Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Sierra Leone while at the same time initiating a savage conflict in Liberia, which led to state failure there, too. The pattern of extractive institutions collapsing into civil war and state failure has happened elsewhere in Africa; for example, in Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda. Extraction paves the way for conflict, not unlike the conflict that the highly extractive institutions of the Maya city-states generated almost a thousand years ago. Conflict precipitatesstate failure. So another reason why nations fail today is that their states fail. This, in turn, is a consequence of decades of rule under extractive economic and political institutions.
W HO I S THE S TATE ?
    The cases of Zimbabwe, Somalia, and Sierra Leone, even if typical of poor countries in Africa, and perhaps even some in Asia, seem rather extreme. Surely Latin American countries do not have failed states? Surely their presidents are not brazen enough to win the lottery?
    In Colombia, the Andean Mountains gradually merge to the north with a large coastal plain that borders the Caribbean Ocean. Colombians call this the
tierra caliente
, the “hot country,” as distinct from the Andean world of the
tierra fria
, the “cold country.” For the last fifty years, Colombia has been regarded by most political scientists and governments as a democracy. The United States feels happy to negotiate a potential free trade agreement with the country and pours all kinds of aid into it, particularly military aid. After a short-lived military government, which ended in 1958, elections have been regularly held, even though until 1974 a pact rotated political power and the presidency between the two traditional political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. Still, this pact, the National Front, was itself ratified by the Colombian people via a plebiscite, and this all seems democratic enough.
    Yet while Colombia has a long history of democratic elections, it does not have inclusive institutions. Instead, its history has been marred by violations of civil liberties, extrajudicial executions, violence against civilians, and civil war. Not the sort of outcomes we expect from a democracy. The civil war in Colombia is different from that in Sierra Leone, where the state and society collapsed and chaos reigned. But it is a civil war nonetheless and one that has caused far more casualties. The military rule of the 1950s was itself partially in response to a civil war known in Spanish simply as La Violencia, or “The Violence.” Since that time quite a range of insurgent groups, mostly communist revolutionaries, have plagued the countryside, kidnapping and murdering. To avoid either of these unpleasant optionsin rural Colombia, you have to pay the
vacuna
, literally “the vaccination,” meaning that you have to vaccinate yourself against being murdered or kidnapped by paying off some group of armed thugs each month.
    Not all armed groups in Colombia are communists. In 1981 members of the main communist guerrilla group in Colombia, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the FARC—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) kidnapped a dairy farmer, Jesus Castaño, who lived in a small town called Amalfi in the hot country in the northeastern part of the department of Antioquia. The FARC demanded a ransom amounting to $7,500, a small fortune in rural Colombia. The family raised it by mortgaging the farm, but their father’s corpse was found anyway, chained to a tree. Enough was enough for three of Castaño’s sons, Carlos, Fidel, and Vicente. They founded a paramilitary group, Los Tangueros, to hunt down members of the FARC and avenge this act. The brothers were good at organizing, and soon their group grew and began to find a common interest with other similar paramilitary groups that had developed from similar causes. Colombians in many areas were suffering at the hands of left-wing guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries formed in opposition. Paramilitaries were being used by landowners to defend themselves against the guerrillas, but they were also involved in drug trafficking, extortion, and the kidnapping and murder of citizens.
    By 1997 the paramilitaries, under the leadership of the Castaño brothers, had managed to form a national organization for paramilitaries called the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (the AUC—United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia).