The Colombian Context

Colombia offers a unique context to explore how civic organizations and armed nonstate actors interact with one another in the context of civil war. In recent history, leftist insurgents, right-wing paramilitaries, and neoparamilitary criminal groups have tensely occupied the same proximate spaces. Civic organizations are similarly ubiquitous throughout Colombia, providing a promising starting point for comparing how armed groups relate to local civic organizations across space and time.

Most of the established literature on the Colombian civil war focuses on how various competing actors battle one another for control of territory, resources, and even political power (González et al. Reference González, Bolívar and Vásquez2003; Echandía 2006; López Hernández Reference López Hernández2010). The modest research that does explore the intersection of civic organizations and armed actors provides conflicting evidence as to the nature of these relationships. Oliver Kaplan’s detailed analysis of one such rural civic organization in the Magdelena Medio region, the Peasant Worker Association of the Carare River (Asociación de Trabajadores Campesinos del Carare, ATCC), suggests that organizational endowments “permit institutional solutions to avoid participation in the conflict, manage internal community order to limit armed groups’ inroads, and demand accountability from these groups” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan2013, 352). Conversely, Gutiérrez Sanín and Barón’s comprehensive case study (2005) of a paramilitary bloc in the same region demonstrates how this group depended on a civic organization it had created, the Peasant and Cattle Ranchers’ Association of Magdalena Medio (Asociación de Campesinos y Ganaderos del Magdalena Medio, ACDEGAM), to coordinate both civic and military activities.

Ana Arjona’s intricate study of three neighboring villages in central Colombia finds that rebel rule varied dramatically based on the quality of preexisting institutions, and that those communities with strong organizational mechanisms for resolving collective action problems “are not only more willing to resist but also more capable of doing so” (2016a, 101). In contrast, María Clemencia Ramírez’s stellar work (2011) on the formidable peasant coca growers’ movement in the southern department of Putumayo reveals that networks of local civic organizations were instrumental in mobilizing peasants to participate in protests that had been planned and coordinated by insurgent groups.

This article expands on the latter line of inquiry by exploring how armed nonstate actors are able to maximize their control over territory, people, and preexisting institutions by “co-opting the civic sphere,” a term that refers to the process by which armed groups appropriate the public space where civilians interact and organize by establishing clear parameters that shape all subsequent individual or group interactions. These groups may do this by assuming control of preexisting civic organizations directly or indirectly, or by encouraging and fostering their creation in the absence of any such organizational infrastructure.

Most, if not all, comparative works on Colombian insurgent and paramilitary groups focus on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) and the AUC because of their expansive territorial presence (Gutiérrez Sanin 2008; Saab and Taylor 2009; CH et al. 2018). In contrast, there is no similar research comparing the ELN and the AUC, even though these two decentralized organizations demonstrate considerable variation at the subnational level, offering a wide array of potential pairings to examine “important outcomes that are difficult to detect with a national level lens” (Giraudy et al. Reference Giraudy, Moncada, Snyder, Giraudy and Snyder2019, 5; Daly Reference Daly2016; ICRC 2018). This article addresses this research gap by comparing two immensely powerful subnational armed units from the ELN and the AUC, highlighting the common benefits accrued from a civic-minded strategy deployed by actors who otherwise possess diametrically opposing ideological agendas, divergent repertoires of violence, and different theaters of combat.

Following the near-elimination of the ELN at the hands of the Colombian military during the 1970s, the struggling insurgent group was able to reconstitute itself as an active belligerent at the national level only due to the quick rise and success of the Domingo Laín Front in the Araucan piedmont during the following decade (Feldmann Reference Feldmann2018; Peñate Reference Peñate, Deas and Llorente1999). By the 1990s, this fighting unit was “one of the most powerful and best-armed guerrilla fronts in the country” (Semana 2007). It emerged as the most dominant armed actor in Arauca after a decade of intense conflict with the Colombian military, regional paramilitary groups, and the FARC in the 2000s (Human Rights Activist 1 2016).

The Elmer Cárdenas Bloc, by contrast, was the organic successor to the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, ACCU), the powerful paramilitary group that was the key proponent behind the creation of the AUC in 1997. Although the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc formally demobilized in 2006, the successor neoparamilitary group, which inherited both its social infrastructure and hundreds of its former fighters, the Gulf Clan (el Clan del Golfo), is at present the largest criminal band of its kind in Colombia, maintaining an active presence in 211 municipalities throughout the country (Indepaz 2017).

Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín (Reference Gutiérrez Sanín2019) suggests that small-n comparative work on armed groups ought to prioritize the larger and more powerful of these units, given their capacity to govern beyond the micro- and even mesolevel. A testament to the enduring strength of the Domingo Laín Front and the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc can be seen in the Colombian state’s ongoing inability to establish a monopoly on violence in their historic territorial bases in Arauca and Urabá, a limitation that owes much to the deep embeddedness these groups have achieved in and beyond these particular zones.

Even though “insurgents and right-wing paramilitary groups differed in their approaches to capture the state” (CH et al. 2018, 1000), both the Domingo Laín Front and the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc employed a common strategy of co-opting the civic sphere to achieve “nested governance” in Arauca and Urabá. This concept refers to the manner in which armed nonstate actors insert themselves between communities of people and the state in order to control and regulate formal and informal processes between the two parties according to their own interests and objectives. Nested governance effectively enables armed groups to bridge informal processes typically ascribed to criminal organizations, such as the indirect rule of local populations, territory, and illegal rackets, with more formal processes centered on legal economic activities, electoral contests, and bureaucratic-administrative institutions, all of which are nominally administered by the state (Duncan Reference Duncan2014).

The concept of nested governance follows in the steps of previous works that highlight the complex layering of different yet interconnected modes of governance at the national and subnational levels, all of which constrain political actors and their policies (Ostrom Reference Ostrom1990; Sinha Reference Sinha2005). Historically, Colombia has been characterized by different levels of political competition in which national political elites “effectively delegated the running of the countryside and other peripheral areas to local elites”—powerful individuals who governed these regional fiefdoms as they saw fit, all “in exchange for political support and not challenging the center” (Robinson Reference Robinson2013, 44). Over the course of the current civil war, armed units from leftist insurgent groups and right-wing paramilitary organizations have inserted themselves into these subnational dynamics in an attempt to control people and territory, sometimes forging alliances with malleable regional elites, in other cases bypassing them entirely.

Garay Salamanca et al. (Reference Salamanca, Jorge, Salcedo-Albarán, de León-Beltrán and Guerrero2008) label this phenomenon “the co-opted reconfiguration of the state,” a term that refers to legal and illegal organizations that employ illegitimate practices to change the regional political order “to obtain sustainable benefits for their own advantage and to ensure that their interests are validated politically and legally” (2008, 96). Nested governance adheres to a similar logic, but instead of focusing solely on how armed nonstate actors place themselves as interlocutors between macro- and mesolevel political institutions and the communities they purportedly govern, this concept also takes into account how these groups navigate formal and informal processes of a social and economic character (Arjona et al. Reference Arjona2015).

The explicit focus of this article on civic organizations, and more broadly the civic sphere, is for purposes of conceptual simplicity. There is no consensus in the social sciences as to what constitutes civil society, broadly speaking. The specific focus on civic organizations provides a clearer baseline for comparative analysis and, by extension, greater methodological rigor. Civic organizations are herein defined as organized groups of people that, at a minimum, sustain a modest participation for a period of time in the pursuit of a common objective, often for the betterment of their community, while also adhering to a commonly agreed on set of rules and principles internal to the organization.Footnote ¹ Civic organizations can be formal and highly structured or informal and rudimentary, yet they are not directed by the state, and they constitute a component of what is popularly referred to as civil society.

The empirical basis for this article comes from 65 semistructured field interviews conducted with local constituents in Arauca and Urabá—civil servants, community leaders, religious leaders, human rights and peace activists, local researchers and journalists, municipal politicians, and peasant farmers—over a 3-year period. While all of them provided important context, only 14 are directly cited, on the basis of their confirmed veracity in respect to the central arguments of this article. Field interviews conducted in conflict settings are heavily influenced by a participant’s “present political loyalties, beliefs concerning the likely consequences of participating in the interview and of expressing particular views, and present personal objectives” (Wood Reference Wood2003, 35). To avoid presenting false or misleading information, the interviews selected to appear in this article were cross-analyzed with other reliable primary and secondary sources, including academic texts, independent reports, legal documents, and media articles. All interview participants remain anonymous for purposes of security, as do the names of several active civic organizations in the Araucan piedmont. All translations are the author’s.

A Brief History of Armed Insurgency and Civic Activism in Colombia

The tumultuous beginnings of organized peasant and labor movements in Colombia date back to the first half of the twentieth century (LeGrand Reference LeGrand1986). Following a vicious midcentury armed conflict—referred to in Colombia as la Violencia—that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, the early power-sharing agreement between the Liberal and Conservative Parties known as the National Front sought to pacify the countryside over the course of the 1960s (Karl Reference Karl2017).

In 1958, the national government approved Law 19, which created the autonomous community action boards (Juntas de Acción Comunal, JACs), democratic civic organizations established at the neighborhood and village levels throughout Colombia to “serve as the formal interlocutor between citizens and the state” (Arjona Reference Arjona2016a, 106). The impetus for the JACs first came from the national government, although the community action boards “were not imposed by the state.” Instead, it was up to communities themselves to assemble and sustain these organizations over time, and therefore these “clearly fall in the realm of local civil society” (Kaplan Reference Kaplan2017, 80).

Two years after the JACs were created, Law 135 was passed, in a partial attempt at agrarian reform. This policy also led to the creation of the Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform (Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria, INCORA), a state agency tasked with distributing property titles to landless peasants throughout the Colombian countryside. In order to give rural inhabitants the requisite organization they needed to carry out this reform, the National Association of Peasant Users (Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos, ANUC) was formed in 1967 (Fals Borda Reference Fals Borda1976). Yet despite the National Front’s numerous efforts to rectify longstanding rural grievances with the center, these policies ultimately proved unable to prevent the emergence of various new leftist insurgent groups in rural zones throughout Colombia during the 1960s (Palacios Reference Palacios2006).

In the face of these new insurgencies, civic organizations, such as cooperatives (cooperativas), trade guilds (gremios), agrarian unions, and other voluntary associations, continued to spring up in Colombia throughout the 1970s (Fals Borda Reference Fals Borda, Escobar and Álvarez1992). Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the armed confrontation between the expanding guerrilla organizations, the Colombian armed forces, and the AUC (a decentralized federation of different regional paramilitary groups) escalated dramatically (González et al. 2003). Whereas the ANUC experienced a pronounced decline in the 1980s, due to internal fragmentation and the worsening violence, the JACs effectively became the most important civic organizations in the country, especially following the political decentralization enacted by the 1991 Constitution (Zamosc Reference Zamosc1986; Ballvé Reference Ballvé2013).

The first decade of the new millennium saw a dramatic reversal in insurgent fortunes with the implementation of a nationwide counterinsurgency strategy supported by massive infusions of U.S. military aid (Porch and Delgado Reference Porch and Delgado2010). With leftist insurgent groups on the ropes, then-president Juan Manuel Santos (2010–18) publicly initiated peace negotiations with the FARC in 2012, leading finally to the 2016 peace accord (ICRC 2018). During this period, Colombian civil society experienced an unprecedented boom in both grassroots and transnational activism, often in response to the escalation and deescalation of the armed conflict, as a wide array of organizations promoting development, human rights and security, and the environment emerged (Tate Reference Tate2007; Montoya and Vallejo Reference Montoya and Vallejo2016).

Seizing the Civic Sphere from Within: The Domingo Laín Front

The department of Arauca is located in the Eastern Plains region and is bounded by Boyacá Department to the west, the Venezuelan state of Apure to the north and east, and the departments of Casanare and Vichada to the south and southeast. Arauca’s seven municipalities are divided between two distinct subregions: the piedmont (Arauquita, Saravena, Fortul, and the western and northern parts of Tame), and the plains (Arauca municipality, Cravo Norte, Puerto Rondón, and southeastern Tame).Footnote ² Following the end of la Violencia in the late 1950s, peasant migrants began arriving in the unsettled piedmont to live and work on family-held plots of land, establishing an exemplary smallholding agrarian model over time.

The harsh realities of the colonization zone were amplified by the lack of basic infrastructure and services, as the only visible state presence in the subregion was INCORA (Carroll Reference Carroll2011). When this bureaucracy became mired in corruption in the 1970s, the local ANUC leadership convened a series of civic strikes that mobilized virtually the entire piedmont population (Plazas Díaz 2017). The state’s response was repressive, provoking local peasant leaders to arm themselves in defense of their communities (Gutiérrez Lemus and González Arias 2008). By 1980, the Domingo Laín Front of the ELN announced its formation when a handful of recently recruited insurgents launched a deadly attack on a police outpost in Betoyes (Tame), killing four while forcing eight others to surrender their weapons (El Espectador 2014).Footnote ³

The first-generation leadership of the Domingo Laín Front was composed of former local leaders of the ANUC and the JACs in the piedmont, and most of the civic leaders in communities under their control “either joined them or began to support their project” (Regional Peace Activist 2016). The insurgent unit grew rapidly in the piedmont over the course of the subsequent two decades; by the mid- 1990s, the front boasted two specialized mobile units, nine active commissions, and a vast network of militia members (El Tiempo 1996; ACNUR 2007).

During this period, the group eliminated all rival claimants to power, as selective acts of violence increased against recalcitrant local figureheads of authority. Even though the FARC’s Tenth Front had established its presence in the piedmont mere months before the Domingo Laín Front emerged, the ELN quickly became the more powerful of the two groups in Arauca because of its skillful extortion of the department’s oil industry. In 1985 and 1986, Arauca began to produce massive amounts of oil for export, and the Domingo Laín Front began frequently to attack the department’s oil infrastructure while kidnapping personnel working for the oil multinationals in exchange for financial remuneration, practices that endured well into the twenty-first-century (Gutiérrez Lemus 2010). The ELN in Arauca deployed a strategy of “co-optation, subordination, and submission of local power structures such as social organizations,” infiltrating and co-opting the extensive preexisting networks of civic organizations and encouraging the formation of new ones to help advance both the group’s interests and those of local peasant communities (Marín Carvajal and Andrés Cajaio 2015, 23).

The Domingo Laín Front’s strategy for maximizing its social standing in the piedmont was based on monopolizing control of community action boards, a gambit that, from the late 1980s on, engendered fiercely fought JAC elections between two candidates backed by either the FARC or the ELN (Rural JAC President 2016). In a short time, the “JACs depended one hundred percent on the insurgent groups,” although the Domingo Laín Front was more successful than the FARC’s Tenth Front at controlling local community action boards, peasant cooperatives, trade guilds, and agrarian unions (Religious Leader 1 2016). By the early 1990s, such was the ELN’s control of the JACs in the piedmont that local military and police attachments stopped sending messages to peasant communities via the community action boards because they knew that these had “ceased to be trustworthy vehicles” to pass along official information to rural inhabitants (González Reference González1991).

Over these two decades, the Domingo Laín Front deployed numerous civic and armed strikes to add considerable weight behind local demands, and participation in these mobilizations was “obligatory in character” (Ex–Civil Servant Reference Servant2016). The insurgents used the JACs to coordinate these strikes by prohibiting any civilian freeriding, and the success of this strategy to gain concessions for peasant communities advanced a key goal of the ELN: to “help legitimize popular organizations in such a way as to appear fair and necessary before the broader majority of the population” (UC-ELN 1990, 81). Numerous ecclesiastical, human rights, and indigenous civic organizations were founded during this period and were able to operate with a degree of autonomy in relation to the Domingo Laín Front, yet only insofar as they obeyed the group’s directives and the parameters it had established throughout the piedmont (Peasant Farmer 2018).

After more than two decades of growth and consolidation, the Domingo Laín Front was so powerful in Arauca that it officiated at local weddings and handpicked the department’s governors. However, at the beginning of the new millennium, the FARC was aggressively moving into illicit activities that the Domingo Laín Front had previously monopolized (Marín Carvajal 2014). To further complicate matters, the paramilitary Arauca Conquerors Bloc (Bloque Vencedores de Arauca, BVA) entered the department and violently seized control of the plains in 2001 (CNMH 2015). Alvaro Uribe assumed the presidency the following year and instantly designated Arauca to be one of his first counterinsurgency targets, a decision that increased the Colombian military’s presence in the department considerably. The FARC and the ELN coordinated joint security operations in order to prevent the BVA from entering the piedmont, but many local politicians, activists, and peasant leaders were incarcerated, assassinated, or exiled from the department (Amnesty International 2004).

The demobilization of the BVA in 2005 provided little respite, as longstanding tensions between the FARC and the ELN in Arauca erupted into a full-scale war between the guerrilla groups. A truce was brokered in 2010 (Mejia 2010). The Domingo Laín Front won the conflict and retained control of the piedmont, purportedly due to the group’s extensive social networks and control of piedmont civic organizations. The latter tellingly remained “strong, extremely well networked, unified with respect to social movement actions, and extraordinarily successful,” even during the worst of the interguerrilla violence (Carroll Reference Carroll2011, 228). This Pyrrhic victory ultimately left close to a thousand dead and an estimated fifty thousand refugees displaced in the department alone (Human Rights Activist 1 2016). As the regional armed conflict deescalated in subsequent years, the Domingo Laín Front continued to be the most powerful armed nonstate actor in northeast Colombia, having survived violent challenges from the BVA, the Colombian military, and the FARC.

Building the Civic Sphere from Above: The Elmer Cárdenas Bloc

The Urabá region consists of 15 municipalities spread across 2 different departments (Antioquia, Chocó) in this remote corner of northwestern Colombia.Footnote ⁴ Urabá remained an underpopulated tropical frontier until the United Fruit Company shifted its operations from Magdalena Department to the “banana axis” (the municipalities of Turbo, Apartadó, Carepa, and Chigorodó) in the early 1960s (Bucheli Reference Bucheli2005). The rapid influx of migrants, along with the lack of state institutions, gave rise to “quite an intense organizational process” in the colonization zone, with new arrivals “settling the new territory and rapidly joining all kinds of associations,” most notably local trade unions (Garcia 1996, 108).

This highly unionized rural proletariat attracted the attention of leftist insurgent groups, such as the Popular Liberation Army (Ejército Popular de Liberación, EPL), which quickly expanded into the zone and “managed to exercise political and military predominance” in Urabá until the arrival of the FARC in the mid-1970s (CINEP 1995, 21). By the late 1980s, both insurgent groups had consolidated control of the region through their growing influence within the powerful trade unions and local political institutions (Romero Reference Romero2003; Steele Reference Steele2017). After the EPL opted to demobilize in 1991, a dissident faction of the group allied with local FARC detachments and attacked their former comrades, while the demobilized guerrillas, in turn, sought protection from their new enemies by taking up arms in collaboration with the Colombian army’s 17th Brigade and other local paramilitary groups (Municipal Politician Reference Politician2015).

In 1994, the ACCU was cobbled together from the remnants of the regional paramilitary chief’s predecessor group and deployed to Urabá in order to seize control of the region once and for all, converting Urabá into the most violent region in Colombia (Verdad Abierta 2011a). Supported by the Colombian military, the ACCU unleashed a massive wave of violence against civilians, forcibly displacing entire communities so that these vacated properties could be “purchased cheaply” by individuals sympathetic to the paramilitary cause, in a deliberate attempt “to rid the region of guerrillas and their perceived supporters” (Human Rights Watch 1998, 103).

By 1997, joint efforts between the Colombian military and the ACCU had expelled what remained of the FARC in Urabá to remote mountain hideouts in the Serranía de Abibe, a feat made possible by the paramilitary group’s successful recruitment of former guerrillas, who knew the region’s terrain and its people intimately (Local Researcher 2015). With the nationwide consolidation of the AUC, the ACCU was subsequently divided into two paramilitary blocs, which would continue to exercise control over the region: the Bananero Bloc in the banana axis and the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc in northern Urabá and Chocó. The latter of these paramilitary units quickly became the most powerful actor in northwestern Colombia, under the command of a 22-year-old named Freddy “El Alemán” Rendón Herrera (Verdad Abierta 2011b).

Whereas the Bananero Bloc retained control of regional trade unions, the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc supported its activities through illegal land grabs, extortion, and control of all contraband entering and leaving the country through the Gulf of Urabá (Romero Reference Romero2003; Ballvé Reference Ballvé2013). Inheriting a territory largely bereft of local civil society, El Alemán continued the ACCU’s previous social outreach campaign, organizing the movement Popular Peasant Power, which trained and converted his wounded soldiers to become Social Development Promoters (Promotores de Desarrollo Social, PDS). These promoters were tasked with creating JACs in the group’s zone of influence, overseeing the JACs’ community initiatives, and coordinating these activities with local politicians (Verdad Abierta 2011a). Another paramilitary civic organization, the Community Association of Northern Urabá and Western Córdoba (Asociación Comunitaria del Norte de Urabá y Occidente Cordobés, ASO- COMÚN), oversaw and coordinated all local development initiatives with financial backing from local political institutions, state agencies, and even international donors, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

With the creation of numerous civic organizations in Urabá, the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc “co-opted a large part of the social life of the zone, above which it exercised influence, monopolizing the mechanisms of civic participation” (Tribunal Superior Bogotá 2011, 220). Simultaneously, the bloc expanded into northern Chocó, forcibly depopulating and deforesting massive tracts of this newly conquered territory, with the explicit aim of converting the previous smallholding peasant economy into one centered on agribusiness and extensive cattle ranching (Barbosa 2015). This territorial reconfiguration was overseen by the Agricultural and Social Project (Proyecto Agrícola y Social, PASO), yet another civic organization created by the bloc (Semana 2006).

Under paramilitary rule, Urabá became a zone replete with sentries, informants, and spies in every town and village (Madariaga Reference Madariaga2006). These vast networks of local intelligence fortified the paramilitary group’s territorial control by ensuring compliance and order in the disparate communities throughout the region. The Elmer Cárdenas Bloc maintained complete social control throughout its territory by punishing any transgression with extreme violence, and such was its dominance that rural habitants recognized that in their region “paramilitarism and the state are the same thing” (Semana 2006). Demonstrative of this, the group’s political project successfully placed dozens of candidates in municipal, departmental, and national level political posts between 1998 and 2006 (CNMH 2018).

At its apex, the bloc maintained some 1,500 formal combatants spread across 6 fronts in Antioquia and Chocó, a fighting force that left behind a tally of 11,127 victims murdered or disappeared and another 150,908 individuals forcibly displaced from their homes (Espinosa Reference Espinosa2012; Verdad Abierta 2011a). When the majority of Colombia’s paramilitary blocs demobilized between 2003 and 2005, the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc stayed active, only to disband in 2006 on its own terms (Daly Reference Daly2016). However, as the group demobilized, thousands of demobilized paramilitaries who had fought elsewhere in Colombia returned home to Urabá, among them El Alemán’s brother, Daniel “Don Mario” Rendón Herrera (IPC de Medellín 2009). Following his brother’s demobilization and subsequent incarceration from 2006 to 2015, Don Mario quickly assumed control of the regional paramilitary infrastructure, including the vast network of civic organizations, and in a short time converted what remained of the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc into the Gulf Clan (CNMH 2016).Footnote ⁵ Even though Don Mario was captured and incarcerated in 2009, this group continues to control Urabá and is now the largest and most powerful neoparamilitary group in Colombia.

Controlling the Civic Sphere: Enabling Nested Governance

Stathis Kalyvas suggests that “civil war is, at its core, a process of integration and statebuilding” (Reference Kalyvas2006, 14). Competition between armed actors and the state can therefore be interpreted as a battle to determine how contested regions will ultimately be governed and subsequently integrated into the rest of the country. Subnational armed units such the ELN’s Domingo Laín Front or the AUC’s Elmer Cárdenas Bloc insert themselves into regional dynamics, where they attempt to control “civilians and the territory upon which they reside” in order to construct and protect their nonstate social orders (Arjona Reference Arjona2015, 1). Selective and indiscriminate violence can serve a useful function in establishing such social orders (Gutiérrez Sanín and Wood 2017), although excessive abuse and coercion can also dissuade potential civilian bases of support from collaborating with armed groups (Berman et al. Reference Berman, Jacob and Joseph2011). Thus, if these actors wish to consolidate control over territory, economies, preexisting institutions, and most important, people, they need to develop and adapt alternative means of navigating both formal and informal processes that are found in such subnational dynamics.

With regard to informal processes, armed actors can control local territory and populations through the effective deployment of violence against both civilians and the state, while they can also overtly regulate illegal economies, such as extortion, kidnapping, contraband, and drug trafficking (Beckert and Dewey Reference Beckert and Dewey2017). However, as Gustavo Duncan (Reference Duncan2014) highlights, such groups are typically unable to invest the proceeds from such economic activities into the legal economy, due to the certain likelihood of state forfeiture. It would be similarly problematic for such groups to participate directly in formal processes related to legal economic activities, electoral contests, and bureaucratic-administrative institutions. Ostensibly, these are all administered by the state, and thus armed nonstate actors need another means to capture power in these dynamics. The following three examples highlight how civic organizations helped these two subnational armed units to bridge these formal and informal processes in their zones of influence.

Protecting Agrarian Modalities While Legitimating Nonstate Assets

One of the key factors driving subnational conflict dynamics is contestation over regional land tenure patterns. In such contexts, different armed groups compete violently to control territory in a bid to determine how it is distributed, used, and administered. In Colombia, control of land means more than just wealth; it also represents “a centuries-old conflict for survival and identity” to disparate groups, all of which interpret “their own interests as the general interests of development and modernization” (Reyes Posada Reference Reyes Posada1987, 4).

Armed groups can thereby be viewed as agents of modernization, actors that “rely on distinctive internalized ideological worldviews” to help translate their preferences into action, particularly in regard to establishing their ideal agrarian model (Maynard Reference Maynard2019, 11). In order to administer and protect drastically different development paradigms in Arauca and Urabá, the Domingo Laín Front and the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc skillfully managed local civic organizations at their disposal to regulate productive forces according to their ideological parameters, while also using these vehicles to launder their assets in the legal economy.

The Domingo Laín Front protected the peasant smallholder system in the Araucan piedmont by directly regulating land sales, effectively vetting all migration into the region while preventing the entrance of large landholders. This rigorous control of local real estate ensured that the quasi-egalitarian land tenure system remained firmly in place (Community Activist 2016). The insurgent front also regulated and protected local modes of production from unscrupulous speculators and the vicissitudes of the market through a patchwork of peasant cooperatives and trade guilds (Human Rights Activist 2 2016). The vast network of cooperatives and trade guilds guaranteed peasant settlers access to agricultural equipment, expertise, credit, and markets, while also ensuring that duplicitous middlemen were unable to set unfair prices or avoid paying altogether (Peasant Farmer 2018).

The front’s infiltration of peasant cooperatives and trade guilds dates back to its emergence in 1980, when the group reportedly invested much of its initial capital into one prominent local piedmont cooperative and eventually became the secret owner of the enterprise (Ospina Reference Ospina1995). The rise of cooperatives surged after the Domingo Laín Front emerged in the piedmont. One peasant leader from rural Arauquita recalled that “from 1984 on there was a boom in cooperatives and the collective economy, which helped to regulate price speculation in the market and to better prepare ourselves in this regard” (Rural JAC President 2016).

The network of affiliated cooperatives proved to be quite a lucrative business, one that expanded the insurgent front’s legal portfolio in the larger department. Perhaps more important, these organizations gave the armed group the means to reinvest revenues generated elsewhere (Ospina Reference Ospina1995). However, this regulatory system was not without its downside. The insurgent group took advantage of its control over local JACs to siphon off public funds for its own purposes: it obliged its political allies to award contracts for local public works to those JACs. Some of those contracts were never fulfilled (Duque Reference Duque2017).

By the time the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc had consolidated control in northern Urabá, in Antioquia and Chocó, in the late 1990s, the agrarian social structures of the peasant communities had been completely conditioned to the paramilitary ethos of large cattle-ranching estates and commercial agribusiness interests at the expense of the peasant underclass. It is illustrative of this that the civic organization PASO was established with local- and national-level support from various state agencies, supposedly to implement productive community projects in which local cattle ranchers and large landholders would provide the land and landless peasants and demobilized fighters would contribute the necessary labor (Verdad Abierta 2011b). In reality, this community project was a “resettlement strategy” designed to convert rural land into “palm oil and timber agribusinesses” (Espinosa Reference Espinosa2012, 323). Furthermore, PASO was a means of protecting the paramilitary agrarian order by “serving as a form of control over the population” (Semana 2006), reducing victims of paramilitary violence and displacement to agricultural laborers “with their own victimizers as bosses” (Verdad Abierta 2011b).

With local properties “purged of their legitimate owners,” El Alemán sought to launder and legalize ownership of this stolen land years before the group’s demobilization through “a twisted brand of grassroots development” spearheaded by PASO (Ballvé Reference Ballvé2013, 87). The paramilitary commander saw things otherwise, of course, testifying during his demobilization hearing that all landowners and businesses under his bloc’s control saw the value of their assets appreciate, due to improved security (Verdad Abierta 2011a). Under his watch, all local civic organizations were expected to make voluntary contributions to the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc (Tribunal Superior Medellin 2014). Apart from funneling state resources toward development projects through ASOCOMÚN and PASO, the armed group also utilized this network of civic organizations to embezzle local government funds earmarked for public services, such as healthcare and education (Verdad Abierta 2011b).

Gutiérrez Sanín and Wood (2014, 215) maintain that ideology is fundamental for armed actors in shaping “distinct institutions and strategies as the means to attain group goals,” while Bert Suykens (Reference Suykens2015, 154) argues that ideology “affects how governance is implemented on the ground.” Even though the agricultural models of development and their primary stakeholders in the Araucan piedmont and Urabá were radically different—smallholder peasant migrants in the former, cattle ranchers and large landholders in the latter—both insurgent groups successfully deployed local civic organizations to promote and shield these landholding systems from external predation. Most civic organizations possess some form of legally recognized status, and can therefore be used to regulate formal economic transactions and to protect local landholding patterns. For the Domingo Laín Front, the preservation of the peasant migrant smallholding system was best served through the co-optation of preexisting cooperatives and trade guilds, whereas the Elmer Cárde- nas Bloc was forced to create new organizations, such as PASO, to legitimize the expansion of large-scale agribusiness and cattle ranching throughout Urabá. Both groups used civic organizations not only as a vehicle to promote, protect, and legalize their preferred agrarian modalities, but also to launder group assets in the formal economy, whether land, capital, or otherwise.

Votes and Candidates from Below, Patronage from Above

Many armed nonstate actors are actively contesting or supporting authoritarian regimes, and thus compete with their opponents outside of formal institutions. Others mobilize in contexts circumscribed by some degree of democratic rule, and thereby seek to challenge their adversaries in every arena possible, formal politics included (Matanock and Staniland Reference Matanock and Staniland2018).

Electoral politics and civil war have coexisted uneasily in Colombia since independence, with various armed nonstate actors managing their interactions with political parties and bureaucratic-administrative institutions in a myriad of ways (López Hernández Reference López Hernández2010). In the cases of the Domingo Laín Front and the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc, these subnational armed units successfully captured local and regional political power in what has been termed “armed clientelism,” or the capacity of armed groups to deliver local votes to allied politicians in exchange for increased access to municipal and departmental budgets and resources (Peñate Reference Peñate1998). The ability of these groups to control local civic organizations—especially the community action boards—was crucial to their success in capturing political power.

In the Araucan piedmont, most JACs were formed before the arrival of insurgent groups in the mid-to-late 1970s, initially operating with a high degree of autonomy. However, the Domingo Laín Front actively began to co-opt as many community action boards as it could, in order to counter the rise of the FARC in local electoral politics between 1986 and 1990. The sudden emergence of the FARC’s political party, the Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica, UP), worried piedmont politicians from the Liberal Party, some of whom went to the Domingo Laín Front and proposed an alliance (Peñate Reference Peñate1991). In exchange for protection from the FARC and local votes mobilized through the JACs under the ELN’s control, these elected officials would channel oil royalties from the departmental budget into local public goods and services, “generating a certain symbiosis between the group and the population” (Echandía Castilla Reference Castilla2015, 7). According to a former JAC president from Tame, these community projects were often proposed by the insurgent front itself (Ex–JAC President 2016).

Almost overnight, only those who were identified as followers of either the FARC or the ELN were able to participate in the JACs that were under that particular group’s flag (Peasant Farmer 2018). From this juncture on, the Domingo Laín Front’s strategy was “to expand inside the JACs in order to multiply its political projects,” a plan that saw numerous mayors and governors linked to the group hold office throughout the department (Religious Leader 2 2016). This mutually beneficial relationship has persisted to the present, as “the politicians obtain positions, status, and a salary,” while the front receives “resources to sustain its military operations and popular gratitude for the services and works it administers in its role as the state” (Duque Reference Duque2017). This strategy proved so effective that eventually all local politicians were forced to collaborate with the JACs controlled by the ELN if they wanted to be elected (Semana 2002).

Although the paramilitary practice of infiltrating political institutions in Urabá dates back to the 1990s, under the command of El Alemán, the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc excelled in placing its handpicked candidates into local and national political posts. Beginning in 2000, El Alemán began to promote the creation of his political movement Urabá, Great, United, and at Peace (Urabá Grande Unida y en Paz) through the local network of paramilitary social development promoters in the region (Local Researcher 2015), with “the goal of bringing regional social leaders together and commit[ting] them to the project” (Tribunal Superior Bogotá 2011, 209). El Alemán’s subcommanders even assembled a civic organization called Development for a Great Urabá (Desarrollo para el Urabá Grande), which in reality was “the financial muscle behind the campaigns” of local political candidates (Verdad Abierta 2011c).

The process driving the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc’s political conquest of Urabá was simple. Prospective candidates would be scouted from local JACs, where, if deemed reliable, they would “pass through municipal councils, mayoralities, and the assembly until they arrived in the National Congress” (Verdad Abierta 2011c). Under paramilitary control, local JACs in Urabá became both “incubators of politicians” and “electoral counterweights,” a reliable mechanism for regional politicians, local civic organizations, and peasant constituents to mutually calibrate the paramilitary bloc’s policy preferences (Verdad Abierta 2011b).

The strategy was exceptionally successful, as from 2001 until the group’s demobilization in 2006, every electoral contest in Urabá consisted of two candidates, one strongly supported by El Alemán and the local JACs, the other a strawman who lent credibility to the election yet stood no actual chance of winning. The group’s political project, Urabá, Great, United, and at Peace, sought to dominate the political life of the region by “monopolizing local community demands through the JACs” in an effort to exchange votes for support for community projects (Tribunal Superior Bogotá 2011, 212). El Alemán calculated that the best way to form counterinsurgent bases in his zone of influence “was to support them in many projects, develop the countryside, repair bridges, [and make it so that] teachers could live there and that there was a Colombian flag in every school” (Tribunal Superior Bogotá 2011, 225).

Since the decentralization of Colombia’s political system between 1986 and 1991, control of municipalities has been of particular importance to armed groups, as they “have been able to appropriate decentralized public revenues and to use these funds to further reduce the state’s already limited monopoly over the use of force” while simultaneously establishing “what are in effect parallel states on both the left and right” (Eaton Reference Eaton2006, 537). Ironically, this particular strategy emulates how traditional political parties govern their constituencies and compete electorally in Colombia. The JACs were originally founded to mediate the demands of local communities with formal authorities yet ended up becoming “paternalist tools of Liberal and Conservative gamonales [political bosses]” or clientelist vehicles for the hegemonic political parties (Zamosc Reference Zamosc1986, 38). As time wore on and armed groups inserted themselves into these regional dynamics throughout Colombia, subnational units such as the Domingo Laín Front and the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc were similarly able to utilize these particular civic organizations to regulate clientelist exchanges of votes for patronage in their zones of influence.

Armed Nonstate Surveillance: Regulating Order and Thwarting External Challenges

Arguably the most important public good provided by any aspiring nonstate ruler is “to protect the populace from both internal and external violence” (Wickham- Crowley 2015, 65). For subnational armed units such as the Domingo Laín Front and the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc, this is achieved by preventing potential disturbances from populations under their control while also resisting armed challenges from external rivals. In the context of civil war, the latter goal is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the former, as increased competition for control of territory and people invariably leads to greater violence against civilians living in these contested spaces (Metelits Reference Metelits2009). To complicate things, the long-term viability of subnational armed units to rule such communities depends heavily on their ability to protect their social bases from external predation (Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2006). The manner in which these two different groups managed to achieve this complex balancing act was similar, with local civic organizations playing a fundamental role in defending their communities against internal and external challenges.

The Domingo Laín Front’s co-optation of the JACs in the piedmont generated legitimacy and loyalty by accommodating local needs, but it also served as a crucial mechanism to monitor and regulate local communities under the group’s control. Before the front’s arrival, the JACs served as a “ministate,” which judged and ultimately disciplined social transgressors with nonviolent forms of punishment, such as communal ostracism. However, with ELN oversight came a more intense form of justice, in which sanctions were often violent and lethal (Peasant Farmer 2018). This draconian social code was disseminated by the JACs to peasant communities in the piedmont and was thereafter obeyed to the letter. As one civil servant from Saravena recalls, “there was room for debate, but at the same time if one didn’t comply with their law, then they were going to die” (Civil Servant Reference Servant2016).

The Domingo Laín Front also sought to inculcate adherence to this social order in residents from an early age by using influential trade guilds, focused on education and youth development in the subregion, to “approve all the teachers in local schools,” while deciding which youth groups and initiatives were permissible (Community Activist 2016). The JACs and many other civic organizations in the piedmont yielded broad networks of local information, and practically all of these were infiltrated to the extent that the Domingo Laín Front “essentially knew everything that occurred inside these groups,” giving the ELN access to these numerous streams of intelligence (Regional Journalist 2016).

In response to increased attempts by the Colombian military and its paramilitary allies to forcibly enter the piedmont, the Domingo Laín Front “established a security cordon, and any unknown person who arrived was killed; they kept an eye on everything and didn’t let infiltrators or paras enter” (Religious Leader 2 2016). The insurgent group maintained a rigorous screening process for everybody who entered and exited each village. If outsiders arrived in these rural communities and had not previously received clearance by local JAC presidents, the insurgents were quick to eliminate them, out of fear that they might be collecting intelligence for the Colombian authorities (Community Activist 2016).

Apart from granting such authorization to outsiders, community action board presidents often performed reconnaissance missions to ensure that the coast was clear of military patrols by ostensibly conducting business related to the community action board on the unpaved access roads, so that local insurgent commanders and their cadres could travel unmolested between villages (Religious Leader 1 2016; Peasant Farmer 2018).

The relationship between paramilitaries and civilians throughout Urabá was similarly mediated by the role of the JACs, and was characterized by the offer of security “in exchange for information and loyalty,” an interaction that converted the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc into “a visible and solicited authority” in the region (CNMH 2016, 272). The PDS-led formation of local JACs served to organize underdeveloped rural communities and to accommodate better their various needs, but they also operated as a microlevel census of sorts, with each JAC maintaining records of who resided where, as well as who transited a particular space and why.

Ever vigilant against a possible insurgent return, the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc did not have to worry about similar challenges to its rule from the Colombian military, due to the close ties between them. However, this dynamic changed when the bloc demobilized in 2006. Following the return of numerous former combatants to civilian life in Urabá, El Alemán sought to make this transition easier for ex-fighters while also maintaining control over these individuals and the communities in which they resided. The paramilitary commander had previously promoted the creation of civic organizations such as PASO, Construpaz, and the Guards of the Gulf Association (Asociación Guardagolfo), all in an attempt to provide employment to these demobilized fighters (Verdad Abierta 2011b).

Whereas these groups were designed to resettle former paramilitary troops, among other objectives, they also served as an effective means for their former paramilitary commanders to monitor both them and the communities into which they were inserted. Construpaz, for example, relied on the entire demobilized membership of the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc, providing El Alemán and his lieutenants with “a powerful intelligence network throughout Cárdenas’ ex-combatant community and accurately measur[ing] this community’s pulse” (Daly Reference Daly2016, 204). The Gulf Clan, in turn, has co-opted and maintained control of these dense monitoring networks, an asset that has proven particularly useful in the face of the recent unsuccessful attempts by the Colombian military and National Police to seek and destroy the neoparamilitary group’s leadership in Urabá (Barrera Reference Barrera2018).

The ability of the Domingo Laín Front and the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc to control local populations while simultaneously protecting them from their rivals was largely made possible by their extensive microlevel monitoring networks composed of local civic organizations. Mampilly notes, “the establishment of security structures allows an insurgency to demonstrate its relative power to civilians” (Reference Mampilly2011, 63). Perhaps more important, security and order make it substantially more difficult for potential defectors to collaborate with the groups’ opponents. Tellingly, the Colombian state’s ongoing difficulties in combating both the ELN in the Araucan piedmont and the Gulf Clan in Urabá owe a great deal to the continued dominance these two subnational armed units maintain over civic organizations.