Colombia’s Elites and the Missing Economy for Peace

By Jenny Pearce and Juan David Velasco

Colombia has extensive experience negotiating peace. Over the past three decades, the country has signed successive agreements with armed groups and demobilized more than 70,000 combatants. It has established transitional justice institutions, reintegration programs, victim-reparation mechanisms, and ambitious peacebuilding policies. The 2016 Final Agreement went even further: it explicitly stated that ending the conflict required comprehensive rural reform and a shift in the approach to the war on drugs. 

And yet, violence persists, partly because many of the signed agreements are not being fulfilled. This is one of the reasons why Colombia remains trapped in chronic violence. As a result, groups change their names, split up, and new leadership emerges. But some things change very little: the geography of war and the structural causes of the conflict. Territories that have been under the control of non-state armed groups since the 1980s continue today to be subject to various forms of social regulation outside the rule of law.

How can we explain the persistence of violence in its various forms? 

The Colombian Singularity

In ¿Quién manda en Colombia? [Who Rules in Colombia?], we propose addressing this question from a less-explored angle: the architecture of power and the historical responsibility of the elites for the failure to build an inclusive national project. 

Our theory of the Colombian singularity seeks to explain how relatively stable electoral institutions and recognized macroeconomic stability have been able to coexist for decades alongside high inequality, territorial fragmentation, and multiple forms of violence. To understand this, we study the elites not as a homogeneous bloc, but as distinct constellations—oligarchic, political, technocratic, professional, and judicial—that compete with one another but also share certain principles regarding the organization of power.

One of our main arguments is that the Colombian elites failed to build a national project that could integrate the territories where the armed conflict was historically concentrated.

Geography makes this particularly clear. The village of La Julia, in Uribe, Meta, served for decades as a strategic rear base for the FARC and today has once again become an important corridor for dissident groups led by alias Calarcá. Puerto Cachicamo, in San José del Guaviare, was another historic stronghold of the same guerrilla group and remains under the strong influence of armed actors. On the other side of the country, El Tomate, in San Pedro de Urabá, was at the heart of the Casa Castaño’s power; today, its surroundings remain strategic for the Clan del Golfo (or, as they call themselves, the Ejército Gaitanista de Colombia [Gaitanist Army of Colombia]).

What is revealing is not that the acronyms of those controlling those territories have changed, but that the locations themselves have not. Neither hard-line security strategies nor peace agreements— which predominantly emphasize disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR)—have succeeded in fully integrating these territories into the rule of law and a legal economy capable of providing sustainable opportunities.

This continuity also links to how the costs of war were distributed. The national elites did not bear these costs directly in the same proportion as other sectors of society. Victimization was disproportionately concentrated among rural, peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-Colombian populations. But there was also a reluctance to pay higher taxes. 

The Role of the United States

U.S. assistance, particularly through Plan Colombia, financed a significant portion of the strengthening of state security capabilities. In the book, we estimate that U.S.-provided resources are roughly equivalent to the revenue from six Colombian tax reforms over the past three decades. Without that external funding, sustaining a comparable effort would have required greater mobilization of tax resources from the elites, potentially through higher taxes on wealth, high incomes, and dividends.

This helps explain another component of our theory: Colombian elites' pragmatic dependence on Washington. From a Latin American perspective, Colombian elites have developed a particularly close relationship with the United States. That dependence has reduced their margins of autonomy regarding issues critical to ending the war, especially drug policy and certain negotiation strategies with armed groups related to justice and the surrender of assets. 

Additionally, there is another discrepancy. Colombia has built a highly qualified economic technocracy, familiar with the language of international finance and multilateral organizations. The book reveals that 54% of those who served as Minister of Finance, Director of the National Planning Department (DNP), or Co-Director of the Banco de la República [Colombian Central Bank] between 1991 and 2022 had some form of affiliation with Fedesarrollo. 

This institutional strength must be acknowledged. But it also reveals a gap. Looking through Coyuntura Económica, Fedesarrollo’s flagship publication, we find decades of sophisticated analysis on inflation, productivity, monetary policy, fiscal discipline, foreign trade, pensions, and the labor market. However, the question of which development model was needed to integrate the territories where the war was raging never reached a comparable level of prominence.

Investments and Exclusion

While discussions on stabilizing the economy were underway, territories such as La Julia remained outside the rule of law. While free trade agreements were being negotiated with the United States and European countries, coca-growing enclaves such as Puerto Cachicamo remained tied to illicit economies without any realistic proposal from the technocratic elite.

Something similar happened with the oligarchic elite (the one that “shines brightest” due to its excessive power within the constellations of elites). Investing where infrastructure, consumers, and profitability exist is economically rational. However, the overall result was that major investments failed to reach those territories as well. Vast regions were simultaneously left out of both a sustained public strategy and long-term private-sector investment.

This is how Colombia learned to stabilize its economy, but it did not develop a project to integrate its peripheries with the same level of sophistication. Therein lies precisely one of the major historical failings of its elites. The Colombian armed conflict has never been merely a security problem. It has also been an expression of the elites’ limited territorial vision and narrow conception of the pathways to progress.

Bringing the conflict to a definitive end therefore requires more than simply negotiating with an armed organization or defeating it militarily. It requires changing the conditions that let another group quickly occupy the same territory once one organization lays down its arms. In the book, we refer to this as the need for “a genuine economy for peace.” 

Thus, after decades of partial peace agreements and demobilizations, perhaps the fundamental question remains: How does one ensure that the territories where a group demobilizes truly become part of the nation?
 

About the authors

Jenny Pearce holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and is a renowned scholar in the study of violence, peace, participation, and inequalities in Latin America. She is currently a visiting professor at the International Institute of Inequalities at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In 2023, she received the Martin Diskin Memorial Lectureship prize, awarded by LASA and Oxfam America.

Her work examines the relationships between violence, peace, inequality, and power, as well as political participation, human security, state-building, and elites, combining academic research with participatory methodologies and direct work with communities.

Juan David Velasco Montoya is a Senior Atlantic Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He holds a degree in political science from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, a master’s degree in Political Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and an MSc in Inequalities and Social Sciences from the LSE. 

For fifteen years, he has worked in the fields of human rights, transitional justice, social policy, electoral analysis, and conflict resolution. He has served as an advisor to judges of the Justice and Peace Chamber of the Bogotá Superior Court and to the Chief Prosecutor of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). He is currently a professor at Universidad El Bosque and was a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana for ten years. 

Subscribe to our newsletter

This article is part of our newsletter issue number 26. To receive upcoming issues in your inbox, click here.