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 Uribe wanted, in particular
changing the constitution so that he could be reelected in
2006, which had not been allowed at the time of his first
election, in 2002. In exchange, President Uribe delivered a
highly lenient law that allowed the paramilitaries to
demobilize. Demobilization did not mean the end of
paramilitarism, simply its institutionalization in large parts of
Colombia and the Colombian state, which the
paramilitaries had taken over and were allowed to keep.
In Colombia many aspects of economic and political
institutions have become more inclusive over time. But
certain major extractive elements remain. Lawlessness and
insecure property rights are endemic in large swaths of the
country, and this is a consequence of the lack of control by
the national state in many parts of the country, and the
particular form of lack of state centralization in Colombia.
But this state of affairs is not an inevitable outcome. It is
itself a consequence of dynamics mirroring the vicious
circle: political institutions in Colombia do not generate
incentives for politicians to provide public services and law
and order in much of the country and do not put enough
constraints on them to prevent them from entering into