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

The AUC expanded into large parts of the country, particularly into the hot country, in the departments of Córdoba, Sucre, Magdalena, and César. By 2001 the AUC may have had as many as thirty thousand armed men at its disposal and was organized into different blocks. In Córdoba, the paramilitary Bloque Catatumbo was led by Salvatore Mancuso. As its power continued to grow, the AUC made a strategic decision to get involved in politics. Paramilitaries and politicians courted each other. Several of the leaders of the AUC organized a meeting with prominent politicians in the town of Santa Fé de Ralito in Córdoba. A joint document, a pact, callingfor the “refounding of the country” was issued and signed by leading members of the AUC, such as “Jorge 40” (the nickname for Rodrigo Tovar Pupo), Adolfo Paz (a nom de guerre for Diego Fernando “Don Berna” Murillo), and Diego Vecino (real name: Edwar Cobo Téllez), along with politicians, including national senators William Montes and Miguel de la Espriella. By this point the AUC was running large tracts of Colombia, and it was easy for them to fix who got elected in the 2002 elections for the Congress and Senate. For example, in the municipality of San Onofre, in Sucre, the election was arranged by the paramilitary leader Cadena (“chain”). One eyewitness described what happened as follows:
    The trucks sent by Cadena went around the neighborhoods, corregimientos and rural areas of San Onofre picking people up. According to some inhabitants … for the 2002 elections hundreds of peasants were taken to the corregimiento Plan Parejo so they could see the faces of the candidates they had to vote for in the parliamentarian elections: Jairo Merlano for Senate and Muriel Benito Rebollo for Congress.
    Cadena put in a bag the names of the members of the municipal council, took out two and said that he would kill them and other people chosen randomly if Muriel did not win.
    The threat seems to have worked: each candidate obtained forty thousand votes in the whole of Sucre. It is no surprise that the mayor of San Onofre signed the pact of Santa Fé de Ralito. Probably one-third of the congressmen and senators owed their election in 2002 to paramilitary support, and Map 20 , which depicts the areas of Colombia under paramilitary control, shows how widespread their hold was. Salvatore Mancuso himself put it in an interview in the following way:
    35 percent of the Congress was elected in areas where there were states of the Self-Defense groups, in thosestates we were the ones collecting taxes, we delivered justice, and we had the military and territorial control of the region and all the people who wanted to go into politics had to come and deal with the political representatives we had there.
    It is not difficult to imagine the effect of this extent of paramilitary control of politics and society on economic institutions and public policy. The expansion of the AUC was not a peaceful affair. The group not only fought against the FARC, but also murdered innocent civilians and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) of the Norwegian Refugee Council, in early 2010 around 10 percent of Colombia’s population, nearly 4.5 million people, was internally displaced. The paramilitaries also, as Mancuso suggested, took over the government and all its functions, except that the taxes they collected were just expropriation for their own pockets. An extraordinary pact between the paramilitary leader Martín Llanos (real name: Héctor Germán Buitrago) and the mayors of the municipalities of Tauramena, Aguazul, Maní, Villanueva, Monterrey, and Sabanalarga, in the department of Casanare in eastern Colombia, lists the following rules to which the mayors had to adhere by order of the “Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare”:

      9) Give 50 percent of the municipality budget to be managed by the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare.
    10) 10 percent of each and every contract of the 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