The Courtroom and the Bivouac: Reflections on Law and Violence in Colombia

Author(s): Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín and Richard Stoller

Source: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 28, No. 1, Colombia: The Forgotten War (Jan.,
2001), pp. 56-72
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3185092
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 The Courtroom and the Bivouac

Reflections on Law and Violence in Colombia

by
Francisco Gutierrez Sanin
Translated by Richard Stoller

Colombian democracy is an orangutan in afrock coat.

-Dario Echandia

The law, its discursive routines, and its representations play a central r
in Colombian public life. For many social actors, including armed groups,
their statements to their victims and adversaries and to significant third pa
ties about the motives and meanings of their violent actions, legalistic la
guage has become the primary and sometimes the only way of expressin
their demands and public justifications. "We give you five working days [di
habiles] to leave" (Molano, 1996): in this peremptory order from a parami
tary group to a community on the Atlantic Coast, the voice of the paid assa
sin merges with the voice of the notary. In a similarly surprising inflection
Rauil Reyes, a spokesman for the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias
Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-FARC), declar
that he would under no circumstances come to a negotiating table whe
paramilitaries were present because they were "a group at the margin of
law." For its part, an "anticommunist organization" linked to drug trafficki
ended its communiques with the stirring phrase "To be read, communicat
and carried out" (Lease, comuniquese y cumplase) (Torres, 1995: 139).
These manifestations offer clues for the analysis of law and violence
Duranti (1997) has spoken of "culture as knowledge," and from this persp
tive, the study of a cultural complex requires, above all, the teasing-out of
rules: of definition, procedure (knowing how), and orientation (knowing h
to find the resources for resolving how).' The rules are mental maps th

Francisco Gutierrez Sanin is an associate professor in the Institute of Political Studies and In
national Relations of the National University of Colombia. This essay presents the results of
Justice and Oligopoly of Arms Project, co-financed by Colciencias. The author thanks C6sa
Rocha for his contributions and the anonymous LAP readers for valuable suggestions that w
incorporated into the final version of this article. Of course, the ideas expressed here are his ow
responsibility. The epigraph was supplied by Pablo Tatay.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 116, Vol. 28 No. 1, January 2001 56-72
? 2001 Latin American Perspectives

56

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 Gutierrez Sanin / THE COURTROOM AND THE BIVOUAC 57

organize the regularities of social interaction and its interpretation for

sons that are both "cognitive" (defining the world in which one operate
"strategic" (for example, defeating an adversary or convincing impo
third parties). Through these rules we can scrutinize dense "learning dy
ics" in which repertories of symbolic and interpersonal resources are
stantly under construction and adaptation.
Insofar as a rule is not trivial but refers to matters that are quite literal
life and death (Gutierrez, 1998b), it speaks eloquently to us about the
of the context of which it is a part. In other words, the advantage of rul
that they can tell us about their context fluidly and directly not as the v
speaks to the torturer but as one speaks to a confidant. If this is the case,
ever, it should be possible to compare contexts by invoking them thro
their rules.
A good illustration of this possibility might be the "percepticide" t
according to Suairez Orozco (1992), arose during the dirty war in Argen
Suairez Orozco points to the suggestion of doubt about the victim's cul
ity expressed in the question "Who knows what he may have been inv
in?" The family resemblance to the canonical Colombian version
knows what he may have owed someone?" is striking, but a comparison of
operators involved in the two formulations reveals a world of similarities
differences. For Suarez Orozco the Argentine situation had three ingred
total uncertainty about the public realm, the conviction that "it can't h
to me," and the epidemiological intuition (orchestrated from above)
social and political ills were the product of sources of contamination
could and had to be "cleansed." "Who knows what he may have b
involved in?" precisely expresses these three dimensions: that anyone
be the (political) enemy, succumb to the infection, and be extirpated.
the only possible certainty was about one's self, the initial expression o
construction of the "rational I" amidst the terror could take the follo
form: "I am politically pure, therefore I am." Correlatively, the method
of terror, of "cleansing," proceeded from the center to the periphery.
we'll kill all the subversives, then we'll kill all the collaborators, then
sympathizers, then... all those who remain indifferent, and finally, the t
ones" (Declarations of General Iberisco Saint Jean, governor of B
Aires during the first junta; cited in Suairez Orozco, 1992).
"Who knows what he may have owed?" expresses a far greater un
tainty. According to Taussig (cited in Suarez Orozco, 1992), the dirty w
Colombia involved terror entrepreneurs who spread the (credible) idea
"it"-the massacres, the "cleansings," the assassination attempts-could

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58 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

fact happen to anyone. As armed actors proliferate and come to imit

other, it becomes more difficult to convince oneself of one's own in
bility, even after shutting the doors and windows to all communicat
the outside world. A good example is the local elections of October
Several regions faced two contradictory threats: the guerrilla groups
ened those who voted, and the paramilitaries threatened those who abs
There was no way to stay out of harm's way-in other words, tota
tainty with regard to any possible world. Since Colombia's armed ac
pursuing an "Orwellian war"-that is, a war that is both virulent and
cient-the methodology of terror works in precisely the opposite di
from the Argentine case: from the periphery to the center, for both s
and social reasons. On the strategic side, it is worthwhile to n
semiofficial notion of "removing the water from the fishbowl,"2 the c
ting threats, and, above all, the conception of the population not as th
and bearer of rights but as a repository of information and therefore as
interlocutor of military intelligence. On the social side, traditionalism
territorial fragmentation stemming from it have led many armed grou
like civic police concerned with the moral reform of their soc
(Gutierrez, 1998a), making them the object of repression. For exam
militias of Medellin turned the youths of the slum areas, their own
base, into a military target of the first order, punishing their sexual tr
sions, drug consumption, thievery, leaks of information, and so on.
words, they killed first their "friends," then the "lukewarm," and
"collaborators," with the hope of reaching (in the far-off future) the c
the enemy's fortress. This "cleansing" is associated with a complete
of responsibility by the victimizer (and sometimes even by the victim
were killed by the war," declares the paramilitary leader Carlos C
referring to peasants who were massacred on his own orders. None
shakes the epidemiological intuition, but it does radically decenter it
side the "dark forces," a mythic agent that is now part of the hard
Colombian official discourse, are everywhere, and on the other side th
lation, with its "culture of intolerance and aggressiveness" (another do
motif in contemporary Colombia), is a source of constant danger.
these conditions, the daily Cartesianism amidst the terror can no
depend upon belief in one's own political purity, because anyone can
"owe" something to someone else. We are left with three variations
strong, therefore I am," for those who have recourse to money or vio
am prudent, therefore I am," for the bulk of the population; and "I am
therefore I am," for the especially vulnerable sectors.3

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 Guti6rrez Sanin / THE COURTROOM AND THE BIVOUAC 59

THE RULE OF LAW: COLOMBIA IN

THE LATIN AMERICAN CONTEXT

But is Colombia just another case of the well-known Latin Ameri

drome of the confrontation of a weak rule of law and a weak judicia
tus with antidemocratic armed forces? Yes and no. It is true that, as
countries of the subcontinent, there have been serious difficultie
installation of an authentic rule of law with some minimal guarantees
citizenry, but the concrete form of this difficulty is rather idiosyncr
sum it up in a phrase, in Colombia we see the combination of an im
stability of institutional macroforms and an almost permanent state o
nal war with violations of rights.
In the rest of Latin America the issue of the past two decades has b
of democratization versus retrogression, whether through overt th
through a stagnation provoked by conservative forces (Aguero, 199
ocratic-transition theory, with all its limitations, recognizes the more
linear and stepwise nature of the process, at least in the form that its
conceived it. In Colombia the process has been much more d
(Gutierrez, 1998c). With our limited experience in military dictat
(only two this century, both less repressive than the civilian regimes
ceded them), increasing the independence of the judicial apparatus
at once easier and much more difficult. It has been easier, in the s
while for most of Latin America it is said that there is no respect for
calling into question the rules of the game as established by the st
(Friihling, 1996: 4), in Colombia respect for the law has been a cult
political marker of the elites. (To explain why would exceed the bo
this article, and in fact the issue has never received adequate treatmen
been more difficult, however, in the sense that while the other countr
subcontinent had an agenda with clear and well-defined goals that p
at least partially successful postdictatorship engineering over the p
decades, in Colombia the forces that want to block genuinely dem
change are precisely the best-trained in juridical techniques, and they
to carry out their actions from within the "rule of law."
This contrast between Colombia and other countries is better visualized
with concrete examples, and two will be offered here. During the 1990s the
so-called democratic transition process in Latin America was disturbed by a
strong antiparliamentary drift that produced constitutional reforms amount-
ing to a weakening of democracy and the rule of law in Argentina, Peru, Brazil,
Ecuador, and recently Venezuela, to name the most prominent cases. In Colom-
bia, despite far more serious problems and a narcocorruption scandal that

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60 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

involved the president and much of the traditional political cla

institutional collapse. Seen with some perspective, the threat
the proposals to close Congress were surprisingly weak (Da
the negative consequences for the long term may be far greate
interesting for our purposes is that the central events of the re
crises were usually formulated in juridical terms, even when
was hardly believable. For example, after a long debate the C
that President Samper-accused of narcocorruption-wo
juridically and not politically, a decision that would bring a c
consequences. This limiting condition-with juridical techniqu
zon of political imagination and as universal language-
Colombian political life its specific structure and texture.
The second example concerns the protection of citizens' rig
(1996: 4) recalls that in countries like El Salvador, Colombia,
mala, and Peru police forces were often protagonists in smal
violence: this circumstance has complicated and made more
agenda for security-force reform. Once more, in the case of
designed to combat impunity, the contrast between Colombia
Latin America is striking. Colombia has suffered a horrible
worse than in most dictatorships but within the framework
law." The protagonists have systematically appeared as "dark
apart from the system; violations by state agents are, it is in
mere "isolated cases." While in Chile, for example, the military
atively wide margin for maneuver when it comes to expre
about certain judicial decisions-even forcing the hand of civi
with explicit threats-in Colombia this would be inconceivab
who are accused of violating human rights hide not behind a
the war against communism or national destiny-but behind
exigencies of "due process." While the Colombian military h
defended certain key elements of impunity-for instance, by lo
intact a military penal code that excuses many crimes as "acts o
relevant point is that they lobbied within, rather than outsi
realm. The result is that in Colombia impunity must be me
dimensions. On one hand, as in the rest of Latin America, ver
responsible for atrocities have been punished or even named
has improved a bit in the past few years because of internation
this is a factor common to the entire region). On the other han
ion simply has not had the opportunity to assess the magnitud
done. In Argentina there was a Truth Commission and later
Chile the facts became known but hardly ever became the su
activity. In Colombia there has been judicial activity, but the f

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 Gutierrez Sanin / THE COURTROOM AND THE BIVOUAC 61

become known. There are (almost) no guilty parties or arrests or ways to

responsibility, but there are mountains of case files and an independen
ciary that-it is worth stressing-is much more than mere window dres
In Colombia, then, the relationship between violence and the juri
realm offers multiple explanatory keys and brings to the foreground
significant particularities of the contemporary social order. In the rest o
article I will focus on the past decade, during which time there have bee
eral points of inflection in the long and paradoxical relationship betwe
and violence that seems to characterize Colombian history. The vari
aspects of this relationship will be discussed with regard to two specific
lems that reflect the cultural and intellectual horizon and a knot of prob
common to many other events and situations. The first is the juridical
ism of armed actors. Laws and wars mutually contextualize each othe
dynamic of relative independence of the judicial apparatus with respect t
armed actors. This in turn implies that "our murderers learn to be jurist
to behave as such. The second aspect, a direct consequence of the first,
enormous growth of the role of extortion as the creator of rights. In the
of a Medellin militia member, "in Colombia you have to be wealthy o
have to be dangerous" (Salazar, 1993). The raw materials of danger are
accessible in Colombia than those of wealth: the material, technical, an
but no less important) symbolic resources to construct oneself as so
dangerous are abundant, thanks above all to what Marco Palacios (1995
called the "eruption of the pariah capitalists": the growing presence of
and powerful elites (drug trafficking, contraband, etc.) over the past 20
At the same time, juridical knowledge has become the standard cod
encoding the demands of those agents who have become "successfully
gerous" and has given society a sort of armed Esperanto through wh
most contradictory demands and expectations find expression. And t
many intellectuals and opinion leaders have noted, seems to have prod
radical fragmentation of judicial practices and of the skills and know
necessary to engage them among the various protagonists of our wars
moment, the central state, guerrillas, and paramilitaries). But the term
mentation" is not very precise. Rather, we are speaking of an open mark
procedures and social techniques such that there is a permanent ten
between "particularism" and "common socialization"4 that transcend
armed groups themselves. I will show that the interaction between
aspects produces the paradoxical effect of legal fervor combined with
cism and profound disenchantment with the law-along with the conv
that the legal order and the world of legal codes have almost nothing
with social practice.

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62 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

A CITY ATTACKED... AND TAKEN TO COURT

At the beginning of 1998, the press started to publish evidence th

Asis, the principal river port of the department of Putumayo, ha
target of the paramilitaries operating in the south of the countr
Semana, February 13, 1998). The town's mayor was the principal
son for these charges, and he gave numerous interviews to the prin
tronic press (for instance, El Espectador, February 13, 1998). Face
indifference of the central government and the indignant denials o
and figures close to it (El Espectador, February 16, 1998), the inh
Puerto Asis marched through the streets of their town with th
demand "to be believed" (Miio, 1998).
None of these tactics had any effect, and in fact when the mayor
to town he found his house destroyed by the typical "dark forces" (
1998). He continued to denounce paramilitary activities and the
the central authorities for phenomena that the whole town consid
proven.5 At that time, the army did intervene: the commander of th
sion filed a complaint against the mayor for slander (El Espectador,
16, 1998). The legal action did not last long, since the general soo
the charge: he explained that the mayor had retracted his comment
he was "a good kid" who had simply received some poor advice. O
the mayor wasn't really proven wrong: the war in Putumayo contin
This incident highlights the obsessive interest of the armed gr
their associates-from competitors to victims-in the law. The Co
military has shown evidence of a surprising legal activism, and i
common feature of the civilian defense ministers of the 1990s has been solid
legal training.6 The paramilitaries suffer from an even greater "juridical
obsession" about both Colombian and international humanitarian law and
about their own status as political actors (El Espectador, December 28, 1997;
Heredia, 1997). The guerrillas, in turn, are convinced that "here [in their terri-
tories] the rules are followed," and they often get caught up in legal debates.
In the cities, violence and law mix with incredible plasticity. "In one of the
neighborhoods of Medellin, the Jehovah's Witnesses were threatened by the
militias if they kept preaching door-to-door as they had done for many years.
According to the militias, this might well be an intelligence operation directed
against them. The Jehovah's Witnesses filed for an injunction against the
militias, but they had to take their preaching elsewhere" (Ceballos, Villa, and
Jaramillo, 1998). "I was charged before the regional prosecutor in Medellin,"
says Gloria Cuartas, former mayor of Apartado, the epicenter of one of
Colombia's most horrible dirty wars, "with presumed complicity with the
insurgent groups that operate in the region ... I was also charged with slander

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 Gutierrez Sanin / THE COURTROOM AND THE BIVOUAC 63

for daring to point out the passive role of the army and, on occasion, their
approving silence" (Cuartas, 1998). It is clear that the Puerto Asis case is not
an "isolated incident" (still another fundamental clich6 of Colombian officia
discourse of the past few years for explaining crimes and human rights viola-
tions by agents of the state) but part of a very extensive strategy or at least
vision.
How are we to explain the dazzling legalism of Colombia's armed actors?
It cannot be attributed to a massive degradation that has put everyone in th
same condition.7 For instance, the "trials" held by the guerrillas, at least in
some of their territories, are terribly asymmetrical, arbitrary, and unfair, but
they are not summary: sometimes local residents and even guerrilla foot-sol
diers come to the defense of a suspect that the commanders want to execut
(various reports; see also Zambrano, 1990). This is not the case with the
paramilitaries, whose desire to "remove the water from the fishbowl" calls for
constant pressure on the population in the form of massacres and massive
intimidation; to put it another way, their strategic necessities impose a sum
mary justice and intensely terroristic practices on both factual and symboli
fronts. For example, an internal disciplinary publication of the Autodefensa
Campesinas approvingly cites the following historical precedents: "Genghis
Khan used rumors about the ferocity of his men and the force of their weap-
ons to terrorize the enemy. In the Second World War, Nazi propaganda
created the myth of the German Superman and of the invincibility of his
army, thereby facilitating the invasion of Poland and the Low Countries
through the demoralization it caused" (Autodefensas Unidas de C6rdoba y
Uraba, 1996?: 2).
But, as we have seen, this does not stop the paramilitaries from engaging
in wide-ranging and high-profile judicial activism that has ended up includ-
ing international humanitarian law and is reflected in their internal operation
by a careful and sometimes grotesque adherence to rules. Nor can we attrib
ute this legalism solely to the desire to "keep up appearances" to the popula
tion or to exhibit an executive efficiency that they really do not have. As we
have seen in the Puerto Asis and Apartado cases, the pragmatics of juridica
discourse are much more complex.
I would suggest, on the contrary, that the juridical problem is one of the
hinges that articulate "order and violence," to use the expression of Pecaut
(1987), in at least the three fundamental domains of regulation (institutiona
construction and development of broad modernizing projects), exclusion
(maintaining the "dangerous classes" at arm's length through relatively inac
cessible performance techniques and a show of hierarchy, asymmetry, and
majesty), and war (leaving open the possibility that adversaries competing
for partial territorial domination might find a common semantic terrain fo

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64 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

identifying their differences and eventual agreements [which in

have historically taken the form of truces or constitutions]). Th
serves as a multiuse tool for responding to the challenges of pol
who never enjoyed key monopolies: on the legitimate use of forc
tion, and on customs revenues, for example. That the law has been
fill this role in Colombia is, of course, a function of historical and
traditions beyond the scope of this article.
What must, however, be emphasized here is that the end of
brought a series of social and political collapses that coincided
explosion and implosion of violence. The explosion consisted of a
lar increase in the crime statistics-especially the homicide rate,
pled. The implosion took the form of the entry of multiple armed a
setting that had previously had only two protagonists: the armed fo
state and the dispersed and ideologically divided revolutionary
Now we contemplate a constellation of new groups: urban militia
torian guards of drug trafficking, paramilitary forces, and the so-
vate justice groups, among others. On the armed left, dispersion
total confusion; ideology has shifted from eponymous justifications
struggle (Maoism, Guevaraism, Castroism) to anonymous justific
theses of petty intellectuals who combine scraps of textbook Mar
pedantic notions from several disciplines, the law among them, d
secondary education (it should be remembered that we are in a coun
period, of dizzying growth in schooling rates).
But it is in the war carried out by the establishment that we see
interesting changes. If we accept the thesis that law has served t
regulation, exclusion, and war, then in this last area it has done so b
a hinge between what we might call "democratic formality" and "
informality." With respect to the first aspect, there has been an ext
strengthening of the rule of law, with an independent judiciary tha
dismissed as purely cosmetic and an extraordinary popularization
think) ofjuridical knowledge, skills, and routines; this has proved
obstacle to military coups and taught the elites to seek solution
democracy. With respect to the second, in keeping with strategic c
also with practices inherited from past wars, there has been an inc
state's terrorist violence. To put it another way, as Sanchez (199
the revolutionary groups that "combine all forms of struggle" did
the formula: they only inherited and imitated it, thus inciting their
to "escape ahead" by applying it with greater rigor and intensity. T
produced by the contrast between formality and informality we
covered by the hemispheric anticommunist policy of the United
with the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall, the articulation of democr

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 Gutierrez Sanin / THE COURTROOM AND THE BIVOUAC 65

ity and informality through law was no longer sustainable. If inform

were sustained in order to serve the war, then juridical techniques w
cease to be useful for key parts of the program of exclusion: concretel
contain the advance of the "pariah capitalists." Nor could regulation,
aggiornamento of the economy, or the state's modernization project (pe
the central themes of the Constitution of 1991) seem very viable in a
order eroded by informality; what was needed was education in the rig
universalism that could produce a genuine common normative frame
and shared rules of the game. The dismantling of informality was not,
ever, part of the mental horizon of elites made hysterical by the conflue
multiple threats.
In this dilemma may quite possibly be found the seed of the paramilita
growth during the 1990s: by decentralizing the war and ceding the mono
on the use of arms through delegation (and not just through usurpation
elite could maintain informality without paying all of its costs. What is m
interesting, however, is that this helps to explain the unusual juridical
ism of armed actors. Using the law means many things at once: it shows
tance with respect to the "shady" elites and the "pariah capitalists," thus
ing the actors acceptable to national and international actors who pla
regulation first within a rigorous-universalist normative framework; i
shows a distance, at least on the symbolic level, from the most aggres
modalities of informality by denouncing drug trafficking, clientelism
political corruption; it ritualizes various forms of threat, converting law
an icon rather than a substitute for armed action; it redistributes and
blame by invoking the decentralization of the war and its consequent u
tainty (now it is not just "Who knows what he may have owed someone?"
"Who knows who may have killed him?"); and, finally, it informalizes
makes illegal (and thus paralyzes) social protest.

EXTORTION AND RIGHTS

The correlate of the legalism of armed actors is the quest for rec
and rights through extortion and "arm-twisting" directed at the legal
tus of the state in general and at magistrates and judges in particular.
should not be deceived: this armed extortionist hopes to obtain "full
cal" decisions and judgments, on stamped paper, duly notarized. He
in the business of his victim.
In effect, one of the most sought-after goals of those who become "danger-
ous" is to be considered an interlocutor, under equal conditions, with the
authors of the law, a law that is aggressively asymmetrical (and even autistic)

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66 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

in its regular practices. The result is an extensive and intricate e

signs that tells those who lack the vocation or resources to const
selves as dangerous that not doing so has prohibitive costs. This r
to the simultaneous criticism and utilization of the inconsistencies
these are both evidence of injustice and precedents justifying ne
and fractures. It must be emphasized that this is not an esoteric me
interpretation by strategists, intellectuals, or students of the issue: i
ingly a commonsense notion, supported by a public and manifest lo
is already a decisive referent in daily debates about justice/injust
ticular, the fatal porousness of modernizing rigorous universalism
insistently pointed out by leaders of social movements and by repr
of subaltern social sectors facing unfavorable legal decisions. For
when protest leaders in a working-class neighborhood of Bogota
self-flagellation, they were visited by a functionary from the city
who told them that both their economic activity (which motivated t
and their modality of protest violated Colombian law (sovereig
human rights (universality). The leaders responded that everyon
government talked to and made concessions to the most diverse arm
Why, then, was the law applied only to them, for staging a peacefu
"We are asking for the same behavior that they show toward other
society, where we see that they have changed the sentences. For
they negotiate the penal law, which we have seen, here we're ask
thing similar." This is a direct allusion to drug trafficking and to th
reduction program of the early 1990s that persuaded many "dru
surrender. "How many times have the guerrillas been amnestie
where they are now, and they were amnestied." This is a direct refe
peace process with the guerrillas. "Why can't they give people a pla
do they have to become delinquents, or something like that, in ord
living?" (Gutierrez, 1998b).
Insofar as many of the social movements of the 1990s in Colo
been led by popular sectors whose economic activities are on the
the law or entirely outside of it-coca-growing peasants (Ramir
describes the construction of an "illicit peasantry") and street v
"illegally occupy the public space" (Palacios, 1995, writes of the
city"), just to name two of the most important cases-we can gras
mous importance of this sort of debate (and "economy of sign
dynamics of resistance and appropriation of rights in a space that
more by armed extortion than by modernizing rigorous univers
another way: the exclusion (through illegalization) of very wide
produced an economy of signs that constantly expands the role an
of extortion as a means of conquest and incorporation.

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 Guti6rrez Sanin / THE COURTROOM AND THE BIVOUAC 67

But this returns us to the analysis of the perspectives constructed by

armed actors. In contrast to the social movements, whose demands focu
incorporation and the citizenship rights denied by an exclusionary fra
work, the armed actors basically demand impunity and thus exceptiona
They cannot be fully universalist and rights-oriented by the very natu
their intense but inconsistent relationship with legality. To be dangero
above all, an expedient for getting what you want. The interesting part is
this demand is put forward in aggressively legalistic terms: either the
adapted to my terms or I will get ready to seek my rights outside of i
extreme case of this juridical obsession but one that set the stage for
many would later imitate is the "narcoterrorism" that ravaged Colom
between 1988 and 1990. This social technique took the form of the ar
actor's presenting himself as a victim of legality and as the bearer of p
legal demands, juridically expressed. For the following, I will make use
collection (which I think is complete) of communiques from Lo
Extraditables, a group of drug lords, led by Pablo Escobar, who used te
ism to oppose the extradition of Colombians.
A first reading of the material conveys the striking and unequivo
impression that, as indicated earlier, the discourse of/about jurispruden
the best (and perhaps the only) language of threat in Colombia. For inst
a broadsheet sent to the Supreme Court justice Lisandro Martinez Zu
ends with the motto "Legal injustice generates violence!" (Los Extradit
1989a). Another communique denounces "a new and antinational judic
dictatorship" and concludes: "We will not sponsor any more legal chall
to the [extradition] treaty, because we know that you do not respect the la
human rights" (Los Extraditables, 1989b). A bit later, another Supreme
justice, Fernando Uribe Restrepo, received an intimidating flyer that m
humiliating use of tu and vos, designed to dismantle the illusion of the
esty and distance of justice, and accused him of "leading a ... clientel
dictatorship." "We have used all juridical and democratic means," said
flyer, "to do away with the treaty. But it seems that our struggle is us
when faced with pro-Yankee government men like you" (Los Extradita
1989c).
With the passage of time the discourse of Los Extraditables became more
sophisticated and began to introduce positive stimuli to complement the
threats as their possibilities of forcing the state's hand increased and as they
co-opted intellectuals and jurists of a somewhat higher caliber. For example,
in early 1990 they issued a communique that asked for punishment for mem-
bers of the military under international humanitarian law (Los Extraditables,
1990a). They also "rejected the assassinations of UP [Uni6n Patri6tica] lead-
ers" (Los Extraditables, 1990b),8 indicating that their "divergences with the

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68 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

groups of the left" had disappeared. Here, apart from a particu

ous cynicism (since narcoterrorism enthusiastically participated
cide against the left and the popular movement in the 1980s and
is a legalism capable of incorporating not only Colombian leg
even international law. But the argument generally followed
already noted: legal compulsion and extortion. Narcoterrorists
justified their crimes and murders as responses to violations of
is it true that the death of Guillermo Cano [editor of the ne
Espectador, killed in December 1986] came about when extradit
ger existed: it occurred as a response to the illegal and antijurid
that president Barco put on the law allowing a treaty that had
illegal" (Los Extraditables, 1989d). They have presented thems
tims of a "judicial dictatorship": "For more than six years we ha
ing for peace but we only have received antijuridical and clande
tions and other outrages in reply" (Los Extraditables, 1990c).
An outside observer might be a bit surprised by Los Extradit
enthusiasm for rigor, just when it seemed that their demands m
and their extortion prove successful. In a communique that e
respectful greeting" they announced that "we accept the verdic
bian justice, because we are subject to the Constitution and th
Extraditables, 1990d). They reiterated the use of expressions su
term of respect par excellence in Colombia, particularly in judic
course, as the situation evolved, Los Extraditables returned t
declare ourselves to be a politico-military movement that will str
extradition, against torture and the state's assassins, against the m
of judges by the government" (Los Extraditables, 1990e). In f
were among the preferred targets of Los Extraditables durin
narcoterrorist crisis.9

CONCLUSION

The law is a farce; the law tells all (even more, it is life or death)
ble conviction is expressed in the convergence of aphorisms such
withstands all" (a document can say anything, but real life is quite
with the conviction, based on long historical experience, that de
are not juridically encoded do not exist. To put it in the terms intr
lier, there is a disjunction between the "knowing what" and the
how/knowing where." It is ostentatiously pointed out that the ca
the world are not those of the law, but, guided by strategic consider

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 Gutidrrez Sanin / THE COURTROOM AND THE BIVOUAC 69

shown with equal ostentation that the categories of the world are trans
to those of the law for one's own convenience.
Perhaps what best symbolizes this assembly of ambiguities is the
Bolivarian enthusiasm of all Colombian armed groups-I have not found a
single exception, and any exceptions would be marginal-from the 1980s to
this day. The military left, the state's armed forces, the popular militias (some
of which even call themselves Bolivarian), the praetorian guards of drug traf-
fickers, and the paramilitary groups all explicitly define their identities with
relation to a Bolivarian ethos (as opposed to any Bolivarian theory or ideol-
ogy). This is a curious, possibly unique intersection in a low-intensity war
that has been characterized by its cruelty and its diffusion. It doubtless con-
tains elements of a return to the founding fathers of Colombian nationality, in
addition to purely agitational elements. Above all, however, Simon Bolivar is
the icon of a truncated rebellion against petty legalism and of the proclaimed
superiority of the warrior over the lawyer-a discursive motif that at its apo-
gee was the exclusive patrimony of conservative forces and that has fed a
good part of Colombia's great debates and civil wars throughout history. But
the Bolivar recovered for the late twentieth century inevitably wears the toga:
he denigrates the law but accepts it as the only language that permits simulta-
neous action with respect to the logics of regulation, exclusion/incorporation,
and war. He does so unhappily, and for new reasons: for instance, the use of
law is an effective method for signaling distance from the "pariah capitalists"
and informality and for demanding impunity "just for me." The social tech-
niques of jurisprudence offer methodological tools that permit the effective
construction of dangerousness, but this generates a new, more powerful sort
of petty legalism, built on the interweaving of armed extortion and judicial
technique. Insofar as this process is simultaneous with the aggressive
illegalization of thousands of persons (illegal peasantry, illegal city) to
advance projects of modernization and normative universalism, extortion
offers an economy of signs in which unarmed actors can find both ostensible
examples of injustice and keys for the naming of the demands for incorpora-
tion: a resource but also a trap.
Legality finds itself at the core of this tragic equilibrium as an icon of its
solidity and of its labyrinthine spirit. It is the universal tool par excellence
precisely because its ostensible porousness supplies the discursive resources
that permit one to face the adversary with efficacy (but an efficacy that is not
principally "juridical"). It is the weapon for denouncing the "formality/infor-
mality" dynamic and for making use of it. It is the soul of the orangutan in a
frock coat: the language that subtly and paradoxically but very effectively
links the courtroom and the bivouac.

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70 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

NOTES

1. Duranti refers only to the first two categories; I have added the third because I cons
indispensable for the discussion that follows.
2. Guerrillas, according to the Maoist postulate, are supposed to move among the po
"like a fish in water." Draining the water therefore means provoking a massive exodus fro
tories dominated by the guerrillas.
3. In a survey conducted in October 1997 and coordinated by the justice group of the In
de Estudios Politicos y Relaciones Internacionales, 93 percent of those polled "agr
"totally agreed" with the phrase "In Colombia anything can happen, however incredi
that the phrase was made especially strong, which should have reduced the number of
agreement). The same survey found high levels of fear and uncertainty among Colom
4. Thus the precise term would be "percolation" rather than "fragmentation."
5. It should be noted that the mayor also confronted and publicly criticized guerrilla ac
in the region.
6. One of them, Juan Carlos Esguerra (later Colombian ambassador in Washingt
jurist of the highest caliber. One of his most important acts as minister was to propose
state pay the legal costs of military personnel accused of human rights violations.
7. This is a very popular thesis in Colombia, especially among journalists who have t
age to make important accusations, but I suspect that this is a case of "adaptive preference
tion": since those who do not adhere to the notion of millimetric symmetry between t
actors can easily be accused of collaborating with one of them, it is best to accept th
preventively.
8. Translator's note: The Uni6n Patri6tica, a political party allied with the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-FARC), was created
during the short-lived truce between the FARC and the government of Belisario Betancur in
1984; the party outlived the truce, but its members (including two presidential candidates) were
subjected to a ruthless extermination campaign that the government consistently blamed on
narcoterrorist organizations despite evidence of military participation in many cases.
9. Los Extraditables carried out a selective terror against what we might call "official Colom-
bia." For example, they made every effort to avoid a confrontation with the Catholic Church (as
they point out in a communique [Los Extradibles, 1990f]) and with the army. They focused their
attacks on politicians, judges, and the police, thus following a long Colombian tradition, both
armed and unarmed.

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