The Paramilitary War of Position

This chapter examines the practices by which paramilitaries sought to methodically build a state presence in the region. The construction of schools and other populist actions were not simply smoke screens for the paramilitaries' drug-fueled criminal economies, nor were they just the egotistical self-indulgence of a few charismatic commanders. Or rather, as this chapter shows, they were those things but also much more. The war of position was a genuine state project; it was a deliberate attempt to create a durable new regime of accumulation and rule. And for the most part it succeeded. Paramilitary statecraft, however, was not the mechanical imposition of a preexisting blueprint; the war of position was a contingent, negotiated process that proceeded (had to proceed) through a mix of coercion and consent among rural communities.

Introduction

This introductory chapter briefly explores the ways in which imaginaries of statelessness have structured the political life of Urabá, Colombia. It argues that Colombia's violent conflicts have produced surprisingly coherent and resilient regimes of accumulation and rule—yet this is not to say they are benevolent. In order to do so, this chapter approaches the state as a dynamic ensemble of relations that is both an effect and an instrument of competing political strategies and relations of power. In Urabá, groups from across the political spectrum, armed and otherwise, all end up trying to give concrete coherence to the inherently unwieldy abstraction of the state in a space where it supposedly does not exist. The way this absence exerts a generative political influence is what this chapter establishes as the “frontier effect.” The frontier effect describes how the imaginary of statelessness in these spaces compels all kinds of actors to get into the business of state formation; it thrusts groups into the role of would-be state builders.

The Masquerades of Grassroots Development

This chapter dissects how grassroots development initiatives enabled the creation of a vast criminal economy. Paramilitaries' use of grassroots development went beyond simply whitewashing their plunder with fashionable, politically correct development-speak. The discourses, institutions, and practices of grassroots development formed an integral part of the paras' extralegal political economy. In the context of the frontier effect, grassroots development made their economies of violence surprisingly compatible with formal projects of liberal state building. The paramilitaries turned grassroots development into a vehicle both for executing their massive land grabs and for promoting, in their words, the “arrival of the state.” As a strategic assemblage of discourses, practices, and institutional formations, the grassroots development apparatus did more than simply give the paras' economic ventures a veneer of symbolic legitimacy; it also enabled and worked in conjunction with the concrete practices of paramilitary rule. Grassroots development was thus both a means of state building and a way of laundering their violently and illegally accumulated landholdings.