In 1997, when the Castaño brothers brought the peasant self-defence groups of Córdoba, the Magdalena Medio and the Llanos Orientales together under a single banner, they did not found one more irregular army among the many already scattered across the Colombian map. They founded a parallel administration, financed by cattle ranchers, agro-industrialists and drug traffickers, … CONTINUE READING →
The financial history of the Colombian guerrilla is not a chapter in the history of crime, it is the chapter that explains all the others. While parties debated reforms that never materialized and the State promised a presence that never arrived, armed organizations built a parallel economy that sustained the conflict for six decades and … CONTINUE READING →
Between 1948 and 1958, Colombia lived through a war that preferred not to call itself one. La Violencia was not a civil war in the classical sense; there were no defined fronts or armies in the field, but rather a machinery of rural dispossession in which party affiliation decided the fate of farms and bodies. … CONTINUE READING →