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