Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín and Ana María Jaramillo

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Colombia combines two characteristics, stability of the macroinstitutional forms and a long tradition of diffuse, chronic and scathing armed conflicts that have generated experiences, convictions, practices, and skills shared by wide sectors of the population. It is better no to come to easy and linear conclusions, though. Those traditions are not explicitly or directly "violent" or "intolerant". In fact, the need to govern and to make decisions in an institutional environment in which power -including the power of weapons- is subject to multiple restrictions has fostered a strong pactist tradition in which every war generates agreements and each agreement generates wars (see Uribe, 1997; Gutiérrez, 1997, but of course the best reference to understand the phenomenon is still the prodigious A Hundred Years of Solitude). This pendular movement is part and parcel of our practice and constitutional thought. The result is that the pendulum pact/war constitutes the attractor of the dynamics of our conflicts

In this context, "attractor" has two possible interpretations: the social conflict converges towards a certain configuration or -in essence- it is described by it. Here we will assume that one and the other meaning are equivalent, although this is a little inexact. What we want to highlight is that this notion leads directly to the classical tension between need and freedom. If our description of the pendular movement characterizing the Colombian society is acceptable, a question immediately comes to mind: Is it possible to imagine "exits" or "new" cycles in a social world governed by an attractor? In other words, can the statements of the resistance and social protest be articulated in a pendular language or can they generate their own grammar? Through this text, we will maintain that this it is at the same time an extremely crucial and ambiguous question.

We find the ambiguity in that the strong pactist tradition of Colombia in the last years has given way to a series of traps of "high level stagnation", to use Elsterian terminology (Elster, 1992:105): a form of very sophisticated adaptation, but which -given its own labyrinthine elaboration- blocks the transit towards new social forms. A brief review of the peace pacts in the last twenty years gives way to the following conviction: nationally they are indispensable, locally they are undesirable. They generate one of the following three outcomes: the physical destruction of the protagonists of the pact (like in the case of the politicides of the Unión Patriótica and of Esperanza, Paz y Libertad), the rupture of the pact (as it has happened many times in the negotiations FARC/State) or the antidemocratic concentration of power in the hands of one or several of the protagonists of the pact (or a combination of some of the previous outcomes. See Romero, 2001, on the union in Urabá). They also constitute, somewhat perversely, the mental and moral horizon of the alternative options: the emancipation strategy is made of processes of peace in which the designers and main characters (authors and actors) -at the same time that the opponents- are war lords.

This is maybe unavoidable but gives origin to a series of paradoxical dynamics insofar as it forces an articulation between emancipation languages and non-emancipatory materials. The common ground of these outcomes is both a substantial loss of density of participatory life and an equally remarkable narrowing of the cultural and intellectual horizon from which society and its possibilities of transformation are conceived, and a very real effect in the decrease of violence (again, see the experience depicted in Romero, 2001). In this case, emancipation cannot summon itself because it is caught in the pendular dynamics, and it can only be seen as an alternative through a counter-factual exercise (what would happen if we stayed in one extreme of the pendular movement?). But the counter-factual discourse has a scale problem (a translation impossibility between the national sphere and the local one), and also a problem of perspective: as soon as you approach extreme B of the pendular movement the remembered cost of extreme A diminishes and that of extreme B increases. The national experience has demonstrated that -as they advance- the costs of the negotiation are felt as excessive by wide sectors of the population.

On the other hand, this pactist tradition we are talking about is recursive: in a) time and b) space. a) Experiences produce historical memories, concentrated on a group of visible precedents and shared conventions bridging different languages, experiences and aspirations, b) but this generates long chains of social arrangements that, at the same time, express and disturb hierarchies. This is clearly shown in the very practice of war, in which, for example, the urban militias developed a politics of sanitation in their territory, attacking, harassing and even physically eliminating drug consumers, but changing dramatically, in that process, the relationships of power in their influence areas. We will see a similar, although clearly differentiated effect, in another aspect of the process of the militias: a syncopated traditionalism, in which the image of a community past is defended with tommyguns, motorcycles, and wild salsa music, that indirectly destroy all of the conditions on which traditional community was based.

Now then, the very idea of recursion leads to the following question: Pacts among whom? To answer this question we will have to go "beyond fragmentation". Against what one would assume from a liberal criticism to violence as intolerance or fear of diversity, in Colombia the destruction of the other is founded -actually and discursively- on fear to the similar (and to oneself). Instead of the social explosion so obsessively blocked by the national elite, we had a social implosion, in which young, poor, Catholic mestizos shoot young, poor, Catholic mestizos. The armed groups -and also their correlate, the peace pacts! - are conceived as pedagogic projects with the mission to discipline and to model a mass that is represented simultaneously as source of legitimacy and of lack of civility. This forces us to carefully study how limits are defined. What resources are needed to trace limits? It is evident that to just state them is not enough. The subtle plot that supports the specific "us" -in opposition to the generic and discursive "us" ("us" the poor, "us" the watchmen of morals, or "us" those who are outside the law) is made of long chains of people, territories and devices, inseparable from the local exercise of differentiation that is one of the keys to the Colombian war. Thus, tracing limits is not a simple academic game: to know who we are and who they are is a military matter, literally a do or die situation. But in as much as the contours of differentiation are only supported by local experiences, we again meet with the simplification and erasure of the identity marks when we move from "small scales" to "large scales". The negotiators of the process of the militias in Medellín had great difficulty in understanding the multiple fractions of the "reinserted" groups. This highlights the fact that, at different scales, different languages and mental maps operate (Santos, 1997a). Simply there is not a discursive device to name the local conflicts from a national and macro stand or a way to conceive new possible worlds from micro-territorial wars.

In sum, in Colombia there is an armed resistance based on an ethos, a practice, and some protest discourses (opposed and/or bitterly criticizing the State or the current social order). At the same time, they are governed by the attractor pactism/violence. Thus, it is difficult to see in them a new social and cultural horizon. This phenomenon can be thought from three different perspectives:

1. The "hegemony effect". "The words, images, symbols, forms, organizations, institutions and movements used by the subordinate populations to name, to understand, to confront, to adjust to, or to resist dominance have been modeled by the very dominance process" (Roseberry quoted by Binford, 2000). For example, the power of the cult to the Virgin Mary in social sectors involved in illegal practices is carefully documented (Salazar and Jaramillo, 1992). The militias made an effort "to clean" their barrios of bums, "undesirable" people and gangsters in an exercise of effective security transcending the restrictions of the State of Law that evokes the demands of the hysterized right wing. It is also possible to track down the pedagogic agenda of armed sectors, in which the expressions, rituals, books and procedures of school life -just as it was lived directly by their leaders and militants- is used. They apply all of them as control tools for their social base: there are "manuals of coexistence" (FARC), "catechisms of coexistence" (Western Boyacá). In Medellín, if somebody were going to be murdered, they would say that s/he had "failed" [the year], etc.
2. The "percolation effect". But at the same time, hegemony is a relationship that is always in course. As the subordinate sectors make theirs -with good or bad fortune- the discourses and practices of the dominant sectors, they transform them and introduce innovations that pass on to the elite who, in turn, makes them "official". This, again, irrigates the society, producing changes, and so forth. We find many examples of this in the Colombian case: from the many ways of killing to the military tactics, all of them are in a constant process of appropriation and imitation. Parlache, a social dialect that was developed between youths belonging to popular sectors and that had to do with the use of drugs and the unemployment crisis, transcended the frontiers of the place where it was born, and became a dialectal form shared by many social sectors in the city. The pactist experience is also exposed to this effect.

1. The "uncertainty effect". As we have suggested, chains that are only interpretable in local environments support the exercise of differentiation. Beyond that point, the frontiers are blurred and every motivation can be good to justify an act. Local differentiation produces national non-differentiation. Anyone can be a victim; anyone can be the killer. Alliances are done and undone in a matter of days (Jaramillo, Ceballos, Villa, 1998: 56). This situation of extreme fluency -"turbulence" (Gutiérrez, 1997) -generates the sensation that "all of them are the same thing" and therefore everything is solved with a self-despising collective nomination. The most hated person in the Colombian national discourse is the first person of the singular: an "us" imagined from "a community of guilt" (Cubides, 1999). If this is good to cope with uncertainty -offering specific objects for the distribution of responsibilities- it also has the immediate result of deteriorating the idea of democratic control and distributive justice. Moreover, it reduces politics of protest to a half tone between rebellion and self-help ("to learn to be better"), underlining, very eloquently, the relationships between diverse modalities of contestation and mercantile circuits.

The effect of uncertainty can undergo scrutiny from another point of view, that of the State. In the cases that we examine here, we can not speak exactly of an absent State: Medellín is one of the most important cities in the country, with around two million inhabitants, the most efficient establishment -as a matter of fact, efficiency is a grounding part of its identity- and an important presence of security organisms. Western Boyacá is hardly a couple of hours far from Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. It is the epicenter of the production of a very important natural resource -emeralds- handled by the State until not long ago (the 60's). As we will see along the text, more than with a weak State, we meet here with an excluding, and porous State that generates extreme forms of uncertainty in the regional and local levels, at the same time that it strengthens diverse advanced modalities of garantism at the national level (see Uprimny and García, 2001).

What comes next in this paper is organized in the following way: First, we introduce an explanation of the ideology of war that makes explicit how the environment of the discourse of protest and contestation has been founded. This, in turn, offers an interesting viewpoint to see, though obliquely, what this kind of contestation is in our context. Second, we introduce two cases. We will briefly depict violence/peace hinges, the militiaman experience from Medellín, and that of the emeralds in Western Boyacá. On the one hand, we have protestant groups of impoverished youths intensely influenced by the armed left, and on the other we have plebeian entrepreneurs involved in organized crime, interested in keeping away the central government. In spite of the enormous distance separating them (see Table), they share at least the following features: a) they are eminently local/regional, but they have a clear global component. In the case of the militiamen, this is apprehended via ideologies and cultural consumption. In the case of Boyacá, one of the central motivations for peace was to be inserted successfully in the world market -and one of the more visible results is an international emerald stock market functioning in Bogotá and operating there every year, b) they are pasadistas (Mariátegui), that is, religious, nostalgic moralists and defenders of the tradition. The most eloquent illustration of this is maybe the great relevance of Catholic imagery, c) but they think of themselves as pedagogic and liberal and take important shreds of the intellectual/modernizing discourse that fed the constitutional change of 1991, with explicit accusations against intolerance and impunity. Once again, we are not entitled to make the two cases collapse in a single category, since in one and the other we meet with two different ways of assuming the territory in connection with the rights, d) they have a conflicting, but at the same time cooperative relationship, with the national State. Finally, we sketch a comparison between the two experiences and draw some conclusions.

The primary source on which this paragraph is built is simple: from the 80's on a specific layer of "marginal intellectuals" grew in Colombia. It was divorced not only from the institutionalized academy but from the legal stakeholders who have a certain degree of visibility in the Colombian public record (Scott, 1985), and was, on the other hand, organically linked to diverse armed expressions, many of them volatile and diffuse. In other words, the justification of the armed fight gradually ceased to be intellectually respectable, but did not disappear. On the contrary, it found new niches, expressions, and languages. It is still quite important because -oppositely to what one could suppose- argumentative ability is a matter of life or death for the armed organizations that have grown in Colombia in the last twenty years. Urban militias, big peasant guerrillas, guardians of the drug traffic, paramilitary groups, even sometimes gangs, appeared either as intellectualized projects or, with time, discovered that without a layer of intellectuals they would not reach that national/regional or municipal relevance to which they aspired. In some cases, it was clear that they could not survive without ideas and rationalizations: an ironic but fully consistent expression of Descartes in the tropic. "I think then I exist", "I am justified then I survive" (see also Gutiérrez, 2001). These intellectuals would endow the project with a vision of future, with the ability to create an "imagined community", according to Benedict Anderson's expression (1991), and with the construction of an interface to be presented and represented before the "bigger society". A crucial aspect of such an interface, was that it combined rhetorical and iconic aspects; it produced reasons, but also believable images able to capture the imagination of wide sectors and of proposing them positive stereotypes to emulate. Think of the effects that at the end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's had the image of hooded men surrounded by microphones and explaining their modus vivendi, dictating their reasons, in short building new forms of visibility. To meditate about our war also implies to recover that iconic/argumentative fabric, and the rhetoric, practices, skills and socio-techniques that constituted -simultaneously- the historical condition of possibility and the specific identity signature for the armed groups.

Now then, at a certain level of abstraction that discourse is, to begin with, quite flat. In fact, due to its condition of [relative] marginality, it grants little space for the mediations between instrumental objective and explanation. The latter need rigorously follow the former. On top of the thought, one places the coif of immediate utility, thus following a strong national tradition. But inevitably, it is refined in as much as it goes to heterogeneous audiences and, therefore, it must be stripped of its most simple and brutal coercive/justifying dimensions. The refinement, certainly, is developed in a specific direction: above all, it will be stylized and standardized stopping in a continuous re-enunciation of some few central motives that are considered untouchable. In other words, an armed violentology has appeared and developed, negotiated by a specific layer of intellectuals and dedicated, among other things, to explain, to document and to legitimate before heterogeneous audiences their practices and procedures. Armed violentology is not at all ineffective and it is not a particularly spectacular feature worthy to be mentioned only because of its extravagancy.

Although we do not have yet the ability to fully interpret the common senses -the "rhetorical topoi" (Santos, 1997b) or the "winning strategies" (Hinttikka, 1973) -of armed violentology, we can suggest some basic intuitions in this direction. Let us begin highlighting that in these cases the dreamt future implies a combination of peace and vigilance (Huggins, 1991), that, in turn, bears a brutal tension among the impulse towards the collective incorporations (more regional in the example of Boyacá, more social in that of Medellín), and a radical ignorance of individual rights through a gregarious reconstruction of society. If there is an obsession in the two experiences that we are reviewing, it is a rejection to all forms of individualism and selfishness: it is necessary to keep up to the rhythm of a common project. Being society a project, and the rights means and not ends, any garantist expectation is subordinated to a notion of discipline and organization. In other words, the armed group extrapolates its experiences and disciplinary expectations, some of them completely idiosyncratic, to the territory in which it has established its domain. A resident from Medellín recapitulates with approval: "Today we are a threatened community and that is good for me: there can´t be thieves, robbers. There can´t be drug-addicts, and the one that smokes [pot, crack] will have to make it over there hidden... but we all know that we have to behave." The obsession of the militias for making people behave well and to educate them had a thousand faces: "A drunk rude husband who arrived home and wanted to [beat] his wife, no, he was not killed, but he was sensitized: you have to be an example for your family and if you are not, you have to take off [to leave] this place, because here we do not need antisocial people" (both testimonies quoted in Jaramillo, Ceballos and Villa, 1998, p. 88). In Boyacá, the guaquero organizations (artisan emerald miners), once the peace pact was formalized, decided to get rid of those who misbehaved. "Some delinquent fugitive guaqueros established at Quípama River, but they were received with the demand that they respect the already convened forms of coexistence" (Myriam Ocampo, Carlos Rangel, Teresa Sánchez-Díaz, 1993 p.13). There, they did not need antisocial people either, because they endangered the delicate balances conquered with so much effort. Recently, around April, 1993, before the need of recapturing the control of the Coscuez mine by the partners of Esmeracol with Carranza as the leader, the guaqueros were forced to leave the mine on their own will. If this order was not obeyed, the bosses would be forced to clean the area in order to guarantee the exploitation by the legitimate State contractors" (Myriam Ocampo, Carlos Rangel, Teresa Sánchez-Díaz, 1993 p. 32). Notice how the "cleaning" metaphor is used to invoke a gregarious image in which transgression is equalized to illness and, therefore, must be eliminated. Thus, violence and intolerance need not linked here. The problem has to do with disciplining and homogenizing of the social base who operates as source of legitimacy and over whom you also shot. The "small intellectuals", to use Gramscian terminology, express this disciplinary amok through codes, manuals, catechisms, poems, and hymns that together with the direct speeches in public squares constitute the most powerful weapon in their rhetorical repertoire. For example, the organized guaqueros of Quípama, led by a powerful Don of the emerald traffic, elaborated a "code of coexistence" in which "disposing garbage in streets is prohibited, the handling of contaminated waters is demanded, and in which robbery and abuses on businesses are settled before the police inspector" (Ibid, 12).

The vision of future associated to this gregarious reconstruction shows a movement from the epical to the pastoral and from the heroic to the local landscape: no more founding heroism like that of the leftist projects that gave a first impulse to the militias at the beginning of the 80's (see the following section), no more references to the mythology of hero/ideologists but a mentality of survival at the service of an inclusive restoration. A militiaman says: "The Ché bled to death, the rest is history". He, on the other hand, would want to live. Where? Another militiaman gives the key: in a self-referred and integrative community.

A revolution to establish the tranquility of the barrio and to recover the local color? If one remembers the extreme conditions of insecurity in the barrios in Medellín at the peak moment of the militias, one will immediately discover that this program was not trivial at all. It constituted an indeed "inclusive restoration": claiming rights and entitlements for groups, but denying them to the individuals of those groups on behalf of a community with pasadist values. Thus their disturbing mixture of conservatism and protest, of solidarity and cynicism.

Where we can see more clearly that contrast is in the relationship between transgression and resistance. In Colombia, social protest has gone through several cycles. In the period in which the narratives of both cases begin (around 1980), the country was at the same time in a very high moment of a criminal cycle and in a turning point for the entrance of drug traffic to several forms of making politics and war. To turn protestors into criminals was, and still is, a key tool in the repertoire of answers to the social protest. It is approximately at that time that the epithet of "narco-guerrilla" is discovered. At the same time, a whole family of institutional designs and conflict dynamics were producing a percolation effect between the political and the criminal worlds lengthwise the ideological spectrum. The unwanted side effects of that mixture of texts (discourse) and contexts (the mixing processes) were huge. In a surprising result that shows all the links of the chain hegemony/percolation/uncertainty, the 80's witnessed the conscious intent of the organized criminals to become political, and of the armed groups to justify their bonds with criminals. When the intellectuals of different armed projects defined the "official society" as a territory to be easily entered and exited -an imagery shared with them by wide sectors of the elite and the discourses coming from the "formal" sphere- they produced a sophisticated "topology of exclusion and incorporation": there were two escape routes, delinquency and rebellion, that generated two isomorphic couples, irruption/stigma and rebellion/prosecution. The purpose of being differentiated in order to produce a unique identity signature, together with the justification of the existence of a group of "outsiders" or excluded, would lead not only to discursive contortions but to the bandits' volatile alliances with the policemen (that are deeply involved in this game of trying to be inside and outside at the same time), of them with the militiamen, of the militiamen with the drug dealers, and so forth, in a frantic carrousel that is extremely difficult to follow but that is NOT incoherent, in as much as it responds to a unique mental map. To kill rogues/to empower them, to differentiate revolutionaries/to identify them will be a powerful cognitive game marking our peace and war processes and tied to a long tradition (regarding this point, see the work of Sánchez and Meertens, 1984).

The surge of the militias has as recent antecedent a period of strong violence that begins in the mid 70's with paid killers (sicarios). In the 80's, with the boom of the drug traffic, favorable conditions were created for the interdependence of diverse processes already being developed: the appearance of gangs in the barrios, the consolidation of gangs of delinquents and problems having to do with the corruption of the police and other security organisms. The drug dealers did not create anything new, but they did introduce important changes in the organization and operation strategies of delinquency with the conformation of gangs specialized in the activity of paid killing, the use of the most modern armament and the capacity of developing activities and criminal business (the so called "cruces") with the police, the army, the judges and the inspectors.

To this, you can add the guerrilla's presence, with the conformation of some commands or groups dedicated to obtain financial resources or the performance of terrorist actions. In their negotiation process in the 80's, the M19 created some "peace camps" with a strong component of military training. Many of these "camps" gave birth to bands of delinquents. The experiment of the M19 also had an important incidence in the crisis of the guerilla's presence-in-the-city, which was based on the creation of commands for the performance of attacks, holdups, and black mailing to support the guerilla fronts in the rural area. This way of being present was questioned by militant and sympathizers of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional and of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party that favored a strategy of military political work in the barrios to put an end to the excess of criminals and the installation of a moral and community order.

The militias themselves were originated in the Barrio Popular # 1, in the North Eastern side of Medellín. Barrio Popular # 1 is a heterogeneous conglomerate of low middle class and low class and of recently inhabited neighborhoods. One of the main objectives of the project was to defeat powerful gangs that had completely taken over these territories, many times with the complicity of the authorities. The success obtained in a first moment with the "cleaning" work was the key to its acceptance by the population and the associations of neighbors (Juntas de Acción Comunal). The militias defined themselves by the control of transitorily abandoned territories -these territories were abandoned by the gangs- and by the appropriation of a function of security that would complement that of the State. "We are a State inside the State" stated Pablo García, the leader of this project.

The military political upbringing of the founders of the militias was later retaken by some urban guerrilla nuclei and by the very gangs. This responds to the interdependence process between political delinquency and common delinquency, additionally favored by the drug traffic. This turns the militias into a stakeholder with an open ambiguity in their discourse and in their practices. Although in their official statements and in their declarations to the media a leftist language was used, their activities were concentrated on eliminating the gangs to protect the community against the disorder caused by "chichipatos" (criminals that steal and rob in their own neighborhood), drug addicts and rapists.

The experience of the Milicias del Pueblo worked as a role model for other leftist organizations that made their own groups. Their successful organizational model was dubbed, in a growing market of demand for security. But this process of growth has as compensation an erasure of the political undertones caused by the massive recruitment of youngsters with no political upbringing but with military experience and the selective entrance of criminals to the militias. This mechanism served the double purpose of re-socialization and co-opting of bandits with the best military technique and the highest moral, but increasingly muddled the nature of the territorial domain of the militias. Furthermore, the internal control -the ability of a personalist leadership, ideologized but weak, to model the behavior of the cadres- also became precarious. The contrast between the disciplinary mentality -that also inspired a war against bad behaviors- and the daily practice became deeper and deeper. If at the beginning it was clear "who is who" -at least for those in the barrio who had called upon the militias "to clean" their territory - the identification task became more and more difficult, even for the protagonists of the military action. Insofar as growth was also territorial, the different militias started to compete with each other, and this increased the so-called "settlings of accounts" among them.

More than because the vicissitudes of war or because of political reasons, peace agreements were thought of due to the coincidence among the burnt out feeling of a generation of survivors and the atmosphere of optimism caused by the convocation of a Constituent National Assembly in 1991 that -it was so expected- would help to design "a new country." The struggle with the gangs was stagnated, and it was not clear who was actually fighting against whom. The barrios that had been enthusiastic for the militias because their expulsion of the criminals and the installation of a certain moral order began to get tired and to rebel against the excesses of the new power. The older militiamen began to evaluate their own vital trajectories from an ideological stand different to the one they held in the moment of their involvement in the armed struggle.

From 1991 on, the first encounters between the nuclei of the militias and the local authorities took place, until the acceptance by the national government of a formal process of negotiations in 1994. Time in this case was on the State's side, but both parties had high stakes in the negotiations. The militias expected to obtain a political recognition and some advantages to consolidate their influence areas. They risked to be accused of treason by those of them who did not want to participate in the negotiations. For the government, it was an opportunity to demonstrate its peace will, in the face of the failure of the negotiations with FARC. It feared, however, that the militias were not a proper political interlocutor, and that they were so divided that in fact one did not have anybody to establish a dialogue with. The local government, in turn, acted as a third party with its own interests, and it promoted the process as a unique event in Latin America (which in fact it was).

Between February and May, 1994, a negotiation process with the participation of the Milicias del Pueblo, the Milicias del Valle de Aburrá (under the Ejército de Liberación Nacional) and a dissident sector of the latter, the Milicias Independientes del Valle de Aburrá, took place in Santa Helena, a place near Medellín. Other groups of militias rejected any possibility of negotiation.

The process soon acquired an unexpected turn: the almost central role of the government's negotiators consisted on trying to prevent that different factions of the militias entered into an extermination war, amid crossed accusations of complicity with the delinquency, with the authorities or with both. The urban war had served somehow to "freeze" the militia leaders in a conspiracy mentality (applied to their internal opponents), fed with popularizing literature and a military visual culture, but unable to come to the technical level required by a negotiation with the State. Even worse, the negotiation process weakened the social bases of the militiamen. The increment of homicides of militiamen in the barrios produced uncertainty among the inhabitants of the northeastern area that were not consulted about the convenience of a negotiation with the government and an eventual demobilization of the militias.

After six months of struggles, an agreement was arrived to. It was subscribed in a public act carried out on May 26, 1994 in the northeastern area. The central points of this agreement were:

• Social investment in the comunas for the improvement of the community infrastructure and the increase in the coverage of basic health, education and recreation, and creation of "nuclei of civic life".
• Creation of a cooperative of surveillance (Coosercom). The government signed a contract committing itself to pay monthly to 358 members of the cooperative a figure between 150.000 and 500.000 pesos and to lend them up to 1.750.000 pesos. The cooperative would have five headquarters and a covering of surveillance on 32 barrios in the Northeastern and Northwestern communes.

The operation of Coosercom would be assessed by the Secretaría de Gobierno and it was based on an explicit commitment of its members to respect the rights and fundamental freedoms of the community, abstaining from assuming behaviors reserved to the police and to work jointly with the security services of the State in the prevention of crime.

• Political privileges: The agreement did not include political privileges (for example, a minimum of positions in the Municipal Council). Everything depended on the initiative of the militias to promote the conformation of a political force or to make agreements with other members of the opposition. The only possibility validated was that of being invited to zonal spaces of discussion and organisms of the administration on the mayor's initiative.
• Judicial benefits: That was the most discussed point due to the adaptation difficulties of the points settled down in Law 104, 1993, regarding the situation of the militiamen. Many of them were being prosecuted not for political crimes but for common delinquency. What could be achieved was the concession of reprieve benefits and procedure ceasing for collaboration with the justice to all those members of the militias that were being prosecuted by non political or related to politics crimes.

The agreement was plagued with difficulties. The creation of the cooperative placed the militiamen, reinstated to civil life, in a false position. Their two missions should be to control the population and to offer information to the police. This turned them automatically into "traitors" before their ex-partners, and favored the degradation of an atmosphere already poisoned by mistrust and mutual accusations. The work of surveillance of the barrios no longer exercised by the militiamen but by the members of the cooperative members paid by the vary State generated a discomfort feeling that increased with the violations made by the members of the Cooperative and their complicity with criminal actions. During the aftermath of the negotiation, numerous accusations of homicides, threats, black-mailing and exiles on the part of the members of Coosercom were presented before the Defensoría del Pueblo (the Town Attorney Office), the Fiscalía (the Town Prosecutor Office) and the Social Pastoral. How could an organization whose main feature had been its expeditious character and its accusation of the slowness and complicity of the authorities become an appendix of the police?

Around 47 days after the signature of the agreements, an event that compromised the development of the whole process took place: Pablo García, the main leader of the Milicias del Pueblo was murdered. The possibility to guarantee the cohesion of a direction team totally disappeared in the midst of the new actions of crossed revenges unfolding soon after this event. The investigation advanced by the Fiscalía to find the responsible for Pablo García's murder culminated with the detention of the boss of the Milicias Independientes del Valle de Aburrá, who was accused of being the intellectual author of the crime. After Pablo's death, the killing of militiamen of one faction or the other was endless.

In the electoral terrain, the militias also suffered a serious setback with the poor voting obtained by their candidate to the Town Council of Medellín. As it has happened in Colombia to many other actors, they had great difficulties in translating civic recognition into political recognition. For the militias, this was even harder since they were not prepared to cohabit with independent organizations of the civil society. For example, the social investment in the areas agreed with the government more than contributing to the recognition of the militias became a factor of discord with leaders and social organizations that made them responsible an undue appropriation of the achievements that were the fruit of community work. The voters of their influence areas chose to support the candidates of the traditional parties. The militiamen did not perceive that the hiatus between a generation of manual workers -owners of an elaborated and complex political culture- and their own proposal -with opaque literate references for the initiate and plagued with idiosyncratic experiences- was enormous. Once again, the local-war-inclusion ("us" of this street, "us" of this block, against those of the next one) did not have any possible translation into the scale of political life in a modern metropolis.

The relationships between Coosercom and the government became more conflicting in the face of the difficulties related to the implementation of certain judicial privileges. A verdict emitted by the Tribunal Nacional (National Tribunal) erased the benefits obtained by the militiamen when settling down that they should comply to the dispositions contained in Ordinance 1194, 1989. On top of this, the indifference of the local authorities to the follow up of a process for which the national government was responsible and the tensions among Coosercom, security organisms and the IV Brigada del Ejército (IV Brigade of the Army) regarding the delivery of ammunition in view of the disappearance of weapons with their corresponding safe-conducts was another addition to the conflict.

Although around 1995 the failure of the process was evident, the government tried to introduce some correctives to revert the dynamics in course. The liquidation of the cooperative in 1996 put and end to this experience, but not to the existence of groups of militias that continued operating in other areas (although under difficult conditions related the to the invigoration of gangs that, in turn, have used the same methods of the militia for the "protection" of people living in its influence areas) and to the signature of coexistence pacts in the barrios, this time with the mediation of local authorities through the officials in charge of the works of peace and coexistence.

Perhaps the first economically meaningful enclave taken over by organized criminals in Colombia was the emerald business. Given in concession by the State to particular companies, the emerald mines became a space where paternalistic practices, mafia protection, and violence comfortably cohabited. The network of complex relationships State/illegality certainly illustrates the differences between a "porous State" and an "absent State." In the republican time (1819), legislation was emitted according to which the wealth of the underground was exclusively a property of the nation. From that time to 1946 the "nation's reserves" were administered through a system of concessions, with the presence of foreign companies and of illegal occupants. In 1946, the administration of the emerald mines passed to the central bank, the Banco de la República, whose statute was also ambiguous (it worked as the central bank, but it was in hands of a board of directors from the private sector. Only around twenty years later it would become a real public entity). Through complex regional, ethnic and political networks, the administration of the mines encouraged illegal economy, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in connivance with the central government. Such an anomalous situation was "corrected" in different ways, always unsuccessfully. The State has been present, perturbing the pre-existent social relationships but not regulating them (for this sketch we have leaned on in Guerrero, 2001 and Guerrero, 1986).

"The pre-existent social relationships" should have -from the very beginning- a complex combination of verticality and social mobility. We are talking about a society, hierarchical and dynamic at the same time, in which not only violence but also primary loyalty supplanted the legal establishment as a guarantor of the contracts. The guaqueros, workers that went to the mines to try their luck, could enter the business if they got a "plantero" -a mediator that provided the tools and the conditions to begin the work. But they owed loyalty and respect mainly to the "leaders", entrepreneurs with their own armed forces that had begun as guaqueros. The combination of intimidation ability, an ostentatious expense and a vertiginous social upward mobility gave the leaders an enormous influence on the guaqueros. "They perform multiple functions, because they act as judges when they punish the offenders and they reward their more faithful servants: they are referees in family quarrels or employers that give work in the mines to their relatives... the leaders are characterized by a combination of benevolence with the poor and an implacable indifference with those whom they consider their enemies. They have performed a judge-and-party role in dealing with different conflicts watching that everybody gets what they consider fair, and even end up defining the actions in regards to public order and security in the municipalities and in the whole region" (Uribe, 1992: 100).

The stability of such a paternalistic dominance was occasionally splashed with blood coming from territorially defined parties. In these "wars", not only different armed groups were involved but also wide sectors of the population, insofar as the restrictions and prohibitions established by the conflicting parties implied, for example, to not go by a highway or a gulch, not to mention the possibility of a vendetta which ended up affecting the relatives of some combatant. Moreover, the authorities also took a side in the conflict, because the enormous wealth generated by the emerald-related-activity was good to buy their connivance and even their direct participation. "The public force is not kindly regarded by the population in general -says an interesting report of the Ministerio del Interior. During the last war, members of the police and of the army rented their uniforms, and collaborated in the performance of official actions which exacerbated the rivalries even more. For example, a death that exacerbated the last war, that of Torcuato López, was executed by a soldier following the orders of the Vargas: the police arrested people that were looked for by the opposite party to facilitate in this way their elimination. Some people who were confined to prison died. Paid gunmen were hired to perform these actions. They had direct access to these reclusion facilities" (Ocampo, Rangel, Sánchez, 1993: 26; Warrior, 2001).

In the 80's, the most virulent wave in the chronic confrontation between esmeralderos came. This time the conflict had to do with the control of the Coscuez mine. It is difficult to establish an exact date, since different oral sources, authors and testimonies offer slightly different variants. More important than to locate the day, month, and year of the beginning of this new phase is to highlight that it was crossed by two big national wars. On the one hand, the dispute over the control of coca crops and the mutual accusations of having denounced to the authorities the existence of such crops faced Molina, an esmeraldero leader, with Rodríguez Gacha, a Don of the drug traffic. On the other hand, the esmeralderos did not take much time to be involved in a territorial dispute with the FARC, and created armed groups to combat them. This led them into an alliance with the paramilitary, whose headquarters were close.

But it is not clear that those groups were able to develop a stable collective action, and in fact in the moment in which Rodríguez Gacha was in the paroxysm of his dirty war against all that smelled of the left, he was also fighting against opposing esmeralderos. In 1989, Rodríguez Gacha died in a police operation. In 1990, Víctor Carranza, in the name of peace and of good businesses was able to begin "distension conversations" with other leaders, which in passing recognized him as a primus inter pares for his long-term vision. Once again, the local rhythms coincided with the global ones, and the constitutional ethos of 1991 looked like a big river in which all the pacifist slopes converged. The arguments in favor of pacts were enunciated nationally, but later they were appropriated in a capillary way and by different stakeholders. The conversations quickly flourished, and in September, 1990, the first Peace Act among all the esmeraldero factions was signed. In this act, the combined exploitation of Coscuez was guaranteed. Later, a more institutional option was chosen. A Committee of Development and Normalization, with the presence of the most prominent esmeralderos, the governor of Boyacá, the bishop of Chiquinquirá, the police departmental commandant, the commandant of the battalion Sucre with base in Chiquinquirá, and the manager of the company Mineralco was implemented (Ocampo, Rangel, Sánchez, 1993, p. 27). The bishop of Chiquinquirá was the president of the Committee.

How does this bizarre pact of peace work? Several features should be highlighted. First, "internal peace" did exist, if for that we understand a formal end to the hostilities among the esmeraldero factions, and the decrease of diverse varieties of homicides (Ocampo, Rangel, Sánchez, 1993; see also Chart 1).

Source: Police Department in Boyacá

But the bonds with the national war have continued. Víctor Carranza, for example, did not stop in his fight against drug dealer Leonidas Vargas, following the tradition of tension esmeralderos/drug dealers (El Espectador, 1998; Warrior, 2001). He also continued with his activity in the other flank: Carranza was imprisoned, when the Prosecutor Office (Fiscalía) found serious indications that he was involved in paramilitary activities (El Tiempo, 1998). This generated multiple protests in Western Boyacá. It was believed that the prosecution of Carranza was only the first step of an attempt to dismantle the esmeraldero´s power, by the central government. In Miguel Espitia's, mayor of Quípama, unconscious Bretchian admonition: "The government should look at us in another way and understand that the leaders of this county are apostles of peace and that Don Víctor deserves respect, solidarity for his cause. This is a case that affects us all, and if we remain indifferent tomorrow, they will take us all. Because of this, we should remain united" (Records of the Verification and Normalization Committee in Coscuez April 1, 1998).

Second, the Church has played a central role. Even the vocabulary ("apostles", "catechism", "faith") in the basic discursive routines is colored by Catholicism. In the Peace Act, the protocol to the end of the hostilities between the parties in dispute- there is a meaningful combination of the typical reasons that fed the Constitution of 1991 and basic Catholic categories: "Solidarity of the same race, as Christians, brothers in the same faith", we state "mutual harmony... community organization for progress, respect to all human rights, to legal norms." In sum, "we decide to opt for the civilized and Christian way to dialogue, coexistence, concord, harmony, respect for individuality and understanding."

Also, the Church is the third party with credibility in the mediation processes. As in these "conversations between gentlemen" there is a permanent temptation to not behave as gentleman (and the mutual post-pact accusations include murders, to put the authorities against a leader, slanders and rumors), the Church is the last instance to which you can appeal, and in spite of all the difficulties that that role implies, it has learned to keep it without not so much waste. But apart from this, it has offered to the process a net of intellectuals and mediators, the priests in every town, able to formulate the terms of civic coexistence through sermons and the use of the "catechism", as well as the participation in specific disputes. "Some parish priests in Muzo and Quípama act as mediators in conflicts among the clienteles of the different leaders. These clienteles are those of the people who are part of the leader's retinue, common people without any hierarchy or range. In this sense, the parish priests have represented a support and a channel for airing the disputes among families in favor of contrary parties in times of war" (Ocampo, Rangel, Sánchez, 1993, p. 22). The line that separates mediation and justification is indeed a thin one. "The bishop of Chiquinquirá is an ally of the leaders, his intervention has been a bridge and mediation in quarrels and confrontation to death" (Ocampo, Rangel, Sánchez, 1993, p. 13). The intervention of the priests does not exclude the exaltation of the influence of the bosses as authority characters." This is corroborated many times not only in the field but also in interviews with the main characters of the pact.

What the leaders are proposing is in fact the reconstruction -invention would be a better word because there is no precedent- of a traditional community under their leadership. To the Church, a double civilizing role is attributed: to educate the social bases in civic skills and to disarm them, in a literal and figurative sense, and, on the other hand, to accompany the leaders in their maturation process, so that they were able to solve their dilemmas of collective action. For that reason, the social structure that serves as a correlate to the pact is a pyramid: "The departmental authorities describe as a pyramid the structure of the agreements of peace in the West. At the base, we have the guaqueros, in the middle the merchants, and at the top the leaders..." (Ocampo, Rangel and Sánchez, 1993: 45). Going back to the anti-political and civil motto predominant among the public opinion in the 90's, they have also subordinated the traditional political class, making theirs the intermediation role of politicians or putting them directly under their service. The leaders launch mayors and councilmen and support them. They are paid off with loyalty and deference. If there are not many cases of direct intimidation against the municipal authorities on the part of the leaders, this perhaps is because disobedience is quite uncommon (not meaning inexistent). But the range of the leaders' influence, and its capacity to subordinate the political middlemen, is not reduced to the municipal field: "In the course of one of our visits we met a deputy and a representative presumably to the Camera that were inside the facilities of the Quípama mine, in guaqueo plan; his dependence of the leaders is evident" (Ocampo, Rangel and Sánchez, 1993, p. 28). As the pact has been developed, however, the political competition has open and some leaders have found resonant, and unexpected, electoral defeats. The political middlemen find that peace has produced democracy. For an interviewee, "when we were in the war it was restricted and several times the first mayors were the only candidates. The first two mayors for popular election that we had in the town were the only candidates. In those elections there were not more candidates, they were imposed candidates, but later there has been more democracy and more candidates in the elections."

But obviously, it is a strange democracy, even taking into consideration that the opening seems to have been perfectly real, and this highlights the ambiguous role of the State. In as much as the peace has obtained real results -a decrease in homicides- it has not destabilized the pact. Therefore, the State does not intervene and looks to another side, but at the same time, it allows that in the Committee of Normalization the governor, and commandants of the army and the police are present. The latter is curious enough, because it was an official policy of the armed forces in the last ten years to refuse participating in the negotiations with the guerrilla, arguing that they did not have anything to speak of with groups outside the law. The armed forces with seat in Boyacá have fluctuated between acceptance of the pact and alarm manifestations for the weapon power and the illegal activities that the esmeralderos perform, keeping complete silence on their bonds with the paramilitary activities. The esmeralderos, in turn, are considered defenders of the legality but they see an adversary in the central government, at least while their two basic claims are not resolved: demands of regional character (that to a certain extend the government would be willing to accept) and judicial non tangibility for the leaders (impossible to grant, among other reasons because of the international repercussions that it would have). Meanwhile, with the guide of Carranza, the emerald activity has been internationalized with relative success. This highlights the fact that traditionalist restoration and globalization cannot only cohabit, but that there are even situations in which one is a prerequisite for the other (as Ocampo, Rangel and Suárez cunningly pointed, 1993).

The condition for this to remain is the politicization of the war and the peace among esmeralderos. Some typical motives in the most direct political peace pacts -"pardon and forgetfulness", "a fresh start", regional and social demands, strict respect to the law in the post-pact period, garantist language- were imported directly form other processes, and the imitation has sometimes been truly meticulous. Nevertheless, the most legitimating role corresponds once again to traditionalist civism: to appease, to make behave and to teach a social base with violent customs (keep weapons, for example), and careless of the common good. The promise of a new, better, life is associated to good behavior. Thus, we cannot overlook the fact that the pact has been welcomed in every population as a true civic festival -financed by the dominant leader- with speeches that proclaim the upcoming of a new social order. But one cannot forget that on behalf of common well being, thieves, transgressors, personal and political opponents (enemies of the order) are stigmatized and even eliminated.

If the machinery seems perfectly oiled this is an erroneous impression. There are people who can look critically and denounce this pyramidal order. With simple and direct words, they make the victim's voice, not that of the killers, be heard. "Mr. archbishop of the diocese of Chiquinquirá, I greet you with all respect. Me, Pedro Pérez, [speak to you] with the purpose of making you know the following anomalies that have come the region of Muzo. The self-defense groups, or whatever they call him, because according to the authorities they have learned of all these crimes that are presented in silence because they are not published by the radio, catch the people and take them at nights to the Minero river... there they shoot them dead, they steal their documents so that no name appears. It is not possible that there is no justice because to my understanding a person that kills a person and takes all he has is unsociable, it is not as [they believe] that the unsociable one is the dead one" (Letter, personal file).

The two cases that we have introduced are, in many senses, abysmally different, but they have something in common: "inverted Lamarckianism". Necessity hinders, does not facilitate, the appearance of the organ. The more cycles of the pendular movement there are, the more difficult it is to think outside this movement. This is not casual, and it points to the possible importance of the Colombian case. In as much as the export of formal democracy to Third World countries is one of the most important characteristics in political globalization, the tension between stable institutional macro-forms and violent dynamics, with the resulting pendulum-like attractor, could become a pretty common characteristic. For the analysts that denounced the wrongs of the country as a result of the weight of pre-modernity, the irony could consist in the fact that the Colombian experience points more to the future of global capitalism, at least in the less developed territories, than to its past.

It is important to stress the fact that the pacts here described were not simple legitimating or purely strategic maneuvers. All the parties involved gave in their power positions, and the result was that the agreements in fact saved many lives. But the costs are also evident. The armed actors in both cases saw the opportunity to continue making the same thing although under new forms and with the aura of legality that the symbols and guarantees of the State confer.

As for the options for democratic development, both cases -much more the militias- have an inclusive component, but at the cost of sacrificing the individual rights of every member of the communities they want to incorporate. The possibilities that from there something is said on democratic emancipation are reduced. In the first place, there is not an appropriate language for the formulation of national proposals, insofar as unacceptable demands are stated (for example, the judicial non-tangibility of armed actors for crimes like homicide) in a State of Law. In other words, the possibilities of success of these territorial dictatorships are inversely proportional to those of the conformation of a viable national framework in the world order. The social and technical correlate of this is the inability of the armed discourses to propose policies in universal terms. Their speeches, admonitions, manuals and catechisms say something, much in fact, to their social bases, but they do not make sense when the enunciation scale is bigger. Second, its synchronization with globalization is merely opportunist, in the sense that the resources offered by it to produce a territorial closing based on tradition are used. Third, the mixtures in all the dimensions -via imitation, alliance, co-opting, representation (in the theatrical sense, as in the case of criminal stakeholders adopting political roles and viceversa) is so dense that it is difficult to know "who is who" and "what it is what." As we said in the beginning of this paper, the more sophisticated the exercise of local differentiation, the more complicated it is to make it in the national field.

We highlight the fact that such an experience is and has been criticized with great clarity by all kinds of voices. Inverted Lamarckianism refers only to the ability to propose. The criticism, that is certainly not restricted to the academic world, is centered in denouncing a certain "Colombian model", a complex system of interdependent conflicts that has very visible emergent (and unpleasant) propeties: a terrorist State by delegation -a political form that quickly has acquired prominence- with continuous regional jolts between territorial dictatorship and war, all of this amid "a wild development model that denies rights" (César Antonio García, 1995). In many parts of the world, this song could sound increasingly familiar.

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