The Secret History of Paramilitarism: Capitalist Insurrections in Colombia’s 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

The dissertation explores and questions the commonly held view that paramilitaries began in Colombia in the 1980s as unofficial counterinsurgency groups designed to fight leftist guerrillas. While this characterization of contemporary paramilitarism is true, it does not shed light on the fact that since the beginning of the 20th century it is possible to see similar groups involved in the violent imposition of the capitalist mode of production. Nor does it illuminate the fundamental and foundational relation between paramilitarism and Colombia’s national cultural history.

I explore in my dissertation how Colombia was built on different forms of paramilitary force that were embedded at the beginning of the 20 th century in regimes of accumulation such as rubber (in the South of the country and lead by Peruvian Amazon Company) and banana (in the North and lead by United Fruit Company). As such, in my dissertation, I argue that paramilitarism is the linchpin of transnational control with extractive purposes, whose interests are rooted in English and American imperialism, respectively. The dissertation maintains that paramilitarism lies at the heart of Colombian nation-state formation without being part of the State Apparatus; it gives form to the nomos of the Nation-State, and to the seizure, division, and administration of space. It also shows how, on the one hand, paramilitarism can be the rubber's company private army of indigenous people: the muchachos de confianza or “the boys”, whose main role is to execute violence on the company's slaves and wage the war for land accumulation and rubber extraction monopoly. On the other hand, it exposes how paramilitarism can also be the use of monopoly's violence by Colombia's National Army in defense of the fruit company's interests and against the striking workers who refused to keep working under dubious conditions.

The dissertation establishes as paramilitarism particular characteristics: its offensive fight according to the dispossession and expropriation of the land; the waging of a war as an economic insurrection, and a condition of being outside of normative limits (limits like friend-enemy, the Public International Law that rules war among Nation-States, visible-invisible, official-unofficial) or in a place where they are blurred.

The research focuses on the analysis of The Vortex (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez. It puts them in dialogue with regional maps and photographs from Thomas Whiffen's book The North-West Amazons: Notes of Some Months Spent Among Cannibal Tribes (1915), United Fruit Company advertising maps and photographs, as well as issues of its Unifruitco magazine. The analysis shows how paramilitarism presence has been silenced, in many cases by a transculturation discourse, according to the modern ideology of economic progress and development. The latter sees as necessary Colombia's entry into the global market and silences the way in which the modern nation is supported on the ruins left by paramilitary limpiezas and the battlefield established by paramilitarism foundational violence, in accordance to capitalist accumulation.