Self-Defense groups, in those states we were the ones collecting taxes, we delivered justice, and we had the military and territorial control of the region and all the people who wanted to go into politics had to come and deal with the political representatives we had there.
It is not difficult to imagine the effect of this extent of paramilitary control of politics and society on economic institutions and public policy. The expansion of the AUC was not a peaceful affair. The group not only fought against the FARC, but also murdered innocent civilians and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) of the Norwegian Refugee Council, in early 2010 around 10 percent of Colombia’s population, nearly 4.5 million people, was internally displaced. The paramilitaries also, as Mancuso suggested, took over the government and all its functions, except that the taxes they collected were just expropriation for their own pockets. An extraordinary pact between the paramilitary leader Martín Llanos (real name: Héctor Germán Buitrago) and the mayors of the municipalities of Tauramena, Aguazul, Maní, Villanueva, Monterrey, and Sabanalarga, in the department of Casanare in eastern Colombia, lists the following rules to which the mayors had to adhere by order of the “Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare”:
9) Give 50 percent of the municipality budget to be managed by the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare.
10) 10 percent of each and every contract of the municipality [to be given to the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare].
11) Mandatory assistance to all the meetings called by the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare.
12) Inclusion of the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare in every infrastructure project.
13) Affiliation to the new political party formed by the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare.
14) Accomplishment of his/hers governance program.
Casanare is not a poor department. On the contrary, it has the highest level of per capita income of any Colombian department, because it has significant oil deposits, just the kind of resources that attract paramilitaries. In fact, once they gained power, the paramilitaries intensified their systematic expropriation of property. Mancuso himself reputedly accumulated $25 million worth of urban and rural property. Estimates of land expropriated in Colombia by paramilitaries are as high as 10 percent of all rural land.
Colombia is not a case of a failed state about to collapse. But it is a state without sufficient centralization and with far-from-complete authority over all its territory. Though the state is able to provide security and public services in large urban areas such as Bogotá and Barranquilla, there are significant parts of the country where it provides few public services and almost no law and order. Instead, alternative groups and people, such as Mancuso, control politics and resources. In parts of the country, economic institutions function quite well, and there are high levels of human capital and entrepreneurial skill; in other parts the institutions are highly extractive, even failing to provide a minimal degree of state authority.
It might be hard to understand how a situation like this can sustain itself for decades, even centuries. But in fact, the situation has a logic of its own, as a type of vicious circle. Violence and the absence of centralized state institutions of this type enter into a symbiotic relationship with politicians running the functional parts of the society. The symbiotic relationship arises because national politicians exploit the lawlessness in peripheral parts of the country, while paramilitary groups are left to their own devices by the national government.
This pattern became particularly apparent in the 2000s. In 2002 the presidential election was won by Álvaro Uribe. Uribe had something in common with the Castaño brothers: his father had been killed by the FARC. Uribe ran a campaign repudiating the attempts of the previous administration to try to make peace with the FARC. In 2002 his vote share was 3 percentage points higher in areas with paramilitaries than without them. In 2006, when he was reelected, his vote share was 11 percentage points higher in such areas. If Mancuso and his partners could deliver the vote for Congress and the Senate, they could do so in presidential elections as well, particularly for a president strongly aligned with their worldview and likely to be lenient on them. As Jairo Angarita, Salvatore Mancuso’s deputy and the former leader of the AUC’s Sinú and San Jorge blocs, declared in September 2005, he was proud to work for the “reelection of the best president we have ever had.”
Once elected, the paramilitary senators and congressmen voted for what