, reveal their everyday improvisation via informal channels, just like other sectors with capital, to support or improve their social position by means of selective regulation. With their enormous accumulation potential, they are admittedly in a position to influence the reorganization of state institutions, laws, and decision-making channels. Nevertheless, they tend to increase the leeway of the bloc in power rather than strive for the dissolution of the state or to act against it (see Estrada Álvarez and Moreno Rubio 2008, 45). It is crucial to recognize the ambiguous relationship among business, politics, and the illegal economy. The primary concern here is not if criminal networks in Colombia and Mexico can acquire “quasi-state” functions (including regional monopolies of violence, which may well be the case), but rather how

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the state ensemble, fractured as it is, actively deploys criminal activities in ways that reproduce and strengthen existing institutional arrangements. The Illegal Economy Is Not Local The illegal economy in Mexico is not a local problem. Its existence depends on transnational connections, both the economic and finance liberalization after the 1980s debt crisis and US health and security policies (Serrano and Palacios 2010, 114). In fact, the opium and marijuana trade of northern Mexico expanded during prohibitionist phases of US legislation at the beginning of the twentieth century (i.e., Smith 2021). Like other agricultural products, opium and marijuana reached the Californian market via the Pacific Railway (Astorga 1999, 4–5). The centers of opium cultivation—an integral part of the local economy in Sinaloa—were close to the transport routes and the US border. In Michoacán, marijuana and poppy cultivation expanded parallel to mining and offered economic prospects for broader social segments. The Second World War was a catalyst for Mexican opium production for morphine and heroin exports. US institutions, with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) at the forefront, had previously pressured the Mexican authorities, which they perceived as too lax in the fight against opium, into dropping progressive narcotics legislation (Smith 2021, 86). However, returning soldiers now increasingly requested this same product, as the European and Asian sources were off limits. By 1943, Mexican opium production had tripled. In Sinaloa, opium became a main source of income, with few agricultural alternatives (Farfán and Porter 2020; Le Cour Grandmaison 2021). The authoritarian state centralization during the so-called pax priísta and the dominance of the state party, Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party), in the postrevolutionary era (Olvera Rivera 2019) allowed for relative control of the illegal economy, according to a widespread consensus among Mexican historians (Astorga 2007). Others argue that this obscures the violence prevalent during this time (i.e., Muñoz Martínez 2020, 3; Pansters 2012). In any case, federal and local police were essential actors to state-crime relations particularly between 1947 and 1985. For example, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS; Federal Security Directorate) was involved in informally taxing Mexico’s opium and heroin exports in the late 1940s (Smith 2021, 129–30). In addition, local authorities, such as the Sinaloa governors Loaiza and Macías in Mexico’s first opium surge in the 1940s, protected and even regulated illegal entrepreneurship and got payments and loyalty in return (Smith 2021, 113, 122; Serrano and Palacios 2010). The role of the heterogeneous state in this economy has been obscured by imaginaries that present the drug trade as naturally opposed to the state. It is

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difficult to prove whether the PRI actually centralized illegal market regulation after the Second World War and replaced local political entrepreneurs (Serrano and Palacios 2010, 116; Smith 2021, 273–92). But clearly, despite the documented brutality of counter-narcotics operations, which included the stationing of US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in Mexico, the PRI barely combated the export of opium and heroin for the US market (Astorga 1999, 4; Flores Pérez 2009, 101; Smith 2021, 256–72). The Mexican government reacted to US pressure via campaigns to destroy opium fields. Particularly, Operación Cóndor in the 1970s (Astorga 1999, 124) involved brutal human rights violations against poppy-cultivating peasants, but operations never cut supply for a long time. Simultaneously, the protection of illegal plantations, logistical support, and securing transport routes seemed to become a side business for the state’s coercive institutions. State and federal police forces such as the Policía Judicial Federal (PJF; Federal Judicial Police), the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR; Office of the Mexican Attorney General), and parts of the military, regardless of their formal function in fighting crime, formed increasingly centralized protection rackets (Müller 2012; Smith 2021, 275– 92). In the state party system, illegal capital for political campaigns was “no cause for excitement” or “worthy of attention” (Astorga 2007, 43). My own interviews confirm rather than contradict such statements. For instance, one nongovernmental organization (NGO) representative recounted when they routinely saw military trucks bring workers to illegal plantations: I lived in northern Sinaloa, a state completely dominated by drug trafficking. What existed in Mexico was a pact between the state and the drug trade; so the drug trade didn’t even need an army, because the Mexican army made sure that everything kept flowing [. . .] when I lived in Sinaloa [. . .] the army often transported people in army trucks to take care of the marijuana plants. They would leave them there and pick them up later. This was so open. I’m talking about the ’80s. (interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011)

With increasingly prohibitionist US policies toward the end of the 1970s, the protection and regulation effort increased. The United States, and particularly the increasingly protagonist DEA, now coordinated the region’s drug control strategies (Pérez Ricart 2018). DEA officials invented the term cartel, which Mexican authorities adopted. They constructed the illegal economy as consisting of strictly hierarchical organizations that controlled entire production chains and delimited areas (Zavala 2018). In the early 1980s, the US authorities increased the pressure on trade routes for South American cocaine through the Caribbean and Florida. Colombian producers such as the Medellín network responded by shifting their transport routes to Mexico. This

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turned what had been illegal agricultural production of opium and marijuana into a service and trade economy for cocaine (Serrano and Palacios 2010, 114). Initially, Mexican service providers were simply logisticians, but little by little, they received 50 percent of the cocaine (as a product) that passed through their territory. This “tax” enabled them to develop distribution networks themselves. Toward the end of the 1980s, they took over end points of the supply chain, where the value increase is particularly high (Flores Pérez 2009, 116). From around 1991 onward, the Colombian networks could no longer operate freely in Mexico and even had to fear arrest (Flores Pérez 2009, 121–23). If true, this shift could only be achieved by Mexican entrepreneurs in cooperation with (some) authorities. The dislocation of forces within the illegal economy and the increasingly close ties between the Mexican economy and the United States through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the facilitation of transnational capital flows, and the feeding of illegal profits into the financial market made the North Mexican “cartels” central players in this economic sector. Under President Zedillo (1994–2000), alliances shifted. The PGR’s office, staffed with new personnel itself, issued arrest warrants for two former directors of the Federal Judicial Police for protecting drug trafficking and money laundering. This was strengthened by a law against organized crime, the renewed establishment of a PGR special unit (UEDO/SIEDO), and the arrest of several generals for links to drug trafficking. The trial against General José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, former director of the Instituto Nacional de Combate a las Drogas (INCD; National Institute for the Fight Against Drugs), accused of links to drug tzar Amado Carillo in 1997, and the arrest of Brigadier General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro in 2000 received much media attention (Reveles 2010, 77). Extraditions, however, did not elicit bombs or campaigns as they did in Colombia. Paramilitarism played a lesser role in Mexico, although groups such as the camisas rojas, grupos de choque in trade unions, or the Batallón Olimpia frequently served to discourage dissent (Anguiano 2010, 72–73). At least 265 members of the Frente Democrático Nacional (FDN, later PRD), the party split off from the PRI, were murdered during the 1990s (Combes 2021). Parts of Michoacán and Chiapas experienced forced displacement and irregular land purchases of collectively cultivated land (Maldonado Aranda 2012, 13). In conjunction with counterinsurgency—for instance, in Chiapas (see chapter 3)—a new actor appeared. According to military sources (Santos Méndez 2008, 305), special forces, the Grupos Aéromóviles de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFEs; Special Forces Groups), deployed to Chiapas in 1994 and received counterinsurgency training from the Kaibiles special forces in Guatemala from 1995 onward. Former deserted GAFEs numbered more than

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one thousand by the mid-2000s. Similar to Colombia and Guatemala, training initially focused on counterinsurgency and later on counter-narcotics (Santos Méndez 2008, 306). Since the United States also trained GAFEs, deserted members of the GAFEs may have received military training from the United States (Meyer 2007, 6) and benefited not only from insider knowledge of the Mexican military but also from specialized knowledge of intelligence systems, surveillance techniques, and operational planning, although the US security institutions were later unable to find any matching lists of names (US Mexico Embassy 2009a). To appreciate the relationship between the illegal and legal economies, it is necessary to place the Mexican economy within its broader global context. When closely examined, the second largest economy in Latin America after Brazil (GTAI 2013) is still shaped by its dependence on US expansion and recession cycles. Both the expected increase in exports and foreign direct investment occurred after adopting the NAFTA trade agreement, but not long-term growth. NAFTA was fundamental for the growth of drug trafficking through Mexico. It accelerated not only integration into global production networks via the maquila industry (Hesketh 2010, 402) but also relative local deindustrialization. It enlarged the workforce pushed out of formal employment and facilitated global trade in all its guises. Mexico began exporting a greater volume of both primary and processed goods; in fact, exports quintupled between 1994 and 2009 (CEPALSTAT 2020; Matthes 2012, 149). Although the United States accounted for roughly 75 percent of Mexican imports in the first phase of NAFTA (1994–2000), in 2009 it accounted for only half of Mexican imports, while imports from China, which were virtually insignificant until 2003, rose to more than 15 percent (Dussel Peters and Gallagher 2013, 94).1 Despite massive growth in foreign trade overall, the trade deficit is permanent and structural, and the account balance at the end of Calderón’s term remained negative (CEPALSTAT 2020). A free trade agreement with the European Union has been in force since 2000; forty-two other, mostly bilateral free trade agreements determine Mexico’s globalized economy even more than many other Latin American countries. The large share of industrial goods in exports and gross domestic product (GDP) distorts the impression of Mexico as an industrial location. During the 2000s, the ratio of manufacturing exports to raw material relative to all exports reversed. Mexico still generated a notable portion of its export value from the manufacturing sector, although this sector declined from 84 percent of exports in 2000 to 76 percent in 2010, and high-tech reduced its share (Matthes 2012, 17). But many of these were re-exports of assembled parts. These manufacturing exports are really the United States outsourcing assembly production steps to a location with extremely favorable wages. Global

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companies use assembly-line production in Mexico for duty-free exports via the numerous free trade agreements (GTAI 2013). Company profits are often transferred to the parent locations. This maquila industry is an extreme example of the low level of internal linkages, having purchased an average of only 3.14 percent of its components in Mexico, since NAFTA came into force. Much of that trade actually takes place within US companies; the second to fifth largest exporters in Mexico during Calderón’s government were assembly-line subsidiaries of US carmakers (GTAI 2013); the sixth-largest exporter in 2009 was Hewlett Packard (Arroyo Picard 2009, 20). Around 80 percent of total exports are dependent on temporary imports (Dussel Peters 2004, 69). The weakly networked export-oriented industry was hardly a motor for other economic branches and generated only very low tax revenues (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 187; Heigl 2011, 141). Mexico is neither an export power in processed products (internal value added is usually below 10 percent), nor does it have complex production chains (Oliver Costilla and Castro Escudero 2005). By contrast, the primary goods sector steadily increased its share of export value since 1998, from 14.8 percent in 1998 to 24.3 percent in 2006 (CEPALSTAT 2020). Mexico at the time of Calderón’s government was Latin America’s largest crude oil exporter apart from Venezuela, exporting the raw material mainly to the United States (78.7 percent), with much smaller shares to Canada (3.1 percent) and China (1.7 percent) (Matthes 2012, 149). The focus of foreign direct investment (FDI) in exploiting raw materials intensified, although investment in extractive industries accounted for only as much as 12.6 percent of total FDI in 2008 (the productive/maquila sector was 41.7 percent and services and trade together was 34.6 percent) (Secretaría de Economía 2008, 19). The global financial sector’s weight in the Mexican economy and the lack of internal investment made foreign direct investment a priority. Although the share of FDI in GDP increased as expected with NAFTA, it remained volatile and initially fell again from 2001 to 2002 but is central to long-term state economic strategies, formalized through free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties. Banking reprivatization and liberalization completely reversed financial ownership structures. In the 1980s, the state still held 66 percent of the banks’ capital stock itself (Alarcó and Hierro 2010, 186; Imhof 2003, 94; Marichal 1997, 29). In a much more polarized ownership structure, few large high-tech companies geared toward global markets and cheap labor, contrasted with numerous small- and medium-sized businesses that produce for the domestic market, with less access to credit and capital (Imhof 2003, 108). Large company groups emerged from privatization, such as Carlos Slims (originally from Grupo Monterrey; Zambrano-Cemex; Salinas Pliego-Elektra). Asset and company property ownership are enormously concentrated (Alarcó and

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Hierro 2010; Díaz Cayeros 2012; GTAI 2013; Imhof 2003). Then, domestic market-oriented companies increasingly merged operations with transnational corporations. Among the ten companies with the highest turnover are those with large foreign participation, such as Walmart-Mexico, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors of Mexico (GTAI 2013). Mining (coal, gold, or silver) is divided between the conglomerates Grupo México, Peñoles, and Grupo Frisco, on the one hand, and foreign companies, especially of Canadian origin, on the other (CEPAL 2011b, 31). Growing income inequality, limited employment options, and the dwindling agricultural yield in the face of cheap imports triggered not only waves of emigration but gave rise to a precarious workforce ready to work in the illegal economy. Income inequality had slowly but steadily declined during import-substitution industrialization but skyrocketed between 1984 and 1989 after the debt crisis, and again intensified between 1994 and 2006. In short, post–debt crisis free trade did not create more or better jobs. Neither were newly created jobs able to close the demand gap, nor did their majority include social security (Arroyo Picard 2009, 39). Women’s participation in the labor market rose from 36 to 45 percent, and official figures showed relatively low open unemployment (below 7 percent for the urban population more than fifteen years of age). But in the 2000s, 575,000 Mexicans per year migrated to the United States, more than ever before; 3.4 million people emigrated during Fox’s presidency alone. The expenditure of all social programs between 1995 and 2006 was considerably lower than their remittances, and still, remittances for Mexico in 2007 only accounted for about 2.3 percent of GDP (CEPAL 2011a, 14). The rhetoric of a free trade agreement intended to curb migration to the United States by investing in agriculture pushed workers into alternative pathways, some of them considered illegal. In the 2000s, at least half of Mexican workers made a living informally; social security was an exception even in formal employment. Between 2000 and 2010, one-quarter of all jobs in the productive sector was lost (Dussel Peters and Gallagher 2013, 98). For some, structural adjustment and NAFTA did provide additional upward social mobility, including an outward-oriented productive sector. The so-called neo-banqueros, about 0.2 percent of the population, whose capital already accounted for roughly 51 percent of GDP in 1994 (Marichal 1997), became influential and consolidated as an entrepreneurial, transnationally networked social class; they control corporate boards and live or have studied in the United States. One of the associations that most influenced economic policies since the 1990s is the employers’ council Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE; Entrepreneurial council). Within it, the small group the Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocio (CMHN; Mexican Council of Businessmen) had decisively driven NAFTA negotiations, with privileged

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access to information from the executives. Indeed, their lunches with executives were informal sites of economic policy making (Ai Camp 2002, 248). The CMHN’s thirty-seven hombres de negocios control considerable parts of the Mexican economy, closely associated with transnational financial transactions and companies. They also hold the largest share of the Mexican state’s internal debt, however, and accumulated high profits through the purchase and sale of public debt obligations; since the 1980s, the Mexican state has paid interest rates of around 50 percent (Marichal 1997, 29). When the state extended the internal debt deadlines, that promised enormous profits. Cemex, Telmex, or Televisa received shares or loans, sold by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, or Citibank. For the employers’ organizations COPARMEX and the CCE, traditional critics of “state-centered,” “protectionist” policies, liberalization coincided with their own interests. Despite the shifts, ownership of large company groups is frequently based on family networks, personal relationships, and informal channels, generating close ties with the respective governments (Alarcó and Hierro 2010, 180–82; Ai Camp 2002, 30–32). In contrast, economic restructuring negatively affected medium-sized, domestic-oriented industrial enterprises organized in the industry chamber CANACINTRA. The participation of the largest companies in GDP increased when President Calderón came to office. The first one hundred companies accounted for 22.9 percent of GDP; in 2007 the five largest groups alone accounted for 10.7 percent of GDP, the first ten companies together for 14.1 percent (Alarcó and Hierro 2010, 186). In absolute figures, their number of employees was significant in the 2000s, with 1.5 million permanent jobs in 2007, but this was only 3.5 percent of the economically active population (Alarcó and Hierro 2010, 186). Some large companies were still (partially) state owned (such as the oil giant PEMEX, the electricity provider Comisión Federal de Electricidad [CFE; Federal Electricity Commission], and the Mexico City Airport). PEMEX still held a (theoretical) monopoly on oil production, yet a complicated network of private subsidiaries was already operating; public discourse increasingly promoted its comprehensive privatization (CEPAL 2011b, 41; GTAI 2013). The selectively globalized economy has created enormous regional imbalances, focused, for instance, on the maquila industry along the US border and near Mexico City, the steel and metal center in the Monterrey-SaltilloMonclova triangle, and oil production from Tamaulipas to Tabasco on the Gulf of Mexico (GTAI 2013). Ninety percent of FDI is concentrated in Mexico City, the Estado de México, and the northern border regions including Monterrey. Less than 1 percent of investment flows into the five more marginalized states with large indigenous populations such as Guerrero, Chiapas, and Oaxaca (INEGI 2012a, 605).2 Instead, poppy cultivation moved southward to Oaxaca (Smith 2021).

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Financial liberalization facilitated both legal and illegal capital flows. Remittances (US$3.67 billion in 1995; US$23.97 billion in 2007) were Mexico’s second-largest source of foreign exchange during Calderón’s mandate (INEGI 2012c, 34), but liberalizing capital flows and North American trade, and the growing weight of fictitious capital, clearly facilitated the ascent of illegal capital groups. Illegal economic actors were able to generate considerably higher profits and invest considerable amounts of capital in Mexico by taking on new positions, most notably in the cocaine supply and marketing chain. According to UNODC (2012, cited in ICG 2013, 7), the price of cocaine increased fiftyfold when it reached the points in the supply chain where Mexican networks participated. NAFTA incentivized moving illicit capital outward; illicit capital transfers from Mexico sharply increased after 1994 (Kar 2012, 10). Such investments, both legal and illegal, went primarily to the United States, with Caribbean offshore centers such as the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Curaçao, Panama, or the Dutch Antilles playing secondary roles. Mexican capital also invests in European offshore centers (Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Luxembourg, and Switzerland) and in banking groups in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In 2002, US$2.7 billion went to Caribbean tax havens; in 2010, this doubled to US$5 billion (Kar 2012, 5, 45).3 Illegal capital inscribes itself in the spatial expansions of contemporary accumulation strategies. Mining and tourism are well-documented examples, as the Mexican state largely abolished the obligation to disclose sources of investment. Successful money laundering can potentially reward violent economic activity in monetary terms. If money laundering is carried out through investments in the tourism sector, such as the construction of hotel facilities, illegally generated capital easily flows into state-promoted development projects and state spatial ordering (Nordstrom 2004, 137). For instance, Mexico introduced investment funds (fideicomisos) in the construction sector, which ultimately obstructed knowledge of capital sources. Former Quintana Roo governor Mario Villanueva, later extradited to the United States, sold 142 beach kilometers on the Riviera Maya via the Fideicomiso Fidecaribe at derisory prices of seven cents, four cents, or one cent per square meter, while Banamex estimated the square meter value at between US$470 and US$770 (CEPAL 2008, 129). Drug-producing regions such as Guerrero, in turn, became simultaneously marginalized and hyper-connected spaces adapted to what state and transnational economic policies had to offer (Le Cour Grandmaison 2021). The political rifts and transformations since the late 1990s reshaped the relation between the state and the illegal economy (see Astorga 2007; Muñoz Martínez 2020). The ambiguous state-illegal economy relationship became more dynamic when the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN; National Action

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Party) took over the government in 2000. Arrangements operated on a less long-term basis. The illegal economy increasingly resorted to its own armed forces (Serrano and Palacios 2010, 135). In 2005, President Fox launched the México Seguro program, and the military replaced parts of the municipal police forces accused of links to drug trafficking. In Nuevo Laredo, civilian authorities subordinated to military command and, toward the end of Fox’s term in office, established a confrontational strategy against parts of the illegal economy. The Fox government prepared his successor Calderón’s discourse. As early as 2001, Mexican security advisor Aguilar Zinser linked criminal offences with national security, declaring them to be the responsibility of the military (Boris and Sterr 2002, 14). Shifting Interests around Illegal Practices In Colombia, the shifting convergence of interests among politicians of regional and national, legal and illegal economies, and the phenomenon of paramilitarism—and thus the well-documented cooperation and realignments among parts of the military, paramilitary groups, and illegal economy networks—are essential for understanding the legal-illegal continuum of economic practices. While avoiding “othering” Colombian politics into a shadowy realm of illegality and rather than a narrow focus on legal norms, the historical relations between parts of the state and influential economic sectors are vital for understanding Colombian politics (i.e., Gutiérrez Sanín 2019; García, Vargas, and Uribe 2018). Marijuana cultivation in Colombia goes back to the time of La Violencia (1948–1958) and had its first peak in the late 1970s (Britto 2020). Growing US consumption fueled this first marimbero boom, unhindered by the United States’s emerging supply-oriented control and the founding of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973. Yet the DEA’s decisive transnational role in shaping antinarcotics politics soon became starkly visible in both countries (Pérez Ricart 2018, 170). In 1978, at the request of the US government and remarkably similar to Operación Cóndor in Mexico shortly before, Operación Fulminante by then-president Turbay Ayala sent ten thousand soldiers to the Guajira, the center of marijuana cultivation (see Britto 2020). Agricultural innovation and boom-and-bust cycles set the stage for the marijuana boom in the Colombian Guajira (banana, tannins exported to Germany preparing for war in the 1930s, and later, coffee and cotton), just as it did in the Mexican state of Sinaloa (with oilseeds) (Britto 2020; Farfán and Porter 2020). Marijuana and the opium poppy gradually replaced these commodities but depended on the brokers, distributors, and exporters and linked the new product to the global market. Many of them were emerging

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agricultural entrepreneurs (with cotton, for instance) who had made a transition from cattle farming aided by a brief phase of partial import substitution industrialization in the 1950s and 1960s and resulting state subsidies (Britto 2020, 59). For the 1970s marimberos at the Caribbean Coast, their experience as exporters was an entry point into the global economy and led to partial integration into a growing transnational cocaine market as it became the more important product in the 1980s. Smuggling agricultural goods was a well-rehearsed practice in both regions; the Guajira became an important site, close to the Venezuelan oil complex and exportation sites both on the Colombian and the Venezuelan side of the border, while Sinaloa was connected directly to train services toward the US and Canadian markets. Marijuana became the product that offered an economic alternative to the growing settler population. Transit routes to the most important market, the United States, initially went through the Caribbean straight to Florida. Carlos Lehder, a prominent representative of the emerging cocaine trade, owned large parts of the Bahamas island Norman’s Cay, which served as a refueling stop (Sáenz Rovner 2011). However, when after 1981 the US Reagan administration no longer regarded the drug problem as a health issue but as a threat to US national security, the US South Florida Task Force slowed down and eventually disrupted the transit route via Florida. As a result, Colombian and transnational networks shifted cocaine distribution routes toward Central America and Mexico and increasingly relied on Mexican networks (ICG 2013, 6). This is not a book about narcotics. Yet we need to understand the complex array of actors employing different strategies and discourses in shaping security policies that preceded and built up to the so-called war on drugs. Within Colombia, networks within the illegal economy took advantage of financial deregulation, which allowed capital flows enormous flexibility and actually cushioned Colombia against some external shocks (Estrada Álvarez and Moreno Rubio 2008, 31–32). Most notably, through the so-called ventanilla siniestra (“dark window”) of the Banco de la República, capital generated in the cocaine, marijuana, and (legal) emeralds trades found its way into the financial sector from the 1970s. The central bank urgently needed capital to stabilize the Colombian peso and boost investment (Fajardo Montaña 2010; Richani 2002, 102). Even if then-president Michelsen argued “the only sinister thing about it was the name, because it was based on the gratuitous assertion that the dollars coming from services all originated in drug trafficking, when, in fact, they came from mobile capital” (cited in Tokatlián and Alfonsín 2000, 149), the “window” is an early sign of the permeability of contemporary financial markets.

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Capital generated from the cocaine trade became central to paramilitary groups in Colombia, for instance, in organizations such as the MAS (Muerte a los Secuestradores) (Verdad Abierta 2011c). In this emerging narcobourgeoisie, the Colombian military found financially potent allies for its counterinsurgency strategy, initially largely unchecked by other state agencies (Gutiérrez Sanín 2019; Romero 2006). In fact, paramilitaries were trained in the military’s own facilities, and the Medellín network financed trainings in the 1980s. The military itself avoided some of the political costs arising from counterinsurgency measures. Colombian authors have long highlighted common practices between the military and paramilitaries (Palacio and Rojas 1990, 92; Medina Gallego 2008; Gutiérrez Sanín and Barón 2005). A wealth of declassified documents collected by the US National Security Archive (published in 2018) demonstrate concrete links and converging interests in the 1980s and 1990s. For instance, organizations such as the Asociación Campesina de Ganaderos y Agricultores del Magdalena Medio (ACDEGAM; Association of Magdalena Medio Ranchers and Farmers) in the town of Puerto Boyacá on the Magdalena River functioned as both a violent organization and a business association, having established its own militia aided by politicians and the military (Gutiérrez Sanín and Barón 2005, 11). Unsurprisingly, illegal economic actors had political aspirations, yet rarely succeeded in securing political mandates for themselves. Dominant class forces rejected the more visible overlaps between the illegal economy and politics. Pablo Escobar, the well-known head of the Medellín network, and Carlos Lehder, one of his business partners, were traffickers who established social security systems including unemployment insurance and social housing, which the state never provided to the same extent, and founded movements outside the two-party system, such as Medellín sin tugurios or the Movimiento Latino Nacional (Palacio and Rojas 1990, 96). After much grumbling among dominant factions, Escobar had to resign from Congress in 1983. Yet in the mid-1980s, the Medellín network controlled its own professionalized armed structures and contract killers, who used violence primarily as intimidation, not only as punishment (Snyder and Durán Martínez 2009, 82). By 1990, roughly five hundred police officers had been murdered in Medellín, presumably mostly by Escobar’s sicarios. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political decision to extradite wanted drug trafficking suspects to the United States led to an open war among the Barco government, state personnel primarily from the judiciary, and the Medellín network (Gutiérrez 2009). Yet this temporary confrontation did not fundamentally affect the overall convergence of class interests. Future president Uribe became governor of Antioquia in 1995. He was cousin to one of the 1980s illegal sector’s most well-known families, the

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Ochoas, who “had financed [Uribe’s] political campaign” for the Senate according to colleagues the US embassy interviewed (US Colombia Embassy 1993). This was, however, “a near universal practice” according to government cables at the time (National Security Archive 2018). From a family owning “extensive land and business holdings in Antioquia” doing “legitimate business, such as cattle ranching, with known Antioquia traffickers” (National Security Archive 2018), the then-governor moved within Antioquia’s “web of relationships” among paramilitaries, drug trafficking, and legal land agriculture (US Colombia Embassy 1997b). Links are at least probable, given that “Uribe almost certainly had dealings with the paramilitaries (AUC) while the governor of Antioquia—it goes with the job” (Department of Defense 2004). Among the most prominent private agents of violence was Los Pepes (Perseguidos por Escobar). Los Pepes had broken away from Pablo Escobar and cooperated with state agencies during his persecution, “with a combination of guile, brutality and strategic alliances” (infobae 2018; Insight Crime 2017). Through the Bloque de Búsqueda created to capture Escobar, former National Police chief Óscar Naranjo admitted, “there was a direct channel of communication between the police and the Pepes, and this fed the agencies of the United States” (El País 2005). Parts of these networks located in the western Cali and Norte del Valle region were instrumental in the symbiosis between para-state groups and drug trafficking, resulting in a more consolidated national organization, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), in 1997 (López Hernández 2010, 49; Policía Judicial Montería 2011). Carlos Castaño, one of the leading Pepes, had founded the paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Córdoba y Urabá, the most important paramilitary group of the 1990s (Gutiérrez 2009; Richani 2002, 103) and then pushed for unity to promote their political and economic interests. Diego Murillo (“Don Berna”), a former Escobar sicario instrumental in providing information on Escobar in the early 1990s, became a leading figure in the cooperation between police, drug trafficking, and the AUC, apparently continued through the police’s anti-kidnapping unit Grupo de Acción Unificada por la Libertad Personal (GAULA; Task Force for Personal Liberty) (Insight Crime 2017). The structural interdependence between paramilitaries and criminal groups is documented in great detail in the Verdad Abierta archive (Verdad Abierta 2011a; 2011f; see Zelik 2009, 233, 250–52; Camacho 2009, 27–28; HRW 2001). The convergence of interests did not come without disruptions. Accusations of illegal capital in Ernesto Samper’s presidential campaign (1994–1998) (National Security Archive 2018) resulted in the judicial process Proceso 8000 in 1995, which treated connections of about two thousand state employees, politicians, and members of the judiciary to the Cali network and led to

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arrests and replacements. The repeatedly contested legalization of extradition to the United States in drug trafficking cases illustrates shifting alliances and struggles. Pushed by the Interamerican Convention on Extradition and a 1980 treaty between Colombia and the United States, the Colombian Congress legalized extradition in 1981 and 1986, yet the Supreme Court twice declared it unconstitutional. The 1991 constitution declared extradition illegal, a direct reaction to Escobar’s violence unleashed in the years prior (Semana 1996). Congress legalized it again in 1997 and included extradition in the 2002 Penal Code, although the latter exempted “political” crimes from extradition (Congreso de la República de Colombia 2005a). Extradition, or the Proceso 8000, however, did not dismantle the illegal economy nor the fact that there were legal-illegal connections throughout Colombian politics and the economy. When free mayoral elections were introduced in 1986, and the 1991 constitution decentralized administrative powers and budget management (Palacio and Rojas 1990, 92) parallel to state transformation in the context of structural adjustment, this realigned the institutional ensemble’s administrative levels and facilitated armed actors’ and local dominant factions’ leverage on local politics and access to public funds. Royalties resulting from mineral resources extraction, which municipalities administered, became a source of income for paramilitary groups (Medina Gallego 2008, 124; Gutiérrez Sanín and Zuluaga Borrero 2011). Paramilitaries were active in emerald and gold mining, and even oil extraction (Medina Gallego 2008, 128); however, according to the AUC itself, its main sources of income were the cocaine and opium trades (Castaño 2002b). Recognizing the state’s heterogeneity helps us understand how parts of it persecuted illegal economy and paramilitaries, while those same paramilitaries were able to forge agreements with other agencies, as well as with large landed property owners (Gutiérrez 2009; López Hernández 2010). Simultaneously, private armies financed through the illegal economy promoted corporate and landowning interests. The co-occurrence of omission and cooperation led to paramilitary consolidation in the years leading up to the AUC’s foundation in 1997, with roots in the Antioquia region (Romero 2006, 368). State omission and collusion allowed paramilitary forces to expand toward growth-promising regions from 1997 onward, carried out via massacres, expulsions, and intimidation. This is particularly interesting considering the shifts in the global cocaine trade described in the section on Mexico, which suggest Colombian brokers’ role in the transnational illegal economy was reduced; however, they increased production. In the 1990s, many coca-growing areas expanded into the “agricultural frontiers” of Putumayo, Nariño, Guaviare, or Meta (Ramírez 2015). The Mapiripán massacre of 1997 is often named as a starting point for paramilitary expansion

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into the Colombian southeast; an unknown number of people were murdered and around 2,700 displaced. Given Mapiripán’s strategic location on the Guaviare River and toward the Orinoco—important transport routes in southeast Colombia—this territorial appropriation gave the AUC control over coca plantations and what would become oil palm cultivations (i.e., Verdad Abierta 2011b). Recognizing the centrality of illegal practices in the global economy in part explains how such actors acquire political power. Paramilitary expansion took place when Álvaro Uribe as Antioquia’s governor relatively openly proposed the institutionalization of legal-illegal alliances. Congress had declared so-called self-defense groups illegal in the 1980s. Uribe legalized them in Antioquia in 1994 introducing the so-called CONVIVIR self-defense groups. Documents now show that Antioquia’s CONVIVIR actually served as legal facades for the AUC (CCJ 2008a; Verdad Abierta 2013b). Paramilitary Éver Veloza García (alias “HH”) stated at a public hearing in March 2008 that “all CONVIVIR belonged to us” (CCJ 2008a, 1); a Bogotá court confirmed the claim in 2013 (Verdad Abierta 2013b). According to AUC member and banana producer Raúl Hasbún, the legal CONVIVIR structures pragmatically served to handle paramilitaries’ finances and to process payments from supporters (Semana 2012d). The Supreme Court withdrew the nationwide legalization of CONVIVIR in 1996 and banned them before the Pastrana government’s peace process with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC; Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) in 1998 (CCJ 2008a, 2). Instead of the drug trade “perverting” a phenomenon of legitimate self-defense, however, the biographies of well-known paramilitaries (Camacho 2009) show how drug trafficking was already important for paramilitary finances from the 1980s onward (Franco Restrepo 2009, 408–9; López Hernández 2010, 47–48; Medina Gallego 2008). Instead of two paramilitary factions, one a political force fighting guerrillas, and one using war for profits (as economies of war literature would have it; Collier and Hoeffler 2004), the illegal economy cofinanced counterinsurgency. The AUC’s anti-guerrilla fight seemed optional in those regions where coca cultivation and processing into coca paste yielded most profits. In the guerrillacontrolled southern regions, paramilitary groups were less present than in departments like Atlántico or Cesar with only sporadic FARC activity. Colombian paramilitarism illustrates the tension between paramilitaries as “robbery machines,” associated with dominant ideas about organized crime, and their role as militias in close cooperation with dominant class factions (Zelik 2005, 489). Particularly in the 1990s (and 2000s), paramilitary groups committed selective killings, disappearances, and massacres in communities where they considered individuals to be “subversive” (Medina Gallego

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2008, 134; Palacio and Rojas 1990, 90; Zelik 2009). By combining legal and illegal methods, these groups, their financiers, and large parts of the military achieved some regional “stability” and avoided negotiated solutions with the guerrillas (Romero 2006, 368). In this respect, paramilitaries were mainly forces of counterinsurgency. Similar to Mexico, the broader economic context allowed Colombia’s illegal and legal economies to grow. The economic structure since the 1980s, and particularly the economic apertura policy pushed by the Gaviria government between 1990 and 1994, drove Colombia’s globalized economy into two main directions—namely, mining and agro-industry, creating further realignments within dominant classes.4 Mining and construction increased significantly in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the importance of coffee and the broader agricultural sector had been declining since the 1940s.5 The agricultural sectors’ loss of importance indicated a partial transition from an agricultural to a mining export economy and, clearly, deindustrialization. Mining activities during Uribe’s term were a smaller share of GDP than of all exports (CEPAL 2007; Matthes 2012). Nevertheless, the focus on extraction clearly shows when looking at the import penetration rate by sector (Bonilla González 2011, 57–58). Sixty-six percent of Colombian industrial production in the 2000s was based on imports such as capital goods (e.g., machinery and car parts), consumer durables (e.g., electrical appliances), or chemical elements, and 56 percent is (re-)exported, only assembled, similar to Mexico, particularly in light industry, like foods, textiles, leather, and metal products. The mining and oil sectors import only 8 percent of their production but export 93 percent (Bonilla González 2011, 58). All other sectors export much smaller shares of their production. The services sector frequently depends on tourism but also on mining. While income from coffee exports was distributed among a large number of producers of different sizes, and accumulation strategies therefore relied, at least partly, on small- and medium-sized coffee farmers, inflows from coal exports remain in the hands of external investors, those from oil exports only partly with the state (Bonilla González 2011, 61). Likewise, there is a global rather than purely local dimension to paramilitarism in Colombia. Paramilitaries ensured a generally friendly investment climate and were deeply committed to the export economy. Numerous transnational companies relied on paramilitary groups to “protect” their facilities, apart from the military and private security (for instance, on Chiquita, see National Security Archive 2017). In northwest Colombia, paramilitary groups explicitly supported export-oriented banana companies and cattle ranchers; many paramilitary commanders came from well-established cattle ranching and farming families (Romero 2006, 376; Camacho 2009). And yet, state policies constructed crime as typically committed by lower-class, young

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men, usually omitting white-collar and corporate crime. The same sectors, for instance, the Society of Farmers (SAC), kept arable land concentrated in few hands, mostly for cattle. At the turn of the millennium, only 5.3 million hectares of more than 114.2 million hectares of arable land were available for food production; 40.1 million hectares were pasture land (Reyes Posada 1997, 294). Wheat, yucca, maize, and other foodstuffs production for domestic consumption declined sharply between 1990 and 1997, as did coffee and cotton production, while agricultural imports rose (Fajardo Montaña 2002, 9–10). In the 2000s, Colombia exported far more technology-intensive agricultural products harvested year-round (cut flowers, palm oil, bananas, and sugar cane) (Fajardo Montaña 2002). Paramilitaries increasingly invested in such agroindustry. Most important, paramilitaries carried out a radical, reverse land reform, truncating any attempted redistributive effect of prior reforms both by advancing their own social mobility and radically restructuring entire rural areas. In both Colombia and Mexico, the rural population continued to grow until around 2005 and decreased only slowly (the urbanization rate was around 78 percent in the mid-2000s) (CEPAL 2006, 27–30, table 11). In contrast to Mexico, small-scale farming continues to account for a considerable share of domestic-destined food production in Colombia. It is all the more noteworthy, then, that the paramilitaries and their social environment, commonly known as the clase emergente, bought and appropriated enormous land areas, many of them in fertile areas of the Magdalena Medio and eastern Llanos (El Tiempo 2011; Reyes Posada 1997; Semana 2008c). This new landowning class, initially generating its wealth from cocaine and emerald smuggling during the 1980s, increasingly invested in the legal economy (Camacho 2011). Appropriating land was central to the globalized economic model, which these forces helped to consolidate, radically affecting small-scale farming (Medina Gallego 2008, 135). To understand the significance of political change in 2002 in Colombia, it is essential to recognize how these complex, historically specific alliances around illegal trade and paramilitaries in conjunction with macro-economic structural adjustments transformed access to the state. CONCLUSION This chapter argued how an allegedly local, frequently othered, “shadow” economy is intimately intertwined with dominant state strategies around an export-oriented, increasingly financialized economy, precisely because it is a globalized part of the local economy. Social mobility via illegal trade offered opportunities based on the impacts of the 1980s trade liberalizations

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in Mexico and those a decade later in Colombia, which the export-oriented agrarian (Colombia) and assembly line (Mexico) economy did and could not offer. While the export of illicit products itself has a long-standing history in the smuggling of legal products, this is not a local problem; but once again this emphasizes how the local and global are intertwined (see, for instance, Hesketh 2017). The weight of illegal practices in Colombia is globally produced, and Mexico’s role as a transit economy is only possible as a place embedded in global economic relations. In Colombia, different waves of producing and exporting illegal products had varying effects and resulted in the upswing and downfall of businesses and regions (i.e., in the Guajira) (Britto 2020). This was similar to earlier economic cycles based on raw materials and agrarian products (i.e., gum or coffee). In Mexico’s more diversified economy with a larger industrial sector, illegal entrepreneurs do not have as much economic weight as they do in Colombia. But in both contexts, the boundaries between the legal and illegal economies are fluid. For a long time, violent land appropriation seemed to play a lesser role in Mexico than in Colombia; the transit economy was not based on landed property. The Mexican constellations of forces hardly resemble the rapid rise of the Colombian “narco-paramilitary” factions associated with land ownership. Nevertheless, social structures are dynamic, sectors associated with drug trafficking have experienced a rise, and their position no longer corresponds to that of subordinate corporate sectors. Despite the variations in numbers—profit estimations from the US market ranged from US$18 billion to US$60 billion annually during the Calderón presidency with the bulk of profits remaining in the United States (ICG 2013, 7)—their role is significant. Violent property rights regulation, forced displacement, and appropriation became an issue in Mexico. This chapter shows, through the continuum between the legal and illegal economies, the local-global connections that shape power relations at different scales, the ease with which illegal practices become part of the global economy, and that illegal actors are integral to political power relations. Such actors may contest state institutional restructuring or the implementation of laws, but they do not necessarily destabilize state institutions. Within a relational understanding of the state (Poulantzas 2002), this approach emphasizes that the boundaries between legality and illegality are themselves the product of power relations.

Chapter 5

Security Narratives Generals, Patrones, and Criminals

DISCOURSE AND REPRESENTATION IN THE FIELD OF SECURITY Through the lens of selective state representations of security and crime, this chapter analyzes turning points during which the construction of Colombian and Mexican society’s criminal enemies became a driving force in security policies.1 How do state institutions frame those their policies aim to combat? Which representations of the “war on drugs” become dominant in which conjunctures? Who buys into and supports them? Answering these questions, the chapter argues that the war on crime assumed a productive role for Colombia’s and Mexico’s democracies. While states presented governance of and through crime as improving everybody’s well-being, they curtailed struggles for more encompassing social transformations in the name of security. Putting crime center stage in any and all governance realms from social, health, and education to policies of law and citizenship tells us how these societies perceived conflict and dissent. Existing approaches on governing crime and security question the ideals of liberal democracy but do not necessarily award crime the central role it has gained in governance and discourse. Yet not only the framing of crime and security, but the prominent role they acquire in governance measures, is central to understanding the contemporary state in Colombia and Mexico. I argue that discourses on how to best approach the perceived and lived insecurity in the 2000s served to legitimize state activity that routinely goes far beyond legal confines to fight potential disorder. Governance in liberal democracy, generally, contains the possibility to suspend rights and resort to coercion. In Colombia and Mexico, “coercion and contention of social unrest [have] been increasingly based on the argument of fighting crime in all fields of public policy. The productive role of crime lies in its potential 105

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to perpetuate, even if not entirely legitimate, a limited form of democracy, and to limit its contestation” (Jenss 2018a, 3). Based on Hall et al.’s (1978, 1986) conceptual takes on discursive reframing (i.e. of crime) on coloniality of state power (Quijano 2014, 777–832), and on approaches that foreground the discursive or epistemic state selectivity that develop the selectivities concept coined by Offe (1972) and Poulantzas (2002) (Leubolt 2014; Brand 2013; Jessop 2008), the chapter makes a case for looking closely at what discourses accompany specific policies and enable their continuity despite obvious coercive practices. These discursive shifts do not depend on national contexts and the capacity of specific social forces to influence state discourse alone, but they are embedded in transnational conceptual shifts, policy arrangements between different governments, and global networks. Much as they are framed as “national” responses against threats perceived as external to society, the policies accompanied by these discourses are framed in transnational constellations and legitimized in part via this global embeddedness. Discourses of crime are not local, and neither is their implementation. The following section focuses on the role of discourse and representation in the state theoretical framework. I then take the topic beyond the state, to highlight the transnational form security narratives have assumed in the Americas, analyzing the transfers of ideas and people between the two states that developed such a remarkably similar agenda on security. The final empirical section analyzes prominent discursive figures in security governance in Colombia and Mexico, and the resulting selective perceptions of the orderly and disorderly. STATE SECURITY NARRATIVES This book focuses on two recent conjunctures during which the construction of society’s criminal enemies both in Colombia and in Mexico became a driving force in security governance. Within this book, this chapter foregrounds the political-ideological, discursive elements. Rather than a stand-alone explanation, it provides a description of successful discourses that produced some level of popular support for heavily militarized policies framed as “anticrime” in both Colombia and Mexico. As said before, this is not to judge the two projects’ success in achieving hegemony (Hall 1985, 119). Rather, discourses are integral to the “shift in the modalities through which ruling blocs attempt to construct hegemony” in capitalist states, to use Hall’s (1985, 117) rewording of Poulantzas’s observations. Both security projects were, ultimately, able “to reconstruct the terrain of what is ‘taken for granted’ in social and political thought—and so to form a new common sense” (Hall 1985, 119). This is not all new; instead, Hall stresses that, following Gramsci,

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“often, ideological shifts take place, not by substituting one, whole, new conception of the world for another, but by presenting a novel combination of old and new elements” (Hall 1985, 122). The relation between discourse and material consequences/causes is reciprocal. When Hall (1985, 121) contends how discourse analysis helps us understand how Thatcherism accomplishes the condensation of different discourses into its contradictory formation, and how it “works” so as to recruit people to its different, often contradictory, subject positions; even though it has only had partial success in its project to construct a new kind of political “subject,”

but warns against overestimating the extent to which discourse theory can explain social formations on its own, he summarizes a long-standing debate that I will not repeat here. Poulantzas’s idea of the condensation of social forces and contradictions in state institutions helps us understand both the “permeability of the state for certain framings” and the discursive framing state institutions “offer for social conflict” (Jenss 2018a, 4–5; see Jessop 2008, 50–52). State discourses can make social conflicts disappear from view or award them less priority than “larger” security issues (Franco Restrepo 2009, 384). Similarly, labeling antistate protest as a threat frequently served to deny activists due process in otherwise liberal-democratic governance (Calveiro 2008, 30; Jenss 2018a). Hall’s emphasis yet cautiousness on discourse allows me to link representation in security policy to “the materialist premise” that “ideas arise from and reflect the material conditions and circumstances in which they are generated. They express social relations and their contradictions in thought” (Hall 1986, 31). Discourse and representation are complex matters; it is impossible to ascribe specific discourses a priori to large social groups, thinking of Hall’s (1986, 40) ironic image “of great, immovable class battalions heaving their ascribed ideological luggage about the field of struggle, with their ideological number-plates on their backs, as Poulantzas once put it.” Nonetheless, class interests are expressed—and can be read through—discursive utterings, for instance, in press releases by particular associations, interviews given to the press, or more mediated media representations. The state permeability for specific discursive framings, while contingent upon political conjunctures, “influences what is perceived as particularly urgent, which problems are securitized and which framings delineate subsequent governance mechanisms” (Jenss 2018a, 5). Authorities may sometimes distort or appropriate representations by those criticizing the state. The symbolism and discourses on security that state agencies put forward, and their ideas about the success and failure of their policies, are relevant to how social forces perceive such policies and who supports them.

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I look at security discourses from the lens of Quijano’s coloniality of power (2000a), and from Hall’s (1980; 1985) work on how racialization influenced the differentiation Thatcherite discourses made between social groups. This highlights the extent to which intersecting categories of social differentiation are crucial to understanding the governance of crime in its discursive and material iterations. In short, different social groups, enjoying differentiated access to the state, influence the state discourse on crime to very different degrees. Different social groups are confronted with the state’s selectivity in filtering certain claims into the institutional realm, “the definition of sometimes contradictory priorities by institutions, the lack of action on some topics and for some social sectors. Criminalization of or impunity for particular social forces is an expression of the state’s penal selectivities” (Jenss 2018a; Aponte 1999). Contemporary security narratives are the result of postcolonial entanglements, co-defined by the coloniality of power. The construction of “others” as a threat, however, was not only an integral part of colonial rule, but is of liberal democracy. First, the (global) naturalization of social hierarchies (class, race) plays a decisive role in defining crime. For instance, Mora (2013; 2017) shows how, in Mexico, social segments originally supposed to benefit from poverty and development policies experienced not only the persistence of colonial attributions but also a devaluation. Poverty reduction is now so strongly intertwined with a specific orientation of security policy that both have an articulated, socially differentiating effect on those who are already economically marginalized (Mora 2013, 177) and simultaneously subject to colonial attributions of how economically unproductive or inefficient they are (see also Bhandar 2018; Bobrow-Strain 2007). For Mora (2013, 182), this shows that an “intrinsic aspect of violence lies in the production of knowledge about what is cause and effect in social reality.” State authorities regard poverty as a cultural problem rather than a structural one. In order to belong to (state-recognized) civil society, people must adapt their habitus. Some segments of the population are considered incapable of making the adjustments needed to overcome this racialized culture of poverty—they are practically predestined to join violent gangs and engage in criminal activity (Presidencia de la República 2007; Mora 2013, 191). The global is relevant in a second, much more concrete and palpable way, and it is in the actual traveling of ideas, the international training and dialogue by police and military, the traveling of security personnel as consultants from one perceived hotspot to the other—in short, the “circulation of both policing techniques and practices, which together lend to the global (re)making of policing within the international realm” (Hönke and Müller 2016, 1). Policing and security conceptualizations are “globally made”—not just globally influential. Security ideas travel back and forth, cross borders more easily

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than the objects they target, and are not simply exported from Washington to the Southern Hemisphere; they are interwoven in complex ways. Notions of security are exchanged, adapted, and shaped between a multiplicity of locations. A range of actors who do not participate in such processes by chance co-constitutes them. Agents in postcolonial states are not passive receivers of security policies devised elsewhere; they shape security policies. TRAINING, IDEAS, AND PERSONNEL: TRAVELING CONCEPTS AND TRANSNATIONAL SECURITY NARRATIVES The perception of growing insecurity is not limited to Latin American countries. The prevailing understandings of security, insecurity, crime, and their explanatory factors have changed worldwide. Ministerial summits and international security conferences, and the executive bodies of countries as different as France, the Philippines, or Brazil, continuously transform their dominant concepts of security, and while administrations frequently frame such conceptual overhaul as responses to newly emerging terrorist threats, this relation is actually reciprocal. In the Americas, the transformation of security concepts since the 2000s has been particularly pronounced and influential, and particularly clearly a transnational endeavor. Hemispheric documents illustrate the long-standing and growing intimate link between security narratives and a free trade model of capitalist economy. The first Americas Summit in 1994, which took place only weeks before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into force, linked security cooperation to the planning of a hemispheric free trade zone. It is commonplace that US (security) agencies have a leading role in these institutional spaces, but not only the United States pushed hemispheric security policy. The enforcement of these paradigms within the United States and beyond brought about a whole body of literature (Schrader 2019; Go 2020; LeBrón 2019). Yet while US governments and agencies have historically been driving forces in consolidating transnationally applicable security paradigms, this by no means was a uniform policy toward Latin American countries that US governments imposed. Formally, the topics of security and economic cooperation remained separate. Time and again, however, economic agreements in the Americas did not exclusively concern the trade sector. Securing sales markets, or dismantling trade barriers, were increasingly interpreted as partial issues of US national security. The conceptual entanglement of development policy, security policy, and the state finds expression already in 1988, in the so-called Santa Fe strategy papers—they were global visions of US security and counterinsurgency

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policy (see Roncallo 2013). In 1995, after NAFTA came into force, US secretary of defense William Perry said the United States wanted to strengthen the “third link,” that of security, in addition to political and economic links. In this vision, Mexico was part of the United States’s security realm (Fazio 1996). Finally, in 2005, the supplementary soft law to NAFTA, the Alianza para la Seguridad y la Prosperidad de América del Norte (ASPAN; Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America), fixed security cooperation among the United States, Mexico, and Canada specifically in relation to the free trade agreement. Although the US state is not a contradiction-free “monolithic bloc” (Poulantzas 1976, 33–35), views on security policy in Latin America seemed to differ only marginally over time. For example, it was under Democratic president Bill Clinton that the CIA institutionalized research into new worldwide threats via the Political Instability Task Force, and made the argument that so-called failed states had to be policed and aided by military means so prominent (Esty et al. 1998; Political Instability Task Force 2003). Security definitions within the United States, having become ever more expansive after September 11, 2001, are laid down in the Patriot Act (2001), the US National Security Strategy (2002), or the National Strategy for Homeland Security (2007). At the continental scale, the 2001 Interamerican Democratic Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), the result of the third regional Americas Summit, was the fundamental document for linking security and economy in the hemisphere and for conceptualizing conservative governance (Rodríguez Rejas 2010, 219). Additionally, the declaration of the fourth extraordinary regional Americas Summit in Monterrey in 2004 postulated that private property as a basic element for economic growth must be protected at all costs (Rodríguez Rejas 2010, 222; Roncallo 2013). A range of documents built on each other and developed a homogeneous conception of what they see as threats. For the common security policy of the United States and Latin American governments, the Declaration on Security in the Americas (OAS 2003), written under the impression of the September 11 attacks in 2001, was a central document. It opened up the possibility of an OAS security project, even though the organization’s security commission only existed since 1998 (interview with grassroots activist, April 2011). Parallel to the government summits, military representatives met frequently; already in 1991, the Compromiso de Santiago de Chile de Defensa de la Democracia  (Santiago Commitment for Defense of Democracy) emphasized the threats of “drug trafficking,” “organized crime,” and “terrorism.” The relative conservative coherence in security conceptualizations at intergovernmental level starkly contrasts with the wide variety of security definitions developed during the 1990s. For instance, actors within the United Nations aimed beyond the state-centered, National Security concept premised

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on external threats to the state, to instead focus on individual needs—namely, freedom from fear and want—through the Human Security concept. From a critical security perspective, this criticism of state-centered security concepts is still insufficient. State security practices become effective precisely because they are based on allegedly legitimate authority and the well-being of all. Conceptualizations of the state that do not take this legitimacy for granted are one way to critically examine such security policy. Yet even the practical implementation of Human Security approaches is rare. The 2000s showed that the little inroads more differentiated security concepts had made were easily reversed. Counterinsurgency practices of the 1970s National Security doctrine continued to feature in military training courses (i.e., in the School of Americas) and continued to find their way into national legislations, implemented in criminal policy by both police and military. Major political shifts in Latin America ensured that the project of the common free trade area Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA; Free Trade Area of the Americas), based on three rhetorical axes of free trade, representative democracy, regional security, failed, at the latest in 2005. Social movements had mobilized intensely against the project, and several Latin American governments (i.e., Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil) oriented their efforts toward regional alliances such as MERCOSUR and, later, UNASUR. Previously, there had been little significant resistance to the US strategic plans. The Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas Initiative, which followed on from the ALCA process in 2008, included a much smaller number of governments. They pursued to align their overall security policies and their “fight against organized crime.” The Guanacaste Declaration, the result of a high-level executive meeting in Costa Rica in July 2009, heavily focused on organized crime, the “war on drugs,” and, generally, “security” (Calderón, Colom, and Uribe 2009, 5).2 In that process, internal and external security notions converged—as seen in government discourses coupling security, organized crime, and terrorism (Beare 2005). Likewise, they promised development policy would significantly prevent terrorism and eliminate security risks. Such changes of definition toward a multidimensional security problem (as the OAS Security Commission’s declaration of Bridgetown 2002 stated) were essential to zero tolerance policies. Grassroots organizations aiming to prevent the free trade zone only systematically focused insecurity or US military activities on the continent in the following years (interview with grassroots activist, April 2011). The agreements at the intergovernmental level had a decisive influence on national-scale political strategies, (in)security concepts, and states’ conflict management. For instance, the US view on migration translated into Smart Border Agreements between the United States and Mexico in 2005,

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Operation Centinela sending the Mexican National Guard, and eighteen thousand Mexican soldiers to the northern border (Benítez Manaut and Rodríguez Ulloa 2006). In 2000, the US strategy paper Santa Fe IV declared migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States its central security threat (Rodríguez Rejas 2010, 273). The document only entrenched an existing policy of mass deportations to Central America since the 1990s. For Colombia, the 1989 US Andean Strategy, aimed at curbing cocaine imports by combating supply in Andean countries themselves, puts emphasis on the State Department, the Southern Command, and US intelligence. The strategy gained momentum with the Regional Andean Initiative from 2001, when Colombia agreed to Plan Colombia, and negotiations with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC; Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) failed. CONCEPTS INTO PRACTICE: SECURITY COOPERATION Security concepts did not just travel into one direction but found their way back into US policing (Schrader 2019) and traveled between places independently from US institutions. The personal ties of high-end functionaries and official (but not necessarily public) arrangements for security cooperation tell us more about such transnational connections. At least between 2006 and 2009, high-level meetings between Colombian and Mexican security apparatuses took place frequently, sometimes monthly (US Colombia Embassy 2009a). Even before taking office, the Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderón visited Bogotá in October 2006 for briefings on Colombian “antidrug” operations. In October 2007, then minister of defense Juan Manuel Santos and Mexico’s attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora met as one of a series of meetings around counternarcotics cooperation accompanied by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). They planned, for instance, to include Colombian police in the so-called El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) (US Colombia Embassy 2007). US cables frequently frame joint Colombian and Mexican counter-narcotics efforts as “working more closely than ever” and their relationship as “symbiotic” (US Colombia Embassy 2009a; 2007). They present Colombia as helping Mexico solve a growing problem within the scope of the Plan Mérida cooperation between Mexico and the United States (US Colombia Embassy 2009a). The director of the Colombian National Police, General Óscar Naranjo, played a particularly prominent role in fostering security ties between Colombia and Mexico during that time. He participated in a series of meetings taking place at the beginning of Calderón’s term (US Colombia

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Embassy 2007), oversaw organizations for Colombian training of Mexican officials (US Colombia Embassy 2009a), and later became an official advisor to Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, in 2012. Mexican media scrutinized Naranjo due to his reputation as a mano dura police and his earlier involvement in the police cooperation with the Cali “cartel” and the incipient Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) (Aristegui Noticias 2012; infobae 2018). US security updates on Colombia repeatedly cite meetings with Naranjo (US Colombia Embassy 2009b; 2009c). The personnel and discursive transfers are transnational, but not only between Latin American countries and an overpowering United States. Prominent figures of the global Spanish-speaking Right co-shaped the discourses centered on security. In fact, Álvaro Uribe Vélez and Felipe Calderón both employed the Spanish campaign consultant Antonio Solá, member of the Spanish Partido Popular (Martín González 2008, 15). Calderón employed Solá in his much-criticized campaign for the presidency in 2006. Solá advised or campaigned for almost all right-wing conservative presidents in the Spanish-speaking world over the past fifteen years, having worked for Mariano Rajoy in Spain, Martelly in Haiti, General Otto Pérez Molina in Guatemala, Porfirio Lobo in Honduras (who took office after the military coup), and Sebastián Piñera in Chile. Through the consultancy firm Ostos Solá, the consultant advised numerous candidacies in Latin American countries, lost the 2008 campaign for the Partido Popular in Spain, and was presented as a potential Partido Popular presidential candidate himself in Spain in 2020 (Lema 2020). Mexican newspaper Proceso (2009) even called Solá the “soul of the dirty war of 2006,” referring to attempts to delegitimize López Obrador’s candidacy against Calderón; other media took up the framing. Solá also worked for the Santos campaign for the Colombian presidency in 2014 (Lewin 2014). Another prominent figure that participated in presidential campaigns both in Colombia and Mexico was J. J. Rendón, portrayed as a “dirty player” hired to influence election results with the help of hackers in social media (Bloomberg Business Week 2016). He worked in Mexico and Colombia but reportedly fell out with the Santos campaign in 2014. The international military cooperation Plan Colombia was framed as international support for the “recovery” of the Colombian state from 2000 onward. The version that received financial US support conceived the armed conflict exclusively from a perspective that saw drugs as problems external to the state and had a far stronger military focus than the Pastrana government’s original proposal. The plan mixed the “war on drugs” with the “war on terror” and a clearly antisubversive strategy (CCAJAR 2003). Cooperation consisted of a preliminary phase from around 1995, when US security institutions mainly cooperated with the military-trained National Police in selective

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counternarcotics activities. The professionalization and equipment that the Colombian military had demanded during President Pastrana’s (1998–2002) peace process with the FARC now marked a far-reaching transformation, visible particularly after 2002. US military presence in Colombia was now stronger, officially flanked by exceptional regulations. The Colombian army, and retired generals as political advisors, gained political weight once again (interview with social scientist, November 28, 2011). Between 2000 and 2003, Plan Colombia was part of a huge US$1.3 billion “emergency” package for the Andes, including US$860 million for Colombia. In its first phase, US aid was channeled into three new “anti-drug battalions,” forty-six helicopters, communications and weapons systems for the army, and fourteen helicopters for the police. More and more personnel of the DEA worked in Colombia (Aristizábal 2007, 168; CCAJAR 2003, 72). Special military units exclusively responsible for “drug control” took over police duties (Aristizábal 2007, 168; Leal Buitrago 2006, 529). After Uribe Vélez took office, the ambitious “counterterrorism” campaign of Plan Patriota, a Plan Colombia update, began (2003–2006). The US government granted Colombia a further US$463 million after Uribe had complied with the demand to increase the military budget and to commit to the immunity of US citizens. US soldiers, mercenaries, and employees of private security companies enjoyed immunity in Colombia (CCAJAR 2003, 73–75; Leal Buitrago 2006, 535). Until 2021, Plan Colombia transfers amounted to roughly $12 billion. The Mexican government announced the Mérida Initiative (MI), the Mexican-US twin to Plan Colombia, in August 2007. Negotiations within the framework of a “new and strengthened level of bilateral cooperation” were brief, since January 2007 (Cámara de Diputados 2008b, 75; La Jornada 2007a). Former intelligence director and attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora (Partido Acción Nacional, PAN; National Action Party) was key for MI negotiations (La Jornada 2011a). While clear objectives were not initially disclosed, under President Obama the MI consisted of four pillars (disrupting organized crime, strengthening law, building a “twenty-first-century border,” and “resilient communities”). The third increasingly channeled scanning and surveillance equipment not only to the US-Mexico border but also to Mexico’s southern border (WOLA 2014, 5; Ribando Seelke and Finklea 2017). The Mérida Initiative was the first materialization of the idea that the Mexican state was unable to manage its security threats on its own. Had earlier Mexican foreign policy been adamant that the United States should not interfere (while this was more rhetoric than anything), the Calderón government now considered cooperation “necessary” (Presidencia de la República 2007, 33). Between 2008 and 2018, US$1.848 billion flowed from the United States to Mexico to expand security infrastructure and technology (SRE

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2019, 54–56), mainly for equipment such as Black Hawk helicopters, aircraft, intelligence technology, training, and logistics (US Department of State 2009). For the 2008–2010 financial year, the United States provided US$1.4 billion; under President Obama, another US$330 million (2011–2012) would go to Mexico (US Department of State 2009). Training for Mexican military and police officers by Colombian elite units was part of considering Colombia’s Plan Colombia an outright success (Proceso 2011c). In 2010, for example, the Mexican Federal Police, now defunct, received courses from the Colombian National Police, the FBI, the Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS), the US Justice Department and DEA, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the Chilean Carabineros (SSP 2012, 33). The involved agents’ economic interests partly drove the MI, exposing the political economy of security discourses. It was integral to a broader-scale and longer-term US-led, regional security strategy strongly built on technologizing security (Graham 2011). The MI included economic benefits for US manufacturers of aircraft, helicopters, and high-tech weapons. Apart from acquiring them, such highly complex systems required permanent high-tech maintenance and spare parts deliveries, which the MI funds and contract included. As US companies provide maintenance, funds ultimately flow back to US firms (Cámara de Diputados 2008b, 62). Compared to Colombia, the Mérida Initiative was bound to have a smaller overall impact in Mexico, particularly since US financial contributions accounted for a much smaller share of Mexico’s overall security spending. Mexico alone spent about US$14 billion annually on its security and justice apparatuses toward the end of Calderón’s term (CASEDE 2012; ICG 2013, 21). The MI, “bi-national working groups,” or DEA offices in Mexico City, however, clearly show how US security institutions were intimately involved in the strategy design and information flows of Mexican security infrastructure and policies (La Jornada 2011a). For instance, the US embassy admitted it knew about the new protagonism of the Federal Police in security in Chihuahua in 2010 before the state’s governor did (La Jornada 2011c; 2011d). The MI remained the most visible and criticized element of a transformed security discourse put into practice. I interpret it less as US financial aid than as the subordinate integration of Mexican security policy under US security paradigms. Protests against the MI did take place, and US agencies repeatedly sought to defuse negative “myths” (Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs 2009). But at least for the Mexican side, the MI’s status as an international treaty between the executives of different countries up-scaled decision-making into inaccessible circles, impeding critical forces in the institutional ensemble to effectively control such decision-making (Cámara de Diputados 2008b, 79).

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DISCURSIVE SHIFTS, CRITICAL CONJUNCTURES Following, the chapter identifies discursive figures that became dominant in Colombian and Mexican security talk during the critical conjunctures of the 2000s. While these figures are not at all new, the prominence they achieve speaks of the similar success of particular security discourses in both countries. Maybe more than the actual implementation of specific measures, these discourses are where Colombian and Mexican security governance converge. The Soldier, the Patrón, and the Terrorist: Discourse Protagonists in Colombia The turn of the twenty-first century was the time of a paradigmatic shift of representation in Colombian security discourses, particularly from 2003 to 2008, at the height of the military campaign against the FARC guerrilla. Only days after taking office in 2002, the Uribe government proclaimed a state of emergency, core to the state discourse directed against FARC “terrorists.” The FARC, Colombia’s oldest and biggest guerrilla organization, has long been constructed as the country’s public enemy number one, an enemy increasingly portrayed as an outright criminal actor who abandoned all political ambitions. This image of the FARC as a criminal threat to Colombian state and society is central in the broader turn toward criminalization in Colombian politics. In contrast to Mexico, the Colombian Uribe government strategically positioned its concept of security, setting itself apart from the United States. The Democratic Security strategy, it claimed, had overcome the National Security Doctrine, while observers argued that this project revived the old national security doctrine. “Uribe took this expression, because it is much more seductive [. . .] but to materialize a politics very similar to National Security” (interview with former senator, November 30, 2011). Those who became protagonists in this governance modality in Colombia were not so much the police or the prosecutor as in the United States (Simon 2007), but the soldier. He became the central figure within state discourse to fight crime. In the governance shift of the early 2000s, the penal system was increasingly militarized, and crime was constructed not only as particularly prominent but also intimately linked to the armed conflict. A humanizing discourse on the soldier was central to governance through crime. He would not kill but dar de baja (literally, “to deregister,” the term moderates the act of killing) and would not commit crimes but was committed to the cause. This image of the soldier fighting criminals and terrorists was held up only under the condition of making war crimes less visible, less of a topic. The state-financed research team Grupo Memoria Histórica (2013,

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43–45) confirms that selective (political) homicide gets the least public attention but is very common. The government advertised its success in protecting important highways from guerrilla attacks and “restoring the freedom of movement of the population” with the massive presence of police and military convoys (Leal Buitrago 2010, 13). The perception of safety on the streets changed. Urban middle classes and dominant class factions felt able to travel overland again (interview with political scientist, October 24, 2011; interview with lawyer, May 5, 2008). Abduction figures remained almost stable, since they were likely to take place on small country roads, their majority directed against people of lower social status (Leal Buitrago 2010, 13). The government discourse of a community in awe of a patrón, a second prominent discursive figure, tended to render all democratic mechanisms obsolete. The patrón is an authoritative figure who protects in return for loyalty and leads the way with an iron fist, imbued with traditional views on masculinity and hard work.3 The wealthy rural family-society which formed the basis of this political imagery laid down in the National Development Plan titled “Towards a Communitarian State” (Presidencia de la República Colombiana 2002), hardly ever questions his decisions. Institutions claimed governance practices resulted from a consensus of all members (interview with political scientist, October 24, 2011; Mejía Quintana, León, and Reyes 2008). The figure of the patrón created an impression of unity and cohesion, which sees dissent as pathological and something to be punished, and draws boundaries between morally flawless citizens and those outside this supposed society of consensus, as Uribe’s (Uribe Vélez 2002) campaign documents show. US embassy meetings (2008b, 1) show that military officers clearly saw grassroots organizations as “the enemy.” The representation of dissent as harmful produced fear. I was seriously affected by this with my kids. [ . . . my son is] a publicly active murals artist. To attack him and intimidate me they put him into prison, they kept him five months without light, without seeing the sun. Yes? [. . .] repression is daily; we have to bend over backwards [. . .] I had to [later] send him abroad because of persecution. (interview with journalist, November 4, 2011)

Colombian legal scholars distinguish three modes of criminalization, which encompass “(1) the punishment of acts which theoretically constitute legitimate social dissent, (2) the political use of laws with ambiguous and vague content on punishable acts and (3) the excessive punishment for liable behavior” (Uprimny and Sánchez Duque 2010, 49–50). Logics of criminalizing protest are nowhere new. Yet the scope and mode of criminalization shifted. Paramilitaries, in turn, were often framed as saviors and able to present themselves as such. AUC commander Ramón Isaza, accused of forced

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recruitment, forced disappearances, massacres, and about 150 murders (Camacho 2009), publicly said in 2005: We did a lot of damage to the guerrillas, and I continued to fight them every day, and today I still do, I have just been appointed AUC General Commander, perhaps this is due to my tireless fight for peace. [. . .] So the Day of the Rural Self-Defense Groups is celebrated in the Magdalena Medio, it is celebrated this year in Santa Fe de Ralito, it will continue to be celebrated all over the country, but with some variation. Not secretly underground, but publicly, because we will have entered into legality after demobilization, and we will not disappear because we are part of the political, social and economic panorama of this country of Colombia, for which we have made sacrifices and many have given their lives. (Isaza 2005)

Cattle breeders’ representative and fervent Uribe supporter José Lafaurie suggested that paramilitary demobilization had caused petty crime to soar, while the AUC maintained order (El Tiempo 2006c). Similar to the soldier, social forces Lafaurie represented liked to construct AUC commanders as those who maintained order against a subversive threat. Again and again, this discourse emphasized the protection of private property and the threat of kidnapping, extortion, or robbery. Conservative landowning factions embraced this discourse, but considerable parts of urban middle-class sectors, who felt threatened by insecure roads and kidnapping, also did (interview with political scientist, October 24, 2011). In state discourses, the AUC hardly appear as dangerous, violent actors, before and during Uribe’s term. In 1997, General Harold Bedoya Pizarro argued that militias were necessary as a mechanism of “legitimate collective defense of society” as the “most democratic expression of democratic community” (cited in Paz Con Dignidad 2010, 12), very similar to the AUC’s own discourse (Mancuso 2004). And President Uribe’s interior and justice minister Londoño Hoyos (2006) repeatedly painted the AUC as self-defense forces that fell victim to drug traffickers, peppering his speech with popular imaginaries of the Italian Mafia: the mafiosi appeared [. . .], disguised as peasants [. . .] in the richest agricultural areas, posing as landowners and martyrs. [. . .] they took over the organizations that the peasants had set up to exercise their sacred right to defend themselves.

Global terrorism discourses tell us about a worldwide convergence of legal paradigms, which under the impression of 9/11 were hardly challenged anymore. Beare (2005, 12) sarcastically remarks on how “[a] sense of the ‘dangerous other’ lurks behind” the linkage of every thinkable crime to terrorism. The Colombian government put the FARC guerrilla center stage. The label “terrorist” for this guerrilla only gained momentum after the 1980s and

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became central to government discourse in 2002 (Uribe Vélez 2002, 4–5; Uribe, cited in Franco Restrepo 2009, 55). The previous government still presented the guerrilla as counterpart in peace talks. Those labeled as “terrorists” or “criminals” are perceived as a danger to the community and placed outside. The terrorist’s victims, however, are not in turn taken seriously as real political subjects (Simon 2007, 75–76; see Hall et al. 1978). This work of labeling legitimized interventions far beyond the criminal justice system and changed the definitions of political offense. The open rule of exception in spaces where, so the discourse went, crime governed, was core to state discourse and governance mechanisms directed against FARC “terrorists” (Ministerio del Interior 2002, 1). Important media analyses have shown how this kind of discourse heavily distorted the perception of who exerts violence in Colombia. Through “the daily repetition of this type of linguistic pattern in media texts [. . .] the legitimation of violence by one of the armed groups in the conflict can be successfully assimilated and reproduced in society” (García Marrugo 2013, 422). Some media (RCN-TV, El Tiempo) kept close to such government discourse; others (Semana or Revista Cambio) wrote the first critical reports on government-paramilitary entanglements (Semana 2007b; Valencia 2007). With an extremely low voter turnout of just over 40 percent (and 52.9 percent of the votes in the first round), less than one-quarter of the population voted for Uribe (Brittain 2007, 253)—yet the candidate was able to convey a savior narrative vis-à-vis key urban population sectors. His independent candidacy symbolically removed him from the two-party system, which many perceived as unworthy of support. After the elections, when it became clear that the two-party system would no longer contain the socio-structural and political demands, new and old land-owning sectors founded new parties close to Uribe, such as Cambio Radical (2003), Colombia Viva (2003), and Partido de la U (2005). At the end of Uribe’s second term, only Cambio Radical and Partido de la U remained; others dissolved due to paramilitary links and corruption allegations. Mostly, founders were former liberals or conservatives. From the FARC, the terrorism label expanded to other, mostly dissident segments of society. The government frequently labeled nongovernmental organizations as terrorists. The labeling as terrorist and criminal led directly to losing the right to life, as the executive institutionalized body count practices in the upcoming years (Ministerio de Defensa 2005). Family members of forcibly disappeared or marginalized youth, who state officials labeled as criminals, said attorneys or the police told them their sons could only have been “drug addicts without dreams or plans in life” who “got into this because of something” (FEDES 2010, 41). When pamphlets circulated in Bogotá in 2008, signed by a group that called itself Aguilas Negras and threatening

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Uribe’s critics (Aguilas Negras 2008; El Espectador 2008a), police general Óscar Naranjo claimed the FARC or parents themselves could have written the leaflets containing death threats and behavioral “advice” (“good kids go to bed early, we will put the bad kids to sleep”) (CCJ 2008b, 1). The terrorist label even took precedence over the idea of the honorable soldier. Testimonies by former soldiers who refused to kill unarmed guerrilla suspects, only to be dishonorably discharged from the military, illustrate the extremes. We thought we’d get praise, but no. They brought us into a barrack at the back and took our weapons and uniforms. When my colonel came in, he insulted us [. . .], if we didn’t understand that alive the guerrilla wasn’t useful at all for him, only the bajas [numbers of guerrilla fighters killed] were important, because he wanted to be promoted and they would evaluate him on that. He said he would arrange for us all to be dismissed. (Semana 2013)

The narrative of a disposable, criminal enemy and his sympathizers exposed remarkably clearly what many in Colombian society perceived as punishable, and what they dismissed. State representation embraced those discursive figures that decriminalized those defending the society of consensus. Uribe’s Democratic Security Policy discursively constructed as its “other” a diffuse, dangerous dissent and tended to openly criminalize all those representing social protest. Those who do not support the government contribute to a failing state and help the terrorists appropriate it (Uribe Vélez 2002; interview with NGO worker, November 17, 2011). The war on (guerrilla) crime assumes a productive role for Colombia’s formal, but highly unequal democracy. Policing crime not only is a mechanism for dealing with poverty “but actively reshapes how power is exercised throughout hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, and gender” (Simon 2007, 21, 18). The selectivity of what is perceived as a crime enabled upper- and middle-class sections in urban contexts to construct theirs as a peaceful, prosperous society and employ practices of social distancing from the violence enacted in their interest—the entrepreneurial society. Their political imaginary echoed calls for an authoritarian government, waiving others’ democratic rights. Representations of crime demonstrably affected political activists, urban subaltern, and (racialized) peasant initiatives skeptical of large investment projects. To them, the dominant political imaginary’s consequences were a threat (violent land appropriation, selective killings of activists, disappearances). Moreover, links between state authorities and paramilitaries persisted, partly immune to criminal law. Instead of filtering rural citizens’ claims into state discourse, power relations made them constantly modify their ways

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of speaking to adapt to state discourse and respective practices by state and nonstate actors. THE GENERAL, THE CAPO, AND THE CRIMINALS: MEXICAN STATE DISCOURSE In Mexico, a similar shift in state discourses on crime accompanied the conjuncture around 2006, when the Calderón government started its military “response” to crime. Guiding overall policy, the National Development Plan inextricably linked development objectives to the concept of security, which the government put center stage. President Calderón himself routinely foregrounded security in his public appearances and visual language (Calderón Hinojosa 2007a; see Presidencia de la República 2007). Between July and November 2006, the drafting of the Development Plan shows that specific social groups shaped the government’s discourse. A total of 420 people participated in Development Plan meetings, almost exclusively representatives from the PAN party and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party); corporations such as Alstom Mexicana, Cemex, Bienestar Social Telmex, and the food company Bimbo; the financial sector (e.g., Santander-México); and the International Development Bank environment. Fourteen presidential office-authored documents show the results, the National Development Plan’s draft.4 The strategy paper Visión 2030, which served as a starting point for the National Development Plan and the programs covered by it (Calderón, in Presidencia de la República 2007, 11), illustrates the government’s global vision. The five thematic axes, which structure the plan based on Visión 2030, show which discursive framework oriented the plan: “rule of law and security,” “competitive economy and job-creating economy,” “equal opportunities,” “sustainability,” “effective democracy and responsible foreign policy” (Presidencia de la República 2007, 31–32). “Efficiency,” “legal certainty,” and “competition” are key terms in the National Development Plan (Calderón Hinojosa 2006, eje 2:7). The concepts remain diffuse—the plan has no meaningful delimitation of different security concepts (national, public, or internal security). Social and economic security appear exclusively in relation to securing growth. Nevertheless, the security topic fills chapter 1; all other topics build on it. The narrative of a state fighting criminal groups gaining territory shaped the years to come. Three figures began to dominate official discourses: the general, the capo, and the criminal. The figure of the general referenced both earlier depictions of the role military personalities had played for the Mexican Revolution and what seemed to dominate the discussion about crime

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from the moment Calderón sent troops to Michoacán in December 2006, military speak. The contextual framing was essential: For the president, he fought not a “war against organized crime” but a “battle” in defense of the fatherland (Calderón Hinojosa 2007b). Through the military, the state had to win back lost ground and “reduce” spaces that criminal organizations had “occupied” (Presidencia de la República 2007, 59). Mexican media followed suit in their reporting on crime. Many feigned technical accuracy in language but seemed to obfuscate what was happening (Escalante Gonzalbo 2012, 39–41). Critics claimed this was the old game of illusions of the PRI years. In ambiguous contexts, rumors spread easily, and critics, similar to the official statements they condemned for not being credible, not always substantiated their accusations against government agencies (Escalante Gonzalbo 2012, 34–35). The call to “stand together,” in “national unity” in the face of a barely defined enemy that threatened state order and private property, is only consistent within this logic (Calderón Hinojosa 2007a). “It is a struggle that we must fight and will of course win if we Mexicans stand together” (Calderón Hinojosa 2007b). The Calderón government equated “enforcing the rule of law” with the “restoration of the monopoly on the use of force,” which it claimed to have lost (CMDPDH et al. 2011, 18)—very similar to the Colombian government’s concept. The solution Calderón offered was hierarchical and military, the imagery centered around an in- and out-group strategy, corpsgeist, and exaltation of the general’s role. The 2007 National Development Plan constructed the army, air force, and marines as “guarantors of the country’s internal security” (Presidencia de la República 2007, 59), thereby shifting their competencies and justifying a decisive expansion of their budgets. What may be surprising is not that fact as such, but that this military dominance changed little in the last fifteen years, not even after a decidedly oppositional campaign by Andrés Manuel López Obrador or the detention of former defense secretary general Salvador Cienfuegos, in 2020. The ICG (2013, 26–27) quotes a military officer who assumed the command of a medium-sized city. One of the things they teach you in the army, apart from the sense of responsibility, is loyalty to the institutions, to Mexico, of pure decency, courage, audacity, the spirit of sacrifice, [. . .] because you create an esprit de corps here, you make the people, your people, proud of the uniform.

Despite the martial imagery, the war discourse was not successful to the extent it had been in Colombia in constituting hegemonic thought. High homicide rates seemed normalized in Colombia, and at least upper- and middle-class sectors perceived military presence (i.e., on roads) as bringing

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(selective) safety. In Mexico, the perception of insecurity was generalized. Calderón saw himself frequently in need of defending the strategy. I fully understand and know that the general perception is that the war is being lost. I don’t share this assessment, but I understand that this is a generalized perception that the state must fight [. . .] even if we were talking about war and it was a war of the state against criminals, it is true - regardless of the fact that there are cowardly acts such as executions and ambushes against state authorities, the army and especially the Federal Police—that the vast majority of clashes between federal forces and the criminals were won by federal forces [. . .]. The proportion of losses [fatalities] is eight to one. (Calderón Hinojosa 2010)

Simultaneously, state institutions began framing murders as collateral damage, illegal house searches became cateos (search in the literal sense), and arbitrary arrests became preventive arraigos (to hold someone) (CMDPDH et al. 2011, 21). Police and media used the word levantar or levantón (literally “pick up”) instead of asesinado (“murdered”) (interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011) (see Comisión Independiente Morelos 2012; Working Group on Forced and Involuntary Disappearances 2011). In the sense of a levantón, the person no longer exists, but death is not necessarily confirmed; for human rights organizations, the term obscured a criminal offence (CMDPDH et al. 2011). Media interviews with military generals starkly illustrate the dismissive attitude toward disposable life. My own interviews confirm them (interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011; interview with human rights lawyer, April 18, 2011). For instance, General Carlos Bibiano Villa Castillo boasted publicly: “When I get hold of a Zeta, I kill him [. . .] I do not trust the Federal Police, because they do not kill, they only arrest. And the army and navy do kill” (Villa, in interview with La Jornada 2011b). In another interview, the same general presented a similar imagery of what the generals were supposed to embody. No, I tell you again, if a cabrón comes near me, either I kill him or we take him apart right there. No one has any reason to arrest me, and I said that on the radio, I said that on television and whoever comes too close to me, be careful [. . .] I’m not wrong. Mr. President, I have enough balls to open this barrel and go in there and face it. (Villa, in interview with Aristegui 2011a, minute 5)

While in counter-discourses, human rights organizations repeatedly condemned the military offensive as a failure (La Jornada 2011e), the general was able to express himself so openly because the Mexican military is judged in military courts only. Even if he encountered criticism, it would remain purely symbolic. Precisely via the discourse that security must be improved

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by all means, the state made space for actions contradicting existing laws via exemptions, effectively constituting an exceptional state. “State actors position themselves outside the law, while pretending to enforce compliance” (TPP 2012a, 20). In the narrative, the general has an opponent—the capos that dominated imageries of crime. They were targets of the kingpin strategy, the idea that killing mid- or upper-level “drug traders” would make the networks disintegrate and disappear. The logic of confrontation exaggerates the scenario of threat the capos posed, and the role of the military in this process. Zavala (2018, 5) convincingly describes how the capo is constructed as a counter-image to the soldier-general. The capo or drug trafficker is an “undisciplined, vulgar, ignorant” male that contradicts the order the military will restore. Nonetheless, the capo image needs uniformity (Zavala 2018, 5–6), and it strikingly resembles a cliché of lower-class, uneducated, ranchero Mexicans—incompatible with the actual investor role many took up, inverting capital in restaurants, money exchange houses, and shopping malls (Thompson 2017). The capo figure is rooted in the idea of the cartel. In the 1980s, when the United States shifted its antidrug policy further into the military realm, DEA officials coined the term, feeding the notion of monopoly-like organizations that controlled entire production chains (Astorga 2007, 150). This dominant discourse and, surprisingly, large parts of social science research perceive the illegal economy as something necessarily distant and separate from political power. From it, a growing danger emanates, competing with the state. The Mexican “drug cartels” are no longer executive but leading forces (Presidencia de la República 2007, 59), their imagined territorial presence and near monopoly of force opposed to the state’s exercise of legitimate coercion. The PGR’s Special Unit on Investigation of Organized Crime published maps of affected territories with clear-cut boundaries. State talk was of “taking” them “back” (Moloeznik 2017, 266). By contrast, experts see “cartels” as networks that partly cooperate with police, partly compete with rivals, or fight state forces. They employ highly variant, risk-friendly or risk-averse, but conscious strategies that depend on their organizational, more or less hierarchical structure (Farfán 2019; Hope 2012). The cartel discourse particularly distorted the role of the Zetas as dangerous urban guerrillas with typical weapons (“they carry AK-47 [ . . . and] Galils”), who, however, immediately fled when the army took over the city government (military quoted in ICG 2013, 26). The simple binary narrative of a state faced with inherently violent cartels became part of the repertoire of the Mexican and international press, while all actors seemed to agree that what was actually happening remained in the dark. Not only is there not enough information to explain violence, but common knowledge is that this information cannot be had. Reality itself becomes uncertain. Escalante

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Gonzalbo (2012, 36) mocks the term cartel as a hardly suitable neologism, born out of US foreign policy needs looking for an identifiable enemy. More sophisticated definitions of those involved in the illegal economy contrast this, identifying “fluid networks that change and align themselves to pursue ever-changing objectives” (Nordstrom 2004, 135; Hope 2012), which in political definitions is often reduced to that of “financial or other material benefit” (United Nations 2000, Article 2a). The talk of the plaza as a clearly defined space controlled by a mafia-like structure below the capo, aiming at territory control, was ubiquitous but imprecise. The imagined and pursued territorial presence and near monopoly of force of the “cartel” became a powerful label to explain violence, as opposed to a passive state (Hope 2012). While the Mexican government exclusively explained rising violence through struggles for control of the plaza, others argued that from an entrepreneurial point of view, such struggles would be inefficient, seeing the plaza as a myth (Escalante Gonzalbo 2012; Zavala 2018). In May 2011, mass graves with hundreds of dead bodies were found in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. In July 2011, at least 46 mass graves had been discovered with more than 230 dead in Tamaulipas alone, and 251 more in Durango (Reveles 2011, 14). In 2010; one grave contained 72 Central American migrants (Reveles 2011, 43–45). Such graves have since been coined narcofosas, which made investigations seem almost superfluous, as the dead were, officials stated, the result of “settled accounts between criminals” (Aristegui 2011b). The stereotypes in state discourses to explain violence often made victims invisible yet implicitly linked to crime, carrying some blame themselves (Escalante Gonzalbo 2012, 32). It also attributed all initiative to the cartels. Public space became a stage for mass abductions on motorways or beheaded bodies dumped on busy roads (Escalante Gonzalbo 2012; Reveles 2011). The more credible the threat, in a context where violence has become a spectacle, the more likely the “productivity” of extortion will increase. The display of violence not only deliberately produced terror and “the impression that the country is going down the drain,” and the narcos “themselves dominated the scene” (Arriaga 2011) but also tightened social hierarchies (Nordstrom 2004, 61; Hall et al. 1978). The universal threat drug trafficking poses to national security begs for the military to combat it—without a fixed time horizon. The discourse excluded the military and federal police from any accusation. The discourse is ambiguous, however, as to the role of “war.” As if imitating the Colombian president, Calderón (2010), especially in his term’s second half, no longer spoke of “war” but of combating a security threat: “I don’t actually use the term war.” This change of labels coincides with Colombia’s Óscar Naranjo arguing it was erroneous to speak of war (cited in Moloeznik

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2017, 265). While the higher echelons of crime seemed to usually elude state activity, officials often targeted those delincuentes at the lower echelons of the trade. The state’s discursive selectivity fully embraced an imaginary in which all those affected, killed, or disappeared were “involved criminals,” for instance, when President Calderón spoke about young people murdered in the Salvárcar massacre (quoted in La Jornada 2011c).5 The official narrative did not deny that state forces killed people. The president himself repeatedly legitimized killings of bystanders, saying it would be “a very long struggle, a very difficult struggle and a struggle that will cost money, time and, unfortunately, human lives” (Calderón Hinojosa 2007b). Indeed, discourses in Mexico and Colombia clearly converged, when the government perceived body counts of “dead criminals” (bajas) as success. Journalists have argued that government agencies artificially inflated the numbers of deaths to legitimize the army’s deployment within the country and the voluntary renunciation of civil rights, and simultaneously as evidence of military success against organized crime (Reveles 2011, 24). Furthermore, officials implicitly denied “criminals’” fundamental rights, created ambiguity on who was part of the community protected by the state and who belonged to the criminals and lost the right to physical integrity, and involved the whole population in the fight against these criminals. First, it was indeed essential for the discursive shift to consider it part of the problem that criminals enjoyed procedural rights in the first place, the right to be presumed innocent, and to legal, confidential assistance (Anaya Muñoz 2012, 122). The government even explicitly argued that rights must be restricted in order to “protect society,” while critics once and again accused the very protagonists of this discourse (i.e., the generals) of being criminal themselves (Proceso 2011a). Second, the imprecise vocabulary blurred the boundaries between civil society and crime. The ambivalent category of the delincuente encompassed entire segments of society and implicitly linked poverty and informality with an initial suspicion. Investigators repeatedly used the assumption that victims’ abduction or disappearance was due to some vague “involvement” with crime, as a justification for not investigating. “It is because he sold drugs. Don’t look for him” or “Nothing happens to normal people—only people with connections,” “the young people are simply in gangs” (HRW 2013, 40; interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011; interview with journalist/lecturer, April 29, 2011). This was still the case when officials described student victims of forced disappearance in Ayotzinapa in 2014 as “unworthy” looters or criminals (Proceso 2014). The ambiguity on who was targeted helped perceive a diffuse “other” as possible victims and not oneself or relatives. Tied to “criminals,” the Ni-Nis label became popular (youth with neither work nor education perspective). Indeed, dwindling social perspectives broadened the social base for illegal economy, which provided

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relatively fast social ascent, apart from the risk of being killed (Maldonado Aranda 2012, 17; Aguilar Rivera 2012). Third, involving the entire population in the state’s fight against organized crime was central (“if we are also united, government and civil society, we will not simply be stronger, but invincible”) (Calderón Hinojosa 2007b), clearly in parallel to the Colombian government’s friend-and-foe narrative. The population, supposed to pass key information on to state authorities, became responsible for the security situation. “It is the citizens themselves who provide key information on how crime publicly manifests itself. Within this kind of intelligence policy, this strategic plan proposes to integrate the citizenry into the security system” (Presidencia de la República 2007, 33). This involvement blurred the boundaries between transparently operating institutions, the protective function of the state vis-à-vis the population, and police tasks, and thus between state and nonstate security actors. The construction of criminals along racialized and class-based difference allowed upper-class Mexicans to use (colonial) strategies of othering for victims and perpetrators alike. They were able to distance themselves from the war itself. State agencies not only perceived social groups such as peasants with a strong connection to their land or those defining as indigenous as suspicious but also increasingly assumed young male underdogs to be prone to crime (interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011). The state’s denial of fundamental civil and political rights to Ni-Nis, informal low-income-sector workers, or racialized groups exposes its structural (and discursive) selectivity and illustrates the coloniality of power in what Mexican “society imagines to be its ‘crime problem’” (Michalowski 2016, 198; CMDPDH et al. 2011, 28; interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011). Those with a lower position in society’s socioeconomic stratification indeed run greater risk of becoming a victim of crime (see, for instance, HRW 2013). In an intersection of race, class, and gender, state discourse constructed these social sectors as unworthy of protection. Their poverty puts them in the same category as crime; their very ways of life become a security risk. The state’s selectivity in recognizing problems as such grew consistently narrow for human rights discourses. Indeed, part of the state promoted a narrative that saw a relationship among human rights, grassroots organizations, and “criminals.” Criminals, it argued, referred to human rights to discredit state institutions (La Jornada and Ballinas 2011). In 2011, Navy Minister Saynez claimed that “criminal groups are trying to damage [. . .] the good reputation of institutions” by using “social groups and the flag of human rights,” and the intelligence agency CISEN (Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional) declared NGOs were threatening the state (La Jornada 2010; Hernández Navarro 2011). Conversely, while human rights were a recurring theme in the Development Plan, the plan did not even rhetorically establish

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a link between human rights and security. In contrast to Colombia, however, systematic documentation of human rights violations by the military was practically nonexistent until a few years ago (interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011; interview with lawyer, February 5, 2011). It is the ambivalence of the discourse, and subsequently, legislation, that makes it problematic from a state theory perspective. The government discursively opposed the defense of human rights, while intimidation and the public display of violence became part of the everyday activities of illegal groups. For the first time, broad social sectors perceived an explosion in Morelia on the national holiday in 2008 as a completely arbitrary attack against anyone. This underlined the “necessity” of combating it (ICG 2013, 23). Additionally, the Mexican government’s security discourse extended its notion of security to economy and mobilized an underlying economic motive. Calderón repeatedly stressed that “despite the war” the country’s “economic recovery has continued” (Calderón in his report to the nation, quoted in Proceso 2011b), suggesting that insecurity damages productivity and investment. For economic prosperity, military action to combat the threat is a prerequisite and top priority. Only when “security has been restored” do cultural policy, labor market policy, or leisure initiatives enter the realm of the possible (Presidencia de la República 2010). The Development Plan’s economic paradigm shifted further away from any protectionist economic policy and toward an intensified integration into the US economy. Conveniently, surveys on crime show that the perception of insecurity and danger displaced economic insecurity as a central problem, starkly contrasting the actual developments. Especially in the sectors described as poor, roughly 36 percent, the incomes of both dependent salaries and self-employment fell in 2008–2011 (CEPAL 2012, 61, 69). The booming commodity sector directly employed only 328,555 workers (Camimex 2014, 2). Despite the 2009 crisis—the reason for which was the asymmetrical, close integration into the US market, not the “war on drugs”—rates of violence had become more important to respondents than low wages and economic insecurity (Consulta Mitofsky 2012, 12, 14). The protection of private property was central to the Calderón government’s security understanding. The Development Plan stated that modernizing the cadastral system and enforcing the protection of intellectual property should safeguard private property (Presidencia de la República 2007, 46–48). Security meant the reproduction of existing property relations and social order. The frequency of the term private investment also shows its importance, envisaged for sensitive sectors such as water, energy, minerals, biosphere reserves, and beach development (Calderón Hinojosa 2006, eje 4). Trying to further the idea of privatized oil—killing a “sacred cow” of the Mexican Revolution—the National Development Plan stated it would still

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permit (!) state shares in the state oil company PEMEX, in the form of “shareholder participation by the state, pension funds and private investors, trade unions and other social actors” (Calderón Hinojosa 2006).6 The goal was to create “a country with a new constitution and harmony between internal and external legislation” (Calderón Hinojosa 2006, eje 5:6) to “become a fundamental part of a North American community [. . .], integrated through policy programs and common institutions, including a Common Security Area and a deep relationship in the areas of migration, trade and investment” (Calderón Hinojosa 2006). Talk of “méxicoamericanos” in “important public posts” again rhetorically tied Mexican and US interests (Calderón Hinojosa 2006). CONCLUSION: TRAVELING SECURITY NARRATIVES AND THEIR CONTRADICTIONS From the lens of state representations of security, and its selectivity to other discursive figures in Mexico and Colombia, this chapter asked which discursive figures became dominant and detailed the construction of society’s criminal enemies, which became a driving force in national security governance. Even if criminalizing discourses were not new, a decisive shift in state discursive patterns took place in the early 2000s. Both states increasingly promoted a criminalization of the political “other.” Discourses increasingly and preventively linked subaltern groups, and specifically those politically active on the local level, to organized crime (Colombia, Mexico) or guerrillas (mostly Colombia). Hall’s focus on ideology and discourse (Hall 1985; for the role of discourse in UK policing, see Hall et al. 1978) and the idea of transnational security narratives help me show how states selectively employed discourses of crime and security, and how some social groups indirectly influence governance via their selective access to the coordinating institutions. The similarity between these discourses across borders is no coincidence. Discourses are made through social power relations that transcend administrative boundaries. A long-term impact in both contexts, governments brushed away the discursive boundary between civilian victims and “criminals.” The ambiguities of discourse meant that it was contested who belonged to the society worthy of protection, and who was considered “criminal” and lost the right to physical integrity. The latter, and the criteria that defined it, remained incalculable, just as the motives for actual perpetration often remained unclear. Discursive patterns preventively linked subaltern groups, and specifically those politically active on the local level, to organized crime or guerrillas. Victims were discredited and constructed as unworthy of protection. Their death was supposed to be accepted as a side effect of order restored. Their presumed criminality denied them the right to life. State

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personnel redefined legal concepts to adapt reality to governance through crime—not the other way around. On the one hand, the illegal economy offered opportunities for relatively rapid advancement for those without prospects, united by the perception “that one can only get ahead by extra-legal means” (Maldonado Aranda 2012, 17). On the other hand, they were the most likely victims of violent recruitment and disappearances and were outside the society that the military protects. Both governments’ narratives described every person killed “in combat” as “criminals” (Reveles 2011, 26) and defined the number of opponents killed as a success. Discourses of fear and criminalization created passivity and consensus, especially among those not yet organized politically. Fear was interiorized, turned into an instrument to regulate behavior, and limited political activity. As a preventive strategy, it became a central axis of antidrug policies in Mexico and Colombia, which clearly (also) aimed at the disciplining of subaltern forces. Discourses of dissent, in turn, hardly reverberated within the state ensemble. Criminalizing opposing political actors, stigmatizing specific groups, and the loss of the right to life point to the larger context of authoritarian crisis management. This production of insecurity in both states demonstrably affected politically active opposition groups and urban subaltern and peasant (indigenous) organizations whose political projects hindered investment in land (see chapter 7). Similar to the escalating armed conflict in Colombia at the end of the 1990s, the political crisis in 2006 in Mexico offered the perspective of an authoritarian transformation, as much as contexts, nature of conflict, and constellations of forces differed. For actual governance practices, the topic of the next chapter, this was the precondition. Institutional practices, which oscillate between the legal/illegal, converged with class factions’ imageries of order; rather than flaws of institutional design or failed governance, they are expressions of state-crime continuity aiming at the distortion of laws to the benefit of those involved.

Chapter 6

Selective Security Unstable Alliances, (Il)Legal Lawmaking, and the Silencing of Dissent

UNSTABLE ALLIANCES AND THE STATE When I attended a regional social forum by indigenous and peasant communities in Colombia’s northeastern Arauca region in 2009, the memory of the army’s offensive was still fresh in people’s minds. Since the 1980s, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN; National Liberation Army) had co-shaped politics in this northeastern region even before oil extraction began. Arauca was also a long-standing stronghold of the leftist party Unión Patriótica. Days after he took office in 2002, Uribe declared the region a rehabilitation zone. To “regain control” from “criminal organizations” in such areas, the state “needed” exceptional, preventive arrests and wiretaps, and it restricted inhabitants’ freedom of movement (Ministerio del Interior 2002, 1). Grassroots activists instead told stories of systematic harassment, arrests, and killings (research diary, August 2009). Their caution toward state forces—and foreigners like me—was palpable. The Indigenous Guard, tasked with making the social forum a safe space and preventing police or soldiers from entering the building, was in a permanent state of alert. They insisted that, in the early 2000s, the army had entered towns such as Saravena with paramilitaries in tow, allowing killings (ONGs Arauca 2002). Yet counterpart to coercive practices, the military made efforts to strike a relationship: In the Soldiers for a Day program, “every Thursday, groups of 20 children go to the Revéiz Pizarro battalion to play with the soldiers. They swim in the pool, participate in raffles, talk with the colonels, and take a ride in the Cascabel tank” (Semana 2003a). 131

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This chapter analyzes what actual (legal and illegal) practices the two security projects entailed. It asks how state-nonstate alliances evolved during the 2000s and who was able to shape the institutionalization of legal and illegal security practices. Again, I think of state violence as frequently dispersed and dynamic. In Colombia and Mexico in the 2000s, coercive practices far beyond the legal sphere frequently enabled a neoliberal state project while tending to disable its contestation. Political articulation became a “high-risk” affair (Zulver 2016) with impacts on the very possibility of political agency (Hume and Wilding 2020). I propose to speak of selective security to account for the hierarchies that shaped security practices and the potentially long-term, yet dynamic security arrangements between a multiplicity of actors with the converging aim of enabling capital accumulation. Informalization and outsourcing of coercion is not a linear process or zerosum game between separate, autonomous actors (critique by Gutiérrez Sanín 2019; Le Cour Grandmaison 2013; Zelik 2009); over time, states may sometimes fight emerging illegal economy actors, sometimes allowing them space (Abello Colak and Guarneros Meza 2014; Malaguti Batista 2018). SELECTIVE SECURITY PRACTICES: BUDGETS, ARRESTS, AND BODY COUNTS Similar to the Colombian rehabilitation zones mentioned earlier, mere days after taking office, President Calderón announced a military-led Operativo Conjunto “against crime” in Michoacán on December 13, 2006. Within weeks, he dispatched six thousand soldiers. Additionally, ten strategic military posts would interrupt illegal trade routes through the northern and southern borders. Soon, Calderón sent additional troops to other regions; retired generals, appointed by governors, took over the municipal police in cities such as Ciudad Juárez, and the state police in twenty-one of the thirty-two states, for example, in Tamaulipas, Chihuahua, or Michoacán (Aristegui 2011a; interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011). At the war’s peak in 2011, ninety-six thousand soldiers were deployed, about 40 percent of active personnel (ICG 2013, 18; SEDENA 2012b, 6). To bolster them legally, a 2007 decree appointed soldiers as Federal Assistance Forces for “situations of turbulence or alteration of social peace.” Federal takeover in Oaxaca between November 2006 and January 2007 seems to have modeled for the Operativos Conjuntos (CVO 2016, 524). In fact, violence in zonas de rehabilitación in Colombia and Operativos Conjuntos in Mexico did not subside. It erupted after the army’s arrival. While Colombia’s general homicide rate fell, extrajudicial executions by state armed forces sharply increased after 2002 (Ministerio de Defensa 2008;

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interview with lawyer, October 21, 2011). In Arauca, homicides peaked in 2003, with the army offensive in full swing, and grassroots organizations kept denouncing extrajudicial killings. The army’s Eighteenth Brigade reportedly let paramilitaries execute selective killings and massacres (ONGs Arauca 2019; AI 2004). State presence, rather than expanding the network of public schools and hospitals, “in the rehabilitation zones fundamentally translated as the presence of security forces and of [. . .] paramilitarism” (interview with former Congress member, November 30, 2011). The dominant perception in Mexico during my incipient research in 2011 was that insecurity was spiraling out of control. Murder rates had fallen until 2007, but shot up in states with Operativos (Our World in Data 2020). Based on violent practices Mexican security agencies already used, the Operativos allowed particularly “great freedom of action” and made commanders responsible for expected “successes” (RESDAL 2010, 232–44). Complaints against the Secretaría de Defensa Nacional (SEDENA; Secretariat for National Defense) to the Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos (CNDH; National Human Rights Commission) doubled in Calderón’s first year as president and included forced disappearances, arbitrary house searches, or the theft of valuables (Centro ProDH 2009, 22; CCIL 2013). If someone suspected the military, “people go to the prosecutor and file charges. They tell them that soldier so-and-so or teniente X never was here. The power of the armed forces in these small towns is incredible” (interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011). In contrast, only 357 soldiers were killed in operations between 2006 and 2012 (SEDENA 2012a).1 The weight of the security apparatus transformed the state ensemble. The Mexican military’s prominent political role translated into its presence in Congress, intervening in security legislation and demanding budget increases (interview with land activist, May 23, 2011; interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011). Effectively, their budget increased in 2007 by 6 billion to 32 billion pesos. Until 2012, however, it more than doubled to 55 billion pesos (CASEDE 2012, 145). On “public security,” the Mexican state spent 75.5 billion pesos in 2007 and 125.4 billion pesos in 2012 (Cámara de Diputados 2008b, 2012), which again represented only part of the entire security and defense budget. In Colombia, the defense sector grew from 4.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1998 to 5.3 percent of GDP in 2007, from 6.7 to 11.7 trillion Colombian pesos (Ministerio de Defensa 2009, 22). Dominant forces’ support for Uribe allowed him to introduce an extraordinary asset tax to cover counterinsurgency costs (Amador 2002). This added 2.06 trillion pesos to the defense budget, and 7.54 trillion pesos for 2007 to 2010, “necessary to increase public forces’ territorial control” (Ministerio de Defensa 2009, 26). An enormous 81.2 percent of jobs paid from the central state budget were

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public employees in defense, security, or police in 2008 (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 11). Contracts with private security companies and indirect employees generated more costs. Increased defense resources theoretically contradicted budgetary discipline, yet only underlined how central authoritarian practices were in otherwise long-lasting austerity policies. All interior policy converged in military strategies. In 2003, the Colombian Justice and Interior Secretaries merged, and in the Soldiers for a Day program, soldiers taught lawyers to shoot (FIDH 2004, 9). So-called Rural Soldiers, a modality of military service, enjoyed near total immunity—a force of 24,930 in 2010 (Presidencia de la República Colombiana and Ministerio de Defensa 2003, 61; Gallón Giraldo 2010, 10). When a “municipality is very poor,” now “they have the soldier as doctor, as teacher. Everything is solved via the military. The very victims of extrajudicial executions [by soldiers], when the mother or father is still alive, how will they go to a soldier for psychological assistance?” (interview with grassroots activist, November 11, 2011). Similarly, Mexican militaries were tasked with infrastructure construction (public and private); logistics, such as distributing gasoline, fertilizers, or textbooks, or the control of ports; and the detention of migrants (CIDE 2021, 5). Mass arrests and (arbitrary) imprisonment became an unwritten but integral element of the selective security project. Colombia’s President Uribe (2003) publicly reprimanded his police chief for too few arrests, saying “in this region, we could not continue with mass arrests of 40 or 50 every Sunday, but of 200, to more quickly imprison terrorists and weaken these organisations; it was insane” (interview with lawyer, October 21, 2011). In Arauca, this policy’s climax was Operación Heróica on November 12, 2002. The army’s Eighteenth Brigade, National Police, and the public prosecutor detained two thousand people in the town of Saravena’s arena, and gave them a non-washable marker on their arms. Of these two thousand, eighty-five eventually went into formal detention, and forty-three faced a trial (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 12). Others, after long periods in remand, “had to be released because there were really no solid charges against them” (interview with former Congress member, November 30, 2011). A new, dense network of several hundred thousand civilian informants received financial compensation, often more than double the minimum wage (400,000 pesos) if their tips on so-called Reward Mondays helped arrest guerrillas or prevent a “terrorist act” (Caracol Radio 2002). In Mexico, the prison population had already risen dramatically during the previous administration (Fox, 2000–2006). The rate, at 156 out of 100,000 inhabitants in 2003 (Home Office 2003, 3), jumped to 207 out of 100,000 in 2006 (ICPS 2006, 3) and remained high at 202 in 2008 (World Prison Brief 2017).2 Military and police likewise arbitrarily detained individuals without warrants, tortured victims (“asphyxiation with plastic bags, waterboarding,

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electric shocks, sexual torture, and death threats”) (HRW 2011, 5), and kept them up to several days on military bases or police stations (AI 2009, 8). Long “pretrial detentions” continued to be frequent (Flores 2013). Both governments measured success by counting dead “criminals”; US authorities applauded (Secretary of Defense 2003). The Uribe government, by demanding as many dead guerrilla combatants as possible, accepted and created incentives for killing mostly lower-class, racialized civilians, ironically, much like many soldiers (interview with lawyer, October 21, 2011; interview with lawyer, May 5, 2008; interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011). In November 2005, Defense Minister Camilo Ospina (Ministerio de Defensa 2005) issued Directive 029, promising both soldiers and nonstate informants monetary compensation for actions leading to guerrilla deaths (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 3). Soldiers then lured young lower-class men to regions such as Norte de Santander, killed them, and presented them as guerrillas killed in combat (Attorney General Montealegre in El Tiempo 2012; FEDES 2010; Semana 2010a). Commander General Manuel Montoya (2006–2008) later suggested the practice of killing for body count was only due to soldiers’ lacking education: “We talked all the time about the army’s professionalization, and it pains me to say it, but the guys who go to the army are the ones at the bottom, the ones in estrato 1 [the lowest socioeconomic cluster]. We have to teach them how to use the bathroom, how to use cutlery, so it’s not easy, doctor” (Verdad Abierta 2020; hearing transcript, Special Jurisdiction for Peace case 03, Caracol TV 2020). The policy rose to grotesque levels. State institutions perceived dead lower-class kids to be disposable, attaching an economic value to their bodies (FEDES 2010, 5). Earlier accounts spoke of 2,248 victims (Fiscalía General de la Nación 2018), but the Special Jurisdiction for Peace found 6,402 falsos positivos victims between 2002 and 2008 (La Silla Vacía 2021; JEP 2021). Payments per killed guerrillero had existed in the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, (AUC; United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) (Franco Restrepo 2009, 406). Now, public funds paid for the policy. The area was “too cold” because it was very safe, so they had to “heat it up,” meaning to generate dead bodies that allowed to justify other, later deaths they could present as results. You searched via the informants’ network, killed people and created the impression there were illegal armed groups in the area where there were none, only to kill innocent people, which you could present as if there were armed groups that did not exist. Pressure rose to such a level. (interview with scholar-activist, October 18, 2011)

Disappearances continued. Numbers range from 11,292 forced disappearances cases during Uribe’s first term to 32,249 cases between 1996 and 2005,

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a particularly heavy year of disappearances (CMH 2018, 82; Semana 2007a; Plataformas de Derechos Humanos 2008, 1–2). In a truth commission session in December 2020, AUC commander Salvatore Mancuso, imprisoned in the United States, insisted that “disappearances [by the AUC] were [. . .] carried out at the request of the Colombian State, of the Military and Police, so they would not [. . .] affect their statistics” (infobae 2020). In Mexico, human rights initiatives started documenting social cleansing and rising extrajudicial executions parallel to the Operativos. Juvenile addicts in various clinics were killed within a few days of 2009 (interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011). “[J]eeps with armed men [appear] in the city, with AK47, dressed in black, they go to clinics for young addicts, put them against the wall. They kill 18 and take five with them . . . ten days later, they kill another ten in another clinic for addicts in Ciudad Juárez” (interview with journalist lecturer, April 29, 2011). Yet these northern, industrial states with particularly high levels of violence were not peripheral, stateless territories, but have a police density similar to the United States (CMDPDH et al. 2011, 12). State forces carried out extrajudicial executions, during military checks, as targeted killings, or death after torture (HRW 2011, 6). In Guerrero and Oaxaca, extrajudicial executions seemed to increase as the number of political arrests decreased (Comité Cerezo 2012, 17). In the majority, soldiers

Figure 6.1. “No more state crimes,” mural in Bogotá, Colombia, September 2009. Source: Photo by the author.

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altered the crime scenes (i.e., by portraying victims as aggressors or as dead from overdose). When two students were murdered on Monterrey’s university campus in 2011, firearms were placed in their hands (CMDPDH et al. 2011, 21; US Consulate Monterrey 2010). Initially, Mexican state institutions neither recognized nor documented enforced disappearance (CMDPDH et al. 2011). The United Nations (UN) later identified a minimum of three thousand disappearances during Calderón’s presidency, three times those recognized during the 1970s Dirty War (Working Group on Forced and Involuntary Disappearances 2011). Numbers grew every year. The National Human Rights Commission opened more than six thousand files on enforced disappearance during Calderón’s term (Contralínea 2012b), mainly in states with Operativos. For instance, after nineteen construction workers disappeared in Nuevo León in May 2011, seventeen municipal police were arrested. The following Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party) government stated at least 26,121 people disappeared involuntarily between 2006 and 2012 (while denying its own responsibility) (ICG 2013, 30). One interviewee traced practices of concealment in a case involving soldiers. [P]eople from the army are involved. [. . .] So X people disappear. Then the car in which these [disappeared people] were driving appears, soldiers drive it in a military operation. The car is recognized, a criminal charge is immediately filed. [. . .] They try to secure the trial with human rights people and so on. So then the soldiers are supposed to testify, two soldiers now in two different prisons. And one day before their trial, the two soldiers are murdered and burned and nailed in their own [ . . . stops]. One has no idea who, what kind of networks they are. But you do know that army personnel are involved, which certainly does not act alone. (interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011)

State inaction was central to selective security. Authorities’ omission to act structurally facilitated impunity and starkly contradict the discourse of fighting insecurity. Frequently, crimes were not or badly investigated. Between 2001 and 2009 in Mexico, the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR; Office of the Mexican Attorney General) did not investigate a single case of disappearance (CMDPDH et al. 2011, 34). Authorities sent cases back and forth or immediately claimed that investigations were unnecessary (HRW 2013; Proceso 2011b). Investigators falsified evidence and included interrogations that hadn’t taken place in their files. In 2009, hundreds of Coahuila inhabitants gave DNA samples to identify disappeared relatives; samples, however, disappeared, too (HRW 2013, 52).3 Families of disappeared heavily criticized the victims’ agency Províctima, established in 2011, for not investigating at all. Its personnel came from the PGR, military, the Public Security

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Secretariat, and intelligence. Irma Monroy Torres, looking for a disappeared relative, testified that Províctima “accidentally sent me an email actually sent to the Defense Ministry, in which he referred to us. We were fake victims. He didn’t believe us. It was only three lines. But the email disappeared from my account. I think it was hacked because it didn’t show up anymore” (Proceso 2012b). The focus on security against a poorly defined “other” brought consensus and narrowed down state selectivity for opposition. But beyond that, the war converged with the repression, harassment, and killings of activists who criticized each government’s economic project, even if the perpetrators were not necessarily state forces. In Ciudad Juárez, labor and human rights activists claimed state violence against them escalated quickly after the Operativo started. “You can mess with a lot of people but if you mess with the army they will kill you” (conversation with activist, October 2012). “With the army came torture. The pretext of drug trafficking has served the government to intimidate and murder social and human rights activists. More than 20 are dead” (cited in Proceso 2011a). The exploding number of human rights violations complaints to the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission (CEDH)—more than thirteen hundred between 2008 and 2009 alone—confirm such tendencies (ACUDDEH 2012, 72). Victims had different backgrounds. Violence in Mexico affected community leaders and small-town mayors, local politicians, and police officers, educated and with jobs (Trejo and Ley 2021). Frequently, however, those killed were so-called Ni-Nis, young men without economic and educational prospects (Centro ProDH 2009, 28). In Oaxaca, activists said criminal groups had arrived in the city with the joint crackdown by federal and state police on the urban social movement in 2006 (see Tello 2016 and personal communication, 2019). Oaxacan public security director José Vera Salinas led special commandos who continued to harass and allegedly even forcibly disappeared Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca activists (APPO; Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) who were involved in the 2006 protests. The APPO later demanded Oaxacan authorities for abuse and torture during a 2007 mobilization (CVO 2016, 196–200). While not new, disappearances of activists, such as Ejército Popular Revolucionario (EPR; People’s Revolutionary Army) guerrilla member Edmundo Reyes Amaya in 2007, occurred with renewed frequency (CVO 2016, 125–32; Contralínea 2011a, 5). The EPR reacted with explosions at oil and gas pipelines near the industrial hubs of Guanajuato and Veracruz (La Jornada 2007b). The EPR (2016, 1) itself claimed that state institutions had secretly buried activists so that “Oaxaca, like other states, is full of clandestine graves” in a statement for the Oaxacan Truth commission.

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Figure 6.2. Protest mural against a renewed version of a public security law granting competences for military and police, Oaxaca, South Mexico, December 2018. Source: Photo by the author.

In Colombia, the intricate network of intelligence services and institutional subdivisions, such as the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS; Administrative Department of Security), the Police Intelligence Directorate (DIPOL), or the Army Technical Intelligence Head Office (CITEC) routinely resorted to extralegal means, wiretapping human rights lawyers, judges, and journalists based on a DAS manual aiming to “boicot NGO work” of “political targets” (El Tiempo 2009). “It was incredible. They rented a flat opposite ours and even went through our garbage. We know they entered the house when we weren’t home” (interview with HR lawyer Alirio Uribe, Jenss 2010). Judicial cases document how, during Uribe’s two presidential mandates, the DAS, directly subordinate to the presidency, functioned as a direct link between the government and the AUC (Semana 2011d). “In practice, the DAS was at the AUCs’ service,” the weekly Semana (2012b) cites the AUC’s Diego Murillo (“Don Berna”), to whom the DAS apparently provided bodyguards and information. The DAS blacklisted at least 106 trade unionists and human rights defenders, passing their data on to the AUC. Thirty-six unionists were then murdered; sixty-one received death threats. During and after AUC demobilization, the DAS trained paramilitaries in explosives but archived its internal investigations on this (Semana 2011f; 2011e; Verdad Abierta 2011c). In 2007, however, eleven high-ranking DIPOL police were

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dismissed (El Espectador 2009a), and in 2011, the Supreme Court sentenced Jorge Noguera, DAS director (2002–2006) and Uribe’s former campaign leader, to twenty-five years in prison as he had facilitated AUC violence (Semana 2011d; Verdad Abierta 2011d). An imprisoned DAS staff member acknowledged their cooperation, while President Uribe repeatedly defended his head of intelligence (Verdad Abierta 2011c). As forced displacement and selective killings against indigenous communities continued, their call for a Minga mobilized almost ten thousand people in 2008, who blocked the Panamericana. While “twelve indigenous leaders have been murdered in Cauca” in only “three weeks,” the Uribe government claimed it “could not allow the protesters to block the Pan American Highway, and claimed the protests are aimed at derailing the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement” (US Colombia Embassy 2008b). In Arauca, urgent actions demanded protection as thirteen peasants and land activists were killed in a single week (Fundación Derechos Humanos Joel Sierra 2008)—perpetrators unknown. In all those cases, activists from Cauca, Arauca, and Oaxaca argued that people had been disappeared because of their activism, and state authorities were implicated in disappearances, if not the direct perpetrators (interview with human rights lawyer, April 18, 2011; interview with journalist, June 6, 2011). Their everyday experiences with the state resembled war, yet within a functioning democratic order (see Barkawi 2016, 200; Coronil and Skurski 2006). These ambiguous, selective security practices oscillated between military and police protagonism and the dispersal of violence. Phenomena such as the Colombian falsos positivos imply the military assumed tasks that paramilitaries had performed prior to 2002, but simultaneously, paramilitaries continued to organize killings. In Mexico’s local everyday, society perceived a large number of in/security bodies, some close to the executive, and others more autonomous (interview with land activist, May 23, 2011). CONTESTED LAWS: LEGALIZING SELECTIVE SECURITY The institutionalization of selective security practices was a highly contested process in both contexts. Each security project is contingent on contextspecific social power relations, prominent actors, and competing social forces traversing the state that may push for, or lobby against, laws that sanction coercive practices (Bruff and Tansel 2019, 6). What begins with lobbying, behind-doors talk between interest groups, or late-night dinners in high-end restaurants can end up as law on paper or not. But even if limited,

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institutionalization or the broad acceptance of respective practices awards the practices’ continuity, sometimes allowing illegal state practices to become legal. In Mexico and Colombia alike, political actors institutionalized security practices because social forces close to decision-making circles accepted and pushed coercive measures against those they perceived as naturally “others.” The Mexican National Security Law In contrast to Colombia, the Mexican government’s National Security Law initiative failed in 2009. This institutionalization process, while truncated, illustrates the influence the army gained in defining political processes, as well as new social frictions around the security project. As criticism of the military grew, even in some military circles, discrepancies between the armed forces’ legally sanctioned competences and actual practices had become more prominent (interview with journalist, June 6, 2011; interview with human rights lawyer, Mexico, April 18, 2011). The Estado Mayor de la Defensa Nacional (National Security Council) only distributed regulations on Operativos in March 2007—namely, the classified Directive for the Comprehensive Fight against Drug Trafficking. Legally, the Calderón government relied on the 1990s Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública (SNSP; National Security System), which allowed pooling the various security forces at the federal and state levels in joint operations. Two main positions competed around the law in 2011. The government argued the law provided the military with a long-due legal framework. Ultimately, the law’s objective seemed to coincide with security institutions’ hopes for a safeguarding from future criminal charges (La Jornada 2011c; Fazio 2011). The Defense Secretary SEDENA was intimately involved in preparing the law before the Mexican Congress debated it (“SEDENA is working with Congress to pass legislation”), but the law was also discussed with US authorities in its earliest stages (US Mexico Embassy 2009b). The law’s failure exposed fragmented temporary alliances among globally oriented economic sectors, the military, and conservative middle-class sectors. A new movement mobilized against the law, unexpected by the government. In 2011, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD) formed around the poet Javier Sicilia whose son had been killed. The crime remained unresolved. Violence and state neglect mobilized a broad spectrum—“the pain brings us together” (interview with journalist, June 6, 2011). Rejecting the law that, the movement argued, legalized illegal state practices, became a central demand. The movement primarily formed in Central Mexico, addressing federal state responsibility (see Muñoz Martínez 2015, 158). The movement organized public walks, and attendance surprised organizers. “The amount of people overwhelmed us, we never expected what

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happened” (Pastrana 2021). As a victims’ movement, it represented relatives of disappeared and killed from different social backgrounds. It criticized state and nonstate human rights crimes linked to the economic model (MPJD 2012b). In fact, the movement—unlike other opposition until then—enabled relatives of the disappeared, particularly mothers, to constitute themselves as political subjects, overcoming the impossibility of speaking publicly about their loss (interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011; participatory observations, December 2012). The MPJD created a space of political organization, protest, and cohesion “in a context of division [. . .] with groups so radically opposed they would never have sat at the same table in other circumstances” (interview with journalist, June 6, 2011). Position papers and Sicilia’s widely read speeches illustrate the enormous political role of recognition, particularly in view of the official discourse about “the criminals.” “First, fundamentally, comes making the victims and this national emergency visible” (cited in ICG 2013, 32; MPJD 2012a). Many relatives of disappeared defamed as “criminals” primarily demanded police and soldiers be investigated, and they were scandalized when “two weeks after [the marches], he [Calderón] establishes the National Day of Federal Police and awards them decorations” (interview with journalist, June 6, 2011). The loss becomes imaginable when a woman publicly testifies to having lost four sons within three years, without the perpetrators ever being identified or state agencies signaling support (participatory observation, 2012). Based on a diffuse internal security concept, the National Security Law initiative envisaged shifting the power over declaring a state of emergency from Congress to the executive (Contralínea 2010). Article 81 obliged the population to pass on information and cooperate in military investigations, and it foresaw anonymous informants and any and all methods of obtaining information. The law allowed any governor or mayor to request a military intervention in case of a threat of “disturbance” (CMDPDH et al. 2011, 24). The initiative did not provide sanctions for human rights violations during operations. Just when the H1N1 virus hit Mexico, Congress fast-tracked the initiative through the two chambers, but without reaching consensus. In 2010, the Joint Committees on Interior, Human Rights, and National Defense (2010) returned the draft to the plenary. After public hearings, the committees criticized the draft for conflating public and national security by creating “a grey area where criteria are unclear and lax; a concept so broad it covers virtually everything: from epidemics to social protests.” The PRI, rejecting the law, claimed the Mexican military was not sufficiently trained for police tasks but, later, sought to “reorganize” the armed forces’ role in a revised law initiative (La Jornada 2011b; 2011c). The Senate did pass the bill; the House gave the green light but never finally passed it. Institutionalization seemed to

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cause unnecessary political costs in 2011, when the military could extend its competences de facto, and investigative responsibilities shifted from the PGR to SEDENA. Nevertheless, generals repeatedly criticized the lack of legal protection for their deployment (Moloeznik 2017, 267–68). The victims’ movement, through its growing media presence and massive mobilizations in April, May, and August 2011, played a central role in preventing the National Security Law. The MPJD, however, drew heavy criticism, and many activists broke away when Sicilia agreed to a media-staged “dialogue” with the president in mid-2011 (Hernández Navarro 2011a), although Sicilia (2011a; 2011b) did criticize Calderón. Contradictions around strategy meant the movement remained relevant mostly for those who, having lost sons and daughters, found relief in others with similar stories (Pastrana 2021). At least two MPJD members, Nepomuceno Moreno and Trinidad de la Cruz, fathers searching for their missing sons, were murdered months later (Stratfor 2011). The struggle among the victims’ movement, Congress, and the executive, however, allowed a Victims Law initiative to develop, which Congress approved but President Calderón sent back for revision. The National Security Law initiative was prominent among a series of projects that Calderón failed to implement. Social forces close to the executive sought to institutionalize coercive practices but were ultimately unsuccessful, partly because of contradictions with the PRI opposition and extra-parliamentary protests (interview with scholar-activist, May 9, 2011; interview with journalist/lecturer, Mexico, April 29, 2011). Toward the end of his term, President Calderón faced fierce criticism (i.e., from urban middle classes who experienced violence). The executive was increasingly unable to realize key projects such as police and criminal justice reforms. On April 23, 2012, in a “Protocol on the Use of Force,” Calderón recommended the security forces use firearms “only in cases of serious threat” (ICG 2013, 34). While contradicting his demands in the National Security Law, this had little practical impact. In general, the Calderón government’s course was contradictory, particularly with respect to what courts could try soldiers who committed human rights violations. Calderón supported military jurisdiction.4 The Colombian Justice and Peace Law The boundaries of legality and illegality depend on social acceptance, constituting fluid constructions mediated through the state. In Colombia, criminalization and mass arrests were paralleled by the selective decriminalization of AUC paramilitaries. The alliance with dominant political forces awarded them partial immunity when Congress adopted Law 975 (Justicia y Paz, JyP) in 2005, after a controversial legislation process. When taking office in mid-2002, the Uribe government immediately pushed for negotiations with

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the AUC—complying with the then secret Ralito Pact agreements between politicians and the AUC for what they called a “refoundation of the fatherland” (Pacto de Santa Fe de Ralito 2001; El Tiempo 2007b). AUC cofounder Carlos Castaño seemed relieved. “[F]inally, we will no longer be the lover but the wife. This society will take us back to its bosom, because that is where we come from” (Castaño, quoted in El Tiempo 2003). The minutes of classified meetings between high commissioner for peace Luis Carlos Restrepo and AUC commanders, which became public years later, reflect the structurally similar interests between some state institutions—namely, the new executive—and the AUC. They do not document negotiations between a state and armed political opponents. The AUC agreed to declare a unilateral cease-fire to allow formal negotiations and did so on December 1, 2002 (AUC 2002b). According to Restrepo (quoted in CCJ 2005, 1), the “ceasefire is a metaphor,” “which should be handled in a very flexible way.” De facto, AUC continued to exercise spatially specific coercion with state permission.5 Indeed, after the “cease-fire,” the AUC murdered at least 4,426 civilians between December 1, 2002, and December 31, 2008 (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 4). Despite that, the AUC’s efforts to be recognized as a political actor (Castaño 2002b), with its legal implications, underscore the difference between pro-state paramilitaries and antistate guerrillas.6 Highly publicized, the official handing over of weapons of the AUC as a warring party dominated the following demobilization. The agreement, signed by government representatives and the AUC on July 15, 2003, determined that the officially estimated number of thirteen thousand paramilitaries demobilize by December 2005. In fact, between 2002 and 2008, 31,671 people officially handed in weapons at collective demobilization events (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 15). From the Office of the Interior Ministry, institutional responsibility shifted to the President’s Office High Commission for Reintegration (ACR) in 2006. A presidential decree (128/2003) stipulated that paramilitaries against whom there were no legal cases yet, need not fear any investigation (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 16). Extradition, however, remained a controversial issue when the Supreme Court allowed it in 2004 (AI 2005, 11–12; Fundación Social 2006), and President Uribe promptly vetoed extraditions.7 Demobilization priorities speak a clear language of selective security. The AUC themselves submitted member lists on which state demobilization programs based financial support, reintegration programs, and training (FIDH 2007, 35). Some AUC groups recruited exclusively to participate in demobilization ceremonies, while other actors loosely linked to the AUC bought their way onto the lists (La Silla Vacía 2010). Seventy-five percent of those registered as demobilized Bloques Cacique Nutibara and Héroes de Granada were not really AUC members, official numbers later said (HRW

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2010, 19). Days after its 2006 demobilization event, documents proved that Bloque Norte’s Jorge 40 had given orders to recruit as many peasants and unemployed as possible, instructing them how to perform as demobilizing paramilitaries during the ceremony. Interior Minister Sabas Pretelt accused High Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo of having “planted” twelve thousand additional paramilitaries on him (El Espectador 2011a). What initially united the Uribe coalition led to contestation and tensions within. Despite that, the Justice and Peace Law (Law 975/2005, JyP) legally fixed decriminalization post-demobilization. The law is the most prominent example of how the AUC temporarily succeeded to translate their power into legislative texts passed by Congress. This centerpiece of AUC institutionalization, despite its contested process, strongly referenced global transitional justice discourses. It ultimately disguised that its “de facto amnesty” (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 16) applied precisely to those who, under international law, had committed crimes against humanity, and who political amnesties (Law 782/2002) did not cover. With a legal framework as tailor made as possible, the government coalition honored a commitment to the AUC, while allowing for an apparent sanctioning (MOVICE and CCAJAR 2009, 37). The initial draft, an amnesty without prison sentences, never made it through the first reading (2003–2004). In the final law, sentences ranged from five to eight years for crimes that, in ordinary law, would entail sentences of up to sixty years, but it shifted the cases from ad hoc tribunals to the ordinary judiciary (Ungar and Cardona 2010a, 305). In a November 30, 2011, interview, a former senator told me that when he [Uribe] presented that project to us, I told him I found it irritating that a thief, those who grab your watch or your wallet in the street, would pay 12 or 14 years in prison while the person who had committed crimes against humanity could pay 6, 8 years, not more. So he said to me, then what can you do, and I said, well, if you are going to treat the perpetrators of crimes of this nature so benevolently, you should give a reduction to all those in prison, but I said it in mockery. So he said, then we have to think about reducing sentences for everyone. It’s an absurd thing to do, but he saw himself accused, as he had to fulfil promises he made to the paramilitaries to treat them benevolently.

The connection between politics and paramilitaries had its most public moment in a highly televised Representative Chamber hearing on July 28, 2004. Paramilitary commanders Salvatore Mancuso, Ramón Isaza, and Iván Roberto Duque spoke in Congress, unsurprisingly repeating both their rejection of prison sentences for themselves (El Tiempo 2004) and their justification based on “permanent threats from guerrillas” (Mancuso 2004). The fact that they were allowed to speak triggered hefty debates—opposition

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senator Gustavo Petro (2004) accused Uribe that “on the paramilitaries, on the drug traffickers sitting at the Santa Fe de Ralito table depends his own re-election.” First critical articles appeared, arguing their appearance made Congress a negotiation space with violent actors about laws affecting themselves (interview with former Congress member, November 30, 2011). Congress discussed demobilization until January 2005 without a legislative initiative (Congreso de la República de Colombia 2005a; Fundación Social 2006, 15–16). In February, President Uribe declared the legislative process “urgent” (Ungar and Cardona 2010a, 308), and Congress commissioned a group of Uribe-coalition deputies to merge nine existing initiatives into a single legislative text (Fundación Social 2006, 17). The AUC, however, were so convinced of their influence through informal decision-making, and of democratic procedures being superfluous, that they demanded a new initiative, which they would themselves present to Senate commissions (AUC, cited in Fundación Social 2006, 142). Victims’ organizations rejected the proposed law, which ignored their demands (MOVICE and CCAJAR 2009). The commissions then rejected Article 71 (earlier release) and Article 64 (political status comparable to insurgents) (Fundación Social 2006, 142). Now the governing coalition massively accelerated the process, appointing two special commissions, which finally tilted back toward paramilitary interests and reintroduced Article 71 and Article 64 (Fundación Social 2006, 150–52; Ungar and Cardona 2010a, 311–12).8 The law then went to the plenary for two final readings. On June 22, 2005, Congress adopted the full text (Ungar and Cardona 2010a, 312–13; Congreso de la República de Colombia 2005a). It is undisputed that the AUC exerted direct influence on this process. Ex-AUC alias Gonzalo, who only joined the AUC after the cease-fire in 2003, told the weekly Semana: Don Jorge40 [Bloque Tayrona commander] said to me: You have to go to Bogotá for me, take care of everything in the Justice and Peace project. In the end, the project must look what we want it to look like. In fact, my work consisted mainly of saving Articles 64 and 71, related to insurgency and political crime. Remember, those articles had been thrown out and it took lots of lobbying to get them back in. (Semana 2006a)

Fixed in legal text, the law gave demobilization a legitimate appearance but amounted to an apparent rather than actual sanctioning of crimes against humanity. Similar to the first draft, the law’s final version partially replaced prison sentences. Demobilized could deduct up to eighteen months in relocation zones from potential sentences (Congreso de la República de Colombia 2005b, 31), and do work sentences in agriculture, meaning some demobilized

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spent such sentences on land the AUC had violently appropriated (AI 2005, 23). Courts frequently granted AUC members “conditional freedom,” allowing revisions during the “alternative sentence” only. Afterward, even crimes such as massacres lapsed (Congreso de la República de Colombia 2005b, 29; MOVICE and CCAJAR 2009, 55). Despite Colombia’s ratification of the Rome Statute, Law 975’s design prevented future International Criminal Court investigations against the AUC (Ungar and Cardona 2010a). Most of the AUC bloques demobilized only after the law turned out in their favor in mid-2005. Again, the government accommodated their interests by distorting rather than verifying figures, handing the prosecutor a list of 3,600 paramilitary commanders, who, even by the new law’s standards, should be in pretrial detention or house arrest. By 2009, however, only 698 agreed to stand trial under Law 975 (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 16; prosecutor cited in MOVICE and CCAJAR 2009, 34). Most others were granted full amnesty. In 2006, the Constitutional Court demanded the attorney general’s JyP unit to make confessions mandatory, as AUC had shared very little information on their crimes and organizational structures in the public audiences the law demanded (verdict cited in Gallón Giraldo 2010, 17). By the end of Uribe’s second term, the JyP trials had resulted in just two verdicts and, by 2012, in nine verdicts, compared to 384,656 open investigations (Fiscalía General de la Nación 2012; López Hernández 2010, 77).9 In 2009, the Uribe-led Congress amended Colombian criminal law allowing the attorney general to suspend investigations against the demobilized, preventing any retrials. The prosecutor, his successor said years later (El Tiempo 2012), had “no crime policy of his own,” causing “chaos in investigations.” Prosecution was “notoriously passive” (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 16), while the judicial apparatus seemed to act swiftly in proceedings against opposition members (personal communication, December 2011). This exacerbated trends from before 2005, when procedures had already omitted victims’ rights (interview with human rights defender, November 10, 2011). For victims of paramilitary violence, state selectivity was highly unfavorable. Victims’ organizations called the law an “absolute” subordination of victims’ rights to protecting the demobilized interests (MOVICE and CCAJAR 2009, 54). Returning forcibly appropriated land and goods went painfully slow and often did not happen. When confessions remained optional, the law put the burden of proof on the victims, reproducing the perpetrators’ already privileged position, the right to know stylized as a judiciary gift (MOVICE and CCAJAR 2009, 61; Congreso de la República de Colombia 2005b, 17). Victims had to inquire prior to hearings to make reparations part of the hearing at all. Of up to five million victims of paramilitary violence at the time, only 28,790 dared to raise questions in hearings (Fiscalía General de la Nación 2012). State and capital groups had promised that ex-AUC would

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get “sustainable working conditions and regular income” (Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación 2010, 6). The Defense Ministry trained and employed seventy-seven hundred desmovilizados as auxiliary traffic police or park rangers (FIDH 2007, 39) and recruited them into security forces’ informants networks (AI 2005, 23). AUC practices persisted, from selectively killing unionized workers or activists, causing displacements and localized terror strategies such as traffic freezes and lockdowns (Semana 2012a). State-AUC cooperation was not a question of lawlessness. Legal references and a negotiation process preserving the form were central. But the JyP process exemplifies the use of law in responding to changing power relations (Poulantzas 2002, 121). Simultaneously, large parts of society had no means whatsoever of accessing judicial mechanisms, filtered out by the legislative’s, executive’s, and judiciary’s institutional selectivity. Instead, Law 975 was central to a limited institutionalization of the status quo post-paramilitary violence. Had Uribe facilitated initial steps for AUC institutionalization as governor of Antioquia in 1994 by establishing the self-defense groups CONVIVIR (CCJ 2008a, 2; see chapter 3), his coalition now continued this institutionalization at the national scale. The law obscured the state’s role, while AUC commanders today insist that crimes were “instigated by the latter, with its presence and deliberate direction” (infobae 2020). The JyP legislative process leaves no doubt as to which forces had privileged access to decisive legislative factions in the sense of structural selectivity. The government actively opposed all efforts to subject the AUC to in-depth investigations or to dissolve their command and financial structures. While illegal entrepreneurs repeatedly counted on both financial and symbolic state concessions, those racialized and classed as different experienced no reliable state protection mechanisms. UNSTABLE ALLIANCES AND THE HETEROGENEOUS STATE In a string of e-mails in the second half of 2002, paramilitary commander Carlos Castaño tried to prepare the AUC to give up the cocaine trade (Castaño 2002b). In Castaño’s narrative, the paramilitaries were a political force that used drug trafficking only as a source of income to perform tasks of coercion and economic development, which the state had neglected. To the extent that the state assumed these tasks again, the AUC would lose legitimacy. The cessation of hostilities by the AUC is our greatest contribution to peace in the country. This means putting an end to all criminal and delinquent activities on the part of all members of the self-defense groups and those who act in their

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name; an end to drug trafficking as finance in all its stages, including support for drug traffickers.

Castaño claimed the few groups and individuals that identified more strongly with the drug trade had lost their original political identity. His narrative coincides with government discourses at the time, claiming the paramilitaries were necessary for rural self-defense, particularly for defending property. The so-called capos had merely infiltrated them. Despite this antidrug narrative, the AUC’s illegal economy involvement dates back to the 1980s. Castaño recognized the AUC had been less successful as an anti-subversive force but primarily promoted and safeguarded capital and state interests. He insisted that the paramilitaries’ relation with the state, and its international partners in security, was one of collaboration rather than confrontation. “The kind treatment of the autodefensas is notorious [. . .] they dump everything on the guerrillas but open doors for us self-defense groups” (Castaño 2002a). Castaño’s recognition of state cooperation in the 2000s pales in comparison to the public statements by Salvatore Mancuso in 2020, another AUC commander convicted in the United States. Mancuso argues “parts of the state” routinely handed lists of community leaders deemed subversive to the paramilitaries. These were, clearly, killing lists (El Espectador 2020). Particularly, this state-paramilitary collaboration targeted organized Afro-Colombian communities. “They [state institutions] used racist remarks such as these were communities of lazy people who did absolutely nothing but harbor the guerrillas in the area.” (El Espectador 2020). Both Castaño and Mancuso illustrate how state-nonstate alliances culminated in a highly selective state security project in the early 2000s. In Mexico, such alliances are less documented at the national scale; however, the detention of former defense secretary Salvador Cienfuegos in the United States in 2020, as well as the US trial against Genaro García Luna, President Felipe Calderón’s former public security secretary (2006–2012), for taking drug trafficking bribes, at least hint at them. García Luna contrasts Colombian paramilitary Castaño mentioned earlier. With a career in the Mexican state’s strategic security institutions, he did not need to prove his political weight. García Luna devised the crackdown on the major student strikes in Mexico City in 2000, and he built the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI; Federal Investigative Agency) under President Vicente Fox (2000–2006). He became instrumental in making security a specific project of the Calderón presidency (Granados Chapa 2011; Hernández Julián 2012). While ex-president Calderón (2020) denied any knowledge of his public security secretary’s involvement in the illegal economy, US embassy staff admitted they had known of García Luna’s illegal connections but worked with the personnel the Mexican state offered (Jacobson, in Proceso 2020).10

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Selective security is a logical outcome as states are heterogeneous ensembles rather than monolithic (Poulantzas 2002). When institutions cooperate with nonstate actors in producing security and insecurity, such cooperation is highly dynamic and can easily turn into conflict. When we recognize that alliances between “local” and transnational nonstate security actors and state institutions may turn brittle with time, and that the state is indeed heterogeneous, the protagonism of and rivalry between different state institutions and their potential cohesion around the selective security project come to the fore. Mexico: Multiplied Security Agencies as Rivals In Mexico, security apparatuses multiplied.11 The localized dispersal of violence and the continuity between repressive counterinsurgency and nonstate violent actors was “an open secret” (interview with human rights lawyer, April 18, 2011; interview with journalist, June 6, 2011). Coercion by security institutions overlapped and sometimes interlocked with fear-inducing strategies of the former, which simultaneously reproduced the logic of military expansion. US cables suggested officials cooperated with Zetas paramilitaries hired by Juárez entrepreneurs to “clean (the) city of these criminals” (US Consulate Juárez 2011). The National Human Rights Commission, a state institution itself, recognized that state forces, or “criminals” tolerated by the former, were frequent perpetrators (Contralínea 2012b). In other cases, police officers confessed having kidnapped people on behalf of local “criminals” (HRW 2013, 29). In Oaxaca, after 2006, criminal groups demanded shares from vendors and regulated market stalls, allegedly undistinguishable from the police. “The market became ugly. In 2007 bad people arrived, Zetas, who I think stayed behind from 2006 when they were in the death squads scaring the APPO” (source cited in Tello 2016, 119). Indeed, Guatemalan Kaibiles special forces rumored to have links to criminal groups had trained Oaxaca’s Special Operations Police Unit UPOE (Tello 2016). In the following years, market vendors began complaining that criminal groups had taken over their association. “You stay as a leader but now you will be under our orders, if you don’t, get out and leave your members to us” (Torrentera 2010). One NGO worker illustrated the sense of helplessness people felt at being unprotected. I just went to Durango. [. . .] I was very concerned because the situation is terribly violent. [. . .] I said to people there, no, you have to do something, a rather personal case, try to find a solution, make it a public agenda. “No, no, no, with whom, because there’s no one to talk to here that you could be sure wasn’t involved. And the governor already told us he can’t do anything. So what we

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will do: We’re going to talk to the Chapo. [. . .] If the government can’t protect us, let them protect us.” (interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011)

Calderón’s narrative that the municipal police had become the decisive infrastructure for violent entrepreneurs (Kenny and Serrano 2012, 207) ran through the entire period. He repeatedly declared the municipal police as corrupt or passive (ICG 2013, 24). While this sounds like he admits state forces were involved in crime, this meant exclusively municipal police. Public security secretary García Luna said, “today a small car moves around in the country that, only the gasoline is not provided by the Mexican state; the wage deficit of Municipal Police is over 1.2 billion pesos per month (14.4 billion per year), and this means either corruption or [the gap] is financed by criminals” (Milenio 2011). When authorities discovered mass graves in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, in May 2011, Calderón accused the municipal police of “not doing their job” (quoted in Reveles 2011, 17). Indeed, after refusing for years, in 2014 the PGR (Attorney General) released information that San Fernando’s municipal police had cooperated with crime, and “when they detain people they don’t take them to . . . the town’s prison but hand them to the Zetas” (SEIDO 2014, 2). In other cities, municipal police cooperated with the Zetas’ extortion business (FBI 2010, 2). Federal police and military frequently arrested entire municipal police units for such links. US court cases somewhat contradict the one-dimensional image, for example, when a Cartel del Golfo member claimed they had paid military and navy alike, but “we didn’t need to pay the mayor, as we had financed his campaign” (Proceso 2012a). Whatever their implication in high-profile state-crime links, the political figures prominent in the “war on drugs” simultaneously played by the books of counterinsurgency and the prevention of dissent. In 2009, President Calderón created the Policía Federal (PF; Federal Police), the successor to the Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP; Federal Preventive Police), under the command of the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública (SSP; Public Security Secretariat). WikiLeaks cables suggest this followed US pressures, which saw the “core for a long-term solution to insecurity” in “the professionalization of the police” (US Embassy, cited in La Jornada 2011a, 4). Initially staffed with seven thousand, the PF assumed thirty-seven thousand personnel when Calderón’s term ended. Its budget jumped 30.4 percent in 2011 alone, parallel to a spike in homicides (Gándara 2020). This did not reduce the confusing number of police bodies, as the AFI stayed under the Attorney General’s command. Repeatedly, one security entity would accuse another, and illegal economy actors also pointed their fingers. Drug trafficker Valdéz Villareal (“La Barbie”) accused García Luna of having him detained because he refused to sign an agreement President Calderón allegedly sought with

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all “cartels.” García Luna’s Federal Police, Valdéz claimed, belonged to the country’s criminals, and he himself paid the secretary and other officials in return for information (Valdéz Villareal 2012). Two hundred AFI agents accused García Luna of criminal links in an open letter to Congress (AFI, cited in Reveles 2010, 132); however, the PGR also arrested AFI personnel for such links (US Mexico Embassy 2008). WikiLeaks cables revealed US diplomats’ doubts about Calderón’s attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora (2006–2009), former director of the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISEN; National Investigation and Security Center) and public security secretary prior to García Luna, and other officials with a “considerable human rights baggage” (US Mexico Embassy 2009c; 2009a). Medina Mora and García Luna represent conservative state personnel with careers in intelligence and counterinsurgency, and both received heavy criticism for extralegal practices under their commands (Contralínea 2012a). Anti-abduction organizations such as SOS México or Alto al Secuestro were well connected to government agencies. Their members came almost exclusively from more affluent backgrounds. Accusations of bribes to them by state institutions abound (interview with lawyer, February 5, 2011). Eduardo Gallo, former chairman of México Unido contra la Delincuencia, described the advantages of access to state decision-making centers (Proceso 2011c): “[T]his doesn’t happen only through money [. . .]. Invitations to meetings, events, and business lunches where you meet with leading state personnel, with the Interior Secretary or the Attorney, who then quickly give you an appointment.” These relatively conservative organizations, often demanding army presence or the death penalty, achieved direct conversation with the executive, unlike human rights organizations. Ultimately, the state even decentralized investigative tasks to such organizations and private companies such as Control Risks or Aquesta Terra, led by a former PGR official, blurring the boundaries between these and state institutions (interview with lawyer, February 5, 2011). These new civil society organizations for security have close links with the state. [. . .] [T]hey know each other, they know their names, they know where they live, they are part of the elite. [. . .] [A]n acquaintance here had an abduction case in his neighborhood, he asked the officials, and they sent him to one of these organizations. A member of parliament [told him], this is the private organization that knows what to do. (interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011)

State representatives simultaneously sought “at least the goodwill [of these people]” (interview with former party member, March 22, 2011; interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011). Gallo sharply illustrates the

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highly selective, personalized links between specific dominant class representations and parts of the executive, which allowed the former a role in decision-making processes, bypassing representative institutions. If you carry weight as a civil society organization, the government obviously wants to be close to you, precisely to prevent you from becoming a problem [. . .]. So they call you, look for you, you suddenly get calls so that your opinion can be heard, or a meeting does not start because you are not there yet. (Gallo, cited in Proceso 2011c)

‌‌ The Secretaría de la Marina (SEMAR; Secretariat for the Navy) gained weight in the institutional structure between 2006 and 2012. It now carried out arrests and supervised security at beaches, illustrating the shifting balance of forces between multiple armed state forces (interview with land activist, May 23, 2011). Between 2005 and 2011, the SEMAR budget more than doubled, growing more than the Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SEDENA; Secretariat for Defense) (CASEDE 2012, 145). From the Mérida Initiative, the navy received its own funds, speedboats, and other equipment. SEMAR got new units for land operations in open rivalry with the army (La Jornada 2011d). In the 2011 Veracruz Operativo Conjunto, the navy took control of urban security (Proceso 2011f; 2011e). New SEMAR bases sprung up in the interior and on the southern border (SEMAR 2012, 38–40). The case of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, wanted by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Mexico for cocaine trade, demonstrates SEMAR’s role. Beltrán Leyva was shot on December 16, 2009, in Cuernavaca, Morelos. The US embassy informed the navy about the operation but excluded SEDENA, the Secretaría de Gobernación (SEGOB; Secretariat of the Interior), and the PGR to avoid leaks (US Mexico Embassy 2009d; interview with journalist/lecturer, April 29, 2011). US-NORTHCOM confirmed that “SEMAR has been trained extensively by NORTHCOM over the past several years” (US Mexico Embassy 2009d; SEMAR 2012, 41), and the embassy called it an “emerging” “key player in the counternarcotics fight” (US Mexico Embassy 2009d). The army’s transnational ties to US security institutions were less close (US Mexico Embassy 2009d).12 The Calderón government’s alliances fell apart in the second half of the term. Many dominant class forces initially supported the planned tightening of the Penal Code and National Security Law, but paradoxically, escalating violence inhibited long-term support based solely on security discourses. From 2011 onward, large corporate conglomerates were no longer unanimously in favor of continuing the war (Revista Dinero 2012). In Calderón’s last three years, tensions within the military, the navy, the SSP, and the PGR grew over budgets and responsibilities and shifts in power relations crisscrossing

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the state. For instance, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN; National Action Party) created García Luna’s SSP when taking power in 2000, making it a counterweight to the SEGOB, home to remaining PRI-related state personnel. The Fox government took the Federal Preventive Police’s command from the SEGOB and gave it to the SSP. Enrique Peña Nieto’s PRI government, Calderón’s successor in 2012, abolished the SSP and reassigned it to the expanding SEGOB as a simple subdivision, sending a message it controlled institutions the PAN lost in 2012. Colombia’s Parapolítica Scandal and Brittle Alliances In Colombia, the re-institutionalization of dispersed violence led to contradictions within the dominant power bloc and, in consequence, within state institutions. First, the alliance between the executive and the paramilitary core began to fall apart in 2006, and second, relations between the executive and parts of the judiciary became more tense. A closer look at these ruptures allows me to perceive to what extent the state and legal and illegal entrepreneurs promoting capitalist development and violence fell into one. The convergence of interests and the legal anchoring of an economic model promoted by paramilitaries and the legal economy alike have survived despite such conflicts. The 2006 presidential elections marked a turning point in Colombia’s political alliances. Although the paramilitaries were still central to the elections, the rupture between them and the Uribe coalition in power became apparent soon after. The support for paramilitary groups, clearly evident in Uribe’s speeches, caused emerging discontent in urban middle classes, grouped different progressive currents under a common counter-hegemonic project, and resulted in relative success for the Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA; Alternative Democratic Pole), the left-wing party alliance, in 2006. PDA presidential candidate Carlos Gaviria received 20 percent of the votes. A press increasingly critical of the demobilization process described the economic power of paramilitaries who bought helicopters, expensive cars, and clothes (El Tiempo 2006b), even if it did not shed much light on the underlying entanglements between the state and the AUC. Partial legalization of illegally obtained property through the JyP law intensified critique. Importantly, opposition senator Gustavo Petro published concrete links between Uribe’s senators and the AUC (Verdad Abierta 2009c; Caracol Radio 2006). After Uribe was sworn in for a second term, state forces arrested fourteen paramilitary commanders who now accepted temporary detention, in accordance with the JyP law (El Tiempo 2006a). As tensions grew, paramilitaries started revealing their political connections in JyP hearings over the following years. In November 2006,

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ex-AUC commander Vicente Castaño (2006; AUC 2002a) threatened Peace Commissioner Restrepo, demanding that the state respect its promises (“Remember, Doctor Restrepo Ramírez, that promises are like debts”). Later that month, the government transferred fifty-nine paramilitary commanders to the high-security prison in Itagüí, prompting them to accuse the government of breaking its word (Movimiento Nacional de Autodefensas Desmovilizadas 2006; El Colombiano 2006). Just days before, President Uribe made a public plea at the Coffee Producers Congress that Congress members under investigation please pass his legislative initiatives while not yet in prison (Uribe Vélez 2006). Among growing pressures, the largest business associations (e.g., ANDI, SAC, ASocana, FEDEGAN) reaffirmed their support for the AUC “peace process” but distanced themselves from “criminals” (Consejo Gremial Nacional 2006). AUC commanders continued their transnational business from Itagüí prison, commissioned murders, and reactivated weapons arsenals (recordings by Semana 2007b). A phone conversation between the then prison director Yolanda Rodríguez and a colleague about her transfer to another prison shows how direct the AUC’s connections to the executive continued to be, while in parallel, the government was publicly paying lip service to the growing criticism of ongoing paramilitary crime. The region is difficult and all, but at least I will feel like a director there. Here I say no, and then they immediately call the Director-General, or the Peace Commissioner, or the Minister, or the President. . . . So I say no, and then they call me from above to say that they do. That’s how it works all the time. (Semana 2007b)

When paramilitaries revealed their connections, politicians of the governing coalition started being investigated in earnest. These politicians then pushed for extradition. The growing criticism of criminal links threatened to endanger foreign direct investment; the emerging class’s economic success competed with legal businesses that until then supported the process. In May 2008, the Uribe government flew fourteen leading AUC commanders to the United States, the nighttime extradition a highly publicized performance of criminals facing justice. Yet the United States charged them exclusively with drug trafficking. This “distanced them from the victims” and the Colombian justice system (interview with lawyer, October 21, 2011). Crimes against humanity remained unresolved. Simultaneously, paramilitaries had suffered a wave of murders of their family members, lawyers, children, [followed] to force them into silence, many of their family members were murdered [. . .]. One

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of these paramilitary commanders, his lawyers were murdered just last week. (interview with activist, October 18, 2011)

The threat paramilitaries posed to the governing coalition resulted in contradictions within the state ensemble itself. Particular tensions arose between the executive and the Supreme Court, the only institution whose staff the president could not influence. After revelations by paramilitaries and media reports, the Supreme Court opened cases against senators and representatives. The court initially focused on active links to the AUC, ranging from logistical support to candidacy in the paramilitaries’ interests, mostly the signatories of the aforementioned 2001 Ralito Pact (El Tiempo 2007a). This comprised one-third of congressmen, mayors, and governors (Fiscalía General de la Nación 2012; Attorney’s Office, cited in López Hernández 2010, 76; CCAJAR 2008). By 2010, the court investigated 39 percent of congressmen elected in 2002 (102 people) for links to paramilitaries; most from the Uribe coalition, reelected in 2006 and from long-established political families (López Hernández 2010, 31–56). Representatives like Eleonora Pineda and Rocío Arias, having worked closely with Uribe Vélez, now lost their posts (interview with lawyer, May 5, 2008). Arias admitted her political support for the AUC and confirmed accusations against others (i.e., Senator Álvaro Araújo) among the first Petro had accused of paramilitary links in 2006 (Semana 2008a). Contradictions came to a head in 2007 and 2008, when more and more active politicians came under investigation (interview with human rights defender, November 10, 2011). Investigators documented how many of the coalition’s parties, Colombia Viva or Alas Equipo Colombia, often founded by Uribe’s supporters only after his 2002 election, served as interest groups for the state-crime interrelation (Semana 2006b). After 2006, family frequently assumed the mandates of those arrested for links to paramilitarism. For instance, Álvaro García Romero, whose case illustrates the AUC history in the Sucre region,13 when sentenced to forty years in prison for ordering a massacre of fifteen in 2000 (Verdad Abierta 2009a), gave his senate mandate to his sister Teresita García, general consul in Frankfurt, Germany, until 2008. Most so-called parapolíticos, including prominent names such as Dieb Maloof, Habib Merheg, and Miguel de Espriella, who signed the Ralito Pact (Semana 2006b; Verdad Abierta 2012b, 2012a), previously helped push through the JyP law in the Senate Commissions on agrarian, economic, and budgetary issues (Ungar and Cardona 2010a, 315; CCAJAR 2008). Others were close to the government, such as Guillermo Valencia Cossio, who had directed the Medellín Prosecutor General’s Office and was interior and justice minister Fabio Valencia Cossio’s brother (US Colombia Embassy 2009b, 4).

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In 2008, conflicts within the state ensemble escalated.14 The president’s cousin, Mario Uribe, had lost his senate seat and immunity in early 2007. After the Costa Rican embassy refused him political asylum and public protests erupted in Bogotá, authorities arrested Mario Uribe in mid-2008. When Supreme Court president César Julio Valencia published that President Uribe had pressured him to stop the trial, and shown his “desire that his cousin receive benevolent treatment” (interview with former Congress member, November 30, 2011), Uribe proposed to withdraw the Supreme Court’s competences and establish a special tribunal for parliamentarians’ offences (interview with trade unionist, May 7, 2008; interview with human rights defender, November 10, 2011; Semana 2010b). Additionally, Uribe’s coalition feared that, after former member of parliament Yidis Medina admitted she had accepted bribes to support a constitutional amendment that allowed Uribe’s reelection in 2006, this reelection could be annulled. In consequence, President Uribe accused the Supreme Court of “selective” justice (interview with former Congress member, November 30, 2011; Semana 2008b). Uribe’s advisor José Gaviria Obdulio repeatedly fantasized the “politicized” Supreme Court was only opposed by the “people as a democratic force” (La Silla Vacía 2011a). State heterogeneity unfolded as the executive seriously devised a strategy to discredit the judiciary. Immediately after the Supreme Court began investigating Mario Uribe in 2007, intelligence service DAS special units illegally wiretapped court members and other critics, ordered by the President’s Office and meticulously documented in hundreds of files (Semana 2012b, 2011e; interview with former Congress member, November 30, 2011; interview with human rights defender, Colombia, November 10, 2011). “Now that we are aware of these reports, we realized that many attacks on human rights defenders coincide with details that appear in the reports” (interview with human rights lawyer Alirio Uribe, Jenss 2010). Much intelligence consisted of devising criminal offences for Supreme Court judges, creating alleged links with drug trafficking, even setting traps for judges to delegitimize their work [. . .]. Even the lady serving coffee in the Supreme Court was an infiltrated DAS agent who placed recording devices under the judges’ tables to listen to their sessions. Or the judges’ drivers. [. . .] relentless espionage and persecution against them [judges] and their families, which ultimately led to major conflict, and many democratic sectors supported the Supreme Court’s work. But let’s face it, that was about to tear apart the entire institutionality. (interview with activist, October 18, 2011)

Cabinet members blamed each other for surveillance and for creating the DAS’s special G3 unit, which exclusively persecuted opposition members

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(US Colombia Embassy 2008a; La Silla Vacía 2011a). After former DAS director Noguera was sentenced and his successor María del Pilar Hurtado fled to Panama, the following Santos government disbanded the DAS in 2011, but its staff dissolved into the same prosecutor’s office tasked with investigations into DAS surveillance. CONCLUSION Political tensions and dissent shaped the way in which governments announced their selective security projects in Colombia and Mexico, aiming to combat “organized crime” and “terrorism.” While in Colombia the security project was embedded in a comprehensive (state) project to transform social relations, there is less coherence in Mexico. Governments in both contexts institutionalized selective security, and, for many, insecurity, during a specific time prone to political crises. State practices frequently went beyond laws, shifting into illegality, but their institutionalization allowed selective security practices to exert influence far beyond a single conjuncture. Crime debates, however, often overlook their economic core. In Colombia, the JyP law ultimately facilitated partially legalizing violently appropriated land, and investigations hardly followed illegal capital (Verdad Abierta 2011a; interview with economist, November 21, 2011). In Mexico, the military influence on government and Congress did not translate into laws modified in its favor, but this does not change state practices beyond legality. If both illegal and violent entrepreneurs and the state have, as Astorga (2007, 14) put it, “made of the war on drugs their raison d’être,” this not only changes the state’s longer-term institutional selectivities but also complicates any progressive initiative. Existing laws did not sanction acts of violence because they did not recognize them as criminal offences, and institutions remained inactive. Calderón explicitly opened legal leeway for activities previously classified as illegal, but permitted in the “exceptional” situation. Social forces supporting the Uribe government in Colombia and the Calderón government in Mexico fundamentally accepted (and demanded) state coercion of what they perceived as naturally “others.” In fact, both selective security projects were ultimately premised on state coercion as well as nonstate violence, and targeted dissent, difference, and potential status quo disruptions. What large parts of society perceived as diffuse violence by

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“illegal groups” with oft-repeated names prevented antigovernment dissent. Insecurity was organized along categories of difference such as class and race, with particular pressure on lower social strata.

Chapter 7

The Law, the Land, and the Gun The Coloniality of State Power in Making Private Property

A PROPERTY CONSENSUS A new “commodities consensus” (Svampa 2015, n.p.), dominated the 2000s in Latin America.1 A consensus to extract and export, it transformed property relations in land, resources, and territory to make space for primary extractive activities, and intensified assembly-line production. Its absolute priority of private property regimes and the logic of acceleration and expansion favored large-scale and capital-intensive projects as well as mono-cultures, and it introduced new patterns of dependency. In Mexico, this priority has led to commodifying land in communal tenure or state management. In Colombia, repeated cycles of land appropriation have led to an enormous inequality in ownership of land and loss of communal and small-scale property, particularly during the period studied. Recent research focuses on land appropriation (Borras and Franco 2012; Kelly and Peluso 2015) and territorialization (Grajales 2011; Rasmussen and Lund 2018), forced displacement (Sandoval, Álvarez, and Fernández 2011; CMH 2015; Peña‐Huertas et al. 2017), or enclosures of the commons (Neocleous 2014; Sevilla Buitrago 2015) in the context of what Sassen (2014) described as global expulsions. Geography and anthropology link this violence to property and the state (Correia 2013; Blomley 2008; Vargas and Uribe 2017). A growing body of literature exposes state-crime collusion in land control (Grajales 2016; Jenss 2018b; Ballvé 2020) and the logics of “agrarian capitalism” (Grajales 2021) that fuel such collusion. Counterinsurgency studies equally call out violent land appropriation via militarization (Dunlap 2018; Hochmüller and Müller 2016). Yet, property relations are seldom a topic of studies on illegal state activities, and land 161

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acquisitions have hardly been defined in terms of state crime. This chapter contributes to developing a decolonial perspective on the role of state violence in property relations and illegal acquisitions of land. The chapter examines conflicts between property regimes in Mexico and Colombia through relational state theory and the notion of coloniality of state power (Quijano 2014; 2000a), which I develop throughout the book. Their combination allows me to grasp the fundamental role the state plays for capitalist relations of production, based on unequally distributed private property. Thinking through state theory and coloniality in the previous chapters, I highlighted how illegality is integral to both global economy and state practices. Quijano (2014), Hall (1980), and Bhandar’s (2018) “colonial lives of property” enable me to map the coloniality of power relations in the hierarchization of different property regimes, which respond to requirements of capitalism and racist constructions of difference, frequently involving state violence. I make two related arguments. First, the state’s operational logic in making private property has had violent impacts. Second, state coercion is intimately linked to conflicts between private property and claims for communal land tenure. In the particular conjuncture of the 2000s, the commodities boom— the wave of global demand that refocused Latin America’s economies on extraction—fell into one with the “war on drugs,” fueling the radical transformation of property relations. The result is what I call, adapting Svampa’s (2015) term, a criminal commodities consensus. The state, parallel to its security offensive, not only removed legal protection for communal tenure— particularly in Mexico—but also mobilized legal as well as illegal means to force the change of communal lands into private property. I first conceptualize the links between the coloniality of state power and property. The next section argues that coloniality has defined the making of private property in Mexico and Colombia. I then shed light on how rural spaces of resistance against this security-economy nexus faced continuous acts of (state) violence and threats to existence in the “war on drugs.” A short conclusion summarizes the findings on the intersections between state violence, land tenure, and the “war on drugs.” THE COLONIALITY OF PRIVATE PROPERTY Fundamentally, property is not static, free of conflict, or apolitical but, instead, an utterly contested power relation in which the capitalist state plays a definite, if sometimes ambiguous role in guaranteeing long-term continuity and safeguarding private property. For a comprehensive understanding of the state’s role in land tenure, this chapter returns to Aníbal Quijano’s (2014,

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777–832) notion of the coloniality of state power. Two aspects are particularly relevant. First, property law is harnessed by actual coercion (Blomley 2008). Violence is at the core of property, and settles what is highly contested, solidifying power relations in law (Correia 2013). The relation between state coercion and the text of laws on private property, on the one hand, and land appropriation and nonstate violence, on the other hand, is more of a continuum than a mutually exclusionary dichotomy. Second, coloniality has shaped hegemonic thought about property (Bhandar 2018). Private property is usually seen as the modern variant of property, more productive and efficient for development than other forms of tenure. [A] farmer who owns his own labor, land and other factor inputs, for example, is likely to see a direct relationship between investments and the level of benefit achieved over the long term. A farmer who belongs to an agricultural production cooperative, on the other hand, may see only a loose connection between personal contributions and benefits. (Ostrom and Hess 2007, 4)

Framed this way, communal tenure can never achieve the productivity and efficiency private property generates. The lack of clearly defined property rights in communal tenure or open-access resources is feared to lead to overconsumption and fewer investments for improvement (Ostrom and Hess 2007, 7). Their basis in complex and interlinked forms of law and customary norms is often ignored, but a perspective on land tenure that aims to expose state coloniality needs to be legally pluralist (Ward and Green 2016, 217–19). Complementary to Quijano, Bhandar’s (2018, 7) focus on racial regimes of property, partly based on Hall’s (1980) notion of articulation, helps develop this argument, as she shows how colonialism depended on juridical formations “twinning the production of racial subjects with an economy of private property ownership.” Law on land tenure in postcolonial states has colonial roots. The historical analysis of property exposes “how the most banal of legal arrangements over land ownership (a tenant farmer paying rent to the landowner) have their historical source in conquest” (Cowen 2014, 7). Bhandar helps us understand the global historical roots of property relations in Colombia and Mexico, now intersecting with the “war on drugs.” Property relations in both countries can still be partially traced to conflicts between the hacienda system (where large landowners absorbed what their tenants produced), smallholdings, and communal property. This “racial regime of ownership” (Bhandar 2018, 4) is persistent. Mexico, however, made important inroads into these highly asymmetrical and racialized property regimes after the revolution. Its colonial foundations make international law blind to some harmful and blameworthy acts (Agnew 2011, 34). In early Iberian and European legal

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philosophy, the alleged difference of those colonized was instrumental for denying them certain rights. In fact, as said in chapter 2, Francisco Fray de Vitoria, for many a founder of international law, saw only Europeans as legal subjects, putting trade routes and colonizers’ access to goods center stage. The colonial expansion appeared as unquestionable, unconditional, and legitimate (Dussel 2005, 48–54). Vitoria explicitly denied the indigenous peoples of the Americas the right to prohibit colonial presence, trade, or land acquisitions (Dussel 2005, 52–53). Indeed, he constructs them as an “Other,” basing his idea of European superiority partly on the lack of the concept of property in the Mexican, Zapotec, or Mayan societies. Bhandar (2018, 5) brilliantly summarizes this argument as a more general trend of colonial endeavors, which expanded from the Americas. The dispossession of indigenous peoples of their land was justified through the absence of legible property legislation, casting them as uncivilized, and outside of history, a people on which to enact programs of civilization. As such it is bound to the concept of the human, and thus the civilized.

The dominant land tenure system, however, is not just based on crimes committed in colonial conquest. Maintaining colonial social classifications in the postcolonial state has caused severe social harm. The coloniality of knowledge production (Quijano 2014, 285–327) carried a hierarchized imaginary of land tenure into the postcolonial state. Land ownership still structures and modifies the possibilities to influence state priorities, and property is riddled with the coloniality of state power. Why did postcolonial states so frequently reproduce this colonial asymmetry? Independence was not revolutionary; it left social structures and imaginaries mostly in place. Social positions according to class, gender, and race continued to define access to state decision-making and to land as a means of production. Historically, race became particularly meaningful (Quijano 2014, 285–327). The hierarchy of social classifications became the basis for states dependent on plantation and mining economies, where large-scale land ownership and coerced and free labor coexisted—salaried labor being a “white” privilege (Quijano 2000a, 539; Bagú 1992). While the Spanish Crown recognized the figure of ejidos and communal pasture land, these suffered legal changes and dispossession under the postcolonial state. Landowners’ relations to the Mexican state differed according to the interests of agricultural industry, haciendas, or cattle breeding (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 77). They acted as state intermediaries, while simultaneously repelling regulation and taxation. The narrative of private property is a story of improvement, of making supposedly idle land productive, based on the core capitalist idea of valorization

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(Neocleous 2014). Discursively, links between ideas of patriarchal responsibility and ethnically differentiated imaginaries of productivity are essential to the place of property in Mexico and Colombia. On the one hand, the discursive “racialization of space” (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 43) facilitated to continue fundamental mechanisms of colonial hacienda production well into independence. It perpetuated the hacienda’s economic base—ownership of large areas of land, patronage, and labor regimes with strong elements of dependence, which resembled debt servitude long after its formal abolition. On the other hand, the representation of indigenous and peasant production as “unproductive” facilitated capitalist accumulation in general—even though organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization frequently highlight small-scale agriculture’s prominent role for food production (CEPAL/ FAO/IICA 2012). Despite that, some rural communities in Mexico were able to maintain their relatively autonomous economies based on the mixed land use of milpa production. If property is deeply connected to colonial ascriptions, private property is associated with order, efficiency, or usefulness (Bobrow-Strain 2007). The postcolonial state frequently introduced a process of enclosure and cultural transformation to constitute indigenous people as “productive wage-laborers and active economic subjects,” “improving” communal land by converting into private property (Neocleous 2014, 147). PRIVATIZING PROPERTY The historical differences between Mexican postrevolutionary land distribution and Colombia’s repeatedly failed land reforms make for very different dynamics. Their differences only expose how “(t)he production of racial subjectivity and the constitution of private property relations are articulated conjointly” (Bhandar 2018, 9). The Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920 partially reversed colonial land relations. Agrarian reform became central to postrevolutionary discourses (Mallon 1994, 73); Article 27 of the 1917 post-revolutionary constitution reintroduced land distribution and the legal figure of the ejido. Ejidos usually combined communal administration with individual cultivation but were inalienable and could not be sold. Such post-revolution laws partially protected peasant land from capitalist accumulation cycles. For decades, after the revolution, Mexico was the Latin American country with the least unequal land distribution, even though ejido land distribution made very slow progress. Mexican nationalism embraced ejidos, but its protection was temporary and bound peasants to the increasingly autocratic state party system. Yet with Mexico’s 1982 debt crisis, financially strong and export-oriented entrepreneurs pushed for and benefited from economic restructuring (Anguiano

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2010). In 1992, this Congress, dominated by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party), changed Article 27 and ended protection for ejido land, while formalization programs led by the World Bank, such as PROCEDE, aimed at accelerating the transition from communal and ejido land to private property (Vázquez Castillo 2004). The imposing idea was that land had to be clearly registered and delimited. Interviews I conducted with human rights and land activists, however, emphasized that land is at the center of many popular struggles in Mexico. The indigenous Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994 was at the forefront of protests against this second wave of decidedly unpopular neoliberal policies. Zapatistas directly reacted to changes in property law, and their struggle illustrates perfectly why access to land is core to the Latin American debate on coloniality of state power (Quijano 2014): The allocation of lands had always been an exit option for the peasant movement in general and for the indigenous. When this possibility is abandoned, displacements and fraud in buying contracts of lands increase. When Ejido land is privatized, big cattle-ranchers and farmers start appropriating land and will not only extend their pasture land or fenced-in meadows or kill people, but will use frauds in the buying and selling of terrain. When this legal possibility (of land distribution) is closed down, the Chiapanekan indigenous sees his death sentence.[. . .] Becoming part of the rural proletariat or emigrating to be a seasonal worker, is not a perspective for him. They are uprooting me from my history and culture, not only from the place where I produce and which I need to live. [. . .] The very moment the allocation of lands is abandoned, the indigenous campesino loses his means of production, and loses his history. (Zapatista spokesperson Marcos, cited in Fazio 1996, 132)

Indeed, the Zapatistas were able to negotiate autonomy with the Mexican state through the San Andrés accords in 1996, opting for “legitimacy versus the legality” of private property (Rocheleau 2015, 700); they have defended inalienable community land and resisted eviction and landlessness since (Juntas de Buen Gobierno Zapatistas 2013). Direct violence against them is nothing new. For instance, in 1990s Chiapas, paramilitary groups received state loans and transport licenses for their violence against indigenous Zapatista communities that defended their right to land (Bobrow-Strain 2007, 150). During the Calderón government’s privatization efforts and since then, local organizations have once and again denounced paramilitary and military violence and forced displacements against Zapatista communities (Frayba 2014; CDH Frayba 2019). The 1990s introduction of the Registro Agrario Nacional (RAN; National Agrarian Register) and special courts for land disputes (tribunales agrarios) have sparked conflict rather than mediation (Torres Mazuera, Mediburu, and

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Gómez Godoy 2018, 27–29). Certification programs such as PROCEDE were unsuccessful. Many ejido communities refused to participate in plot measurement and registration. In 2012, the Mexican statistics agency Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI; National Statistics and Geography Institute) stated there were still 5.7 million ejido members, and the National Agrarian Register listed 31,628 ejidos on 100,473,830 hectares. Of those, 24,890 were separated into individual plots, but only a minority of ejido areas are actually privately owned (INEGI in La Jornada 2012b); the privatization process took hold mostly in urban peripheries (Salazar 2014, 77). Changes in agrarian law ultimately require the ejido members themselves to establish who are “legitimate users” of the land and achieve its formalization by contracting surveyors. This gradually privatizes the formalization process for property rights itself (Salazar 2014, 76). When they realized that this was a trap or didn’t work for them, the process halted—but the government keeps insisting via [the certification program]. For example, to receive state subsidies [. . .] peasants are now asked to demonstrate that the land is theirs or that at least there is no ejido control over the land. In the end, the ejido commissaries are losing competences as the ones responsible for the land. (interview with human rights defender, February 5, 2011)

When the efforts to transform ejidos into private property via certification programs mostly failed in Mexico and the land market never thrived (see de Ita 2006), the Calderón government explained ejidos simply lacked loans and capital, and legal restraints on ejidos inhibited innovation (Calderón speech in La Jornada 2012b). The main state aim, then, was to produce private property where ejidos and communal lands existed. Securing private property of land meant entirely abolishing the inalienability of land administered in ejidos and communal land, completing the project begun in 1992 under President Salinas de Gortari (Calderón Hinojosa 2006, eje 2, 106), and particularly targeting the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero. New legislation, the National Development Plan (Presidencia de la República 2007) argued, would prevent the expropriated or former land owners from opposing or blocking the project. This law is intended to regulate that these persons can demand a higher payment by means of an established procedure, but in no way hinder the development of the project. (Calderón Hinojosa 2006, eje 2, 24)

Congress subsequently modified decisive articles 30, 80, 72, and 164 of the Agrarian Law between 2006 and 2012 (Cámara de Diputados [Diario Oficial Federal Estados Unidos Mexicanos] 2012a) to allow the accelerated

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transformation of ejido land into private property. The state could now lease larger areas to the expanding mining and agro-industrial companies. The Mexican state, heterogeneous as it is, seeks to play a key role in the global logic of the “commodities consensus” (Svampa 2015). Land activists and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers I interviewed emphasized the decisive role state agencies played in transforming the existing variety of property regimes and the state’s increasing reluctance in recognizing legal pluralism. As one NGO worker (March 25, 2011) observed: “the state . . . starts to generate processes . . . of displacement and over-exploitation.” In Chiapas, the regional government integrated urbanization and counterinsurgency strategies in resettlement programs for peasants living in dispersed and fragmented communities. This rural cities program implied restructuring the tenure of their former plots and made them mere users of prefabricated state housing in semi-urban spaces (interview with grassroots activist, April 20, 2011). In Yucatán, peasants who refused to give their land up for construction works were often detained, and state attorneys used falsified accusations against previous owners in favor of projects the state executive promoted (Grupo Indignación 2007, 31–44, 46). The last legal changes the Calderón government made frame former ejidatarios as actual property owners (Cámara de Diputados [Diario Oficial Federal Estados Unidos Mexicanos] 2012b), further dismantling postrevolutionary protection for small-scale agriculture. State institutions responded to the mining sector’s growing weight by frequently granting land use concessions of fifty years to Mexican and global mining companies, renewable for another fifty years. In 2010, about 25 percent of Mexico’s total territory was licensed to mining companies (Contralínea 2012a; La Jornada 2011b), apparently without state control over implementation, environmental standards, or labor relations (La Jornada 2011a). State institutions did not recognize the asymmetrical relations between participants of this free land market; its effects and the subsequent demand for land in Mexico’s highly stratified rural society expose the coloniality of state power. The ejido transformation caused semi-forced rural-urban migration, ecological damage, and conflicts over land. Cheap imports via the NAFTA trade agreement exert additional, structural pressures on small agriculture. The history of landed property in Colombia is a proper counter-history to the Mexican Revolution’s symbolism of land distribution. Property relations of land were subject to continuous settlement extension and ownership concentration cycles, particularly in areas considered “peripheral” (Molano 1992). Settlements did not, of course, take place in an “empty” space but, instead, in displaced racialized rural communities. Much rather than a model

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for producing consensus, the highly symbolic land redistribution after the Mexican Revolution worried observers in Colombian elite circles, particularly, the breaking up of haciendas; it served as a negative blueprint. One essential difference to postrevolutionary Mexico was that the subsoil could by law belong to individual land owners, and in these cases, the state relinquished its power of disposal. The laws were complex; they had veered away from the former Spanish separation of soil and subsoil but then reintroduced it. For instance, if a terrain had been legalized before 1873, its owner owned the subsoil as well; after 1873, the state often assumed ownership, distinguishing minerals of special interest (Botero 2003, 4, 15). These complexities determine the influx of taxes from hydrocarbon and mineral extraction to the state, and impact the contemporary pressure on land ownership. In Mexico’s twentieth century, this pressure became less severe than in Colombia, as the state regained its property over oil and declared a considerable percentage of land inalienable ejido, or communal land. The repeated failed attempts at Colombian land reform in 1936 and the 1960s (chapter 2) show that agrarian dominant factions continued to hold considerable power, channeled their demands into state decisions, and based their accumulation strategies on large estates, while even well-organized peasant initiatives were able to influence state policies only at very specific conjunctures. Communal ownership had little importance in national land debates at all. In 1973, the Chicoral Pact fixed the “agreement between the government and the large landowners associations to maintain the rural ownership structure” (Gutiérrez Sanín, Acevedo, and Viatela 2007, 20). In view of this rigid agrarian structure, some four million peasants migrated to cities between 1971 and 1985 alone (Reyes Posada 1997, 185). Apart from indigenous resguardos, no legal protection such as ejidos existed. In Colombia’s 1990s, a state-sponsored, market-based land reform intersected with violent appropriation. The World Bank–supported agrarian reform between 1994 and 2000 (Law 160/1994), for example, only codified existing conditions, providing landowners with subsidies to buy land. Its guiding principles were land title allocation, private ownership, and the commodification of land used for subsistence farming but not, as grassroots organizations demanded, the expropriation of fallow land (CNC 2003). While the law reformed the Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria (INCORA; Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform), only about 180,000 hectares changed hands through market mechanisms. Most of the beneficiaries were unable to pay the interest rates on the state loans for 30 percent of the purchase price and the first seeds (Mondragón 2006, 168). The purchasing power of small families declined; increased food imports further weakened smallholder agriculture. Subsistence farmers with their own land often started working for large landowners or as subcontractors for agribusiness (see

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Fajardo Montaña 2002). Large or transnational agribusinesses were far better equipped to respond to global market demands and, together with financial market- and foreign-oriented dominant factions, drove the policy changes (López Restrepo 2004). The National Commission for Indigenous Territories founded in 1996 and collective titles over five million hectares granted to organized Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific region became the almost singular institutional counterweight to the increasing valorization of agricultural land for the export economy (Castillo 2010, 152). The contrast of Colombia-based, transnational corporations to landless labor couldn’t be more glaring at the turn of the century. Small-scale farming suffered from lacking support measures, while the 0.4 percent of landowners who held above five hundred hectares expanded their ownership from 32.5 percent in 1984 to 61.2 percent of all registered land in 2001 (Higginbottom 2005, 122). Landless laborers worked in capital-intensive sugar production or banana, citrus, and flower cultivation. Structural adjustment and market liberalization gave rise to new conflict scenarios for small farmers and indigenous communities (i.e., rights to seeds, increased natural resources investment, and industrialized land use). What defined social relations in late 1990s rural Colombia, however, was the forced displacement of peasant, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific Coast, the Llanos, and fertile river valleys, mostly by Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia paramilitaries (AUC; United SelfDefense Forces of Colombia) (El Tiempo 2011; Plataformas de Derechos Humanos 2008). The AUC, through massacres and massive forced displacements, became agents of making private property and counter-land reform. Violent expulsions had virtually no effect on large estates. In 73 percent of the cases, the expulsion affected mini-foundations of up to twenty hectares in area, and 26.6 percent of the cases concerned medium-sized properties of roughly twenty hectares (PNUD 2011, 71). Displacement existed before, but between 1997 and 2004, parallel to paramilitary expansion, displacement was systematic and frequently entailed complicity between security forces and paramilitaries, or security forces’ acquiescence (OHCHR 2015, 5). Land ownership expansion by paramilitaries reversed any redistributive effect of earlier agrarian reform attempts. In the Colombian state ensemble, formalization became a dominant idea deemed necessary for attracting investment. “[F]or these objectives it will be necessary [. . .] to stimulate the development of the land market, and to distribute land for which possession was forfeited (resultante de la extinción de dominio)” (Presidencia de la República Colombiana 2006, 33). Considering forced displacement, this has severe consequences. Have people been physically away long enough from their plots, they face not only the actual loss of land but also their formal tenure.

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Similarly, the state prioritized mineral extraction, and designated large areas as oil and mining districts, grouping companies and subsidiaries of the extraction and processing chain around them, and defining them through a “specific legal regime [ . . . to] facilitate the exploitation of opportunities offered by the expanded market and new trade liberalization treaties” (Ministerio de Minas y Energía 2005, 10). Legal changes would “stimulate the participation of investors in the oil sector” (Uribe Vélez 2004). Rising world market prices, demand, and the legal framework—as early as 2001, export-oriented factions pushed through the new mining law against trade union resistance—led to a veritable boom in foreign direct investment (FDI) in oil and mining in the 2000s. Between 2006 and 2009, FDI grew by 73 percent to more than US$3 billion per year (CEPALSTAT 2020). The Uribe government granted almost nine thousand licenses covering twenty-two million hectares, almost one-fifth of the country’s total area (Semana 2011b). In 2005, Law 1004 changed the free trade zones regulation. The state explicitly sought to include investments from the most traditional landowning sectors, and private ownership of free trade zones could be attributed to single individuals, such as Uribe’s sons (Dinero Portal de Noticias 2007; Estrada Álvarez 2010, 208–11). New regulations understood free zones as an instrument to stimulate transnational capital accumulation within Colombia, and located the zones outside the national customs regime. By 2010, the government had declared thirty-seven new zones. Imports into free trade zones on Colombian territory were exempt from import taxes, and the purchase of raw materials from Colombia by processing companies in free zones did not constitute exports either (Kalmánovitz 2008; Estrada Álvarez 2010, 19–21). What gained little attention is that this state prioritization of global and national entrepreneurial interests directly impacted communal property. For instance, in Tamarindo in the Atlántico region, the state had granted 250 hectares of land to displaced families in 2001. When the customs authority DIAN established a free trade zone between Barranquilla and Galapa in 2007 (Zona Franca Permanente Internacional del Atlántico), a new round of evictions ensued, threatening families’ livelihoods (MOVICE 2011; Verdad Abierta 2015). In general, subsidies for peasants sharply declined during Uribe’s term, “particularly in the last 10 years, the entire [agrarian] infrastructure, institutions constructed over decades, were dismantled” (interview with economist, November 21, 2011). In contrast, the agricultural subsidy program Agro Ingreso Seguro (Semana 2009, 118:5) offered at least 302 billion pesos to wealthy rural families, for example, through the parafiscal Fondo de Ganaderos (Livestock Fund) controlled by Federación de Ganaderos (FEDEGAN; Livestock Breeders’ Federation), via the pretended division of land parcels in Caquetá or Magdalena (El Espectador 2011b). Such divisions of actually large properties

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were, in fact, illegal. Several cabinet members later faced corruption charges. Former agriculture minister Felipe Arias was released in 2013 after two years in pretrial detention. The evidence that the Uribe coalition conceived the program for no other purpose than these subsidies to landowner friends who had supported their campaign is overwhelming, and it provoked critique from urban middle classes, trade, and industry (Semana 2009; El Espectador 2011b; Arias 2018). The state-facilitated process of making private property in Mexico and Colombia tells us two things about the coloniality of state power in property. First, race, having emerged as a key category, translates into a hierarchy of forms of property in state policies. Communal land, indigenous resguardos, and ejidos once again serve as private property’s “other.” Various strategies of othering are at play: colonial social classifications valued a commodities approach more than claims for commons and elements of customary law. The countries’ National Development Plans, which summarize the governments’ overarching political goals, both conveyed this. President Caldéron’s Plan (2007) presented private property regimes as necessary and inevitable and, simultaneously, universalized the interests of dominant social groups who already enjoyed privileged access to the state. The Colombian Uribe government equally foregrounded its strategic interest in valorizing land on a large scale, in its National Development Plans and the strategy paper Visión 2019 (Presidencia de la República Colombiana 2006, 33). The protection of displaced persons or the return of their land was no state priority. Second, the state’s omission to protect exposes the colonial bias that prevails in state land tenure policies in societies that know diverse forms of ownership. Frontier debates, loosely adjacent to discussions on property relations, emphasize the role of formalizations in conflicts over land, making land uses and its claimants “controllable,” intelligible, and adorned formal owners with authority (Kelly and Peluso 2015, 473; Uribe 2019). While sometimes frontier debates end up downplaying the state’s reach, the formalization of property really exposes the postcolonial state’s essential role in these conflicts. Formalizing property is a step toward a society in which clearly delimited private property rights are the base for and subsume social relations (Kelly and Peluso 2015, 474). The security such formalizations produce is the highly selective security of property of the “entrepreneurial society” (Franco Restrepo 2009, 90–92).

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FROM PRIVATIZATION TO LAND CONTROL AND THE WAR ON DRUGS Property is intimately articulated with access to the state and the possibilities of exercising coercion and, thus, control. Control over land, dependent on social power relations, is increasingly more decisive than actual property titles. “Control grabbing” is the new catchword (Grajales 2011; Kelly and Peluso 2015), again riddled with the coloniality of power. In Mexico, lease or tenancy examples that ultimately lead to dispossession are numerous (La Jornada 2011b; interview with human rights lawyer, April 18, 2011). “[In Nuevo León,] a municipality leases people’s land for a miserable price. Land which you will never be able to use again for agriculture, leased to mining companies [. . .] today, many of the cases we are talking about is not the selling of land” (interview with grassroots activist, April 20, 2011). The only condition for leasing ejido land is to have the plot’s value officially appraised; an administrative process is sufficient. The ejido assembly, the local decision-making body, cannot challenge such an individual decision (Eslava Galicia and López Bárcenas 2011, 69–71). “In Carrizalillo, the mining company didn’t have to buy the land. It leased it! Under a scheme which didn’t benefit the peasants and didn’t include the buying or selling of land” (interview with land activist, May 23, 2011). So-called temporary surface occupancy agreements are often signed in highly asymmetrical conditions between corporations and ejido farmers, who lack information and legal counseling. Additionally, the Law for Prevention and Management of Waste holds the owners responsible for environmental damage—in this case, the ejidos. A mining company leasing land from ejidatarios cannot be held legally accountable for pollution arising from the extraction process (Torres Mazuera, Mediburu, and Gómez Godoy 2018, 45; Eslava Galicia and López Bárcenas 2011, 69–71). Tenancy regimes have become integral to land acquisitions by mining companies in Sinaloa or Nuevo León, and even for plantations in Veracruz and Sonora, and reverses the relation between tenant and owner. Land control means tenants cannot define the land’s strategic orientation toward certain products. “It links them [land and peasants] more closely to the major agrarian production through tenancy. Big land owners, well, they won’t buy if they have the possibility to rent at such a low price, and to utilize the people themselves as workforce” (interview with grassroots activist, April 20, 2011). The Colombian counterpart to leasing were so-called productive alliances, which imagined peasants and agro-industrial corporations as “teams” but, in fact, constituted a contract system resembling the old hacienda world. For instance, the state-coordinated program Colombia Responde (UACT 2008)

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devised agricultural projects for the forcibly displaced after critics demanded an end to state neglect. As prior mass displacement had actually made labor scarce in some regions, state efforts aimed to attract displaced people from other parts of Colombia to resettle there. Participants received land parcels but, in effect, became wage-dependent agricultural workers. Initially, they were paid a minimum wage but lost decision-making power over what they produced—namely, crops that institutions considered “strategic.” So they call for displaced farmers to go to a region, they give them work there, a little bit of land, so that they can grow oil palms, or rubber or sugar cane. Only for that, yes? [. . .] but the people meet completely different conditions than before. Or people who are not from there, and they tell them, well, you can’t go back to Urabá now, but go east, there’s a piece of land that doesn’t belong to anyone, that belongs to the state, and whatnot. But this piece of land has already been given a fixed goal, it already has a programme. (interview with grassroots activist, November 11, 2011)2

‌‌ During the Calderón presidency, the Mexican federal state and municipal agencies increasingly withdrew land control from ejidos, often omitting communal organizations’ claims. State institutions transfer decisions about land utilization to spheres where they can’t be democratically contested. The 1993 mining law, for instance, gives mining, framed as an activity of public utility, “priority against any other land use”; it violates indigenous communities’ preferential right to mining concessions (Eslava Galicia and López Bárcenas 2011, 56, 71). In some cases, the state actively fragmented former ejidos to make way for capital-intensive production regimes in vertically integrated value chains. In 2012, the Mexican Official Journal listed expropriations of ejidos or smallholders on the basis of “public utility” at least weekly (Cámara de Diputados 2012b; Jenss 2016, 383). State policies actively embraced global investors’ interests but endangered the sheer existence of small-scale rural communities’ livelihoods. The state agency Procuradurı́a Agraria (PA) emerged in 1992 from the defunct Agrarian Reform Secretariat, which managed land distribution and contacts between the state and ejido authorities—the form the state’s outreach to peasants took for decades. While responsible for mediating conflicts in land tenancy, the PA in fact provided model contracts for land tenancy and support for mining companies seeking to invest in ejido land, as the National Development Plan requested. Ejido members filed thousands of complaints to the PA since the early 2000s, and the PA’s inspectors are the first key link between entrepreneurs and communal and ejido farmers (Torres Mazuera, Mediburu, and Gómez Godoy 2018, 28–29, 52). A land activist from Guerrero (interview May 23, 2011) described the process:

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[The PA] tells the ejido commissioner: you have to summon an assembly. He is the one who does the dirty job in his own community, he convinces people to sign. The PA keeps the minutes, while he summons the meeting. The PA oversees that all the legal requirements are fulfilled, so that mining companies are legally permitted.

NGOs report cases where the PA acted as the door opener for entrepreneurs by bending ejido rules and omitting informed consent for regions as diverse as Yucatán, Oaxaca, or Chihuahua (Torres Mazuera, Mediburu, and Gómez Godoy 2018, 43). In San José del Progreso, for instance, the mining-affected ejido has lacked an agrarian authority since 2009 (CODT and SIPAZ 2014). The coloniality of property in land lies not only in the logic of clearing large areas of land to enable their commodification. It emerges in the aim of transforming communal owners into market-oriented consumers. This cultural and colonial transformation is particularly relevant because, symbolically, the ejido model had been deeply entrenched in popular narratives that simultaneously served to legitimize state party rule in Mexico—contrasting starkly with Colombian imaginaries of peasants as guerrilla. Earlier, I exposed the colonial operational logic of state institutions involved in making private property. Enclosures and certification processes have aggravated structurally violent conditions of severe inequality and the loss of livelihoods. Their link to “a core set of acts that threaten physical security and are viewed as harmful across the vast majority of societies” (Agnew 2011, 31) is intimate. I call this a criminal commodities consensus. The consensus implies that state institutions acted coherently over time, if not coordinated, uniting a heterogeneous state ensemble, to realize the overarching goal of attracting investment. The making of private property exacerbated the coloniality of power, when state policies omitted any protection of ownership concepts other than private property and, particularly, when state institutions were themselves involved in violent acts of dispossession. Coloniality of Property in the War on Drugs The “war on drugs” and military offensives against guerrillas provide the context in which the dynamics of land tenure in Mexico and Colombia have unfolded in the last two decades. The regions concentrating most violence are frequently not abandoned but, instead, regions with economic growth and dynamic changes in land tenancy and production patterns. While the state ensemble’s coordinated and renewed interest brings these sites of struggle to the core of state priorities, the existential threats described by communities

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and those I interviewed are reflected in forced displacements, disappearances, killings, and harassment. Investor trust became the linchpin of economic policy in both countries. Colombia’s Arauca region, with its oil pipeline, illustrated the immediate economic effects of exceptional competences for militaries. In 2005, eight hundred soldiers and a fleet of ten helicopters, acquired with US support via Plan Colombia, guarded the Caño Limón-Coveñas pipeline for the joint venture of Oxy and its Colombian partner Ecopetrol (El Tiempo 2005a). Such protection contracts were renewed but largely remain in place (Ejército Nacional 2014). In 2002, the Eighteenth Brigade boasted they “knew the names of every family member” living close to the pipeline (ONGs Arauca 2002).3 Effectively, the areas in which the military and National Police “restored order” simultaneously became attractive investment grounds. The Alliance Act, which legalized Plan Colombia’s financial aid in the US Congress, openly links the plan to the demand “(2) to insist that the Government of Colombia complete urgent reform measures intended to open its economy fully to foreign investment and commerce, particularly in the petroleum industry” (US Congress [106th] 1999). During this period, the Colombian military focused on regions

Figure 7.1. Peaceful scene in Arauca, Colombia’s oil region to the northeast, November 2011. Source: Photo by the author.

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such as Boyacá, North Meta, and Tolima, where it did push back on the FARC guerilla (Ministerio de Defensa 2008, 2009, 28–29). In Mexico, the military increased its presence precisely where the state granted mining concessions. During the Operativos in Guerrero, military barricades and camps appeared on indigenous communities’ collective land with gold deposits (interview with land activist, May 23, 2011). In Oaxaca, local administration and state and federal security forces joined in coercive strategies to dissolve anti-mining protests. On March 20, 2009, residents of the municipalities of San José del Progreso and Magdalena Ocotlán blocked the entrance to the Canadian-owned Cuzcatlán silver mine and remained there for fifty-one days. They demanded the Environment and Resources Secretariat cancel the project due to environmental hazards, particularly arsenic and cyanide contamination of the area’s rivers (REMA 2013). Fifteen hundred state forces dissolved the blockade on May 6 (CODT and SIPAZ 2014, 48). Protesting the mine was a question of property. San José was a typical ejido, having gained land in 1927 and 1936. Ejido administrators accepted the PROCEDE certification in 1999 to clarify its delimitations with neighboring communities (CODT and SIPAZ 2014, 14). While the Cuzcatlán corporation claimed it had gained mining concessions in 2006, some for fifty years, anti-mine protestors argued the ejido administration had permitted land use change without consultation; ejido members themselves had been coerced and tricked into signing leasing agreements and selling land (CODT and SIPAZ 2014, 15, 24). The precondition for dividing up the ejido, and in part for divisions within the community, had been PROCEDE. The mayor used criminalizing narratives against those protesting, likening them to the APPO members that federal forces had violently driven out of Oaxaca City’s center in 2006 (Bacon 2012). After violent confrontations, Bernardo Vásquez, who had led the anti-mining protests, was killed in 2012, apparently by armed civilians close to the municipal administration. Protestors and a 2012 fact-finding mission contended the company provided armed civilians and capital to buy arms (CODT and SIPAZ 2014, 21, 50). “We’ve seen them give money to people in the community who are against us . . . who now have new cars, when before they had nothing” (inhabitants cited in Bacon 2012). They also intimidated inhabitants in conjunction with police. “The president’s people are armed, they don’t wear uniforms. . . . We believe they have military training” (CODT and SIPAZ 2014, 50). Around 23 percent of Oaxaca state was licensed to mining proposals in 2011 (REMA 2013). During the Mesoamerican Forum in Minatitlán, people in various workshop rounds stressed the similarity of such stories across Mexican (and Central American) contexts (research diary, April 2011). The violent transformation of property relations reinforces the coloniality of state power. Race played a role in being affected by violence (i.e.,

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disappearances or rape). Peasant and indigenous communities are not only less protected but are more likely to be victims of state violence in the “war on drugs” (see Mora 2013; Jenss 2016). Agricultural communities affected by mines in Oaxaca are predominantly indigenous. In the case of the disappearance of the Mixteco Manuel Ponce Rosas in Guerrero, threatening calls referred directly to this: “Don’t fool around [. . .] This happened to him because he is defending the Indians” (Contralínea 2009, 16). The Abejas communities affiliated with the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN; Zapatista Army of National Liberation) in Chiapas frequently pointed out paramilitary groups were still very active and intimidating them after 2009. Their critique targets state institutions such as the Supreme Court, which acquitted sixty-nine paramilitaries in 2009, despite some of them having confessed to participate in the Acteal massacre in 1997. Only six were still detained in 2013 (Abejas de Acteal 2013). In Colombia, the military offensive went far beyond a simple coincidence between structurally selective disadvantages of an accumulation regime for small farmers, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, and warfare. Aided by bribed notaries and the regional judiciary, paramilitaries,

Figure 7.2. Zapatista mothers march against President Calderón’s war, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, May 8, 2011. Source: Photo by the author.

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entrepreneurs, and state personnel processed thousands of forged purchase contracts. Even peasants who had already died “signed” these contracts (interview with grassroots activist, November 11, 2011; interview with human rights defender, November 10, 2011). Large landholdings of more than ten household units (Unidad Agrícola Familiar; Agrarian Family Unit) held 39 percent of the land in use in 1999 but 53 percent in 2008 (Mondragón 2011). At the end of Uribe’s term, less than one hundred thousand people held 41 percent of the land, all in holdings of more than two hundred hectares (El Tiempo 2011). The coloniality of power rendered parts of society noncitizens. As part of demobilization efforts, the state’s agricultural agency, Instituto Colombiano de Desarrollo Rural (INCODER; Colombian Institute for Rural Development), provided almost three thousand hectares of land to demobilized paramilitaries by mid-2005 and invested two million pesos as “start-up finance” for each paramilitary willing to demobilize (El Espectador 2008b). By 2008, the demobilized set up 157 such companies, including palm oil companies such as Corporación Democracia or Fundación Lindo Porvenir in the Pacific region, in areas where the AUC had previously displaced large numbers of people. This shows the failures of liberal democracy, but beyond that, such state policies compromised the survival of rural populations. State discourses on crime invoked land tenure in four ways. First, they constructed some forms of ownership as insecure. Second, rather than providing protection against displacement, state forces downplayed their participation in violence and abuse, often depending on the victims’ social status. Third, state discourses defined who was criminal along racialized constructions of difference. Most important, state discourse extended the idea of crime toward peasant and indigenous activists, labeling them as “dangerous” (La Jornada 2010). They became a source of insecurity, and their questioning the dominant concept of land tenure and control played no small part in it (Jenss 2016, 379). Dominant (state) discourse contrasted the perceived security of private property with an alleged insecurity of communal lands but ignored the actual diversity of land tenure. The allegation of insecurity criminalized communal holdings. Where investment returns for global and Mexican investors alike were not guaranteed, state documents now labeled this a security risk (Presidencia de la República 2007). Similarly, global investors have framed small-scale and “fragmented” land ownership structures as “problematic” (Stargardter 2014). Communities’ ways of life themselves were increasingly framed as security risks (Jenss 2016; Mora 2013). Fourth, the state neglected the role both criminal groups and legal business play in changes of land tenure. In Colombia, narratives on the military “reconquest” of the state consistently presented military security as a prerequisite for “investor confidence,”

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the safeguarding of private property, and guaranteed returns for investments in agro-industrial conversion (Presidencia de la República Colombiana 2006; Ministerio de Defensa 2009). The selective security project’s connection to land as a means of production was so obvious that it transformed the state’s “spatial selectivity” (Brenner 2004, 89). It explicitly included regions such as Chocó, which previously played a negligible role in economic policies, in investment promotion, and in military operations. The significance of private tenure in this specific sense of security shows the structural bias of state institutions (Poulantzas 2002). In “coloniality of power,” Quijano (2000a, 551– 52) stresses how in (post)colonial Latin America, heterogeneous narrations tended to be reduced to single stories. Despite an existing counter-discourse, the overwhelming discourse on organized crime either made conflicts over land disappear from view, or framed them as security risks. The narrative of violent “cartels” has seldom taken into account how, apart from their documented participation in enclosures and violent land acquisitions, state-nonstate collaboration and confrontation contributed to a violent reorganization of property relations, at least in Mexico.4 The numbers on how many people have been displaced since 2007 are as disputed as the assumed reasons for displacement. Based on ENOE and ENVIPE surveys, forced displacement leapt to an unprecedented level in 2009. ENVIPE, which shows much higher numbers of up to 1.5 million displaced persons in 2012 (CMDPDH 2019, 109), asks for persons who changed their place of residence “to protect themselves from insecurity” (CMDPDH 2019, 64). ENOE, in contrast, sees a reduction of forced displacement between 2010 and 2013 (it counts only 15,840 displaced in 2012) (CMDPDH 2019, 109–10). ENVIPE counted a total of 8,726,375 displaced between 2011 and 2018, a trend that began in 2008–2009 with already high numbers in states like Estado de México and Jalisco, Nuevo León, and Chihuahua (CMDPDH 2019, 66).5 Those displaced range from small businesses that experienced extortion, to families of former hitmen; most leave some form of property behind (IDMC and ITAM 2010). In my interviews, one human rights activist emphasized that they take the owners of the land by force to public notaries, who have to be corrupt, in exchange for the titles, in the name of . . . [B]ut then the narcos don’t need territorial control but the appropriation of land titles. It does not matter if it’s big landowners or communities, they do it everywhere. (interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011)

The very states that concentrated extreme and rising levels of violence in the “war on drugs” still increased their share of FDI flowing into Mexico by four percentage points to 26.1 percent in the 2006–2011 period. Even more, they siphoned off more FDI in absolute terms, while investment flows to

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the rest of Mexico declined with the 2009 US economic crisis (Secretaría de Economía 2012, 1, 8). Activists in northern Mexico state that “the most uninhabited areas [because of violence] are exactly the same as those planned for the development of these megaprojects,” meaning investments in shale oil deposits close to Juárez and the network of gas pipelines between El Encino and Topolobampo for gas imports from the United States (Alvarado 2015). In any case, violence did not affect such infrastructure investments; their delays were mostly due to indigenous communities protesting the pipelines. Conflicts between property regimes played an essential role in the appropriation of space. One land activist (interview May 23, 2011) stated that the process of paramilitarization he observed indeed expressed conflicts between an indigenous concept of territorio and military spatial control strategies over regions with predominantly self-defining indigenous communities. The collaboration between military and paramilitary, producing fear to break up communitarian structures, allowed the well-known outsourcing of some tasks to those trained yet not officially recognized by the state armed forces (interview with land activist, May 23, 2011). Police subunits across municipal, state, and federal police seem to have provided logistic support for criminal actors in land appropriation (HRW 2013). Southern Mexican organizations clearly placed displacement processes in the context of investment projects requiring large-scale land ownership, such as the Spanish and Mexican investments in wind power, mining, or agribusiness projects (TPP 2012b; ACUDDEH 2012; see Hesketh 2022). The criminal consensus about land appropriation is more pronounced and better documented in Colombia; not only does it date back to the 1990s and early 2000s, but it was a more coherent and temporarily government-supported process. AUC paramilitaries themselves highlighted their role in the connection between violent displacement and freeing up spaces for investment, routinely arguing the objective was state building—envisioning a state that enables capital accumulation. In a largely forgotten newspaper interview (Semana 2005a), AUC commander Vicente Castaño laid out that “in Urabá we have oil palm plantations. I myself have won over entrepreneurs to invest in these permanent and profitable projects. The idea is to get the rich to invest in these kinds of projects in different areas of the country.” The effect was forced displacement. In Colombia, the official register of forced displacement (Registro Único de Víctimas; Single Victims Register) counts an exorbitant rise in displacement between 1995 and 2002, followed by an unstable and ambiguous trend since 2003, with significant upsurges in 2007 and 2011 (CMH 2015, 54). The Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES) has lower numbers for 2002, but registers a continuous trend of forced displacement during the Uribe presidency, of up to four hundred thousand people a year (CMH 2015, 56). Both sources reveal that, while forced

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displacement existed before, and paramilitary violence, considered the main cause for displacement, makes the hike at the end of the 1990s unsurprising, the Uribe presidencies were periods of massive forced displacement, instead of a reduction of violence (CMH 2015, 60). For an enormously rapid valorization process based on unequal property relations, practices of forced displacement were a necessary prerequisite. Paramilitarism served to valorize previously marginalized spaces and as a “door opener” for companies, as the AUC itself claimed (Semana 2005a). As one of its first efforts, the Uribe government reshaped the regulatory landscape of the agricultural sector; it cut the agricultural agency INCORA’s resources to 20 percent of its previous budget and renamed and partly restaffed it, abandoning the idea of land reform altogether (Verdad Abierta 2011a). Although it would be short sighted to interpret this as deliberately initiating illegal titling, the new INCODER authority ultimately facilitated this. Regional branches of INCODER now declared “vacant” the very land that smallholder families had abandoned out of fear (e.g., after relatives had been murdered) and signed them over to “demobilized” paramilitaries and others (Semana 2011b; El Tiempo 2005b; Verdad Abierta 2011a). In the Vichada region, the authority signed over titles of thirty-eight thousand hectares to Habib Merheg, an ex-senator later sentenced to prison for links to paramilitaries (Semana 2011b). In Magdalena, papers and testimonies document routine meetings between Jorge 40’s paramilitaries and INCODER personnel, who signed land parcels (which smallholder communities had legally won in the 1980s and 1990s) over to middlemen. While the previous agricultural authority INCORA revoked (collective) titles in just 80 cases between 1996 and 2002, this number jumped to 134 cases in February/March 2003 in the Magdalena region alone—a region which saw the displacement of at least 199,746 families between 2000 and 2009 and where Jorge 40 and politicians signed the Chibolo Pact (Verdad Abierta 2011a). Similarly, senator Jorge Castro’s brother used regional notaries to acquire titles for land that peasants abandoned after orders from Jorge40’s paramilitaries. Castro got into an international reforestation program of the French National Forest Office (ONF; Office National des Forêts), and INCODER officials (later detained) dissuaded peasants from reoccupying the land (Verdad Abierta 2013a). INCODER revoked collective titles in a number of regions (El Tiempo 2005b; Verdad Abierta 2011a), true to the Uribe coalition’s presentation that large parts of Colombia were unfairly titled to indigenous groups as reserves. For instance, Cauca’s ex-governor, Juan Chaux Mosquera, famously said “not a meter of level ground for the indios, not one more meter for reserves, which really are unproductive and opposed to development” (cited in Posso 2011). Title transfers were common practice after President Uribe took office and are an expression of both the structural selectivity of the state and shifting

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institutional selectivities. Between 2002 and 2010, state institutions provided similar support in the mining sector, where a mix of formal and informal ownership, employment, and subcontracting prevails. In 2011, the successor government under Juan Manuel Santos acknowledged that in more than half (!) of the licenses granted since 2002, there had been overlapping of mining licenses in nature reserves and páramos [water-rich high-Andean biosphere areas], speculative games, granting licenses without control and in some cases in a suspicious manner, violation of the rights of indigenous and Afro-Colombian mining communities and appropriation of property titles. (Ministerio de Minas y Energía 2011, 1; Revista Portafolio 2011)

Appropriated land changed hands repeatedly, through legal purchase contracts and registered titles, so that ownership now lies in part with large legal, and long-established capital groups and conglomerates. It is difficult to prove their detailed knowledge about the prior violent appropriation of their concrete plots. “These are no longer these almost illiterate straw men, many related to the paramilitaries, they are not individual rich hacendados” (interview with economist, November 21, 2011). The Rural Statute of 2007, a government law initiative, shows how the coalition sought to legally anchor radically reshaped property relations postdisplacement to meet business demands for formalization and security (El Tiempo 2007c). These literally demanded to “clean” land titles from peasant demands. Even though the statute was only temporarily in force, it openly aimed to prevent later claims by smallholders, allowing new land users to have their ownership of fallow land certified after only five years; two witnesses would be sufficient (El Espectador 2009b). The senators and commission chairpersons of the governing coalition who supported the bill were among those the Supreme Court investigated in the parapolítica scandal of the late 2000s (see chapter 6; Ungar and Cardona 2010b, 356–57). Smallholder organizations sharply criticized the initiative for facilitating the legalization of titles over illegally appropriated land. The statute would have made a return even more impossible and did not encompass any recognition of protected indigenous and smallholder territories and alternative economic plans (Agencia Prensa Rural 2007; FIDH 2007, 45). Even the Procuraduría General de la Nación (PGN; Office of the Inspector General) stated the statute “could be used for money laundering” (cited in Agencia Prensa Rural 2007). For indigenous initiatives, the statute was a “legalization of displacement” (ONIC 2007), contributing to its ultimate rejection. These organizations, however, faced contradictions in their counterproposals to the dominant restructuring, when invoking colonial Spanish jurisprudence such

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as the figure of the resguardo. The Rural Statute would put them at even greater disadvantage. Investigations into forced displacement mostly came to nothing (El Espectador 2008b; on this process in the Montes de María Region, see La Silla Vacía 2011b; Semana 2011b). According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, it was working on less than six thousand cases of forced displacement in 2009 and had not even determined the perpetrators in more than 99 percent of these (Fiscalía General de la Nación in Gallón Giraldo 2010, 8). Until 2010, seven cases succeeded beyond preliminary investigations, and the courts issued no sentences. While the Uribe government did expend various decrees to improve policies at the places of reception, and announced a National Plan for the Population Displaced Due to Violence (Presidencia de la República Colombiana 2005) in 2005, numbers of forced displacement kept rising again. The Constitutional Court demanded to know about the frequency of resources allocated to places of reception (CMH 2015, 99). Property is essential to understanding the process and discourses around Colombia’s consolidation policy, the second phase of its US-supported military offensive. Residents in the regions of consolidation activity testified that paramilitary groups were present in the region after the army’s arrival (HRW 2010, 72–74), even though some small farmers assessed the agricultural support elements of the Centro de Coordinación de Acción Integral (CCAI; Integral Action Coordination Center) as positive (Isacson 2012). Apparently, the Defense Ministry stopped a “risk report” by the Ombudsoffice on the increased presence of paramilitaries since the beginning of the military offensive (HRW 2010, 76; see interview with grassroots activist, November 11, 2011; interview with social scientist/activist, October 18, 2011). Institutions taking up work in regions previously seen as FARC strongholds, such as La Macarena, sometimes employed methods echoing paramilitary action, for instance, gathering all community members in village squares to ask for FARC collaborators (Isacson and Poe 2009, 17). Small farmers, the official beneficiaries of CCAI programs, seemed to simultaneously be under suspicion of being guerrilla sympathizers. Consolidation focused on four counties, all of which had high displacement numbers. Since 1995, more than half their population, 110,000 people, had been forcibly displaced (Isacson and Poe 2009). For instance, in the Montes de María region, the paramilitary Bloque Héroes Montes de María demobilized, yet new criminal groups such as Rastrojos or Urabenos began playing similar roles (Refworld UNHCR 2017). Simultaneously, the rapid concentration of land property continued (i.e., La Silla Vacía 2011b; Oxfam 2013). Despite the military and navy presence, the number of displaced

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persons from the CCAI regions in 2011 accounted for half of the newly registered displaced persons in all of Colombia (CODHES 2012, 3). International institutional counterparts ignored the paramilitary presence in the very areas of military-led “consolidation,” and curious connections emerged within the framework of both the alternative development programs and the CCAI. For example, USAID funds went to agricultural projects by the AUC’s Bloque Central Bolívar (BCB). In 2009, the BCB declared it would return at least thirty-six thousand hectares in Sur de Bolívar to the Victims Reparation Fund (Verdad Abierta 2009d). According to BCB lawyers, institutions would be unable to trace paramilitary ownership of these lands, as the involved companies were “clean,” and capital came from Plan Colombia and through loans from the Agrarian Bank. For instance, the Cooproagrosur cooperative, set up on behalf of the BCB in 2002 parallel to Uribe assuming the mandate, received 228 million pesos from USAID for technical assistance and training for oil palm cultivation in 2004; at least forty-seven thousand people had been displaced from the region between 1997 and 2007 (Acción Social, cited in Verdad Abierta 2009d). Support and Resistance: Social Ascent and Political Articulation Materialist state theory highlights which social forces benefit from and shape state practices (Poulantzas 2002). Hall (1980, 338) and Quijano (2014, 777–832) add how these benefits may be enacted through concrete relations of race and class in specific historical conjunctures, and Bhandar (2018, 12) describes legal techniques around property that redefine (il)legality and “produce legal subjects.” Property law was the means to realize colonial power’s objective of securing landed possessions, and international law enshrined this desire as legitimate (Bhandar 2018; see Vitoria in Dussel 2005). Ownership became indeed “central to the formation of the proper legal subject in the political sphere” (Bhandar 2018, 4), when political rights were linked to ownership. Racialized modes of subjectivity that assigned entire populations permanently to the past developed in conjunction with property laws (Bhandar 2018, 3). Even the contemporary politics of an urbanized world are partially mediated through landed property, as it shapes state selectivities. Considering long-term deindustrialization, renewed interest in agroindustry, the routine extraction of raw materials, and real estate and land investments perceived as “safe” investments for liquid capital desperate for a home, landed property is an essential means for participating in capitalist accumulation cycles. Communal property includes access to, but also control over land— the right to withdrawal, the right to determine people’s access, resources

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management, and the right to determine modes and content of production (Ostrom and Hess 2007, 11). For these communities, “property interest” is not monetary (Blomley 2008, 316) but, instead, driven by quests for selfdetermination and (sometimes collective) livelihoods (Mora 2017, 71). Their diversity—communities with collective holdings in addition to private plots, strictly communal lands, or the collectively administered ejidos where crops are planted individually—is often reduced to a single story of unproductive land. Yet the fundamental role that the Mexican ejido plays in local imageries, frequently with nationalist undertones, sometimes invoking decoloniality, might explain ongoing resistance to changing property regimes in ejidos and communal lands (Mora 2017, 70). Private land ownership implies higher social and political status. In contexts where social ascent via education or employment is no viable option, the (violent) appropriation of land can serve as a form of social mobility. Criminal networks aspire to the power of landed elites. Acquisition and formalization processes grant authority “no matter who holds the property rights” (Kelly and Peluso 2015, 474). As a result, the division between legal and illegal land ownership blurs. Colombian agroindustry, particularly, but even companies considered urban have partially relied on prior violent land appropriation (Camacho 2013; El País 2013). Two aspects of property are particularly salient. First, different regimes of property are continuously in conflict. Claims to protect ejidos and communal tenure by indigenous and peasant organizations confront state practices that aim at disorganizing and fragmenting mobilizations around communal land, in favor of private property. Peasant movements rejecting commodification transcend the social classifications that the coloniality of state power assigns them (Quijano 2000b). Selective murder against these activists resembles a punishment for this transgression. State coercion and preemptive disciplining within the “war” frequently targeted smallholders. Scattered rural communities with autonomous agendas and demands such as the defense of territory came to particularly fear militaries and police. The Colombian state exacerbated the coloniality of property not only by denying and withdrawing collective property titles and eliminating restrictions on private property expansion into collectively managed land but also by employing particularly repressive practices against indigenous mobilizations. Repeatedly, the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC; Regional Indigenous Council of the Cauca Region) mobilized against land appropriations and state violence by the Uribe government. In 2008, the CRIC denounced riot police who shot dead at least two protestors (Pachón 2009). The Consejo Nacional Campesino (CNC; National Peasants Council 2003), a countermovement to land appropriation, mobilized against the Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA; Free Trade Area of the Americas),

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denouncing how closely violence was intertwined with trade. Both faced severe criminalization and threats. Violent state practices against indigenous and smallholder initiatives were not restricted to the Uribe government; yet the coherence and energy institutions mobilized to disorganize and destroy organizational contexts after 2002 was striking. In Mexico, the state of Guerrero became one of the centers of the “war on drugs” and the state with most forced disappearances (HCHR Mexico 2018). A rural movement’s representative describes how communities came to be framed as dangerous regardless: “All these movements for the defense of land . . . these spaces the government abandoned for decades, because back there it’s only the indigenous, now it turns out it’s a big risk, because more autonomous processes are initiated and guerrilla groups have emerged” (interview with land activist, May 23, 2011). They invoked the coloniality of power by framing military incursions into indigenous community as “occupation.” Activist Nestora Salgado (2013) declared she was more afraid of the Mexican army than the “cartels.” Human rights lawyers likewise described land appropriations as “a brutal process” (interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011). Second, private property ownership underpins the political power necessary to influence state policies. This political power is riddled with coloniality, when property and land ownership regimes are hierarchized and ascribed to social groups classified according to race (and class). In Mexico, family businesses, all originating in the twentieth century, transformed into powerful corporations based on vertically integrated flex-crops production. Today’s largest agro-industry companies all benefited from land privatization and from entering the Mexican stock exchange in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, Grupo Bimbo, Latin America’s largest bread and food producer; Gruma, a maize flour producer; or processed-foods giant Grupo Herdez (Oxfam 2016). Such translatina companies, active across the continent, in the United States, and overseas, have been important, yet not the only agents in driving land concentration during the “war on drugs.” In Sinaloa, for instance, five hundred large-scale owners use 36.8 percent of arable land; in Mexico, generally, 1 percent of the owners controls 56 percent of land (Vázquez García 2017, 13). Three states that concentrated extreme violence (e.g., Zacatecas, Chihuahua, and Coahuila) produced 22.94 percent, 14.05 percent, and 11.3 percent, respectively, of Mexico’s total mineral production other than oil, frequently in land-intensive extraction projects (US Geological Survey and US Department of the Interior 2012). In Colombia, long-established dominant groups with landed property, which had organized in the Sociedad de Agricultores de Colombia (SAC; Colombian Agricultural Society), in FEDEGAN, and some in the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (FEDECAFE; National Federation of Coffee Growers),

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allied with new partners. Numerous groups that successfully diversified their palette became fervent Uribe supporters and grew during his two mandates; the property of land was essential for most of them, given the commodities supercycle. The Ardila Lülle group invested in agro-industries like sugar refineries and beverage production such as the widely consumed Postobón brand, as well as in media, as the main shareholder of Uribe-supportive television network RCN (Media Ownership Monitor Colombia 2021b). The SantoDomingo group owns Caracol TV and real estate, tourism, logistics, and transport firms; Grupo Aval (which controls 33 percent of Colombia’s financial market, according to the Media Ownership Monitor Colombia [2021a]) invests in agribusiness, energy, gas, and mining, as well as the insurance sector and the hotel industry. Such sectors’ particular interest in making private property is mirrored, and partly explained by, the rapid rise in land prices—in some cases, fifty times higher than before violent appropriation— even though land was and is fundamentally more expensive in Colombia than in the rest of Latin America (interview with economist, November 21, 2011; Fajardo Montaña 2002). Owners of large estates have withdrawn land from production, offering enormous scope for speculation (Mondragón 2011). Something similar happened in Mexico, where Salazar (2014, 80) shows how land prices in Mexico jumped up precisely in the years after ejido land privatization but slowed down in later years. In making private property, legal entrepreneurs and the illegal economy frequently overlapped. In Colombia, violent land appropriation did not stop after paramilitary demobilization in 2005; it continued in waves throughout. In fact, paramilitaries came from and/or became social elites, underwriting their upper-class status with private property (Camacho 2011). In contrast to earlier capos like Escobar, the AUC’s paramilitary commanders frequently came from regionally dominant, already landowning, upper-class families with ties to regional politics. Salvatore Mancuso, who served a drug trafficking sentence in the United States until 2020, is from a wealthy cattle breeder family of Cordoba; Rodrigo Tovar Pupo (Jorge 40) is the César region’s ex-governor’s nephew (Camacho 2009, 26). Again, their anti-subversive imaginaries of dissent-free society and their quest for capital accumulation by legal and illegal means are not neatly separable. Nobody remembered that the Castaño family [cofounders of the AUC] came from the heart of the Medellín cartel, nobody asked about the clase emergente, nobody investigated the reasons for the unusual growth of drug trafficking and the spread of coca cultivation in areas of paramilitary expansion. The label “against insurgents” covered everything. (Valencia 2007, 26)

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Sixty-six companies were sentenced to return land to displaced peasants between 2012 and 2020 (Forjando Futuros 2020, 1–2), among them construction giant Cementos Argos, banana exporter Bananeros de Urabá, and cattle breeding firm Sociedad Agropecuaria Carmen de Bolívar. Even if widely accepted, forced dispossessions still violate the state’s own claim to legitimacy based on its supposed protection of minority rights. Communities and NGOs in both countries have argued that past land appropriations constitute breaches of international law, binding texts such as ILO Convention 169 and indigenous norms being recognized in their constitutions (TPP 2012b). State institutions resorted to highly questionable methods in favor of specific economic projects, ignoring or misjudging basic regulations.6 Communities frequently resisted land use transformation but then faced intimidation. In Mexico, one state government directly threatened a newly elected mayor from a citizen initiative who was critical of a land-based business project, neglecting the legally regulated distribution of state revenues to municipalities. “You have to come to the Interior Secretariat today, we have to talk to you, otherwise we won’t let you take office. [. . .] If you don’t change your position, you won’t get a penny for your community, you won’t have health care, you won’t have funds for education, you won’t have water supply,” that’s what was said in the office of the Permanent Secretariat at the Interior Secretariat, [. . .] “you have 24 hours. Forget about the funds for your community” [. . .] “but well, there are other ways and means for us,” he meant violence, didn’t he? (interview with NGO representative, March 25, 2011)

Legal-illegal capitalism thrives on the coloniality of state power in property relations. Just like legal enterprise, illegal actors diversified their economic activities by obtaining land. Likewise, legal Colombian investors frequently relied on prior displacement to amass land in answer to the commodity cycle’s very high demand for land-based products. In Mexico, large-scale acquisitions by illegal actors have contributed to intensified agro-industry, for example, in the Mexican avocado industry. CONCLUSION In this chapter, analyzing conflicts between different property regimes through the lens of coloniality of power allowed me to relate property to racialized constructions of difference in the postcolonial state. I contextualized state violence in property in relation to social stratification. The notion of coloniality (Quijano 2000a) relates state-led or tolerated violence in property to global social relations and to capitalist processes of enclosure. To

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understand dispossessions as an integral part of modernity is a merit of such decolonial approaches. My core argument is that the postcolonial state’s operational logic in making private property causes social harm by aggravating violent conditions of severe inequality and the loss of livelihoods, equivalent to acts that are condemned as crimes. The harm that the transformation of communal land tenure caused was intertwined with physically violent acts in both countries. Racialized constructions of difference translate into a hierarchy of forms of property in state practices. The coloniality of state power regarding property is, fundamentally, the state’s lack of protection for or neglect of those laying claim to property beyond private property sanctioned in state legal text. The state’s failure to protect exposes the coloniality of state land tenure policies in societies that know diverse forms of ownership. The state’s role in conflicts between different property regimes exposes the political power those with private property enjoy; however, enclosures also involve actual, violent practices against physical integrity, by paramilitary groups or state institutions. Section 4 linked changes in land tenure to physical violence in the “war on drugs.” State institutions have themselves employed contested concepts of crime and criminals when legitimizing the transformation into private property. The dominant narrative on crime in the “war on drugs” constructed collective land tenure not just as unproductive but also as risky. Here, coloniality intertwined with the “war on drugs” in three ways. States systematically omitted indigenous peoples’ claims for collective property. They actively deconstructed existing legal protection for communal lands. And the coloniality of neglect intertwined with actual state crime when, simultaneously, state agencies participated in murder, torture, and violent displacement in regions where large-scale agricultural production or mining expanded on either a legal or illegal basis. Examining property exposes the (albeit indirect) links among the state ensemble, private investors, and criminal forces and the structural interests they share. I argue that, in consequence, the “commodities consensus” (Svampa 2015) turned criminal through neglect, lack of protection, and direct practices by state institutions and their collaborators.

Chapter 8

Enduring Violence

When I arrived in Colombia at the end of February 2020 after a long absence, unaware I would have to leave again only two weeks later due to a global pandemic and the shutting down of borders, the impressions of both social change in the country and the return to an uncomfortable political past were very much present. Colombian society had transformed—and yes, the contested 2016 peace accords between the state and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC; Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia) had had their impact, despite the political efforts to curtail it. But in 2018, the government had returned to an ultraright right-wing political proposal aiming to continue where the second Uribe presidency had left off. This was tangible in the high rates of murdered land, environmental, or social activists—at least one hundred were assassinated between January and May 2020 (Deutsche Welle 2020)—and in the turmoil perceived in regions such as the Cauca, where indigenous communities confronted both military incursions and criminal organizations. Anecdotes from Santa Marta on the Caribbean Coast conveyed the fear people felt due to worsening everyday security, and in the face of the imminent return of former paramilitary commanders who had finished their sentences based on the Justice and Peace Law. Similarly, friends and interview partners for a project in Oaxaca, Mexico, would tell me how they felt the security situation had deteriorated, and how they were measuring their mobility through the city, avoiding certain neighborhoods. A southern Mexican acquaintance explained how he had turned down a work trip feeling it would endanger his life. The origins of these changes of everyday practices lay in the politics of the 2000s. People I spoke to in Mexico invariably referenced the repressive state response to mobilizations of the mid-2000s as a starting point for the deterioration of the security situation. The state may have been authoritarian before, but collusion with nonstate armed forces at the regional level now made protest a particularly dangerous affair (personal communication, 2019). 191

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Contemporary conjunctures in both countries are very different yet converge in narratives of organized crime as the source of violence. Returning to the 2000s and the two political projects based almost exclusively on the production of highly selective and exclusive security and the state’s strengthened coercive logics helps us understand that this convergence surpasses mere discourse. Both states had undergone an institutional reorganization of the state architecture, shifting of competences, and allocation of resources for security institutions such as the army, navy, and police. Coercive practices received a clear boost in both countries from 2002 and 2006 onward, embedded in very similar narratives. The comparative aspects of this analysis clearly show how in Mexico after the 2006 elections, similar to Colombia’s 2002 situation, the core issue of security enabled political forces to rally people behind hard-handed, outright violent state strategies that combined legal and illegal practices. In fact, both governments legitimized the increased military presence with the increase in violence, which was in part actively brought about. Unashamed, the Mexican government borrowed discursive figures and explanatory patterns from the Colombian government (i.e., the specifically charged concept of democratic security). In both Mexico and Colombia, crime proved to be utterly central to the exercise of authority across the heterogeneous state ensemble, and it aligned diverse institutions around a single policy, even if these alliances within and outside of state institutions were only temporary. Uribe’s discourse coincided with the fear of kidnappings in urban sectors; in Mexico, the fear of violence led to a receding demand for economic and sociopolitical change, which had still caused upheaval in 2006. The failure of political projects such as the National Security Law in Mexico and the highly criticized implementation of the Justice and Peace Law (Law 975) in Colombia illustrate the varying degrees of success of similar authoritarian projects and attempts to redraw the conceptual boundaries between legal and illegal. The political alignment around security went hand in hand with the extraction of value. Security and penal policy is still a cardinal point for investment incentives. If anything, the violence by multiple actors facilitated the concentration of economic means, forcing small businesses to close and small-scale agriculture to give up rather than cause large investment flows to dry up. Ideals of an investor-friendly, dissent-free society are inherent to the actual war waged on the disorderly. The latter may simply contradict a private property model, and the war effectively reconfigured rural territories into large-scale export spaces, frequently tying peasants to agro-industrial corporations. The production of insecurity demonstrably affected small farmers, racialized communities, those that actively sought to maintain a property model different from private ownership, and politically active opposition members who resisted the valorization of land. Particularly for the victims

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of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), institutional selectivity (in the land distribution agency INCODER, the military, and the judicative) was extremely unfavorable from 2002 onward. The war exacerbated existing labels and criminalizing practices in security governance. In Colombia, these labels invoked the FARC to discredit protesters’ claims. Again, during the peasant strike in 2013, the official discourse, by using the term infiltrated and speaking of “vandals and criminals, the latter are at the service of the terrorists” (El Espectador 2013, 2014) implied that the guerrilla instrumentalized ignorant peasants who would never have taken to the streets on their own account. In Mexico, the label of criminals persisted, such as when forty-three Ayotzinapa students were disappeared and six killed in 2014 (Proceso 2014). Two processes seem contradictory at first but are intertwined. On the one hand, the aligning of state institutions around the common governance objectives of fighting political enemies as criminals resulted in authoritarian and hierarchic governing modalities, combined with elements of enemy penal law. On the other, the critical governance perspective on the “war on drugs” exposes the intertwinement among (some) state institutions, organized crime, and paramilitaries in shifting, flexible constellations that are neither adequately described by a state-nonstate hierarchy nor by complete paramilitary autonomy. In Colombia, although I do not assume a unitary “paramilitary” faction in Congress existed, state selectivity was highly favorable to paramilitary forces with roots in both agrarian capitalism and illegal economy, the state permeable to their demands for instance in the Justicia y Paz (JyP) legal process. Politically dominant social sectors increasingly concluded it was time to contain irregular forces through a demobilization process, to allow growing capital inflows and enable investment guarantees, without significantly affecting their economic basis. Not only are the various measures in different policy fields under military leadership interconnected (Plan Colombia, alternative development programs, reintegration), but they link to an often conceptually vague world of ideas that did not accept the existence of dissent. While the extreme positioning of the Uribe government elicited political articulations and new coalitions from the Colombian Left, and the emerging party Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA; Alternative Democratic Pole) won around 20 percent of the vote in 2006, the Democratic Security label allowed the state to disorganize emancipatory projects and cause rifts within the political opposition. “[T]he possibility to link any left-wing project to the guerrilla [. . .] led many sectors to accuse the Polo of having links with the guerrillas and other sectors to move closer to the established forces to appear less offensive” (interview with former senator, November 30, 2011). The

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dominant convergence of interests during Uribe’s government was, then, a direct threat to opposition, extra-parliamentary groups, journalists, or peasant organizations that sought to scandalize (war) crimes committed by AUC and state security forces. The state partly reinstitutionalized the exercise of coercion and violence it had previously decentralized. The massive shift of competences to military institutions constitutes a second process and goes far beyond an increased military budget. The military, the navy, and militarized police forces assumed nonmilitary tasks, such as providing health care in so-called consolidation zones (or, after 2008, the Integral Action Coordination Center), infrastructure contracts, or psychosocial care. The military jurisdiction and the military’s autonomy since the 1960s in determining their own budget already ensured a privileged position. As a result, the Democratic Security project, with Plan Colombia and the expansion of military presence, strengthened ultra-rightwing land-owning forces, weakened the opposition in the respective areas, and tied them into an extractivist model of accumulation. However, conflicts within the state ensemble (i.e., between the executive and the judiciary) illustrate how, despite the above-described convergence of interests, the judicative assumed a crucial role in reshaping selective security. A second, intertwined conflict arose between former AUC representatives and the Uribe government, apparently forced to adopt a certain distance to those who had previously formed part of its base. It could no longer adequately mediate between the image on the international stage, fundamental for investments, and the interests of the traditional capital factions and the clase emergente. In official discourse, it was the Uribe government that eliminated paramilitarism, via the demobilization process after the “cease-fire” in 2003. This discourse and the actual threat to critics of this process are completely at odds with each other. I argued in chapter 6 that the Uribe government’s policies, despite fragmented alliances, resulted in important continuities in Colombia. The years 2010–2013 brought not only a new government under Uribe’s former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, but also a slow shift in the state’s crime discourse. Selective security governance did not radically change. The Santos government declared a peace process with the FARC guerrilla in 2012. This four-year process necessarily implied at least a partial deconstruction of the enemy, terrorist, and drug dealer labels attributed to the FARC. Evidently, the sole willingness to negotiate with the FARC spoke to political opposition in a radically different way than the former government. Government discourse now integrated the FARC into the dominant economic and security-related state project, although only temporarily, and partially successfully. Simultaneously, however, the 2011 Law on Citizen Security aggravated the punitive take on protest in the penal code (Congreso de la República de

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Colombia 2011). Social protests were numerous (e.g., student protests against education reform, indigenous mobilizations for autonomy, local protest against large-scale infrastructural projects, strikes by coffee producers, oil workers and truckers), and political dynamics seemed slightly more favorable for them after 2010. Yet the Citizen Law again codified authoritarian imageries of order and, by curtailing protest, benefited those backing the status quo of inequality. For instance, obstruction of free transit by (illicit) means can entail two years of prison. Roadblocks have precisely been a widely used means of protest in Colombia, particularly during the critical conjuncture of 2013. As peasants went on strike in 2013, broad urban social sectors showed solidarity; once seen as a symbol of indigenous backwardness, the traditional, widely worn peasant poncho (ruana) became a protest symbol (Agencia Prensa Rural 2013). In Bogotá, supporters even cut out ruanas from paper to wear them, symbolically connecting urban and rural sectors. The laws facilitating detention, high charges against minor offences, and the ready use of anti-terrorist legislation against social protesters or intellectuals, however, were still in place. Protestors barely found repercussion in state discourse, and powerful actors fervently tried to limit the arenas of “making politics” to their own circles. For example, during the 2013 agrarian strike, economic committees and government officials claimed that the natural scenario of politics was Congress and that negotiations shouldn’t be taking place outside formal institutionality (Agencia Prensa Rural 2013). Landowners, who historically attributed themselves peasants’ representation, refused to be bypassed. State officials claimed that “criminals at the service of the FARC” incited violence in the protest, although peasant representatives documented security forces’ repression (El Espectador 2014). The continuity of an underlying motive—namely, the investor-friendly, dissent-free society—has since led to increased crimes and crime-led discourse, making the “radical environmentalists” who “impede progress” new protagonists in state discourse on crime (Portafolio 2014). Yet it is the critical conjuncture of the peace deal referendum in 2016, well into Juan Manuel Santos’s second presidential mandate, which demonstrates how criminalizing forms of security governance discourses continued to be successful. Forces around the former head of government, Uribe, and his new party Centro Democrático (CD; Democratic Center) feared the peace deal’s material consequences would put their own impunity at risk and imply loss of privilege and appropriated land. Their (successful) campaign to reject the peace agreement in 2016, and the return to a clearly anti-peace, right-wing government in 2018, has shown how pervasive the Uribe years have been in terms of discursive and material practices. The entrepreneurial society, claiming security for accumulation and private property, originally supporters

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Figure 8.1. Encounters with police as students march against educational reform, Bogotá, Colombia, October 2011. Source: Photo by the author.

of military defeat against the FARC, was divided. Dominant forces that did promote peace competed for a social base with the far-right Uribista security project. While the former’s base was more clearly in agro-industry, semiindustrial exports and telecommunications, it still depended on large-scale exports and open markets, and never questioned the growth model. The concerted campaign against the peace deal was based on sectors such as banana farmers organized in the Asociación de Bananeros de Colombia (Augura) and accused of ties to paramilitaries, and urban groups less affected by that conflict’s violence (El Espectador 2016). Protecting their own former constellations of criminal heterarchy against prosecution, the no-campaign’s anti-peace discourse conflated the peace process with governance through crime, and argued the only way to deal with the guerrilla were criminal charges or military operations; they routinely attributed criminality solely to the FARC, demanding it cease “criminal acts unilaterally” or denying the possibility of dialogue with “terrorists” altogether. Their actual, long-lasting success was that broad social sectors would close their eyes to the fact that this discourse’s most fervent representatives were themselves implicated in criminal activities with paramilitaries, and instead

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believe the FARC were the “real” perpetrators. In a representative survey, 32 percent of those asked attributed the main responsibility for violence to the guerrilla and 28 percent (metaphorically) to all Colombians; only 6 percent saw responsibility with the paramilitaries. State numbers show the exact opposite (up to 98 percent of assassinations, forced disappearances, and massacres were perpetrated by paramilitaries) (CMH 2012, 21; see García Marrugo 2013). Finally, a majority rejected the peace deal on October 2, 2016, which then went ahead in adapted form. The Duque government, elected in 2018, rejected the peace accords with the FARC based precisely on that discourse. It was unable to dismantle the institutional edifice established for implementing the accords, such as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. The forces it represented did, however, drag the implementation as best they could, and the judicial work on past cases of extrajudicial killings changed little the day-to-day experiences of war and violent appropriation in the Cauca or in Arauca. Despite far-reaching debates of agrarian reform, in effect, the accords also did little to reverse the post-displacement property relations and concentration of wealth in the hands of those who have benefited from authoritarian neoliberal state practices. Former AUC groups may have transformed into what the state now calls “criminal gangs” and (partially) fight, yet they continue to influence regional politics and economy. The return of former AUC commanders who served drug trafficking sentences in the United States after extradition fell into a conjuncture with renewed liberties for perpetrators of violence, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the ruptures in 2006 and 2007, some arrangements have proven to be longer lasting, rooted in regional dominant class relations, and leading to appointments of state personnel close to former AUC. For instance, the Duque government appointed Jorge Rodrigo Tovar Vélez, paramilitary commander Jorge 40’s son, as the director of the victims unit of the Interior Ministry in 2020 (El Tiempo 2020). The clearest illustration of how Colombia’s politics of war, property relations, and dominant forces are entangled with the AUC is Jorge Tovar’s subsequent successful candidacy for one of the regional peace mandates in the representative chamber for the 2022 elections, supported by the César region’s Victims Unit director, Víctor Hugo Mosquera. The Victims Unit, set up in 2011, theoretically provides the displaced and other conflict victims with assistance. The peace mandates are supposed to ensure the parliamentary representation of victims of (mostly paramilitary) violence during a transition period until 2030. Mosquera, however, a member of ex-president Uribe’s far-right Democratic Center party, operated the regional Victims Unit from a Tovar family property, and reportedly said the “guerrilla cannot take these peace mandates” (El Espectador 2021).

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In Mexico after 2006, the military assumed massive powers and nonmilitary responsibilities, including governance in zones of military operations or the navy taking over environmental issues, and was able to enhance its own position in the institutional structure. Narcos became the single foil on which statehood was discursively reproduced. In official discourse, the Mexican state functions by distancing itself from and fighting the “drug cartels” and defying them. While violence became commonplace, reports of success (seizures, arrests, and kingpin killings) suggested the greatest possible efforts by the state. Informal arrangements were the norm, even when partially combated, and even where individual cases of corruption were uncovered. State practices frequently involved illegal means such as disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and extrajudicial executions—not only in the vaguely defined area of the “war on drugs”—and sought to discipline protest more intensively by means of counterinsurgency strategies. The focus on extractive accumulation strategies and assembly-line production and the continued dismantling of state concessions to lower-class and racialized others not only worked as structural exclusion but also turned unfavorable institutional selectivities for subaltern sectors of society and specifically for human rights organizations into impenetrable walls of silence. The blunt flashing of privileges by state personnel in the face of social sectors with severe socioeconomic grievances who had simultaneously lost family to violence seemed to speak of a complete lack of interest. Spaces of violence and spaces of economic boom overlapped. The illegal transit economy and the spaces and economic sectors into which most (foreign) investment flowed (e.g., in the context of the mining boom) were, to some extent, the same. In consequence, less than large capital groups, insecurity affected social sectors that already faced socioeconomic hardships, adding frequent murder, disappearance, and military incursions. The boundaries between war and non-war, between combatants and civilians, and between state and nonstate forces blurred. If contradictions over social mobility and the best conditions for capital accumulation in regions such as Michoacán or Coahuila turned violent, this nevertheless served local, upwardly mobile families and locally anchored economies with transnational ties. Only seemingly a paradox, while the Mexican state massively expanded its military action, both geographically and qualitatively, a multiplicity of actors emerged, who exercise violence on their own initiative, against, with, dependent on, and independent of state funding, enforce the law, enforce informal rules, and establish security and insecurity. Some are self-defense movements with roots in indigenous struggles, some are groups formed by local businesses against actual threats, and some have a very unstable profile oscillating between open crime and semi-legal economic benefit. In addition, half the Mexican population assumed that police forces and “criminals”

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cooperated (Latinobarómetro 2011). Yet stubbornly, narco narratives have kept to the script of drug traffickers confronting the state, the latter trying to curb violence despite a few corrupt officers. This story neglects dynamics of collusion and dispersal in coercion, the state’s toleration of criminal acts, and state crime. Violence resulted to be frequently functional, rather than an irrational, singular act. Decisive class factions from vertically integrated financial market-oriented industries continued to support the economic project of deepening free trade, investment incentives, and labor market “flexibilization” and indirectly benefited from violence and the lack of state protection for labor, peasants, and indigenous communities (Deloitte 2012; CONCAMIN 2012). The security project was, nonetheless, far more contradictory, fragmented, and contested in Mexico. Large parts of the legislature initially largely supported the tightening of penal legislation and the expansion of military competences, among other things. Yet as early as 2009 and 2010, some dominant sectors began to shy away from enshrining in law the practices that the Mexican military had been used to, when the popularity of the victims’ movement made them realize the National Security Law would entail high political costs. They did not formulate an alternative political project, however, and the law’s failure never meant the “security” project was abandoned. In practice, the de facto state of emergency, which varied from region to region, was enforced and made permanent—beyond the political conjuncture. But the deepening of neoliberal reform was less straightforward than in Colombia. In fact, commentators would claim that so-called “second generation of structural reforms” after the 1980s (Dussel Peters 2004, 75) was lagging behind, given that state oil company PEMEX had still not been fully privatized, nor had the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE; Federal Electricity Commission). Calderón’s Partido Acción Nacional (PAN; National Action Party) did not succeed in pushing through its individual projects (see the private sector criticism, CEESP 2010, 2012). As a result, capital groups no longer perceived the PAN as adequate representatives for their interests and accumulation strategies. Although they advocated for a very similar political project of hegemony, decisive sectors of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party) increasingly distanced themselves from Calderón’s PAN government. Given the very high concentration of capital, it hardly surprises that the contradictions within the bloc in power were more about how, not which, project should be advanced: the convergence of interests among entrepreneurs, parts of the army, and state personnel accepted that broad social sectors be subject to a permanent economic and security crisis. State agencies increasingly worked to enable

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corporate plunder, and to that means eroded what was left of social protection and employed coercive practices. Violence, however, did make people come together in practices of dissent. In the context of the 2012 elections, the youth movement #Yosoy132 assembled diverse social protest, as they feared the manipulated return of the old PRI order in the guise of Enrique Peña Nieto, the state of Mexico’s former governor, with a reputation of corruption and repression—which eventually happened. First seen as a fleeting effort, #Yosoy132 became a broader mobilization explicitly condemning the discourse of youth criminalization, collusion, and state violence. The day Peña Nieto took office as president, antiriot police arrested ninety-six protestors but had to liberate them later for lack of solid accusations (CIP Américas 2015). The year 2012 represented a change of tone. The rising homicide rates during the Calderón government gave the impression of an ever greater catastrophe (Our World in Data 2020), the reasons for which remained unclear. Contradictions within the various security apparatuses came to light. The PRI, in contrast, achieved to present itself in 2012 as the option of the old and familiar in times of crisis. PRI symbolism and government discourse initially contrasted with Calderón’s. Politicians from times prior to the Alternancia appeared as more capable state personnel. The PRI government’s Pacto por México cross-party alliance demonstrated new assertiveness at the beginning of the legislature (2012–2018), and the executive’s ability to integrate different social sectors, parties, and (hegemonic) projects into a supposed change of direction. It revived the Ministerial Conference for the Fight against the Illegal Economy after three years and pushed a money-laundering law into force in 2013. The government even presented itself as active concerning human rights violations. While President Calderón held back an elaborated Victims Law, the PRI passed it as early as 2013. In practice, however, the security crisis was far from over, and the PRI’s answers were much the same. Arbitrary arrests became a popular police measure even in Mexico City and against middle-class students. The capability discourse cannot hide the fact that security policy did not undergo significant changes. In 2013, the security budget increased by another 10.31 percent compared to 2012 (Contralínea 2013b). Peña Nieto introduced a gendarmerie specifically for resource and corporate protection, and doubled the military bases with soldiers exercising policing tasks from 75 to 142 between 2012 and 2016 (Animal Político 2016). In 2017, the government attempted another Interior Security Law by decree, but again, human rights bodies criticized it, and the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 2018. The internationalization of the “war on drugs” intensified the spatial selectivity of coercion, through the Southern Border Plan of 2014 (ICG 2018), promoting highly coercive strategies ever more clearly intended to curb migration.

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Actual homicide rates seemed to depend on temporary and spatially specific social relations (CCIL 2013), and they all but deteriorated for racialized and marginalized people (CIP Américas 2015). Escalated coercion and the intertwined use of legal and illegal practices reacted to and increasingly prevented the contestation of capital reproduction (see Tansel 2016, 6). The year 2014 illustrates this particularly well. That year, in the killings of Tlatlaya, Mexican soldiers seemed to copy their Colombian counterparts by presenting killed civilian youth as criminals, placing firearms in their arms. But first and foremost, the disappearance of forty-three students from Ayotzinapa exposed state complicity and set the case apart from the tens of thousands of forced disappearances human rights organizations have demanded be investigated since 2006. The persistent lack of clarity and attempts by government investigators to rig facts were such blunt attempts at distortion that the selectivity of security based on class, racialization stigmata, and gender could no longer be denied. Dominant discourses were, in fact, based on intersecting exclusions. Major media played along, labeling the future teachers from Ayotzinapa as insubordinate, useless, and dispensable. The links to a shutdown of rural teachers’ training centers as perceived loci of criminal dissent at a time when the government attempted to privatize education and cut the costs of rural teacher-training centers seem all too blatant. Ayotzinapa represented a rupture. From this point onward, official discourse lost all persuasive power in imprinting in popular imagery the necessity of a military campaign against crime or even the idea of a state pitted against cartels. The forty-three became a symbol of emancipatory movements criminalized and annihilated by a criminal state, which values its citizens depending on their “utility” within relations of production. Even though state discourse still painted them as superfluous, this discourse failed to reach its audience. It had become all too clear for many that the federal executive itself was co-responsible for the crimes and for the neglect in investigation. A US court confirmed this in 2020 (Deutsche Welle 2020; Proceso 2014). Aggravating penal law and militarized crime policies contributed to permanently reproducing the privileged position of those violent actors with influence on particular state institutions. Military and naval prominence and autonomy remained the same (Moloeznik 2017). It hardly affected those who through state access, informal power centers, and institutional links to illegal forces enjoyed certain protection from prosecution. The PRI government pushed through a tax reform initially vehemently opposed by both Mexican and transnational mining companies and investors in the maquila industry. They claimed the reform would turn Mexico into a “high-tax regime” (cited in Pett 2013; Camimex 2014). These measures, however, did not mean a policy turnaround, and simultaneously, the PRI struggled to push for a

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general energy reform and thus the complete privatization of the state-owned company PEMEX. Why are these inter- and intra-institutional hiccups so important? They tell us something about the state that is often forgotten. The state’s heterogeneity is essential for understanding shifting security alliances, as different social forces are present within the state ensemble. Colombia is a prime example, because these became so very visible during the Uribe time. While overall, there was a decisive shift in state policies toward using state violence to quell tensions, prevent greater protest, and intimidate opposition, this outcome was neither set at Uribe’s taking office nor did they convince everyone in the state for a longer period of time. The persistent success of Uribe’s and Calderón’s security discourses and practices is partly because they were beneficial to some in highly unequal, fragmented societies. Utterly authoritarian imageries of social order clash with extremely heterogeneous and unequal socioeconomic constellations. Those social sectors close to the state and the export-oriented economic model did experience security governance as successful (or partly so, in Mexico). At the very least, it did not affect them negatively, and they have historically supported authoritarian penal law. Likewise, the tendency of preventive imprisonment has different effects on different class factions but can be interpreted through inequality in the rule of law. Those targeted by selective security tend to be poorer, in precarious working conditions, and sometimes supplement their income by petty crime (UNDP 2013). In Colombia, the political project of the 2000s both reacted to the need for repositioning large-scale landowning agricultural sectors and to the global commodities supercycle. While mining activities were less prominent in gross domestic product (GDP) composition than in the export structure (CEPAL 2007), a return to extraction is written all over Uribe’s two terms, and continued to be the main theme in Colombian economy after 2010. Despite falling or at least volatile resource prices, the following governments presented open-pit mining and oil extraction as one “engine” of economy on which Colombia’s growth was built. It was this model of capitalist accumulation for which the Uribe presidency and earlier rounds of violent land appropriation prepared the grounds. In Mexico, likewise, a hard-liner free market course guided Calderón’s presidency, increasingly difficult to stomach for more industrial and domestic market-oriented forces who had lost access to political circles and began demanding a longer-term vision for industrial policy even supported by large capital groups (CEESP 2010, 2012). In contrast, extractive sectors clearly gained political weight (Camimex 2014). The military campaign, rather than curb illegal economy’s importance, pushed profit margins up and

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made practices of collusion more diffuse. The focus on extraction including agro-industries, together with volatile global price cycles, helped expand legal-illegal economies and security arrangements, for instance, in avocado production or coal extraction. The highly coercive, authoritarian neoliberalism during Uribe’s and Calderón’s presidencies elicited surveillance and coercion over political and everyday activities, and they simultaneously delegated coercive practices to informal actors, actively leaving gaps of control. It was not necessary to organize coercion as a monopoly throughout. This complex picture of coercion is seldom linked to competitiveness based on expansive accumulation in extractive sectors and ever lower labor costs. With Poulantzas, Hall, and Quijano, I recognize the long-term continuity of coercion as a political tool, deeply intertwined with the coloniality of state power, yet in different conjunctures it is competing social forces that actively pursue specific political projects. Their relation with coercion and (political) violence transforms constantly, as does their access to different state institutions. The perspective on “habitual practices of illegality” (Gregson and Crang 2017, 2) in global trade combined with my relational understanding of the state contributes to questioning the frequently assumed binary between legal and illegal economy. The allegedly local, frequently “othered” illegal economy intertwines with state strategies promoting an export-oriented, increasingly financialized economy, precisely because it is a clearly globalized part of economy. Social forces from illegal economy are part of the social relations that traverse the state ensemble and influence state practices. With this in mind, Quijano’s coloniality of power (2000a), and Hall’s (1980; 1996) work on racialization highlight how intersecting categories of social differentiation are crucial to understanding security governance in both its discursive and material iterations. In short, different social groups, enjoying differentiated access to the state, influence the state discourse on crime to a very different extent. Even if criminalizing discourses were not new, a decisive shift in state representations of the “war on drugs” took place in the early 2000s, driven by specific social groups. Both the Colombian and Mexican states promoted a criminalization of the political “other” by linking them to crime or guerrillas. The discursive boundary between civilian victims and criminals was brushed away, frequently leaving open who, labeled as “criminal,” lost the right to physical integrity. The focus on the contested materialization of highly exclusive security policies, and their (attempted) institutionalization, allowed me to project these policies’ effects far beyond a single conjuncture. State heterogeneity, central to the relational perspective, allows me to think of the state as a constantly changing ensemble, on the one hand, and an entity contrarian to deeper changes that would limit capital accumulation, on the other hand. I

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specify my earlier call for historicizing coercion through the concept of selective security, which describes both this flexibility and the structural selectivity of the state that shape state protection and priorities of security policy, the weight of security institutions within the state ensemble, and their rivalries, as well as the dynamic alliances between state and nonstate actors in creating security and insecurity. The weakened effect of security discourses in the 2010s shows how contradictory the dominant political projects had become. Between May and June 2021, the discontent accumulated in Colombian society since the early 2000s erupted in the so-called paro urbano, a month-long mobilization across Colombia’s bigger cities and smaller towns. The initial spark on April 28, 2021, was protest against a tax reform that would have primarily affected low-income people—planned and announced in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that, by shutting down public life, cut informal workers from their daily income necessary for their survival. The paro drew considerable amounts of people even in smaller towns who had seen few social forces critical of the Uribe and Duque governments before, although it did build on important Minga mobilizations in 2019 that went far beyond indigenous communities. Mobilized social groups represented very different social strata—urban informal sector, young people without socioeconomic perspective, older people affected by the pandemic, indigenous organizations, and sections of urban middle classes. Some groups have long experienced the effects of extreme social inequality, such as periods of malnutrition and the lack of socioeconomic perspectives, but the so-called post-conflict phase made visible how little economic hardship is due to the conflict, and instead how economic policies actively contributed to it. The mobilizations’ primary success was to overturn the planned tax reform. The reform would have extended the value-added tax (VAT) to more goods and services and, by lowering the tax allowance for low incomes, would have overburdened those who already struggled economically. In contrast, the financial, mining, and oil sectors, Colombia’s priority sectors, contribute hardly any tax revenue. Consistently, the state has relied on incentives for direct investment over the past twenty years and introduced round after round of tax exemptions for companies and licenses for extraction. In 2019, protests against tax reforms had already drawn reactions. “I want to be clear, with this law we are not giving gifts to the richest. This reduction in taxes on profits is for all entrepreneurs, small, medium and large,” ex–finance minister Alberto Carrasquilla promoted the plan at the time. The 2019 reform mainly resulted in lower state revenues, however, and the COVID-19 pandemic let revenues from value-added tax plummet, as Colombians radically reduced their consumption. The 2021 reform partially compensated for these losses but left the big companies untouched. Moreover, it would have made little difference

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to the distribution of state funds: Colombia’s defense and security budget remains one of the largest in Latin America, even though a portion went to pandemic control in 2020. The security project in Colombia materialized in horrific insecurity for lower-class social groups thought of as disposable. Killings and displacements of indigenous people were central (El Espectador 2010). Contemporary practices are the continuation of the security project: Police practices in the face of the paro included torture, temporary disappearance, and killings. On May 2, 2021, police killed twenty-four-year-old Brayan Niño. At least seventy-seven individuals remained disappeared in the context of the mobilizations (Temblores 2021, 12). In 2019, data was published that military strategies under Duque had again included body count and so-called falsos positivos (CC-UE-EU 2019). Fifteen years ago, government discourse and punitive elements in law anchored firmly in the imaginary of society that the real criminals in Colombia were the guerrillas and their “sympathizers.” The 2021 mobilizations, nonetheless, exposed the fragility of the authoritarian neoliberal fix. Colombia, a model pupil of the macroeconomic stability doctrine for decades, including a constitutionalized debt brake, lost its standing on the international capital markets due to the pandemic. Fitch, Standard & Poors, and other rating agencies downgraded Colombian sovereign bonds to the BBB category with poor outlooks, just above junk status; the peso devalued sharply against the US dollar; and for the first time in years, the country’s solvency and debt issuance were in question. This failure on their own terms, and the mobilizing power of a broad coalition against state violence, extreme inequality, and socioecological destruction, opened a window of opportunity. The concrete successes of the protests seemed small; nevertheless, in a climate characterized by the normalization of violence in recent years, the suspension of a policeman who had shot a protestor, or the police’s recognition it owned trucks from which ununiformed agents shot into demonstrations in the city of Cali, cannot be underestimated. The protests not only laid bare the brutality of the selective security project but showed the deepened demand for change in Colombian society (Gómez Delgado 2021). Building on that movement, a new possible politics for Colombia is embodied by Gustavo Petro’s and Francia Márquez’s successful campaign in the 2022 presidential elections. Mexico’s authoritarian state transformation between 2007 and 2012 and in the following years seemed to surprisingly allow a progressive cycle to begin in 2018. While the state seemed to have transformed, even its materiality, the 2018 realignment of social groups around an adapted project of change (although not with new political actors), as a result of the perceived crisis of this model, seemed to open up a possible way out. Precisely segments

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of the economic groups of Monterrey—the Monterrey Group was, twenty years ago, one of Mexico’s leading conglomerates and the cradle of big business—broke away from the authoritarian neoliberal option and instead seemed to perceive López Obrador as a viable political option—they had begun to experience the war (interview with social scientist, October 10, 2012; interview with activist, October 2012). In the following years, a number of high-ranking judicial cases in the United States seemed to partially uproot earlier alliances between politics and crime. For instance, Iván Reyes Arzate, the head of the Federal Police Sensitive Investigative Unit (the US Drug Enforcement Administration cooperation unit of the Policía Federal) pleaded guilty in a US court, admitting he had worked with the Sinaloa network (US Department of Justice 2021), and García Luna’s arrest points to the same connections (Carrión, De Alba, and Ibarra 2019). In 2021, the Defense Secretariat (SEDENA) accepted that, since 2010, it had paid compensation for only 187 cases of soldiers’ rights violations, and victims had signed confidentiality agreements (Animal Político 2021). The limits of a possible project of change, however, have become starkly visible since 2018. The incapacity or unwillingness of new governing forces to actively transform the materiality of security institutions and the neoliberal economic project at large have led to a perception of futility and hopelessness. Military forces continue deployed in the streets; in 2021, the government even employed (armed) soldiers in vaccination campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic (CIDE 2021, 6). The government abolished the Policía Federal in 2019, after the body amassed a striking record of corruption and abuses. Yet President López Obrador replaced it with the Guardia Nacional (National Guard), which, again, consists mainly of former soldiers, and has been deployed in anti-migration operations (Gándara 2020). Images of National Guard soldiers chasing Central American migrants in southern Mexico showed once again the authoritarian nature of punitive state practices. Neither has illegal trade significantly shrunk, nor has there been any sign of breaking up power relations around violent appropriation in different regions. The decline of cocaine use in the United States, and in turn the US opiate crisis, have made Mexican illegal entrepreneurs return to heroin production and to fentanyl (see Smith 2021). While President López Obrador seemed to discard the so-called kingpin strategy in 2019, and this represented a break with the well-known and failed security script (Johnson 2019), violence rates have not subsided. Unsettling links among the “war on drugs,” the feeling of terror in parts of Mexico, and economic success persist, and the reduced avenues for social ascent interlink with illegal appropriation of profits; however, these links and dynamics differ depending on contexts (Morris 2020; Le Cour Grandmaison 2021). Future research needs to understand the multi-scalar character of these contexts of violence in Mexico.

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The pandemic grip on the United States let the Mexican economy contract by -8.2 percent in 2020, yet in the same year, the Senate approved reforms that reduced taxes on services platforms such as Uber, Uber Eats, or Airbnb (Vargas Mendoza 2021, 32). The country’s foreign debt services grew in the years prior. Austerity motivated moves to reduce government spending, presented as cutting down on the excesses of previous officials, but the bulk of the reductions were in public education, the electoral supervision body, and the judicial branch of the state (Vargas Mendoza 2021, 39). This is not without irony, as austerity also motivated many of the previous governments’ decisions (Beck, Bravo Regidor, and Iber 2020, 84). Oil production remains responsible for up to one-third of government revenues via PEMEX, which also remained a spending priority. Private investment has slowed down somewhat, even though López Obrador has not proven to be the contrast to prior presidents some had hoped or feared him to be. In fact, the impacts of expansive state infrastructure projects themselves continue to be violent (El Financiero 2021). The government continues to promote Mexico as a network of “dense, interconnected industrial corridors, where high-risk industries, extensive agribusiness and extractive industries” thrive (ToxiTour 2021, 6), without any serious environmental or social assessments or regulation. The nationalist rhetoric (i.e. around the cancellation of rounds of renewable energy licenses auctions and the nationalization of lithium reserves) has not led to a more just redistribution of property. The European Union–Mexico investment treaty under negotiation will likely lead to even less possibilities to reverse the lack of regulation and mediate the toxic effects of corporate ecological destruction (La Jornada 2021). State investment projects such as the so-called Maya train on the Yucatán peninsula have drawn protests by indigenous communities and ecological concerns, and led to claims that the inclusion of indigeneity is purely folkloric (Flores, Deniau, and Prieto 2019). Murders of environmentalists have continued to occur. For instance, Samir Flores, who had led protests against a stateplanned thermoelectric plant and gas pipeline in Morelos, was assassinated on February 20, 2019. The production of security and insecurity during the last two decades has had enormous effects on property relations in both countries, as racialized constructions of difference translate into a hierarchy of forms of property in state policies that are deemed worthy of protection. As the state prioritizes and legitimizes the making of private property as more productive and secure, it not only aggravates violent conditions of severe inequality but also contributes to the actual physical violence exerted against racialized and marginalized rural communities. Examining the domain of property exposes the (albeit indirect) links among the state ensemble, private investors, and criminal forces, as well as the structural interests they share.

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In consequence, the “commodities consensus” (Svampa 2015) turned criminal through neglect, lack of protection, and direct activities by state institutions and their collaborators. In Colombia, the valorization of (private) land required not only the expanded military presence and high-technology war in the early 2000s but also the containment of paramilitary groups, which I describe via the demobilization process in chapter 6. In Mexico, in contrast, the multiplicity of state institutions and other actors exerting violence gave an impression of diffuse chaos, yet never endangered the long-term return to extraction in combination with agro-industry and assembly-line production, while violence did alter property relations in a number of regions. Finally, the security policies observed and implemented by increasingly authoritarian, if formally democratic states with the aim to enable capital accumulation, are of a decidedly globalized nature. Their global character depends on the global naturalization of social hierarchies (class, race), as they play a decisive role in defining criminality. Yet the global is also palpable through the actual traveling of ideas, the international training of and exchange of concepts by police and military, and the traveling of security personnel as consultants from one perceived hotspot to the other, shaped between a multiplicity of agents who can also be localized in postcolonial states. While acting in a clearly globalized world, Colombian and Mexican governments, security agencies, and advisors are indeed no passive receivers of security policies devised “elsewhere.”

Notes

CHAPTER 2: WIELDING POWER 1. Some see this as the absence of hegemony (Palacios 1986, 91; Richani 2007, 404), the incapability of rallying society behind a political project. Even when advocating a more processual understanding of hegemony (Morton 2011; Hesketh 2017), one has to contend no unifying dominant forces united these sectors (Uribe Hincapié 2001). 2. As early as the 1960s, however, domestic market-oriented actors no longer determined economic policy. The state began to neglect ejido agriculture, despite its previously remarkable productivity and its significant contribution to generating foreign currency, and thus to industrialization. 3. Inflationary pressure had massively intensified and was 25 percent in 1980, the trade balance deficit grew, capital flight took on undreamed-of proportions (more than US$20 billion in eighteen months between 1981 and 1982) (Moreno Brid and Ros 2009, 137). The central bank, which for a long time held up the peso value, withdrew from the foreign exchange market in February 1982, its reserves dwindling. 4. In the 1960s, ejidos and small-scale farming still employed 70 percent of the rural labor force, but only part of the land was suitable for agriculture, and the rural economy remained dependent on state subsidies, even if ejidos received only 38 percent of agricultural investment (Díaz Cayeros 2012, 244).

CHAPTER 3: SUPPORTING REPRESSION 1. By referencing Poulantzas’s and Hall’s 1970s work, I do not insinuate that the qualitative shift in statecraft in the 2000s in Colombia and Mexico trailed behind an earlier 1970s transformation in Europe. Rather, neoliberalizing processes in Latin America largely preceded those in Europe, introduced through the economic project brutally implemented by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile from 1973 onward, through the economic restructuring after the Mexican debt crisis of 1982, and subsequent structural adjustment programs of the 1990s. 209

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2. For formanalytic critics, Poulantzas almost exclusively prioritized shifting power relations and cycles of relative autonomy and ultimately neglects how social conflicts and the structural, long-term reproduction of capitalism interact in the state (Jessop 2008, 27–38). I am interested in concrete historical processes and focus how they take shape via institutions and public policies. 3. See a variety of critical policing studies that establish the data for this (i.e., Alves 2018; Alves and Vargas 2017; Moncada 2009; see Offe 1972 for discussing violence as a mode of selectivity).

CHAPTER 4: BLURRED BOUNDARIES 1. While the foreign trade balance with the United States showed temporary surpluses (INEGI 2012b, 47, 56), after a peak in integration in 1999 (81 percent of Mexico’s total foreign trade!) with the United States in 2007, at Calderón’s taking office, it was only 65.5 percent. 2. Chiapas, for instance, saw its per capita income deteriorate from 46 percent of Mexico City’s per capita income in 1980 to 16.4 percent in 2000 (Dussel Peters 2004, 72). 3. On average, this amounted to a total of US$3 billion annually in the 1970s, US$17.4 billion in the 1990s, and US$49.6 billion after 2000. The transfers increased from 3.8 percent of GDP in the 1970s to 6.1 percent of GDP annually in the 2000s (Kar 2012, 10). 4. Exports increased from about US$6.7 billion (1990) to US$11.89 billion (2002); imports rose from US$5.58 billion to US$13.19 billion in the same period (CEPAL 2007). 5. The industrial sector increased from 14.8 percent (1945–1949) to 21.1 percent of GDP (1965–1969), but between 1988 and 1998, the share of the industrial sector fell again from 25 percent to a 1940s level of below 15 percent (Kalmánovitz and López 2006, 7).

CHAPTER 5: SECURITY NARRATIVES 1. A Colombia-focused version of parts of chapter 5 appeared as “Criminal Heterarchy and Its Critics: Governance and the Making of Insecurity in Colombia,” Global Crime 19, no. 3–4 (2018): 250–70. 2. Agreements on the ministerial level such as the Commitments to Public Security in the Americas (OAS 2008), also link border security and carceral systems to “fighting drug trafficking,” money laundering, and illegal arms. 3. For a perspective on the omnipresence of “hyper-masculine traits cultivated in the military” in Colombia after the peace deal, see Meger and Sachseder 2020. 4. Some of these documents were available on the Presidential Office home page until 2011 but classified as “confidential” and not intended for publication in this

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form—a sign of a contradictory relationship between disclosure and exclusivity of the circles involved (Calderón Hinojosa 2006; Contralínea 2010). 5. The strategy did not foresee to eliminate criminal groups. By 2030, organized crime should be “contained” (not disappeared), a confidential working document from Calderón’s campaign said (Calderón Hinojosa 2006, 2, 9, 26; Contralínea 2010). 6. Partly, the next PRI-led government implemented this in 2014.

CHAPTER 6: SELECTIVE SECURITY 1. President Calderón measured success in drugs and goods seizures, enumerating hundreds of tons of cocaine and marijuana, cars, and hundreds of airplanes between 2006 and 2012 (ICG 2013, 27), as well as the eradication of 15,8466 hectares of marijuana and 95,535 hectares of poppy fields (SEDENA 2007). 2. The prison population was above the world median but still far below the US rate of 743 out of 100,000. Many, around a stable 41 pecent between 2000 and 2015, were in prison without a sentence (World Prison Brief 2017). 3. Torture and disappearances had hardly any legal consequences for state personnel; 405 registered cases of human rights violations by Federal Police officers led to seventy-six court hearings and eighteen verdicts (Hernández Navarro 2011a). 4. In mid-2009, the Supreme Court reviewed the Military Justice Code applicability (enacted by decree in 1933) but then declared itself incompetent to decide (Centro ProDH 2009, 51–52; Kenny and Serrano 2012, 212). In the face of international pressure (i.e., by an Interamerican Court sentence on the 1970s disappearances), Calderón did propose to change military jurisdiction in 2010 but again accommodated military wishes by keeping extralegal executions, illegal arrests, and house searches under military jurisdiction. Sexual violence, disappearances, and torture were excluded, but military courts still investigated and determined the nature of the offence (CMDPDH et al. 2011, 25). A constitutional amendment in June 2008, aiming to strengthen judiciary processes via oral trials and to inhibit bribes for judges, had little tangible impact; by 2011, only eight states started implementing it (CMDPDH et al. 2011, 19). 5. Restrepo indirectly allows the AUC to continue armed operations in regions not yet under their control (AUC 2002a). The minutes state “since it is a unilateral ceasefire and we have allegedly not yet had any contact with the government, we clearly have the right to counter any subversive aggression if they attack us, because they will certainly continue to attack us,” warns Mancuso. Restrepo replies: “I am making this very clear. I, as a representative of the government, cannot take this right away from you” (AUC 2002a). 6. In 1997, Law 418 on peace negotiations with illegal groups had already relaxed the conditions for amnesties for armed actors; however, to be eligible for potential punishment remission in a peace process, their offences had to be of “political nature.” Since the government could not recognize the paramilitaries as political without incurring high political costs (“political” applied to insurgents, which the AUC so clearly were not), it changed the legal conditions for negotiations (AI 2005, 11; Verdad Abierta 2010). On November 12, 2002, High Commissioner Restrepo assured

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the AUC the government saw them as “political actors” and de facto state power in some regions (AUC 2002a). Barely four weeks after the “cease-fire” on December 23, 2002, the Uribe majority in Congress passed Law 782, and offences no longer had to be political. The government revoked arrest warrants against AUC commanders, although US institutions demanded to extradite commanders Salvatore Mancuso and Carlos Castaño. 7. Uribe’s veto against extradition excluded one commander he claimed was not of the AUC (La Silla Vacía 2010). As expected, a crisis with AUC commanders ensued over the original promise not to extradite, but it remained temporary (Fundación Social 2006, 71). Parliamentary opposition and international organizations such as UNHCR (2005, 10–11) claimed government and the AUC were not actually hostile parties, which again prompted calls for non-extradition from the AUC. 8. Senate president Humberto Gómez Gallo (Conservative) appointed ten discussants (six from the Uribe coalition) in Senate Commission II. Chamber president Zulema Jattin (Partido de la U / Apertura Liberal) sent both articles to Chamber Commission II, which she coordinated. This commission usually dealt with budget debates, and had no expertise on the topic, but an Uribe majority. 9. In 2007, with only fifty-five people in detention under Law 975 (FIDH 2007, 35), a Supreme Court sentence questioned the amnesties granted despite paramilitary crimes not being “political” (Corte Suprema de Justicia [Colombia] 2007). The Uribe government accused the court of “ideological partisanship,” recalling the court’s independence from the executive was only “relative” (HRW 2010, 23). 10. Tate (2015) illustrates a similar looking away strategy by US diplomacy in the case of Colombian officials’ ties. 11. In difference to Colombia, tensions between the executive and the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) had little consequence and were discursive rather than substantial. In 2011, President Calderón claimed judges had promoted impunity, working with “criminals.” “I know, pardon the expression, the judges’ song. But I know that they are on the list [‘están en la nómina’ implies illegal economy payments], I know how much they get” (Proceso 2011d). A meeting between Calderón and Supreme Court president Cossío Díaz resolved the tensions. Higher judges apparently directly benefited from Calderón’s policy, with an untaxed fund of 1.2 billion pesos confiscated from “organized crime” available to pay themselves bonuses and training (Contralínea 2011b). Disputes over jurisdiction between judiciary and executive also did little to change impunity. A decree limited the state of emergency (Diario Oficial 2011), and Cossío Díaz (2012) argued against expanding the already far-reaching military jurisdiction. In three prominent cases of extralegal executions by military officers, the Supreme Court denied military jurisdiction. 12. Within the military and between military and government, conflicts arose. In mid-2012, three generals were arrested, including a member of the Estado Mayor, Tomás Ángeles Dauahare. Military officials, indignant, said this was against the army as an institution; President Calderón had sided with one group in the army, inexcusable as commander in chief (Contralínea 2012a). News of wiretaps within the Offices of the Defense Secetariat increased tensions (Medellín 2012). The military clearly

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was no homogeneous entity, and shortly before presidential elections, important posts were contested. 13. In 2009, the prosecutor argued about García’s involvement, that “paramilitary structures in the Sucre department began as an incipient military force at the service of cattle ranchers’ private interests. From 1996 and 1997, the paramilitary phenomenon unified and consolidated with the consent and complicity of the department’s cattle ranchers and politicians.” They had, following Salvatore Mancuso’s confession, “begged for its creation” (Verdad Abierta 2009a). 14. Before the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court had already played the role of a counterweight to some extent. In 2002, it annulled parts of the rehabilitation zones decree but accepted a rewritten one (sentence C-1024/2002; interview with lawyer, October 21, 2011). “Uribe’s congressmen usually do not comply with norms, so the court denied them a number of their key projects” (interview with trade unionist, May 7, 2008). In 2003, the Constitutional Court declared the zones unconstitutional. The Uribe government in turn attempted to weaken the court, which it rejected as an institution symbolizing the progressive 1991 constitution, and declared to continue the decrees (Presidencia de la República Colombiana and Ministerio de Defensa 2003, 44). Yet in December 2003, the Constitutional Court annulled Uribe’s campaign centerpiece, the antiterrorism statute (Gallón Giraldo 2010, 14), which expanded the military’s competences in all of Colombia, granting it investigative functions for civilians, allowing DAS, military, and police to wiretap phones and store personal data.

CHAPTER 7: THE LAW, THE LAND, AND THE GUN 1. Parts of this chapter appeared as “A Criminal Commodity Consensus: The Coloniality of State Power, State Crime and the Transformation of Property Relations in Mexico,” State Crime Journal 7, no. 2 (2018): 306–28. 2. Scholars have shown similar forms of legal dispossession to continue after Uribe’s presidencies (i.e., Peña‐Huertas et al. 2017). The implementation of private property schemes itself is not illegal in terms of official law, partly because that law has been changed, but its impact has often been devastating (Ward and Green 2016, 223; Agnew 2011, 33). 3. Days after taking office in 2002, Uribe declared a state of emergency (Decree 1837) and, weeks, later defined special zones (Decree 2002) (Ministerio del Interior 2002). 4. In Colombia, parts of the state ensemble have recognized state responsibility, while entailing little consequence (CMH 2012). 5. The states of Tamaulipas and Chihuahua concentrated most forced displacement between 2009 and 2014 (36.35 percent), but after Calderón’s term ended, displacement shifted toward states like Oaxaca, Michoacán, and Quintana Roo (CMDPDH 2019, 51).

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6. This differs slightly from a state-making argument as articulated by Charles Tilly (1985). While the state may be continuously made and remade, the question here is less about state making than about which social forces support which forms of state reaffirmation, and at the cost of whom.

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Index

accumulation, logic of, 83–84 activists: interviews with, 18; targeting of, 5, 67–68, 139–42, 186 Administrative Department of Security (DAS; Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad), 72–73, 141, 157 AFI. See Federal Investigative Agency Afro-Colombian enslaved people, 26–27, 55–56 Afro-Colombian Palenque, 45 Afro-Colombian paramilitary soldiers, 62 Afro-Latin Americans, relations of state with, 14, 16 Afro-Mexican communities, 47 Agencia Federal de Investigación. See Federal Investigative Agency Agrarian Law, 167–68 agrarian reform, 45, 48, 167, 169 agrarian strike, 195 agricultural communities, 178 agricultural sector, 102, 182 agriculture theory, 25 agro-industries, tension in, 25 Agro Ingreso Seguro program, 171–72 Águilas Negras, 3, 119 ALCA. See Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas Alemán, Miguel, 41, 66

Alternative Democratic Pole. See Polo Democrático Alternativo Andes mountain range, 36 ANDI. See National Business Association Anguiano, Arturo, 43 anti-abduction agencies, 152 anticrime policies, 14, 106–7, 114 Antioquia, Colombia, 30, 72–73 anti-progressive violence, 63 APPO movement, 78 Arauca, Colombia, 131–32, 133, 140, 176, 176 Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas (ALCA; common free trade area), 111 Arias, Felipe, 172 Arias, Rocío, 156 Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), 20–21, 30–31, 60–61, 69–71, 114, 117; campaign against, 116, 118–19; land acquisition and, 184; protests blamed on, 196–97 articulation, 10, 15–17 Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia. See National Business Association asymmetrical relationship, with state, 35 263

264

Inde

Atlantic Coast, 27 AUC. See United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia Auditors Court, 8–9 austerity policies, 42, 207 authoritarian neoliberalism, 11–12 authoritarian populism, 12 authoritarian practices, 10, 12, 59, 205–6 authoritarian statism, 12 authority, crime and, 192 Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. See United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia Ayala Declaration, 48 Ayotzinapa, as rupture, 201 banana cultivation, 37, 102–3, 196 Banco de la República, 38, 97 bankruptcy, of Mexico, 42 banks, nationalization of, 43 Barcos Vargas, Virgilio, 38, 62 BCB. See Central Block of Bolivar Bedoya Pizarro, Harold, 118 Benito Rebollo, Muriel, 72 Bhandar, Brenna, 17, 162–63, 186 Bloque Central Bolívar. See Central Block of Bolivar Bloque de Búsqueda group, 99–100 body counts of dead criminals, emphasis on, 126, 135 Bogotá, Colombia, 2–3, 30–31 Borda, Fals, 10 Boyacá, 27–28 business sector, authoritarian turn and, 73 cafeteros. See coffee producers CAI. See Immediate Attention Centers Calderón Hinojosa, Felipe, 7, 17, 67, 69, 75–77; alliances of government of, 153–54; collaboration with Colombian police of, 113; crime response of, 121–23, 133, 211n1; exports and, 92; Mérida Initiative

and, 115; on police, 151; on security threats, 125–26 Camacho, Ávila, 41 Caño Limón-Coveñas pipeline, 176 capital accumulation, 58–59, 61 capital inflows, in industrialization, 26 capitalism: articulation of, 26; industrial, 15; Mexican, 33–34 capitalist development, uneven, 26 capitalist production, in Colombia, 6 capitalist state, 34 capitalist transformation, 46–47 capital-labor relations, 29, 40 capo. See drug trafficker capo-controlled space (plaza), 125 Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 76–77 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 40 Caribbean Coast, 97 Carrasquilla, Alberto, 204 cartels, narrative of, 180 Castaño, Carlos, 99, 144, 148–49 Castaño, Vicente, 155, 181 Castro, Jorge, 182 Catholic Church, 30 Cauca, 191 caudillos. See intermediaries CCAI. See Integral Action Coordination Center CCE. See Corporate Coordinating Council CEDH. See Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission Central Bank, 42 Central Block of Bolivar (BCB; Bloque Central Bolívar), 185 centralized monopoly, 13 Centro de Coordinación de Acción Integral. See Integral Action Coordination Center Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional. See National Investigation and Security Center Centros de Atención Inmediata. See Immediate Attention Centers certification programs, 167

Inde

Char family, 73 Chaux Mosquera, Juan, 182 Chiapas, Mexico, 1, 166, 168 Chibolo Pact, 182 Chicoral Pact, 47, 169 Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission (CEDH), 138 Chocó, Colombia, 179 Cienfuegos, Salvador, 122, 149 CISEN. See National Investigation and Security Center Ciudad Juarez, 132, 138 civil corporations (corporaciones civiles), 48 civilian youth, presentation as criminals of, 201 class relations, racial power and, 14, 15–16 Clinton, Bill, 110 CNC. See National Peasants Council CNDH. See National Human Rights Commission coal exports, 8 coal extraction, oil and, 4 cocaine trade, 6, 84–85, 89–90, 97, 148–49, 206–7 CODHES. See Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement coercion: authoritarian, 12, 79–80; coloniality of, 13–16, 53–58; dispersal of, 10, 13–14, 19–20, 54–55, 80; historical, 11, 53–54; historicizing of, 20; by state institutions, 150; state violence and, 54; variability of, 57. See also state coercion coercive practices, consensual and, 54, 68–69, 192 coffee producers (cafeteros), 30, 36–37, 187–88 Coffee Producers Congress, 155 collective land rights, 33–34 collective municipal ownership (propiedad comunal), 47 Colombia. See specific topics

265

Colombian Agricultural Society (SAC; Sociedad de Agricultores de Colombia), 63 colonial bias, land tenure and, 172 coloniality: of coercion, 13–16, 53–58; of law, 64; of private property, 162–63; of property, 175; as social grammar, 24–25; state coercion and, 55, 194; of state power, 14, 16–17, 25, 54–55, 108, 163, 180, 189–90, 203; war on drugs and, 175–76 Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos. See National Human Rights Commission commodities boom of 2000s, 25 commodities consensus, 208 commodity supercycle, 6, 8, 202 common free trade area. See Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas communal land (ejido), 35, 47–49, 164, 165–68, 177, 209n2; control over, 174–75; leasing of, 173 communal owners into market-oriented consumers, transformation of, 175 communal property, 185–86 communal tenure, 163 communities, framed as dangerous, 187 concealment, soldiers and, 137 Confederación Patronalde la República Mexicana/Mexican Employers Confederation (COPARMEX), 40, 75 Consejo Coordinador Empresarial. See Corporate Coordinating Council Consejo Nacional Campesino. See National Peasants Council consensus: commodities, 208; criminal commodities, 175, 181; property, 161–62; violence and, 59, 65–66 Conservative Party, in Colombia, 27 consolidation policy, of Colombia, 184 constitutional assembly, call for, 31 Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES; Consultoría para

266

Inde

los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento), 181–82 control grabbing, 173 COPARMEX. See Confederación Patronalde la República Mexicana/ Mexican Employers Confederation corporaciones civiles. See civil corporations Corporate Coordinating Council (CCE; Consejo Coordinador Empresarial), 41–42, 75–76, 93–94 counterinsurgency, 11, 101 counterreform, 47 counterterrorism plans, 114, 118–19, 158 COVID-19, 204–5, 206–7 Crang, Mike, 81–82 Creel, Santiago, 75–76 crime: anticrime policies, 14, 106–7, 114; authority and, 192; governance through, 7–8, 116–17, 196–97; against indigenous populations, 56, 149; perception of, 120–21; petty, 118; as presented as other, 82–83; prominent role of, 105–6; state-crime collusion, 4–5, 10–11, 161 crime-related vocabulary, as imprecise, 126–27 criminal, labeling as, 193, 195 criminal capital factions, 81–82 criminal commodities consensus, 175 criminal enemies, security policies and, 105–7 criminal groups: as part of society, 86; political administrations and, 9–10, 81–82 criminalization: modes of in Colombia, 117–18; of political enemies, 130; of poverty, 15, 108 criollo (person of Spanish descent), 27 critical criminology, 55 critical security studies, 11 Cundinamarca, 27–28 Cuzcatlán silver mine, 177

dar de baja. See “deregister,” kill dark window (ventanilla siniestra), 97 DAS. See Administrative Department of Security DEA. See Drug Enforcement Administration dead criminals, emphasis on, 126, 135 debt crisis, of 1982, 38, 209n2 debt servicing, 42 decision-making, access to, 16 Declaration of Security in the Americas, 110–11 decolonialization, 26–27 Defense Ministry, 60 defense sector, in Colombia, 133–34 delincuentes. See low-level criminals demobilization, of AUC, 144–46 Democratic Security strategy, 116 democratization processes, 12 Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad. See Administrative Department of Security Department for National Property, 41–42 “deregister,” kill, 116–17 DFS. See Federal Security Directorate Díaz, Porfirio, 34, 39–40, 41, 47–48 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 66 Dirección Federal de Seguridad. See Federal Security Directorate discourse: of fear, 130, 192; global terrorism, 118–19; modernization, 43; national, 35, 106, 119, 202; state, 107–8 discourse protagonists: in Colombia, 116–21; in Mexico, 121–22, 128 dispersal, of coercion, 13–14, 19–20, 54–55 dispersion, 12–13; of violence in Mexico, 64–65 displaced persons, in Mexico and Colombia, 18–19, 63, 188–89 dispossession, 44, 48 dominant classes, 27, 209n1 dominant state projects, 9

Inde

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), US, 89, 124 drug policies, critiques of, 3, 83 drug trade, representation as against the state of, 88–89 drug trafficker (capo), 124–25 drug trafficking history, in Colombia, 5, 100–101 Drumond, 8–9 Duque government, 197 Echeverría, Luis, 41–42, 66 economic conglomerates, consolidation of, 38–39 economic crisis: in Colombia, 69; of 2009, 128 economic growth, 6, 7–8, 28 economic history, of Colombia, 36 economic regulations, 29 economic relations, security and, 26, 39–40 economy: export, 44–45, 102–3; formal employment and, 87–88; global, 84–85; political, 10; security and, 128; shadow, 83, 103–4. See also illegal economy economy players, illegal trade as, 86 Ejército de Liberación Nacional. See National Liberation Army Ejército Popular Revolucionario. See People’s Revolutionary Army Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. See Zapatista Army of National Liberation ejidatarios, as property owners, 168 ejido. See communal land election: falsified, 72; of July 2006, 76 ELN. See National Liberation Army emancipatory projects, 63 emigration, 71; from Mexico, 93 endogenous, violence as, 17 entrepreneurial society, 120–21 EPR. See Popular Revolutionary Army Escalante Gonzalbo, Fernando, 125 Escobar, Pablo, 31, 39, 62

267

Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios; ESMAD. See Mobile Anti-Riot Unit estates (haciendas), 44, 45, 49, 164 European legal philosophy, 163–64 European states, violence of, 56–57 everyday life, security concerns and, 191–92 evidence, falsification of, 137 executive branch, in Mexico, 65, 77 export commodities-led economic project, 5, 23, 63 export economy, 44–45, 102–3 export-oriented plantations, 45 export products, of Colombia, 36 extortion, productivity of, 125 extrajudicial executions, 136–37, 158, 198, 211n4 extralegal activities, social mobility channels as, 87, 130 EZLN. See Zapatista Army of National Liberation falsas positivas. See incorrectly identified guerillas Fals Borda, Orlando, 60 FARC. See Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia FDI. See foreign direct investment Federación de Ganaderos; FEDEGAN. See Livestock Breeders’ Federation Federación Nacional de Cafeteros; FEDECAFE. See National Federation of Coffee Growers Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 88 federal free trade project, 36 Federal Investigative Agency (AFI; Agencia Federal de Investigación), 149, 152 Federal Judicial Police (PJF; Policía Judicial Federal), 89 Federal Police (PF; Policía Federal), 67 Federal Security Directorate (DFS; Dirección Federal de Seguridad), 66–67

268

Inde

Fideicomiso para la Cobertura de Riesgos Cambiarios; FICORA. See Trust for Covering Exchange Rate Risks Finance Department, 42 Finance Ministry, 38 fiscal policy, 37 flow of goods, drug trafficking and, 83 Fondo Nacional de Café (National Coffee Fund), 37 force, use of by state, 12–13, 56–57, 61 forced disappearances, 133, 135– 37, 142, 187 forced displacement, 170, 180, 181–84 forceful groups, as autonomous, 13 foreign direct investment (FDI), 171, 180–81 formal employment, lack of weight in economy of, 87–88 formalization, of land ownership, 170–71 formerly colonized, as marginalized, 55 Foro Mesoamericano de los Pueblos, 18 Fox, Vicente, 75–76, 95–96, 149 Franco Restrepo, Vilma Liliana, 12–13, 53–54, 56–57 Fray de Vitoria, Francisco, 164 free market policies, 81 free trade paradigm, 27–28, 82–83 free trade project, 44 free trade zones, 171 FUDRA. See United Fast Deployment Forces Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. See Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia G3 unit, of DAS, 158 GAFEs. See Grupos Aéromóviles de Fuerzas Especiales Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 29 Galán, Luis Carlos, 31 Gallo, Eduardo, 152 García Luna, Genaro, 67, 149, 151–52 García Romero, Álvaro, 156

Gaviria, Carlos, 102, 154 GDP. See gross domestic product general, role of in Mexico, 121–23 global authoritarian turn, 53 global economy, illegality and, 84–85 global entanglements, war on drugs and, 9–10 global-local tensions, 28 global relations, 56 global terrorism discourses, 118–19 Gonzalo (AUC member), 146 governance, through crime, 7–8, 116–17, 196–97 government, of crime, 105 grassroots organizations, as enemy, 117 Gregson, Nicky, 81–82 gross domestic product (GDP) of Mexico, 91–92 Grupo Memoria Histórica, 116–17 Grupos Aéromóviles de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFEs), 90–91 Grupo Social y Empresarial de la Defensa; GSED. See Social and Corporate Group of Defense guerilla crime, war on, 120–21 guerilla deaths, compensation for, 135 guerilla groups, 7, 29–30, 63, 66–67, 117–18; incorrect identification of, 205 Guerrero, 177, 187 Gutiérrez Rebollo, José de Jesús, 90 H1N1 virus, 142 hacendado. See landowner hacienda model, 29, 163 haciendas. See estates Hall, Stuart, 10, 15, 16–17, 53–54, 59; on crime in government, 106; on discourse analysis, 107 hard-handed government (mano dura), 5, 11, 17 Hasbún, Raúl, 64 hegemony, 58–59 helicopters, provision of, 63

Inde

hemispheric reading, of war on drugs, 5–6 Hesketh, Chris, 26, 43, 49 heterogeneous power relations, 28 heterogeneous state, 148–50 hierarchies, racial, 5 High Commission for Reintegration, 144 highways, protection from guerilla attacks of, 117 historical-materialist policy field analysis, 58 historicizing, of coercion, 20 Hoffmann, Odile, 24 homicide, focus on, 82 homicide rate, of Mexico, 7, 17, 122– 23, 133, 200–201 Hooker, Juliet, 5–6 Hoyos, Londoño, 118–19 human rights experts, 18 human rights initiatives, in Mexico, 136 human rights organizations, state and, 127–28 human rights violation, documentation of, 128 Hurtado, María del Pilar, 158 illegal accumulation, interrelations with legal and, 83–84 illegal accumulation strategies, 6, 83 illegal arms trade, 84 illegal capital, 95 illegal economic practices, 20, 83–86, 103–4 illegal economy, 83, 87, 101; AUC and, 149; in Colombia, 97, 202–3; in Mexico, 88, 198 illegal exports, fight against, 85 illegality, as integral, 82–83 illegal plantations, protection of, 89–90 illegal practices, as central, 101, 201 illegal trade, substance restriction and, 83–84 ILO Convention, 189 IMF. See International Monetary Fund

269

Immediate Attention Centers (CAI; Centros de Atención Inmediata), 62 INCORA authority, 182 incorrectly identified guerillas (falsas positivas), 7, 205 independence struggles, 26–27 indigenous autonomous areas, 44 indigenous collective organizing process (Minga), 3, 140, 204 the Indigenous Guard, 131–32 indigenous incarceration, 82 indigenous Latin Americans, relations of state with, 14, 16, 25–26 indigenous populations, crime against, 56, 149 industrial capitalism, 15 industrialization, 9, 28, 33, 37; capital inflows in, 26 inflationary pleasure, 209n3 infrastructure investments, 37 infrastructure projects, violence and, 207 insecurity of communal lands, perception of, 179 institutional racism, 25, 192 institutional reorganization, of state architecture, 22, 192 Instituto Colombiano de Desarrollo Rural (INCODER), 179, 182 Integral Action Coordination Center (CCAI; Centro de Coordinación de Acción Integral), 184–85, 194 intelligence service, network of, 141 Interamerican Convention on Extradition, 99–100 interest rates, 35, 42 inter-institutional hiccups, 202 intermediaries (caudillos), 20, 45–46, 64–66, 86, 164 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 38, 42 investigations, into Colombian politicians, 156 investment funds (fideicomisos), 95 investment incentives, penal policy and, 192

270

Inde

investment opportunities, demand for, 6 investor trust, 176, 179–80 Isaza, Ramón, 117–18 jefaturas políticas. See state intermediaries job market, flexibilization of, 4 La Jornada (newspaper), 8–9, 18, 77 judicial investigations, 73 judiciary: discreditation of, 157–58; executive autonomy and, 61 Justice and Peace Law, 143–48, 154–55, 193 juxtaposition, of Mexico Colombia and, 6 Labor Law, of 1950s, 35 Lafaurie, José, 118 land: appropriation of, 161, 182–83, 188, 192–93; colonization in Colombia, 44; control of, 172–73; indigenous struggles and, 182; privatization industry and, 187; redistribution of, 34–35; relations war on drugs and, 50–51; tenure physical violence and, 190; tenure system, 164, 179 landed property, in Colombia, 168–69 land-grabbing, 25, 46, 103, 161, 178–79 land in state ownership (terrenos baldíos), 47 landless laborers, 170 landowner (hacendado), 26–27, 46, 49 landowner class, lack of uniformity of, 27–28 land ownership, 24, 25, 51; political rights and, 186 land reform, 169 large estate (latifundia), 36, 49 large properties, divisions of, 171–72 latifundia. See large estate Latin America, illegal economy and, 83 Latin American states, independence of, 56–57 Law 200, 28

Law of Baldíos (fallow land), 48 law of justice and peace, 21 Law on Citizen Security, 194–94 The Law on the Executive’s Competences in Economy, 41 layered inequalities, 24–25 legal-illegal alliance, 101, 189 legal-illegal entrepreneurial forces, 86–87 legalization, of selective security, 140–41 legal products, illegal practices and, 84 legal sociology, 25 legislative action, illegal economy and, 87 legitimate activity, demarcation between crime and, 85–86 LeGrand, Catherine, 45 Lehder, Carlos, 97 lending, of 1970s, 42 liberalization, economic, 82–83 Liberal Republic, 28 licit/illicit overlap, 85, 96, 188 Livestock Breeders’ Federation (FEDEGAN; Federación de Ganaderos), 63 livestock farming, 45 living standards, 35 López Michelsen, Alfonso, 97 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel, 7, 75–77, 113, 206 López Portillo, José, 41–42, 43 López Pumarejo, Alfonso, 28–29, 45 lower-class soldiers, as disposable, 135, 205 low-income-sector workers (Ni-Nis), 127 low-level criminals (delincuentes), 126 M-19 group, 30–31 Madrazo, Jorge, 67–68 de la Madrid, Miguel, 42 Magdalena, Colombia, 182 Mancuso, Salvatore, 72–73, 149, 188

Inde

mano dura. See hard-handed government manufacturing exports, of Mexico, 91–92 Mapiripán massacre, 63 maquila industry, 91–92, 201–2 march of silence, 1–2, 2 Marcos (Zapatista spokesperson), 77 marijuana, 89–90, 96–97 marimberos, 97 market vendors, danger of, 150–51 Márquez, Francia, 23 MAS. See Muerte a los Secuestradores mass graves, discovery of, 17, 63, 125 mass imprisonments, 21, 134 material concessions, of PRI, 34 Materialist state theory, 185 Maya train, 207 mayoral elections, 100 Medellín network, 31 Medina, Yidis, 157 medium-sized businesses, 92–93 MERCOSUR alliance, 111 Mérida Initiative (MI), 115 mestizaje. See mixture Mexican capitalism, 33–34 Mexican Employers Confederation. See Confederación Patronalde la República Mexicana Mexican media, 122 Mexican military, lack of fear of persecution of, 8, 123–24, 198 Mexican Revolution, 29, 31–32, 65–66, 121–22, 165 Mexican security, US paradigms and, 115 Mexican state formation, 47–48 Mexico, 4, 7–8, 31–32; presentation as stable of, 5 Mexico Seguro program, 95–96 meztizo. See mixed MI. See Mérida Initiative middle class, in Latin America, 86–87 migration, US view on, 111–12 military, state and, 212n12

271

military and paramilitary, collaborations between, 181 military coup, in Colombia, 30 military courts, Mexican military and, 123–24 military expansion, increase of violence and, 198–99 military presence, in Mexico and Colombia, 22 military solutions, 69 mine, protest against, 177 Minga (indigenous collective organizing process), 3, 140, 204 minifundia (small estate), 36 mining, 102, 202 mixed (meztizo), 16, 34 mixture (mestizaje), 24, 35 Mobile Anti-Riot Unit (ESMAD; Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios), 3 Moctezuma, Julio, 41–42 modernization discourse, 43 money laundering, 85, 95 monopoly: deconstruction of idea of, 11, 53, 57; violence as, 13 the Monterrey Group, 206 Montoya, Manuel, 135 Mora, Mariana, 108 Morelos, 48 Moreno, Pedro Juan, 72–73 Morton, Adam David, 25 Mosquera, Víctor Hugo, 197 the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), 141–43 Muerte a los Secuestradores (MAS), 97–98 Muñoz Martínez, Hepzibah, 11 murders: in clinics for addicts, 136; media framing of, 123 Murrillo, Diego, 98–99, 141–42 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement Naranjo, Oscar, 112–13, 120 narco narratives, 199 narco-paramilitary faction, 71–72

272

Inde

National Action Party (PAN; Partido Acción Nacional), 41, 43, 75, 88–89, 137; ejidos and, 166; individual projects of, 199–200; Mexican military and, 142–43 National Agrarian Register (RAN; Registro Agrario Nacional), 166–67 National Business Association (ANDI; Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia), 71 National Commission for Indigenous Territories, 31, 170 National Development Plan (PND), 121–22, 167–68, 174, 210n4 (ch. 5) national discourse, 35, 106, 119, 202 National Educational Workers Union (SNTE; Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación), 78 National Federation of Coffee Growers (FEDECAFE; Federación Nacional de Cafeteros), 70 National Front, 60–61 National Human Rights Commission (CNDH; Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos), 133, 137, 150 National Investigation and Security Center (CISEN; Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional), 50 National Liberation Army (ELN; Ejército de Liberación Nacional), 69, 131–32, 138–39, 178 National Peasants Council (CNC; Consejo Nacional Campesino), 49, 74–75 National Security Doctrine, 116 National Security Law, 142–43, 192 neoliberal policies, 4, 11, 21, 58, 209n1 (ch. 3); of 2000s, 68–69, 203 New Alliance Party (PANAL; Nueva Alianza), 79 Ni-Nis. See low-income-sector workers Niño, Brayan, 205 Noguera, Jorge, 140

non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 89, 127–28, 175 nonstate armed forces, collusion with, 191–92 nonwhite labels, 30 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 81–82 the Noria Project, 11 Norman’s Cay island, 97 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 90, 91, 92, 95, 109 northern Mexico, 181 Nueva Alianza. See New Alliance Party Nuevo León, Mexico, 137 Oaxaca, Mexico, 77–78, 138–39, 150, 177, 191 Oaxaca businesses, protest and, 78 Oaxaca’s Special Operations Police Unit (UPOE), 150 Obregón, Álvaro, 33 Offe, Claus, 16, 106 Office of the Interior Secretary, 144 Office of the Mexican Attorney General (PGR; Procuraduría General de la República), 89–90, 137–38 offshore finance, 85–86 oil companies, expropriation of, 40–41 oligarchies, in Colombia, 26–27 Olímpica, 73 Operación Heróica, 134 Operation Centinela, 112 Operación Cóndor, 89 Operativo Conjunto, 132–33 opium, 88 organized crime, 21; involvement of entire population in fight against, 127 Ospina, Camilo, 135 Ospina Pérez, Mario, 63 other, focus on, 138, 164 other, state and, 16–17, 50–51, 56, 127, 129–30; violence against, 158–59 pacification, appearance of, 64–65 Pacific Railway, 88 Palace of Justice, 30–31

Inde

PAN. See National Action Party PANAL. See New Alliance Party paramilitaries, 47, 61–63, 70–71, 79–80, 90; drug trafficking and, 101; land reform and, 102–3, 184–85; links between military and, 98; as saviors, 117–18; selective violence of, 101–2; tensions between state and, 155 paramilitary demobilization, 188, 193 paramilitary violence, purpose of, 71 parapolítica scandal, 154–55, 183 paro urbano, 204 Partido Acción Nacional. See National Action Party Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD; Party of the Democratic Revolution), 7, 67 Partido Popular party, 113 Party of the Democratic Revolution. See Partido de la Revolución Democrática Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRI; Partido de la Revolución Mexicana), 34, 65, 66; 2012 and, 200 Pastrana, Andrés, 69–70, 113–14 Patriot Act, 110 patrón (protector), 117 PDA. See Polo Democrático Alternativo peace process, rate of violence during, 70 peasant movements, 186 peasant organizations, 74–75 peasant production, as unproductive, 165 PEMEX, 201–2 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 113, 200 Los Pepes group, 99–100 perpetrators, selection of by governments, 16 Perry, William, 110 peso, value of, 205 Petro, Gustavo, 154–55 petty crime, paramilitary demobilization and, 118 PF. See Federal Police

273

PGR. See Office of the Mexican Attorney General Pineda, Eleonora, 156 PJF. See Federal Judicial Police Plan Colombia, 113 Plan Mérida, 112–13 plaza. See capo-controlled space PND. See National Development Plan polarizations, war on drugs and, 6 police: absence in San Cristobal, 2; community distrust of, 62; as consultants, 20, 112–15; as military force, 60; violence, 60 Policía Federal. See Federal Police Policía Judicial Federal. See Federal Judicial Police political articulation, receptiveness for, 8–9, 186–87 political crisis, in Mexico, 7 political dominance, market demand and, 28 political economy, coercion and, 10 Political Instability Task Force, 110 political power, land and, 187 political projects, 58–59 political violence, in Mexico, 67 politics, ambiguous relationship between illegal economy and, 87–88, 103–4 pollution, ejidatarios and, 173 Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA; Alternative Democratic Pole), 154 polymorphic networks, 86 Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR; Ejército Popular Revolucionario), 76 Porfirian dictatorship, 65–66 Porfiriato, 33 postcolonial state: coercion and, 16, 55, 58; land and, 163–65; war on drugs and, 9, 84–85 postcolonial state theory, 4 Poulantzas, Nicos, 11–12, 16, 24, 53–58, 106 poverty, as cultural problem, 108 poverty, in Mexico, 75, 87

274

poverty reduction, security policies and, 108 power formations, 87–88 power relations, 19, 24–25, 51 PRD. See Partido de la Revolución Democrática presidential elections, of 2006, 154 Pretelt, Sabas, 145 preventative imprisonment, 202 PRI. See Party of the Mexican Revolution primary goods sector, 92 prison population, of Mexico, 134–35, 211n2 private investment, 128–29 private property: communal land and, 21; privileges and, 4, 196, 208; protection of, 128–29 private security, defense of, 62 private violence, 61–62 privatizing property, 165 Proceso (newspaper), 18 Procuraduría General de la República. See Office of the Mexican Attorney General productive alliances, 173–74 projects, security, 5, 22 property consensus, 161–62 property left behind, 180 property regimes, conflicts in, 162 property relations, 33, 44–45, 51, 161–62, 207–8 propiedad comunal. See collective municipal ownership protector. See patrón protest mural, 139 Províctima, 137–38 punitive policing, 19–20, 55, 60 Quijano, Aníbal, 10, 17, 44, 53–56, 162–63 race: as category, 24; colonial violence and, 15; land and, 172; political action and, 25

Inde

racial hierarchies, 5, 19, 24–25, 55–56 racialization, 19, 45, 48, 51, 54; property and, 165, 179; state discourse and, 108 racialized policing, 11 racism, Colombian state institutions and, 23 railways, in Mexico, 39–40 Ralito Pact document, 63 RAN. See National Agrarian Register Reagan, Ronald, 97 Regeneración phase, 33 regional armed conflicts, 28 regional ruling groups, 60 Registro Agrario Nacional. See National Agrarian Register rehabilitation zones (zonas de rehabilitación), 132–33 Representative Chamber hearing, 145–46 resource extraction, 9, 21, 25–26, 100, 171 Restrepo, Luis Carlos, 144 restructuring, stabilization and, 43–44 Revolution in Progress, 28 Reyes Arzate, Iván, 206 rights, restriction of, 126, 131–32 Riviera Maya, sale of land on, 95 Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 30 Royal Dutch Shell, 40 Ruggiero, Vincenzo, 81–82 Ruiz, Ulises, 78 rural communities, displacement of, 168–69, 174 Rural Soldiers, 134 Rural Statute (2007), 183 rural-urban migration, 168, 169 SAC. See Colombian Agricultural Society Salgado, Nestora, 187 Salinas, José Vera, 138 Salinas, Ricardo, 43, 49 Samper, Ernesto, 99–100 San Andrés accords, 166

Inde

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico, 1–2, 2, 178 San José ejido, 177 San Lorenzao de los Negros, Veracruz, 47 San Salvador Atenco, 77 Santa Fe de Ralito Pact, 72 Santa Fe strategy papers, 110 Santiago Mexiquititlán market, 2 Santos, Juan Manuel, 17, 183, 194, 195 Saravena, Colombia, 134 sección22 protest, 78 Second World War, 88 Secretariat for National Defense (SEDENA; Secretaría de Defensa Nacional), 133 Secretary for Planning and Budget (SPP), 41, 42 sectarian, racism as, 23 secular schooling, 29 securitization, capital accumulation and, 5 security agencies, as rivals, 150–51 security apparatuses, in state ensemble, 4 security consults, 108–9 security cooperation, 112–16 security law, in Mexico, 21 security policies, shape of, 19–20, 21, 26, 55 security projects, of 2000s, 68–69 SEDENA. See Secretariat for National Defense selective security. See specific topics Semana (newspaper), 18 settler movements, 45 shadow economy, 83, 103–4 Sicilia, Javier, 141–43 Sinaloa, Mexico, 187 Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación. See National Educational Workers Union slavery, 27 Slim, Carlos, 76 small estate (minifundia), 36

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smallholder organizations, 183–84 small plots, government omission to protect, 44 Smart Border Agreement, 112 SNTE. See National Educational Workers Union Social and Corporate Group of Defense (GSED; Grupo Social y Empresarial de la Defensa), 74 social classifications, 9, 164 social cleansing, 136 social conflict, state discourse and, 107 social forces, contradictory, 58 social formations, war on drugs and, 19, 24 social hierarchies, 108, 208 social mobility, military and, 70 social movements, weakness of, 29 social protests, 195, 196 social relations, shift in, 35, 56–57, 65 social violence, 8 Sociedad de Agricultores de Colombia. See Colombian Agricultural Society sociopolitical regionalism, 59–60 Solá, Antonio, 113 soldiers: Colombian security and, 116–17; guerilla numbers and, 120; in rural Colombia, 75 Soldiers for a Day program, 134 sonorenses. See upper-class citizens Southern Border Plan, 200 Southern epistemologies, 15 Spanish colonial rule, 26–27 Spanish conquest, 14–15, 24 Spanish people, perception as naturally superior, 14–15 Special Jurisdiction for Peace, 197 Special Unit on Investigation of Organized Crime, 124 SPP. See Secretary for Planning and Budget Standard Oil, 40 state: anti-abduction organizations and, 152–53; asymmetrical relationship with, 35; authoritarianism, 35;

276

Inde

discourse, 107–8; ensemble conflicts within, 64; FARC and, 69; heterogeneity of, 100; land allocation of, 44; policies, 4; practices against indigenous landowners, 187; restriction of role in economy of, 83; spatial strategies, 47–48; strategies as violent, 22; theory analysis, 22, 25, 57; use of force, 12–13, 56–57, 61 state agencies, land and, 168 state-AUC cooperation, 148 state coercion: coloniality and, 55, 194; private militias and, 61; property and, 162; race and, 53; security and, 4–5; state crime and, 55–57, 66, 158–59 statecraft, 54–55 state-crime collusion, 4–5, 10–11, 161 state crimes mural, 136 state ensemble, conflicts within, 194, 213n4 state heterogeneity, 157 state inaction, 137 state institutions: access to, 54; contradicting policies of, 14; operational logic, 175, 189–90 state intermediaries, 9, 164 state-nonstate alliances, 132 state-nonstate coercion continuum, in Colombia, 59–64, 68–69 state-nonstate relations, 4–5 state-paramilitary cooperation, 149 state power, coloniality of, 14, 16–17, 25, 54–58, 108, 163, 180, 189–90, 203 state security narratives, 106–7 state violence: impact of, 55; against protest, 11, 17, 21 strategic terrain, state as, 13–14 structural adjustment, 93–94 structural racism, 55 subaltern property, 44, 45 subordinate Indian, concept of, 14–15 subsistence farmers, 169–70 subsoil (subsuelo), 8, 169

sugar production, 48, 170 Supreme Court, of Colombia, 156–57, 212n11 Supreme Court, of Mexico, 65 systemic criminality, 4 Tamarindo, Colombia, 171 taxation, 9 tax reform, 204–5 tax regimes, 44 tax system, of Colombia, 37 teachers’ union protest, of Oaxaca, 78 Tello, Carlos, 41–42 temporary surface occupancy agreements, 173 terms of trade, for unprocessed products, 42 terrenos baldíos. See land in state ownership territorio (indigenous concept of land), 181 terrorism label, on NGOs, 119–20 terrorism sentences, as harsh, 64 threats, over land use, 189 El Tiempo (newspaper), 17, 18, 36–37, 70 title transfers, 183–84 tobacco exporters, 27–28 torture, 134–35, 138, 211n3 tourism, illegal capital and, 95 Tovar Pupo, Rodrigo, 72 Tovar Vélez, Jorge Rodrigo, 197 trade sector, 109–10 transformation, of war on drugs, 12 transit routes, to the United States, 97 transnational companies, 73, 92–94, 170 transnational connections, with illegal economy, 88 transnational security narratives, 109–12, 129–30 Trust for Covering Exchange Rate Risks (FICORA; Fideicomiso para la Cobertura de Riesgos Cambiarios), 43 Turbay Ayala, Julio César, 61

Inde

2000s, security policies in, 4 Unidas de Despliegue Rápido. See United Fast Deployment Forces unionists, targeting of, 66 Unión Patriótica (UP), 31 United Fast Deployment Forces (FUDRA; Unidas de Despliegue Rápido), 70 United Fruit massacre, 60 United Nations: human rights conferences, 31; identification of disappearances by, 137 United Nations Human Security concept, 111 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 85 United Nations Single Convention, 84 United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC; Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia), 62–63, 70–72, 118, 135–36, 144–49, 156; commanders of, 188, 197; forced displacement and, 170; state violence and, 158; transnational business interests of, 155 United States (US), 42, 91; antidrug operations, 81; AUC and, 155; relationship with Latin America of, 110, 113; security agencies, 109–10 university students, disappearance of, 2, 66, 193, 201 unstable alliances, 131–32 UP. See Unión Patriótica UPOE. See Oaxaca’s Special Operations Police Unit upper-class citizens (sonorenses), 33 Urabá, Antioquia, 63–64 Uribe, Mario, 157 Uribe Vélez, Alvaro, 6–7, 8–9, 17, 23, 69–73; AUC and, 145–47, 155–56; election of, 119; extreme positioning of, 193–94; FARC and, 116–17; illegal economy and, 101; land and, 172, 182; police arrests and, 134;

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protests and, 140; transnational security and, 113 US. See United States US-influenced Latin America, 55, 91, 210n1 (ch. 4) US Political Instability Task Force, 6 US South Florida Task Force, 97 Valdéz Villareal, Edgar, 151–52 Valencia, César Julio, 157 Valencia Cossio, Guillermo, 156–57 valorization, 164–65 value, extraction of, 192–93 Vargas Lleras, Germán, 23 Vásquez, Bernardo, 177 Velázquez, María Elisa, 24 ventanilla siniestra. See dark window Verdad Abierta archive, 18 victims: of paramilitary violence, 147–48; as unworthy of protection, 129–30 Villa Castillo, Carlos Bibiano, 123 Villanueva, Mario, 95 violence: contemporary context of, 9; of development of Escobar, 39; in Global South, 56; private, 61–62; role of state in, 3–4; war on drugs and, 1 La Violencia (The Violence), 10, 29–30, 45–46 Visión 2030 (strategy paper), 121 voter turnout, low, 119 War of a Thousand Days, 28 war on drugs. See specific topics Washington Consensus, 38 Western Cauca, 27 white Creole elites, 16 whites, privileged position of, 15–16 WikiLeaks, 17–18 Will, Bradley, 78 World Bank, 37–38, 47 “yellow union” arrangements, 35 Yucatán, 168

278

El Yunque, 76 Zapata, Emiliano, 48 Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN; Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), 1, 50 Zapatista Other Campaign, 76–77

Inde

Zapatista peasant uprising, 48, 166 Zapatista support movement, 1, 76–77 Zavaleta, René, 17 Zedillo, Ernesto, 74, 90 Zeta group, 124–25, 151 zonas de rehabilitación. See rehabilitation zones

About the Author

Alke Jenss is a senior researcher at Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute Freiburg (University of Freiburg) and leads the institute’s Contested Governance research cluster. She holds a PhD from the Sociology Institute at PhilippsUniversity Marburg, Germany (summa cum laude). Her research is situated at the intersection of critical political economy, state theory, urban (in-)security, and development studies with particular reference to Latin America. Her current research project analyzes the decision-making practices and emerging new spatialities of in/security brought about by transnational (renewable energies) infrastructures. She has published widely on authoritarianism and insecurity, in journals such as Globalizations, Political Geography, Latin American Research Review, and Global Crime.

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