The Armed Face of Neoliberalism
Jasmin Hristov's book is an exploration of the history and evolution of armed paramilitary forces in Colombia, focusing primarily on the past two decades. Her stated intent is to "offer a model of a twenty-first-century state apparatus of coercion under a formally democratic regime by exploring the structure and functions of that apparatus, the conditions that make it a necessity, and its capacity to evolve into new forms" (p. xi).
Paying particular attention to this period not only makes her book especially relevant to an understanding of the current situation in this beautiful and catastrophic nation, but also highlights one of her central points: the intrinsic relationship between paramilitarism and neoliberal capitalism. The combination of neoliberalism and paramilitaries, while perhaps most drastically expressed in Colombia, is similarly present elsewhere throughout the region. Emphasizing this connection, even if through its most extreme example, has far-reaching implications for understanding a fundamental aspect of neoliberal economics as applied in Latin America -- the forcible dispossession of large groups of structurally disadvantaged people from their means of subsistence.
After describing the application of neoliberalism within the particular historical development of the sociopolitical and economic context of Colombia (chapter 1), Hristov details the current features of what she terms the "State coercive apparatus," or SCA (chapter 2). In this, she includes paramilitarism (chapters 3 and 5), defined as "the use of violence to advance the economic interests of a particular sector of society with the tolerance or support of the state" (p. 60). The book shows the dual function of violence in contemporary Colombia -- both as an instrument to suppress opposition and as a tool to enrich a privileged few.
As she notes, the role that technically illegal but in practice actively supported paramilitary groups play in the widespread violation of human rights, and the repression of opposition that these are intended to achieve, has been well documented. Her book, while attending to these features, offers a view of the ways in which this violence directly facilitates the acquisition of resources, and the subsequent concentration of wealth into the hands of a small elite class. This attention is one of the book's major and most important contributions, both for the study of human rights and for understanding the current political and socioeconomic situation in Colombia, with implications far beyond its borders.
By focusing on paramilitary violence in Colombia, Hristov takes as her subject matter one of the most acute situations for the violation of a wide spectrum of human rights in the contemporary world. She usefully includes concrete examples throughout the book to show how violence benefits the capitalist class while impoverishing the working majority (and, I would add, the structurally unemployed). Yet she seeks to resist allowing the acts of violence themselves to become the sole focus, as she argues that works that do so run the risk of actually obscuring the underlying engines of these atrocities. That sort of decontextualized approach, she says, is "incapable of identifying the ways in which the current profoundly uneven class structure fuels violence. . . . The detachment of violence from the totality of social relations in which it is embedded as well as the material foundations of society out of which it arises, limits greatly the understanding of the forces that drive it" (p. 11).
Though her intention is to move the study of human rights beyond attention to the violence and violations themselves, Hristov's book is only partially successful in carrying this through. The book relies on bullet-pointed lists of specific human rights violations, taken largely from media sources and presented as a way of exposing the concrete realities of violence for individual victims (especially chapter 4).
Certainly this intention is laudable, particularly when framing it, as she does, as part of an overall objective to practice social research in ways that work to transform material conditions, inspired by Paulo Freire's injunction to allow the major questions to "arise from the concrete social reality of the protagonists in the Colombian conflict" (p. xi). Nonetheless, this is a problem in describing a situation where "facts" are so difficult to come by and so easily manufactured. I say this not to doubt the veracity of any of the instances she presents; the sources she draws on have undertaken the dangerous and essential task of documenting cases of violence perpetrated by powerful actors. Yet from an analytic perspective, the amount of space she dedicates to repeating the cases reported by independent news agencies and NGOs seems to miss the point. Rather than working to establish the "truth" through facts, it seems that the analysis could have been more fruitfully centered on how the circulation of "facts" operates and the effects it has.
