Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Resumen: Analizando el caso colombiano se procura dilucidar las caractersticas de la guerra irregular y las
razones de su duracin a lo largo de ms de cinco dcadas, mediante una breve recapitulacin. En seguida se
examinan algunos de los trabajos ms representativos de los investigadores sociales colombianos al respecto, as
como sus referentes tericos ms universales y el tipo de interpretacin que se ha ido construyendo. El acento est
puesto en la singularidad de una guerra irregular, de baja intensidad pero de larga duracin, y en sus efectos sobre la
poblacin civil en las zonas en donde la guerrilla ha logrado un grado de implantacin y de manera correlativa el
ejrcito desarrolla labores de contrainsurgencia. El ensayo termina con el anlisis de distintas modalidades de
resistencia civil hacia la guerra, el modo y secuencia en que se han ido manifestando y algunos ejercicios predictivos
acerca de los desarrollos previsibles de la resistencia civil.
Palabras clave: violencia, guerra irregular; Colombia, estrategia contrainsurgente, resistencia civil, historia,
Siglo XX.
Received 07.02.08
Accepted 08.03.08
***
Start looking after loosing a war who the 'culprits' are is a proper old women thing; it is always the structure
of society that causes war.
(Max Weber, 1919)
come closer (with some guilty curiosity at the beginning) to the strategic doctrines, (to assimilate the
slang) of military theory specialists, to discern the technical work terminology, to penetrate -anywayinto this area of clear -obscure, of understood and coded messages, which it is the predominant one in an
irregular war. The Anglo-Saxon expression is very significant and pertinent: most of the warlike actions,
as assumptions, motivations and purpose are gray area phenomena (Gray Area Phenomena). The
rationalization grade, the elegant symmetry of the criminological theories of Lombroso, or the criminal
sociology of Ferri, which were provided with a criterion that allowed to distinguish with clearness
between motives, means and opportunities of the criminal act, they have had to give in some time ago like
pretension (with major willingness one can be warned as for the changes in the jurisprudence and with
regard to the distinctions between different types of crime: how to harmonize all these theories with our
oblique reality!) and today they are seen like rare pieces of junk; on the other hand those readings of
revolutionary doctrine have had to be re-edited, all those who gather the appellant discussion on
insurrectionary models, assumptions, variants and tactics, as well as the profuse one, although more
cryptic, literature about assumptions, strategies and tactics of the counter-insurgency. Not up to the point
in which to be an investigator of the conflict the analyst has to be unfolded in strategist -and in his least
nice variant: lounge strategist- but it is an imperative today to penetrate with criterion into these
formulations, to examine its assumptions, to decipher them, to decode them, locating them in our context.
War and strategy are basic matters, today key words, unavoidable. As for the first concept, to
assume it implies that there is not already understood the armed conflict like a plurality of violence in
which the irrational, unexpected and unpredictable is occupying a first place, as in 1987, but it starts from
the assumption of which by being lethal and destroyers, exists in them a grade of rationality, even if this
is purely instrumental. We could state a kind of inhibition at the moment in which the discussion got
about the nature of our war, a certain decency on having referred to it for most of the analysts, as if it was
a question of an untimely consideration, or it contained some type of ideological authorization to those
who promote it or to those who carry it out, but it open a path anyway, and it is a current matter; even if
the discussion about its specific character, the relations between the warriors with society, scarcely begins
to appear. With regard to the matter of strategy, the problem has been more about information than of
inhibition.
Which ever the epithet war assumes, in what there is a consensus, produced by the obstinacy of the
facts, and a consensus that has the force of a popular prejudice, is that it is a matter of an irregular war, in
which, according to the classic proportion, the nine tenth parts of its strategy remain a secret at the
beginning, still to the most perspicacious observer. The guerrilla war variants that here prevail, have lead
to a continuous learning between warriors as for handling the information. Tactics and diversion or delays
maneuvers, systematical disinformation, and an increasing virtuosity in the handling of psychological
warfare resources, an increasing mediation, have been the rules. And who ever has analyst's pretensions,
all this implies some other obstacles, if the information is profuse, diverse and contradictory, who tries to
analyze it, to be faced in the middle of such a diversity has to boast of subtle, to support an attitude of
constant alertness about the consistency of the information obtained, of its sources, it has always to
proceed in his balances, according to the classic advice: "with inventory benefit.
That is why the proposed expression: "logics of the war can turn out to be presumptuous up to the
maximum, it can induce the mirage of which after clarifying the assumptions, the keys are possessed, and
after deciphering the strategy and the contenders plans of campaign, such a meticulous pursuit of the
events has been done as to establish with clearness its sequence, its logical relation. The matter is only
about the inference from fragmentary indications, to find tendencies starting from very precarious
evidences, almost all anecdotal ones. To study the armed conflict from its direct protagonists, but never
lose sight of the regional and local societies, a set of those who take part of a way scarcely indirect, or try
to avoid only its most lethal effects, there is the core. In constant search of a balance between the
tendencies and continuities that could be elucidated, and the appellants ruptures in the pre-established
tendency, due to new resources put in the game, to new weapon or new coalitions of political forces,
since one of the characteristic appellants that we will go to find, if we summarize the Colombian armed
conflict with some detail, is that in more than one conjuncture it registered a tacit agreement or a
convergence calculated concerning precise targets, between gesticulating of the illegal armed groups and
the political parties that act in the legality. To combine all the struggle forms some time ago stopped
being an exclusive formulation of a political group. The challenge of formulating an explanatory principle
in such intricate context is current.
And in the most recent it has been answered in several ways: with assiduity, although not
exclusive nor principally by sociologists, historical series have been constructed about the territorial
expansion of each of the armed actors and for it the employment done by geography and instruments of
cartographic representation, assimilating the criticism about its theatricality, the magnification to which
its inadequate or ingenuous employment gives place Already in the classic text of the pioneers Fals,
Guzmn and Umaa, the chapter of the Geography of the Violence (the IVth in the first one of two
volumes) became indispensable to show in a convincing way to the profane reader the unequal
distribution of the facts; and in addition to being an element of the method of exhibition, a didactic
resource facing this type of reader, it turns into an analysis element to understand the way how it was
spreading over the national territory 1 since they have verified that although on the part of their
promoters guidelines and slogans that were covering the whole country were given, the regional diversity
ended up by being the rule.
Certainly one of Colombia: Violence and Democracy of 1987 book s contributions also classic at
this point, was having introduced the notion of social actors in its determination for demonstrating the
multi causality, the violent facts multi dimensionality. May be the political violence intention of
separating in a conscious way of the tendency to over estimate the political violence will be taken too far
(and with some mistakes of that book fashionable slogans were done) but the case is that they conceive
and analyze the plurality of forms in which the violence appears, the diverse effects, contradictory in
many cases, and the multiple causalities that intervene, to a great extent because they assume that under
each of these forms a social actor sub lies. This way they immediately refer characterizing four forms
that count with a clear political content to complex combinatorial processes 2 that happen between them
in the real life, the weight of the argumentation is put in analyzing, decomposing, differing; the emphasis
is put directly in considering the specific gravity of every form, more than in receiving the interaction, or
the feedback between them. And that in addition to the fact of which the companions do completely
without the intention of being represented and of representing this diversity, so much as in what could
have the cartographic instrument of didactic intention, as for explanatory possibilities, it leads them to
what to my judgment is the thickest appreciation error with regard to the presence and territorial domain
acquired to this date for an armed actor, and to all assumptions, and to all strategic implications that it
has, it is possible to read there:
It is absolutely not true that after Belisario Betancur the situation of public order caused straight
by the guerrilla clash is worse than before. This argument is used repeatedly in favor of the comeback to
the strategy that grants priority to force, but there are no comparative studies that demonstrate it. If it is
considered to be, for example, the geographical expansion of the guerrilla groups factor, the opposite is
verified: between 1977 and 1983 in effect eight fronts of the FARC located in regions much delimited
(Corinth, Marquetalia, Magdalena Medio in Bolivar, Urab, el Pato, Algeciras, Can del Duda)
multiplied up to twenty-seven, spread throughout the country, while from 1983, scarcely they increased
from twenty-seven to thirty and two, and today the relatively active ones do not go over seven." 3
The comparative studies that were prepared subsequently, and, more important than that: the
papers that the own guerrilla produces and that in a gradual way goes out to the light, point out, much on
the contrary, that this has been one of the periods of major growth: when it is carried out, and in a most
methodical way, the unfolding of the fronts on FARCs case: at the end of this period it had managed
practically together with the number of fronts, to duplicate the number of their activists.
The authors had warned us, and in a context in which it is heightened like a request of principles, a
basic assumption of its analysis, the postulate about which the logic of violence in Colombia is not
inexorable; (Ibid. p. 27) but the appreciation mistake does not come from logic oscillations, from the
contradictory and sinuous of the course of events, but it has an empirical foundation; and so much like
this information deficit, it could weigh in the slanted of such an appreciation the thought full of desire,
the well thought attitude of not aggravating things, not facilitating force solutions course; against what
could be thought, if the point is well contextualized, it is not in any case a logic matter.
On the other hand, to understand today the reality of the territorial presence of an armed actor, and
considering it to be a basic input, like a fundamental fact to discern its strategic intentions, we are
provided with the whole technical set of instruments that they put at our disposal the geographical
information systems, but especially with the information compiled with criterion, with databases and
analysis from them, which register the change of this presence in the intervals that we want to define, and
at the level of detail, local, regional, national, which will be necessary; and, also, we are provided with the
imperative of using them, and of corroborating the information that they provide us; it is not possible to
dispense of them, but neither to depend on only one source.
Nevertheless, and despite its verified advantages and flexibility, the previous skill does not realize
all the components of the changeable regional reality in war times. It portraits very well the guerrillas
ascensional role in areas of recent population, realizes the consonance, the grade of identity that exists
between a colonization which principal mobile is the cultivation profitability like the coca and poppy,
when the guerrillas had no rival at sight and were an unanswered power in these areas, but it does not turn
out to be suitable when the above mentioned consonance breaks in favor of an increasing social
differentiation as the process becomes stable, and still less if they turn out to be armed rival in the
horizon, if war degrades itself with the arrival of paramilitary.
I know with certain detail level Molanos work, and have presented in other contexts the present
critical notes, although, having been employed at some brief opportunity next to him, I have not had the
occasion to debate them in his presence. Molano not only has showed the possibilities of the interview
skill and the mended life histories, but he imposed a language and created school. After him were great
investigators who adopted it for those peripheral regions and of recently population, where the
predominant activity is illegal, and the obvious mastery of the illegal armed actors, like the Amazona and
the Orinoqua, and it has been applied also to other regions, regions of traditional population, successfully
varied and not always with its sensibility and talent. The language to which I allude is the one that
denotes the direction that goes from the individual protagonist, author of his testimony, to the social actor
to a great extent composed from multiple testimonies, and to compose Molanos he has made use of his
previous intellectual baggage, principally of the Marxist conception of the process of capital original
accumulation, of the relation with the soil s revenue, and the dynamics of classes s struggle in the
agrarian societies surrounded by a productive system that he characterizes as of greedy capitalism.
The existential of the histories, the special care in the literary invoice that bears elements of
verisimilitude and fiction, and also theatrical, can have driven to a certain ambiguity on the proper
concept of social actor. As Molano himself exhibits autobiographicaly in a small history written in 1992
and of methodological connotations titled Confesin de parte it is not a question of the dramatization or
theatrical representation of the socially significant facts, or of its staging, it is a question of rather
understanding the mentality that guides the action of the individuals, and at the same time relating it to
the production universe, with what takes place and how it takes place. If he affirms that reading
Marx's El Capital cover to cover was key in his basic training, simultaneously he recognizes everything
what his readings and later experiences had complementary to go towards the comprehension of
individual and collective mentalities, to the search of the rural rationality and how it has evolved in the
most recent stage; in sum, in his work the principal intention has become to understand the motivations of
the action socially faced from testimonies and histories of individual lives. To construct a character who
is representative of a sector of the society. From there the actors' denomination and the diffusion that it
has obtained until coming to the common language and to its employment like part of the psychological
warfare to which the proper actors are pawned.
The actors examination, managed in good time to replace the previous analysis centered on the
factors (objective and impersonal, completely exterior to the individual) giving the analysis a tone much
intimist and personnel. The actor s logic appears in the testimony with all his subjectivity, and with the
consequent tendency to praise his own action at the expense of the social action itself. The investigator
skill consists in choosing representative testimonies, of hefting them, confirming their versions with other
sources, and anyway, in placing them in context and mending them attributing their importance, defining
which of the sectors or society classes they represent. Fals Borda, who used the skill in his Historia Doble
de la Costa, on having prefaced the one that to my judgment is the best work of Molano, Siguiendo el
Corte, names it an imputation method and explains in detail his steps.
Nevertheless one of the limitations of the above mentioned method can consist on the fact that is
less sensitized to understand the adaptive strategies, the routine thing, that innumerable scale of events
that are not happenings. The daily action turns out to be darkened by the unusual event, by the
protuberant fact. And it does not manage to tell, for example, how not always the conflict redounds into
violence; it is an analysis skill that is designed to receive almost in an exclusive way the conflict in its
most extreme declaration. (Which is essential but it does not include a key dimension: the form in which
people adapt themselves in the middle of a war situation, coexists basely with it, and, anyway, it manages
to avoid its most lethal effects) And the epic - heroic tone in which the interviewed personages, in general
commanders or guerrillas with control, narrate the war facts, praises in an invariable way the protagonist
of the first line, at the expense of the others. The risk of what Bourdieu in a moment named the
the rural military arm of the drug trafficking 7. Definition that coming from the one who comes would be
useful to open the discussion, still knowing that, for the case, drug trafficking is a generic and diffuse
expression that does not denote in itself the connections it could have with politics, locally regional or
national, since also its different links as economic activity are dispersed through out the country.
In any case, as a whole, like a tendency and clear balance of previous oscillations, already
overcome the attitude that was consisting of undervaluing the role of the actors, considering them to be a
simple passive expression of the structures, abstract and impersonal.
Still with its simplifications, which seem inevitable, the current apogee of the notion of social
actors indicates a countertendency that puts the accent in the plurality, postponing a set vision to perceive
the interactions, the interferences that appear between the different alternatives of territorial control
during the war.
I believe that today and in view of the facts and evidences accumulated, it is possible to agree in
that the intensity of war united to its duration, and the diversity of violence associated to it, are creating a
new conception of the territory. Some of the outstanding figures of the military strategy go so far as to
formulate like a principle, and in an axiomatic way, the importance of the geographical knowledge:
combatant who does not know the territory in which he acts well, is convicted to lose it. The
clausewitzian and neo-clausewitizian discussion, has re-formulated the terms of this discussion, and
underlines the supremacy of the population on the territory in its strategic importance, but without it
going so far as to minimize the second one of the components. In fact like an outstanding feature of the
Colombian situation we meet that in a given moment the armed actors seem to be guided by the maxim:
if you are not provided with the support of the population, think about how to dominate the territory, the
other will come on addition, this way the fact is that ours turns out to be a fragmented territory and ours
a divided society (and the previous one is a conscious paraphrase, of the provocative title of Marco
Palacios and Frank Safford s book: Colombia: pas fragmentado: sociedad dividida, Bogota, 2002).
Simultaneously has been gained conscience about the limitations of the cartographic
representation to realize the dynamics of the war and population flows. In several recent works from a
pair of French geographers Vincent Goeset and Olivier Pissoat and on the base of a taken detailed
examination of the whole series of Colombian publications, from the outstanding figure of 1962 up to the
most recent, were indicated the inevitable distortions maps suffer as effect of the aggregation, and the
instrumental and conditional character of any cartographic representation, even if it is well elaborated. It
is up to the investigator, then, to refine the interpretation, to consider the information, and to offer the
reader, to the reader in general, specialist or layman, a context adapted to every map, in addition to a
picture of conventions in which the source of information is specified, etc. And, nevertheless, not even
the most sophisticated of the cartographic representation tools manages to realize the flows of population
that produces the forced displacement.
I make notice that in any case there is already a valid precipitate; a convergence between different
approaches: works as the one that compiles a governmental dependency (Colombia: Armed conflict,
regions, Human rights and DIH 1998-2002, Presidency of the Republic) and the prepared one by an
ONG as the CINEP by the team that coordinates Fernn Gonzlez (Political Violence in Colombia.
from the fragmented nation to the State construction, Bogot, May, 2003) they start from very
different assumptions, have different periodicity criteria, different technical set of instruments for the
cartographic representation (they use software of incompatible geographical information systems between
themselves) nevertheless it is not by chance that they come to similar conclusions as for the geographical
concentration of warlike facts and the associate forms of violence (grades of implantation, areas of
consolidated rearguard, areas in dispute, areas of confrontation) as for the persistence in time and
the diffusion rules.
And the valid precipitate gives us the unavoidable spatial frame in the analysis, liberating us from
judging the presence of one armed actor from its own formulations. And with regard to the data sources,
in contrast to approximately two decades ago in which to obtain the basic information or to gain access to
the information took the investigator to the semi underground ambiences in which it could obtain, to
depend on one or two sources at most, and to the consequent dilemma of the medieval theologian trying
to distinguish the canonical from the apocryphal, today the problem, is not to discern the authenticity of
the documents, it is their abundancy, it is a problem of oversupply, with the consequent need to refine the
criterion.
representation forms and organization; what, on the contrary, the French thinker found an outstanding
feature of the North American society: the profusion and importance of the voluntary associations and for
which he was previously thinking that if perhaps in the future civil wars and confrontations would
register, from them such forms of association and representation would become even strengthened, those
that having arisen from the base of society, already had prospered.
Answering to a world tendency and to specific stimuli, between us, at least in the last decade,
registers a certain and healthy heyday of the nongovernmental organizations and forms of local and
regional association, but they keep on being weak and especially, in a context like the current one, very
vulnerable. The climate of intimidation that exists in regions where there has been the presence of armed
actors has been clear.
And this is a crucial fact that, those who adopt a major sensibility and formulate the axiom of
insensibility of the majority usually do not register. And certainly to affirm without much ado with regard
to the facts of violence of any period of our contemporary history, we all are responsible, we all have
been guilty, helps to dilute the concrete responsibility of people and groups. As well as to affirm without
much ado that we are insensitive, with countries by comparison like Spain, does abstraction of the
singularity of our conflict, and is far from being a suitable or balanced judgment.
Let's remember that this plain attribution of the collective responsibility had a variant that was
bordering on the cynicism: that we all are smeared, was used during the process 8000 (the investigation
about the financing on the part of one of the drug traffickers organizations of president Sampers
campaign, 1994-1998) with the intention of diluting or palming the principal responsibilities, to postulate,
without much ado, that who ever have bought contraband products was also making a profit, and had the
same responsibility as the president who had been chosen thanks to the drug trafficking money.
And it is not that I am a willing to consider the exceptional nature of the Colombian case;
comparing is unavoidable, to establish historical analogies is indispensable, but they are constructed
precisely to highlight what exists of specific in every case, in conscience of which the similarities or
tendencies shared by the cases that are compared become exhausted when reaching the singular, finally in
conscience, that compare or to do analogies is not equivalent to implant at all costs the principle of
identity A=B.
One of the analysts who judges us from outside, but who is very familiar with our history and
situation, is who more has insisted on the above-mentioned fragmentation and asymmetry, going so far as
to affirm that it is the whole constitutive element of our history, and that includes the proper popular
classes, which demonstrate the biggest suspicion towards the State that does not guarantee them
the access to a social citizenship and often give in a kind of anarchist - liberalism which drives every
social sector to try to conquer at its own risk the advantages possible.10
Fragmentation, prevailing individual tendencies, the individualism as rule of proper social action,
in sum: deep social lack of organization. Crossfire but in several directions simultaneously, make difficult
to apply the friend - enemy logic in a diagram of recognizable forces. As for sensibility attributions, as
well as for guilt attributions, it is necessary to distrust the generalizations and is necessary to go deeper,
any delicacy turns out to be small. And in such an intricate context perhaps the most encouraging signs
are being received from the left, from those sectors of the left that do more emphasis in the organizational
problem, those who inside the Democratic Alternative Pole demonstrate that they have better assimilated
the previous experience and can lay down their short term interests, for the sake of the institutional
profitability of a new organizational model and of wide coverage. And from there precisely most calm
statements come about what the collective sensibility means. 11
And the most recent: the massive mobilizations on March 4, 2008 are an unpublished phenomenon
in Colombia, for its spontaneity, for being massive and multitudinous. Summoned by members of the
youngest generation, making intensive use of the media, the Internet networks, politicians of different
parties will try to capitalize them, and is already seen how partial to the government they try to found in
them a new reelection project; nevertheless, none of such attempts of exploitation manages to spoil them.
The guerrilleros, or even, the wildest practitioners of terrorism who manage to construct networks to
move their wars forward, for effective they are in the "netwar" can not manage to avoid the negative
effects of the over use of media and the contrast with the raw facts that affect the collective sensibility.
Soon they verify that the profit in hearing does not mean profit in credibility, the "mediasphere" has
become the principal battlefield, and its massive character, its simultaneity, in it any attempt of
manipulation, proves to be ephemeral, counter-productive.
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Notes
*A previous version of this essay was presented in the 8 National Conference of Sociology, Cali, Colombia, On October, 2003;
which has been extended and updated for the present publication.
** Titular Teacher of the Sociology Department of the Colombia National University. Email: fcubides etb.net.cl
1 The Violence in Colombia Took I; Sociological Monographs, National University, Bogota, 1962, p.105.
2 Quoted book, 1st work. edition, Bogota, 1987, p. 25.
3 Ibid, p. 168.
4 To produce a life history, to treat life as a history, that is to say like the coherent history of a significant and faced sequence of
events, is perhaps to sacrifice itself for the sake of a rhetorical illusion, of a common representation of the existence, which the
whole literary tradition has not stopped, and still not stop, reinforcing in: Actes de la recherche en Sciences Sociales N 62/63,
Juin 1986, p. 70.
5 The self-defense illegal groups in Colombia, Republic of Colombia, National Defense Department, December, 2000. p. 5.
6 Paramilitary in Colombia: context, Allied Forces and consequences in: Political analysis N 12, April, 1991.
7 It does not matter what the paramilitarism is in its origins, the fact is that it is the rural military arm of the drug trafficking facing
the guerrillas in De Juan de la Cruz Varela a Tirofijo, interview done by Dew Londoo in: Political analysis, N 37, August,
1999.
8 Civil resistance in Bogota. Antanas Mockus, Mayor, IDCT, April, 2002.
9 Charles, Tilly (1978), From mobilization to Revolution, Wesley Addison, 1978; See also a very pertinent article for our case: "The
rise (and Sometimes Fall) of Guerrillas Governments in Latin America of Timothy Wickham-Crowley in: Sociological Forum,
Volume 2, Number 3, Summer 1987.
10 Daniel Pcaut in: Measuring force-balance of the government s first year of lvaro Uribe Vlez, Planet, Bogot, 2003, p. 20.
11 When scarcely it was initiating its transit to legality, and in a clear and consistent rupture with the immediate past, and when
scarcely it was overcoming the offense which it survived, the ex-Navarrese guerrilla Wolf already said it in 1990: "Now the only
thing that exists is a crossfire in which nobody knows why is shooting nor why they shoot him. It is not known where this goes; or
better, it is known that is not going anywhere. When there is a cause people are motivated to fight and even to die for it. Now there
is no cause, declarations to Semana, May 8, 1990.