Colombia: The logics of irregular war

and civil resistance *

Fernando Cubides Cipagauta **
Summary: Analyzing the Colombian case one tries to elucidate the characteristics of the irregular war and
the reasons of its duration throughout more than five decades, by means of a brief recapitulation. Immediately we
examine some of the most representative works of Colombian social investigators on this matter, as well as its most
universal theoretical modality and the type of interpretation that has been constructed. El accent is given in the
singularity of an irregular war, of low intensity but long duration, and in its effects on the civil population in the areas
where the guerrillas have achieved a grade of implantation and in a correlative way the army develops counterinsurgency works. The essay ends with the analysis of different forms of civil resistance towards the war, the way and
sequence in which they have manifested themselves and some predictive exercises about the foreseeable
developments of the civil resistance.
Key words: violence, irregular war, Colombia, counter-insurgent strategy, civil resistance, history, 20th
Century.

Colombia: las lgicas de la guerra irregular y la resistencia civil

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)

Some constants in the analysis

A panoramic reading of what has been taking place in Colombian social sciences for at least a
decade, allow us to understand that the innovation grade as for theories, methods and skills, has been in a
determinant measurement according to adapting itself to the nature of an armed, singular conflict like
ours: of long term but low intensity, to its alternatives, to its dynamic. If, since it is known, its emergence
as academic disciplines was sealed by a pressing knowledge demand about violence, of multiple violence,
and having produced it, induced, along with sour polemics, the first recognition of its relevancy, its early
visibility; presently they are being judged first of all for their little or big aptitude to unravel the origins
and the course of the armed confrontation, as well as the strategies place in game, they are being
evaluated as for their relevancy first of all by their aptitude on formulating predictive judgments about the
type of irregular war that prevails here and of its immediate development.
For it then, strategists out of necessity, more than for vocation, many investigators have had to

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.

From violence to war

It is not that it has the scope of a Copernican draft, but to understand the violence declarations
diversity in the context of a war, to assume it this way (without implying that war is going to explain each
and everyone of the violence forms, or realizes each of the facts) sends us to a style of reasoning, to a few
sources of interpretation, and certainly to a few databases and information sources. As for the first subject
it means to come to all authors who have docked the war (even when it predominates over the aberration)
like a singular type of social action; and the warriors simultaneously framed in a complex technical
device, which restricts them and mostly determines them, not like automatons, but like subjects that
during the warlike action have not resigned from their will and make use of a margin of freedom, even if
it is precarious, facing their action in relation to others, and connecting to it a subjective sense, as the
famous definition says.
And a brief exploration in our own theoretical tradition allow us to find that the sociology has not
been foreign to the effort to annotate the field of the irregular war, to explain the conditions in which it
arises, as well as any of its most general features. And in it - and at the risk of being a pedant - it would be
necessary to point out inside the accessible theoretical sources that we find a singular relevancy for our
case to an authors' trilogy that, starting from dissimilar assumptions, with diverse theoretical horizons,
they enter upon the matter, and, not in vain, they do it taking an outstanding figure as a fund noise:
Clausewitz. I refer to Carl Schmitt (Teora del partisano, 1963; Clausewitz como pensador poltico,
1967); Anatol Rapoport (Estrategia y Consciencia, 1964; Concluding Remarks by Anatol Rapoport in
On the War, 1968; Clausewitz, filsofo de la guerra y la poltica, 1967); and Raymond Aron (Clausewitz
et la guerre populaire, 1972; Penser la guerre: Clausewitz, dos Vols., 1976).
It seems to me worth noting down that the more important works of at least the last decade, it will
not be possible to accuse them of having continued in the age of the innocence as for theoretical modality:
in the profuse and very unequal literature that has formed, enclosed in that one with intentions purely
descriptive, or still nominal, it is possible to trace an universal intention , the Colombian case progressive
overcoming idea and the consequent attempt of doing a methodical comparison with other well-known
cases. In the same way the conflict has worsened and deteriorates in front of our eyes, the need for the
above mentioned comparison is more conscious, more pressing, and worse than good, that way, has
propitiated the modality exchange.
And as for rules of application, interpretive skills, it is possible to state an intensive learning.
Taking the actors speeches literally is a question of the past, from my point of view a whole
disenchantment registers on this subject. A way has been made through the attitude of judging every
ideological product, every declaration, maxim formulation with inventory benefit. The virtuosity in
which came to develop the histories of life skills, which produced anthological texts, of literary quality
like those of Alfredo Molano, turns out to be as for the methods a good example.
Since he narrates it in one of his writings of autobiographical cut, doing of the need a virtue,
Molano took the qualitative skills at excellence levels, at first for regions of traditional population in the
Orinoquia (Los Aos del Tropel) where it combines them with the conventional tools, then for areas of
new population in the confluence field of the Orinoquia with the Amazon region (as in Selva Adentro), at
once for the chaining between the violence of 50's and the most recent (as in Siguiendo el Corte) and
anyway for a sub region frontier and much circumscribed inside the Amazona, as in Up-stream. Related
to the previous ones, the book Trochas y fusiles is centred on the reconstruction of FARCs history, on
what of its past and its origins still in its current orientations. Most of the natural stages where his
testimonies and histories develop belong to the Orinoqua and to the Amazona. Read his qualifications in
the sequence in which they were published, it is obtained practically, in his big lineaments, the itinerary
of the colonizing process.
The comparison that Antonio Caballero did at that time of Molanos written work with La
vorgine, is fair. If Jos Eustasio Riveras novel helped like no other text to announce the situation of the
Amazona, national and internationally in the 30's and 40's and his fictitious history is nourished of real
experiences and of direct experiences in the area, Molanos work have obtained for the urban Colombia
of the 90s something comparable.

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

biographical illusion is latent in all those narratives.4

It is understood that the majority of the literature inspired by this model, on having tackled a
phenomenon like the guerrillas, observes it with circumspection; that its mobiles and strategic plans are
studied carefully, even that the territorial domain that it exercises is valued for what it has of positive
towards the sectors and the weakest links of the productive process; it turns out less understandable on the
other hand that the friendliness means a loss of analytical independence, and that a lot of works derive
towards the merely apologetically. A certain fascination is warned by the facts of the war, but , same as
the fascination that war -its spectacular nature, facts and protagonists produces on journalists- can also
lead to a loss of interest by the non participants, for the day by day and the routine which not fighting
population has to confront its consequences. Without rejecting the war alternatives -its geopolitical
implications, effect in the population movements- the long term has to do with rules of establishment,
with productive systems, mentalities and motivations that persist in the middle of the war and despite it,
with the whole series of prosaic attitudes, which that literature genre is not sensitized to receive. After the
rural marches of 1996 (of the massive mobilizations of rural coca growers, in the south of the country) it
was possible to see that the method in question, and the history of life skills, even for the virtuosity
existed in its application, had given all of itself.
To this point there is no doubt that where more distortions and errors were accumulated was in the
evaluation of the paramilitary like armed actor. Clouded by an appellant semantic treatise (self-defenses
or paramilitary?) its progressive geographical expansion scarcely of two periods of five years went to this
part was magnified in all its scopes. But only up to the most recent stage, and goes out to light works that
have a solid empirical foundation in the regional, the oscillation excelled itself, pendulous, between the
ends of the execration and the denunciation, on one hand and for other one, the fascination for the mass
media skill of some of its spokesmen. And, with everything debatable that it could keep on being, the
current subjection to justice of most of them, simultaneously the enormity of its crimes and resources, has
shown up the weakness of its flow chart, its fissures.
A look to the first official document of the Defense Department in which they appear, illustrates
the problem well: it refers to an official and public text in which the above mentioned Department was
establishing the magnitude of the phenomenon, compiled the official information, rests on the analysis of
the academic investigation to explain it. The document begins with a paradox (undoubtedly involuntary)
alter affirming: "The commitment and the decision of the Colombian State, the military forces and the
national Police to fight the criminal action of the self-defense illegal groups, are demonstrated in the
results reached in the last times (and it brings numbers), to annotate at once: Nevertheless, between
the agents that generate violence in Colombia, the illegal groups of self-defense are those who have
had the biggest growth and the biggest territorial expansion in the last years. 5 With which some
type of explanation becomes pressing, even if it is speculative, as the one offered from here. Still if the
worst hypothesis would be adopted: that the above mentioned intention only existed in the role and the
accusations of one of the reports of Human Rights Watch, according to which in 9 of 18 brigades in
which it was organized the Colombian army back then there were officials with control who are
compromised by the paramilitary were completely true, nevertheless one would not manage to explain
such a rapid growth.
From 1996 it has been possible on my part to do a pursuit of this armed actor in a more specific
way, to establish a sequence in his actions, as the press information registers them, and of his motivations,
as his leader and spokesmen spread them, across their own means (Bulletins Colombia Libre, web page)
and for the echo and amplification that from a time until now massive means grant them, particularly the
television. I have tried to infer from there (of indications, therefore, more than of consolidated evidences)
the expansion intentions, the plans of territorial domain, try to infer of all this is a strategic plan or longterm goals that have been fixed. The ups and downs of a negotiation as that it has been carried out by the
current government, have served at least to make clear the fissures, the weakness of its hierarchy, the
incongruities of its politics as group.
The exercise of a meticulous pursuit from the secondary information is useful although not
conclusive. Certainly that for the period previous to 1990, Alejandro Reyes had already done the
superposition of the map in which the paramilitary had carried out their most lethal actions, and the map
of ground buys for drug traffickers, the mail between one and other were indisputable: in 300 of 1020
municipalities back then it was possible to find both aspects.6 Very much later, in 1999 the ex-president
Alfonso Lpez Michelsen -in an interview- risked a summary definition of the paramilitarism: "they are

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.

The types of resistance to war and its determinants

In a recent event organized by the Mayoralty of Bogot and the National University about the
Civil Resistance and not violent Political Action (Bogot, August, 2003) a balance was achieved between
the exhibition of resistance experiences with a good representativity (Delegations of the municipalities of
Silvia, Caldono and Pez in the Cauca, of the Alto Ariari in the Meta; Of Mogotes in Santander, of the
region of the Carare and of Tarsus in Antioquia) and the theoretical formulations, universalists. As for the
regional mosaic, apparently there are variants, and although the representatives of those movements who
adopt the resistance as part of an identity reconstruction movement have its specific gravity, there are not
the only ones.
If a basic consensus exists about the profiles of the situation, and it is clear for anyone that we
have been present at a constant degradation, to the protuberant fact, like product of the aberration, of
which on part of the contenders of the armed conflict during the actions one does without the distinction
between the combatants and the civil population. The participants were wondering then: How to resist
this tendency? Under what conditions is it possible revert it or, at least, to resist it?
Stathis Kalyvas, one of the international guests, presented there a model that proposes to receive
the logic of violence in the context of a civil war, I anticipate from his book that he would publish soon,
a work empirically founded on the facts happened in his country Greece, between 1943 and 1949;
Kalyvas, trying to adapt itself to the subject-matter of the event, proposed to deduce of his model the
conditions in which it is possible to change the course of this logic, to demonstrate in the facts that it is
not inexorable. The nucleus of his previous work is the description of violence forms, its interaction in a
certain historical context, and the way in which its fluctuations depend on the war course. One of the
outstanding characteristics of the national "case" from which he prepares the thickness of the information
that feed his model is that it was a question of a confrontation in which there was not opposite, ethnic,
religious or of social class, defined with clarity, and along with the confrontations properly military and
opened between the conflicting edicts, there takes place an innumerable scale of violence facts, a process
of degradation that at first sight is eventful, chaotic and anarchic. The analogy, with our situation is
tantalizing. Kalyvas, making a show of a formidable tension for the objectivity, and combining the
application of his model, and the handling of the aggregate information, with a series of interviews in the
area to the survivors, agents and victims, become perceptible certain rules, subtle connections between
war facts that are provided with a strategy, with a few definite objectives, and others, which pass for
episodic and unexpected. An empirical find incorporated then by his model, and that would give for a
philosophical pessimism, is how violence levels increase in a civil war since strong incentives are arising
for the indirect use of violence: starting from the testimonies, and contrasting meticulously with other
available sources, it was seen that if there are few who exercise straight violence, many people who were
not committing themselves straight, turned out to be involved by implication, using in a conscious and
studied way the mechanism of denunciations, inciting warriors to use violence against those who have old
complaints.
As a logical derivation of his argumentation, completely applicable for our case, to understand the
dynamics that generates war is a prerequisite, a fundamental assumption for the suitable orientation of not
violent action.
And during the discussion arises an empirical observation, which was obtained from the analysis
of available numbers for all civil conflicts of the XXth century (to the law of big numbers it is necessary
to add: for every ten people died in this type of confrontations, 8 (eight) have been unarmed civils). That
its why it can be postulated that, in contrast to the conventional wars, of most international
confrontations, civil confrontations take a "triangular" character as a singularity: they always involve civil
disarmed. And a slightly raw metaphor is used to synthesize it: the civil population has being the
"umpire" across whom the contenders think about how to give themselves decisive blows. Analysts as
Kalyvas warns us nevertheless against the sociological deviation that consists of supposing that always
and in all cases the civil support to the armed groups is predetermined by divisions and ethnic contrasts or
class, and is exterior to war itself.
In the civil pedagogy in which Antanas Mockus as Mayor of Bogota was pawned, with all his
resources, and with his taste for the symbolic, a notion of civil resistance is formulated in the middle of

war, valuable but unilateral:

What is civil resistance?:
It is a set of attitudes and actions by means of which the members of society do not accept to
surrender nor even yield before the pressure of the violent ones. It consists of expressing the rejection that
we feel towards the violent ones and towards the acts that threaten the life of people, works and important
facilities for the city p. 4 and p. 5:
the civil resistance is born in an autonomous way from the civil power. This means that the
citizenship does not delegate in the State the whole task of expressing the indignation, but he commits
himself in a direct way in the action against the violent ones (...)
and p. 6: There is civil resistance when there exists a clear decision not to collaborate with
the illegal armed groups nor using weapon8
etc.
even if in the examples that are quoted there are included other forms of resistance, the resistance
from below against a dictatorial authority (or democratic but that possibly becomes arbitrary) is not
conceived, and since its formulation has a doctrinaire character (and it is not a coincidence the form of
catechism that adopts) the omission is more sensitive. The mayor is in his area, after all, but that's why he
acts like an authority, and, as such, I do not hesitate to recognize it, in his determination for promoting the
civil resistance he showed the same personal courage opposite to the guerrillas and the paramilitary.
Nevertheless it is necessary to repeat a more comprehensive and multilateral definition of the civil
resistance, I believe that in particular sociologists, we are in conditions to do it. Since it refers to a
real mantra, of a well known formulation, of that we do almost, an identity element, by force of
invoking in a regular way the distinction between legality and legitimacy.
Since like theoretical formulation there has never been given a finished coincidence between the
society and the state, there will always be an asymptotic approach: the most just and better organized of
the political systems that we so far would imagine, the most perfect of the democracies will never be able
to answer directly to all the tendencies, demands and needs of the society. In other words the legality
rationally better definite, more coherently statutory, not for it is entirely legitimate. The possibility of this
interstice between the legal and legitimate is what bases the resistance right, or the resistance from
below. Theoretically is key to allow, like a possibility, that still the most democratic of the authorities,
and the most popular of the leaders, should incur in an arbitrariness, and for it itself it is also key to
guarantee the resistance as a right.
With all its validity, the centralized civil resistance induced by the authority, still by the most
legitimate of the authorities conceived, has the disadvantage of which it does not propose, and less still it
manages, to solve the asymmetry between the efficacy grade of the organizations that exercise violence in
the frame of a strategy, the amorphism, the dispersion, the demobilization of those who are not framed in
any organization.
With all its authenticity, its spontaneous character, the decentralized resistance, from below, is
not self sustainable, it takes the passivity as a feature. A clear case is that of our wrongly placed ones:
their resistance consists of thinking with the feet, it can hardly be supported in time, propose like
model. And on the other hand, it needs -so that it happens- certain structural characteristics: recognizable
borders, a balance of forces that makes them operating. The clear thing is that when ever it has taken
place by itself, it has been for a short term, it is proper of a transitional circumstance. And seeing from the
capital the different declarations of resistance that have been taking place, the above mentioned
asymmetries were understood. One of the paradoxes of the recent Colombian situation is that the armed
conflict has been accentuating preexisting inequality: for example those who exist between the
downtowns and the periphery; although spectacular actions have taken place in the cities, the basic stage
is the field. As we were listening to the testimonies we were understanding better that Bogot has become
a privileged niche: at least from ends of the 80s it has been improving in a consistent way its quality of
life measured to the most objective indicators: coverage of health, of education; from 1994 they have
been lowering the numbers of most lethal violence: murders, personal injuries, and they have improved
almost all safety indexes. And the question is inevitable: will it be able to continue doing it while in many
of the regions the situation deteriorates? How lasting is a situation in which there are portions of a country
territory in which the institutions work, they are renewed, its legitimacy is endorsed, while in others the

typical is a pre hobbesian war situation of all against all?

All this leads us to another basic question: the sovereignty; its parcellized character in a
circumstance like the current one. The existence of a dual power in special regions of the country, the
fluctuating of the borders between the territorial domains of diverse actors, and the suspense that causes
this changeability in the settlers, and all this like a typical feature of the most recent stage. In one of his
books Charles Tilly, who became known like investigator as part of the group that produced the book The
history of violence in America (1969) the archetype of the North American "violentology" ( forgive me
the barbarism, the colombianism) was referring to these situations which are unstable and transitional like
characterized by a multiple sovereignty while a historian as Perry Anderson, recaptures it to emphasize
the unstable of the resultant balance but it re-formulates it and prefers to speak of parcellized
sovereignty. Although in his case referring to the distribution of power in the European feudal societies,
one and the other coincide in underlining the social costs that a similar situation implies9
The asymmetry that has been noted down between the grade of organization and the efficacy of
the structures of those who practice violence, and the demobilization and dispersion of those who try to
be opposed to it: how to correct it? Obviously: by means of an organization that shelters and promotes the
movement to the advantage of the resistance, which amplifies it, which gives it continuity, but first of all
as two dimensions converge: the civil resistance that legitimate authorities and its pedagogic towards the
citizens, and the one that grows from below in an autonomous and spontaneous way, like a question of
survival in the regions and most affected areas by the war and its associate violence.
Specialists in generalities, as the parodic expression says, super specialists in conflict and in its
most virulent variants, to my judgment, and if we throw a panoramic look to the intellectual production of
the sociologists that is reflected in the released qualifications, as to what has being their professional
practice, they have come tackling the two mentioned dimensions.
On having recaptured in an assiduous and persevering way the problems with which the discipline
was inaugurated like academic profession, on having continued the trace of the pioneers, it helps to create
a moral community different from the one that ties ordinarily the students of the same matter and
linked, precisely to the virulent character of the studied matter as the School of Sociology program
was saying, which Georges Bataille promoted on his time.
And about the most recent and concerning the hobbles and resistances that the humanitarian
exchange has found, but especially concerning the most recent slaughters, the idea (let's not call it a thesis
since it is formulated in an axiomatic way, as if it was a question of a hard fact, strongly proved) that
most of the Colombians being, or we have become, insensitive to the heap of events. Nevertheless: how
to measure the sensibility? On this matter there is nothing similar to the Latin barometer, an instrument
of careful design, which tries to define collective features, national identities, avoiding the stereotypes
and the easy generalizations, comparing in a systematical and recurrent way. On the other hand with
regard to the sensibility and the way editorial writers expressed themselves usually they use the example
of the type of massive mobilization that has happened in Spain against the terrorism, being some actions
of ETA or the offenses on March 11 at the Atocha station. But the comparison is too thick and it ignores
important historical differences. The most crucial to my judgment, which in Spain s case have been
mobilizations with organized expressions, which the parties have promoted and with regard to which and
for it, they have done without their differences, and without their rivalry, as involved they are in the
struggle for power (as they were on March 11, just before an election, and it would be necessary to see
the massive mobilizations and the almost unanimous rejection that 11-M, as the peninsular ones call it,
produced). And, otherwise, that has well identified the origin of the threat, which could have planned a
clear line, and which also none of those claim leaders has tested to obtain dividends by means of winks or
tacit agreements with those who remain in the illegality.
Because of its duration, the number of victims and damages, here the facts are more serious but
simultaneously the responsibility on them is more diffuse. When the specialists qualify wars like ours of
asymmetric they point at that: the disparity, to the great thing that remains in the shade, the difficulty of
planning a clear line since it is not a question only of two contenders, but of several; and since at the same
time one and others have done long learning in that of mixing all forms of struggle, giving place to a
framework, to an intricate network, difficult to decipher to a simple sight. And in the asymmetry or
disparity there is also an aspect of Colombians social life that would have been interested a lot to
Tocqueville: the lack in the base of society of a good number of voluntary associations, the deficit of

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.