CIAO DATE: 09/02

From “Restricted” to “Besieged”: The Changing Nature of the Limits to Democracy in Colombia

Ana Maria Bejarano and Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez

April 2002

The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Abstract

During the last decade and a half, Colombia has witnessed both an improvement in the dimensions of democratic participation and contestation and a severe deterioration in those dimensions of democracy related to effective protection of civil liberties and subordination of the military. While the term “semi-democracy” seems most appropriate to classify the Colombian political regime, the restrictions that made the Colombian regime semi-democratic during the second half of the twentieth century have changed in nature. Between 1958 and 1986, restrictions were placed on the competitive dimension of democracy. From the mid-1980s onward, the regime’s shortcomings stem from the weakness of the state, the emergence of powerful armed actors, and the absence of the rule of law.

Seeking to explain this recent process of democratic erosion, our argument hinges mainly on political variables, even as it takes into account the deleterious impact of drug trafficking on the Colombian state, society and politics. At the regime level, we claim that it is no longer the system’s “closed” nature that affects prospects for democratic consolidation, but instead the excessively lax rules of the game created by the political reform initiated in the mid-1980s. This set of rules has engendered additional incentives for party fragmentation, leading to an extremely atomized and personalistic party system.

Yet at another level, we argue that the Colombian state has undergone a severe erosion leading to its partial collapse in the late 1980s. This collapse is partial in the geographical sense and also in the functional sense: while some state apparatuses have retained certain coherence and capacity to act, other crucial state branches have either collapsed, have become almost totally ineffective, or have become totally disfigured in relation to their original functions. This “partial collapse” of the state is the result of challenges posed by both guerrilla expansion as well as very powerful criminal organizations (the drug-dealing cartels) upon a state which was historically weak to begin with.

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