The Legacy of a Weak Democracy:

The Colombian Case

POLI 372: Latin American Politics

Instructor: Dr. Michelle Bonner

By: David Romero Espitia

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The study democracy in Latin America has been extensive since much of the region

transitioned from authoritarian regimes to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. Much of

the debate focused on giving a definition to the form of democracy that was being

implemented by governments across Latin American countries. The purpose of this paper

is to extend the research of democracy in Latin America in its attempt of determining the

challenges to democracy in the region. This article uses Colombia as a case study to

identify the three most significant challenges to democracy in this specific country. The

paper argues that political exclusion, political violence, and socioeconomic inequality are

the three most significant challenges to Colombian democracy.

Introduction

To properly approach the concept of democracy in Latin America, the term must

first be defined. Schmitter and Karl (1991:76) define democracy as: “a system of

governance in which rulers are held accountable for their actions in the public realm by

citizens, acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected

representatives.”1In addition, Robert Dahl (1982:11) identifies a series of political

institutions that are needed in a democracy: elected officials, free, fair, and frequent

elections, extended suffrage to practically all adults, almost all adults have the right to run

for office, freedom of expression without the fear of being punished, freedom of access of

alternative sources of information, and freedom of association.2

1 Schmitter & Karl’s definition builds on Joseph Schumpeter’s (1943:269) minimalist definition of
democracy: “the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisionswhich
realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of individuals who
are to assemble in order to carry out its will.
2 Schmitter & Karl (1991:81) complement Dahl’s initial work by stating that in a democracy “elected

officials must be able to exercise their constitutional powers without being subjected to overriding

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 As Gerardo Munk (2015:371) notes, the Latin American political context of

democracy has generally relied on the minimalist concept of electoral democracy in

which elections are the only means of access to government offices, elections are based

on the universal right to vote and the right to run for office without proscriptions, and

elections are devoid of violence or fraud. Moreover, Guillermo O’Donnel (1994:55-56)

argues that historical factors, along with the sever socioeconomic problems of Latin

American countries, has resulted in democratic regimes that are not institutionally

consolidated and that are characterized by practices and conceptions about the practice of

political authority that lead to “delegative” democracies.3

The first section of this case study examines how political exclusion has led to a

regime predominated by the traditional elite and the persecution or extermination of

alternative political actors legitimized by the use of the “state of exception”. The second

section argues that continued political exclusion has generated political violence and

resulted in a state of “violent pluralism” in which human, civil, and political rights have

been repeatedly violated. The third section looks at how Colombia’s socioeconomic

inequality, fuelled by the global integration of the Colombian economy, has led to the

reduction of political representation and the rise of a transnational state that weakens the

legitimacy of the democratic system.

Political Exclusion in Colombia

opposition from unelected officials” and that “the polity must be self-governing; it must be able to act
independently of constraints imposed by some other overarching political system.”
3 “Delegative democracies rest on the premise that whoever wins election to the presidency is thereby

entitled to govern as he or she sees fit constrained only by the hard facts of existing power relations and by
a constitutionally limited term of office” (O’Donnel 1994:59).

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 Political exclusion has been a prevalent characteristic of the Colombian regime.4

The traditional governing elite has repeatedly excluded opposing political actors by

establishing political pacts between the two traditional political parties. In instances when

a political pact has proven insufficient to silence and exclude opposition, the government

has resolved to exterminate the opposition. This has been done through the use of the

“state of exception”. Political exclusion in Colombia is best exemplified through two

historical events: the “Frente Nacional” and the extermination of the “Union Patriotica”

(UP).

Since the consolidation of the Colombian Conservative and Liberal parties in the

mid-19th century, Colombian democracy has been limited to a duopoly of the monopoly

of power (Ramirez 2010:85). The best representation of the exclusive two-party regime in

Colombia is the 16-year political pact that lasted from 1958-74, better known as the

“Frente Nacional”. During this period, the Conservative and Liberal parties agreed on a

power sharing governing pact in which power would alternate every four years between

the two parties through elections. During the “Frente Nacional” all governing positions

were equally divided amongst the two parties while no other political actors were allowed

to contest the power structure.

The “Frente Nacional” also served as a strategy to repress, silence, and alienate all

radical liberal “gaitanistas” and self-defence left-winged groups. These groups had

mobilized against the Conservative and Liberal oligarchy after the assassination of

populist Liberal Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in 1948 (Guzman Campos: 1962). It was this era of

4 Hedstrom & Smith (2013:11) refer to political exclusion as the process in which an individual or group is
excluded from participation in political processes. This exclusion may stem from law, custom, intimidation
or discrimination.

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high political exclusion that resulted in the birth of left-winged guerrillas such as the

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Although the “Frente Nacional” opened up a democratic space for the

participation of the two traditional parties, this political pact excluded alternative actors

and relied on the use of “state of exception” to maintain political order (Pizarro

Leongómez, 1991:159).5 Between 1949 and 1991, when the current constitution was

enacted, Colombia was under a state of siege for a cumulative total of thirty years. It was

during this period that the government developed sophisticated mechanisms of repression

and terror to defeat all of those individuals or groups considered as adversaries.

One of the state’s mechanisms to repress and silence adversaries was the use of

political assassins by both Liberal and Conservatives in their efforts of ensuring electoral

victory as well as protecting their economic interests (Palacios 2006:164). In 1968, it

became legal to create civil defense groups to privately confront guerillas and to support

the army’s counterinsurgency efforts. Many right-wing landowners and drug traffickers

formed such groups “in order to protect themselves and help the government retake and

secure rural land being surrendered to the guerilla groups” (Holmes et al 2006:168).

In 1984, after escalating violence and deteriorating civil-military relations,

president Belisario Betancourt Cuartas decided to sign an amnesty agreement with a big

block of the FARC, M-19, and EPL guerrilla forces in efforts to broaden political

5 Andrés Dávila Ladrón de Guevara (1998) has called attention to the use of the ‘‘state of exception’’ as a
government mechanism to legitimize military actions against civilians and thereby achieve long-term
institutional stability.
In Colombia, the “state of exception” meant that civil rights were restricted and the powers of the armed
forces to arrest, interrogate, and try civilians for crimes of subversion, and to govern large regions of the
country were expanded (NCOS 1995: 53).

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participation and avert greater armed conflict (Watson 2000: 533). 6 As Watson notes, the

disarmed groups often decided to participate in the electoral system and the FARC

remnants formed the UP, while the M-19 formed the Accion Democratica-Movimiento 19

(ADM-19). However, Colombian military and paramilitary forces continued to view

these groups as subversive and a threat to the state.

The UP had been formed from amnestied elements of the FARC and had been

particularly successful in North-western Colombia at the local electoral level. UP

supporters and alleged supporters increasingly became targets of massacres, with

violence ascribed to the paramilitaries, whose rhetoric increasingly focused on the need to

cleanse society of anti-Colombian elements. Between 1984 and 1990, more than 1000

members of the UP were assassinated.

Political exclusion has been an enduring characteristic of Colombian politics; one

that has limited the participation of alternative political actors and given birth to various

armed guerilla movements. The government has devised mechanisms that allow for the

use of repression and violence to eliminate all opposition that pose a threat the traditional

structure of power. Through the use of the “state of exception”, military actions against

civilians have been legitimized in the government’s efforts to achieve long-term

institutional stability.

Political Violence

The state’s use of military forces and counter-insurgent paramilitary groups has

led to high levels of political violence and a state of “violent pluralism” in which human,

6The M-19th (Movimiento 19 de abril) center-left insurgent group was established by university students
after the fraudulent elections of 1970. The EPL (Ejercito Popular de Liberacon) is a Marxist-Leninist armed
guerrilla group that was established in 1967. Finally, the Marxist-Leninist FARC guerilla forces (Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) were established in 1964.

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civil, and political rights have been repeatedly violated. As aptly pointed out by Brubaker

and Laitin (1998), one should not conceive of political violence as a higher degree of

conflict, but as a process following its own logic, whose episodes follow a volatile

trajectory, largely endogenous and highly contingent.

Political violence and illegality in the periphery is intrinsic to the maintenance of

Colombia’s model of democracy, where a counterinsurgency metanarrative legitimizes

the dirty war carried out by the armed forces against political alternatives portrayed as

leftists, at times with paramilitary proxies or in alliance with paramilitaries (Ramirez

2010:85-86). This type of political violence has resulted in a state of “violent

pluralism”.7 This behaviour has led to numerous human rights violations, and has directly

limited civil and political rights.8

In response to trade union violence, political protest, and other forms of political

and social resistance, military forces throughout the 1980s were responsible for the

detention of over 8,000 individuals, numerous forced disappearances, and allegations of

torture (Aviles 2006:386). Throughout the 1980-90s, paramilitaries expanded their

participation to the rural regions of the country. Since much of the rural territory was

ignored by the state, these self-defence groups served as the protection forces for the rural

elite against any threats from left-winged guerrillas.

7 Arias & Goldstein (2010:5) define this term “as a way to think about violence in Latin American society
as not merely concentrated in the state or in ‘‘deviant’’ groups and individuals who contravene otherwise
accepted norms of comportment in a consensual democratic society.”
8 In the Colombian context, violent pluralism can be understood as “the situation that ensues when
demands for democratic, nonviolent alternatives to conflict resolution that can bring into dialogue multiple,
divergent voices are met with resistance by the state, while the civilians who embrace a nonviolent
approach are treated as potential enemies threatening the integrity of Colombian democracy” (Roldan
2010:64).

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 As Aviles (2006:384-385) notes, paramilitary groups became even more crucial to

military forces and the state as increased international pressure, especially from the US,

called upon the Colombian government to consolidate a less violent and more democratic

regime in the transition to a neoliberal globalized capitalist state. The overt use of

repression and violence was thus transferred over to paramilitary forces. By the 1990s,

the paramilitary groups had replaced the armed forces as the leading perpetrators of

human right violations, accounting for about 70 per cent of political assassinations

(Aviles 2006: 384).

In 1989, paramilitary groups were banned and a series of anti-paramilitary

policies where established after it was proven that paramilitaries were responsible for

more civilian deaths than guerrillas (Kline 1999: 75-76). However, this was not the end

of the participation of paramilitaries in Colombian politics. Throughout the 1990s and

into the early 2000s, various presidents, including Ernesto Samper (1994-98) and Alvaro

Uribe Velez (2002-2010), have supported the creation of new civilian militias in counter

insurgency strategies, most famously known as CONVIVIR (Aviles 2006: 397).9 Only

after two years of their existence, these new private self-defence groups displaced over

200,000 peasants (Hylton 2003: 88).

Most recently, ex-president Alvaro Uribe Velez and many of the members of his

government are being investigated for what has come to be known as “para-politics”. As

Vanden & Prevost (2017:452) note, in 2006 sixty-eight members of Congress were being

investigated on allegations that they connections with paramilitaries. The long history of

tension, confrontation, and violence has led to the construction of a culture of violence in

9 Asociasiones Comunitarias de Vigilencia Rural (CONVIVIR) were authorized by the Samper

administration in 1994 to provide special vigilant services and private security and were limited to a
defense function, supporting the armed forces with intelligence about local communities.

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Colombia. As Pécaut (2001:91) argues, coercion and violence are now fixed components

of the social and political machinery of Colombia and any attempt to change this must

include sincere and arduous efforts.

Social Inequality

The underlying causes of Colombia’s political violence revolve around broad

factors such as unequal access to economic power, especially land and resources, and

unequal access to political power, which ultimately, are institutional factors related to the

creation of guerrilla and paramilitary violence (World Bank 2000:6). Colombia’s

socioeconomic inequality, fuelled by the global integration of the Colombian economy,

has led to the reduction of political representation and the rise of a transnational state that

weakens the legitimacy of the democratic system.

The conflict in Colombia has mainly been a rural phenomenon where the vast

majority of victims have been the rural poor (Rojas & Tubb 2013:132). In the early stages

of the conflict in Colombia, intense violence resulted in a high number of forcefully

displaced individuals, landless peasants, and increased levels of poverty in the rural areas.

It was in these regions that guerilla forces recruited the majority of their combatants

(Palacios 1995:167). The isolation of these communities has led to an increased influence

of insurgent groups.

Moreover, the 1980s and early 1990s saw the introduction of a series of political

and economic reforms that sought to further democratize the country and integrate the

Colombian economy to the global system. As Bejarano & Pizarro (2005:14) argue, these

reforms contributed to the “extreme atomization of political representation” and

weakened the legitimacy of the democratic system. These reforms consists not only of the

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decentralization of capitalist production and introduction of neoliberal economic policies,

they also result in the transformation of the state into a “transnational state” (Robinson

2001: 18).10 Robinson also argues that this transformation is linked with a process of

democratization that is limited by capitalist globalization and the interest of transnational

corporations and the emergence of the transnational elite (Robinson 2000: 90).

Aviles (2006: 384) argues that this process of transformation in Colombia has

promoted a regime that has co-opted and repressed opposition while globally integrating

the economy. External pressures to create a welcoming environment for international

business and transnational corporations accompany this process, resulting in an increased

paramilitary repression against guerrilla insurgency in the efforts to further exclude them

from the political process. Aviles argues that this process results in a “Low-Intensity

Democracy”.11

In order to foster neoliberalism and transnational corporations, the Colombian

government and the state’s armed forces tolerated and promoted paramilitary repression

of political and social opposition to the globalization of the economy. Individuals who

opposed this transition into neoliberalism righteously did so as the burden of

neoliberalism fell on the rural and urban poor. The opening of the economy led to an

unemployment rate of 20 percent by 1999, the elimination of jobs in the agrarian sector,

and the weakening role of the state. This worsened the state of violence by forcing

10 A transnational state is a set of institutions that operates in order to advance the interests of transnational
corporations, with national states becoming components of a larger economic and political project (Aviles
2006: 383).
11 Giles et al (1993) define Low-Intensity Democracy as a largely procedural democracy that allows

political opposition, greater individual freedoms, and a more permeable environment for the investments of
transnational capital.
Giles and Rocamora (1992: 505) also argue that the paradox of low intensity democracy is that a
civilianized conservative regime can pursue painful and even repressive social and economic policies with
more impunity and with less popular resistance than can an openly authoritarian regime.

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agrarian workers to substitute their traditional crops for drug production or to join either

the guerilla or paramilitary forces (Ahumada & Andrews 1998: 462). The economic

transformation has also resulted in the exacerbation of rural poverty in particular, the

extreme levels of land ownership, and increased levels of income inequality. 12.

Conclusion

Political exclusion, political violence, and social inequality are factors deeply

rooted in Colombia’s long history of conflict and confrontation. It has been through the

use of coercion, repression, and exclusion that the traditional elite has monopolized

political and economic power. Political exclusion and political violence have thus

become practices engrained in the political behavior of the regime and has shaped the

interaction between the state and civilians. Social inequality has led to the decrease of

political representation and the increased tensions. These are all challenges that

jeopardize the future of Colombian democracy.

There has been a spark of hope with the recent signing of the peace agreement in

2016 between the government and the FARC guerilla forces. However, the 2018

congressional and presidential elections have demonstrated that tensions remain high and

that polarization has once again put Colombians at odd. If Colombia is to become an

inclusive and prosperous democracy, all Colombians must be made part of the decision-

making process and the government must demonstrate a sincere effort towards

harmonizing the interest of all Colombians. Further research on the topic should focus on

examining the ways in which a state facing similar challenges can consolidate a strong

and stable democracy.

12Between 1997 and 2000 the Gini Coefficient for income distribution increased from 0.54 to 0.59: the
income of the richest 10 percent of the population increased by over 20 percent to reach 58 percent of total
national income between 1992 and 1997 (Yepes Palacio:2000).

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