The Armed Face of Neoliberalism

Relatedly, she hints at but does not follow through on some of the other issues involved in discussing human rights in Colombia. As she notes, discourses of human rights are deployed by numerous groups within and across the nation, in ways that carefully attend to their own agendas. One telling example is provided by the Alvaro Uribe administration, which simultaneously proclaims citizen security a human right that the state must protect, while accusing those who appeal to the need to respect other human rights to be acting in the service of the guerilla by trying to tie the state's hands. Glimpses of these competing discourses of human rights in the book leave open questions ripe for further exploration.

Hristov makes effective use of ethnographic vignettes in describing the effects of the macro-processes of the armed conflict on the lives of individual people, an addition that usefully illustrates the micro-dimension of the issues she raises. More attention could have been paid to the shifting dynamics of this micro-dimension, where competing situational and even internally contradictory sets of interests present each individual/group involved with a certain opportunity structure at every juncture. Focusing the analysis on these unstable networks could perhaps have revealed more of the ways in which these decentralized and competing interests fuel the system, in addition to and in conjunction with the application of neoliberalism. Reference to other authors who have engaged in describing the complicated dynamics at work in perpetuating the cycles of violence remains conspicuously absent or under-explored, limiting the book's engagement with highly relevant academic debates.

This book serves a vital role in debunking the propaganda and misinformation that so often circulates in the English-language media, including the portrayals of the recent "demilitarization" process, which purportedly dismantled the structure of the paramilitary but which, as she exposes in detail, only resulted in its adoption of new forms. It stands as an important compilation of media sources and reporting that does not adhere to the master narrative about Colombia, as frequently presented and constructed through the mainstream U.S. media and government reports. In addition, she carefully details the structural features of the current political economic system in Colombia, which, as she convincingly argues, operates as "a twenty-first century apparatus of coercion accommodated under a democratic regime" (p. 202). She includes a detailed chapter on the history, aims, and repression of one indigenous activist group, the Consejo Regional Indígena de Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca, CRIC) (chapter 6), enabling readers to appreciate the difficulties involved in any attempt at resisting the appropriation of land and resources.

Accessible to a general readership, the book is a valuable description of the violence and the many violations of human rights in ways that reveal rather than obfuscate the roots and causes of the perpetuation of the conflict. By making explicit the connections between neoliberal policies and paramilitarism, and the use of violence as a means of resource acquisition and the facilitation of a climate for its continuation, Hristov powerfully refutes attempts to oversimplify the conflict in Colombia and its justification as part of the "war on terror." The recent recertification of Colombia's human rights record by the U.S. State Department (September 2009) and the approval by the U.S. and Colombian governments for the use of seven Colombian military installations by U.S. military personnel (August 2009) makes this understanding all the more vital, and her book all the more timely and relevant.

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/faulk031109p.html

The Armed Face of Neoliberalism
by Karen Faulk

Jasmin Hristov . Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia . Ohio University Research in International Studies Series. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. xxiii + 263 pp. 28.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-89680-267-4.

Karen Faulk is Adjunct Professor at the Department of History and Anthropology of Carnegie Mellon University. This review was first published by H-Human-Rights (November 2009) under a Creative Commons license

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