It is recommended by Jason, in the comments from yesterday. Here is the link. Here are some excellent paragraphs:
...illegal drugs are only one branch of the Colombian criminal industry sector. Besides being a principle drug producer, Colombia is also the world's largest manufacturer of counterfeit U.S. dollars; it is the main producer and user of assassins for hire (sicarios); it is the first or second Latin American exporter of prostitutes; it produces very high quality counterfeit documents, particularly passports; and it is a large producer of pirated software and CDs. Colombia is the only country of which this author knows where owners of urban lots and vacant houses place large "not for sale" signs to prevent fraudulent sales. Colombia is a country where the state has been a bounty, and where white-collar crime has grown dramatically judging by frequent newspaper reports. In Colombia, soldiers find a hidden guerrilla treasure accumulated through drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnappings and consider it normal to keep such treasures as a "prize" for serving in the armed forces. It is a country where police officials negotiate the transfer of captured cocaine with drug traffickers and where the terms "millionaire stroll" and "throw away person" were coined as euphemisms for a quick kidnapping of a person taken to A.T.M. machines to empty his or her bank account and for social cleansing. All these facts show that Colombia has developed a competitive advantage in economic activities that require law breaking or illegal skills. They also highlight the predatory nature of Colombian capitalism and the illegitimacy and weakness of property rights in the country.
And more...
All these facts highlight the need to understand why some behaviors that, although found in other countries, are more common in Colombia. During the last several years, Colombian scholars have begun to explore why Colombian society imposes few, if any, controls on individual behavior…Indeed, every Colombian has a high degree of freedom to establish his or her own norms. Because of this freedom, Colombians show great individual creativity and various degrees of social discipline. The lack of social controls produces individuals with remarkable behaviors: anybody who respects the law and the rights of others does so because of individual convictions, as do those who break the laws. Success in Colombia is individual, not social or collective. Loyalty normally extends only to people close to oneself because without their help it is impossible to survive in the midst of a hostile environment. "The net result is an abundance of anti-social behaviors: individual rationality predominates over collective rationality"…
Geography has been a main reason for differences between Colombia and other Latin American countries. Since colonial times Colombia has been a collection of diverse regions with little communication and trade among them. Physical barriers have been (and are) so great that many regions remained very isolated and self-sufficient. Because of geography, until the early 20th century Colombia was the Latin American country with the lowest exports per capita and total international trade in the region. Only the development of coffee in the 1920s changed this. Furthermore, the growth of exports led to the development of an export-oriented infrastructure that established communications and transport facilities between the producing region and the ports, but did little to integrate the country. Geography also made tax collection very expensive. Not surprisingly, tax collection was frequently auctioned to the private sector and became a source of private wealth. Until the mid 20th century, international trade taxes were the main central government tax source. A very poor central state was a corollary of the country’s regional diversity. Because of its geography, Colombia had a great need to spend on infrastructure in order to integrate the country and to generate a national identity and a feeling of belonging, but it had few resources. Further, other financial restrictions and the pressures of the urban populations concentrated government expenditures in a few cities, and the state never established a significant presence or controlled most of its territory. It may be argued that these problems were similar to those of other Latin American countries. The difference was that the population in Colombia was spread out in the country while in most other countries it was concentrated in one or two cities and some rural areas. Thus, the lack of control of the territory had greater implications in Colombia than in the rest of the region because it also implied lack of control over a large proportion of the population…
While in many Latin American countries the armed forces have been a source of national pride, the Colombian armed forces traditionally have been weak. They have not been capable of overthrowing governments as has been common in other countries. For example, the military coup of 1953 was more "an opinion coup" promoted by the traditional parties in response to societal clamors to end violence. They have never controlled the territory and have not had a significant presence along the national border.
If you read only one piece on Colombia in your lifetime, it should be this one.
Most of this is really bad, but, would we call the Napoleonic era British Navy corrupt because it divvied up captured prizes among its crews? We should distinguish between what’s anti-social or destructive and what’s simply a different cultural norm.
Building on the Navy example, the outsourcing of tax collection to the private sector is pretty routine, historically. Medieval lords did it, for example. In more modern times, the United States at both the Federal and State level has outsourced primary responsibility for tax collection to the private sector – US income taxes are collected by employers, and sales taxes are collected by retailers. It is simply that in the US we have made the, er, enlightened decision to dragoon the required compliance of entities whose capital investment makes it potentially costly for them to evade, rather than paying them a franchise fee. Sticks instead of carrots.
Fundamentally, someone is often paid to do the morally grey tasks of government – we pay our soldiers and sailors to ‘kill people and break things’ and we pay our IRS auditors to oversee the above mentioned income tax impressment. We just view paying them salary as somehow more ‘clean’ than paying piecework.
Ask a behavioral psychologist, and he’ll say carrots work better. Carrots look like corruption, though – paying people not to sin or be criminal. Sticks look more honorable – beating the tar out of sinners/criminals looks better than paying them not to sin – and so sticks are the choice.
Hy, you are talking about Venezuela.Her is called express kidnap.There is even a movie about the “m..stroll”.We have oil so we dont need cocaine, for the rest is almost the same.
Thoumi has a good anthro/socio perspective, but his solutions — rebuild Columbian society — are hardly realistic (where to start?). This is where some good economic advice would help. Many problems can be traced to US drug laws/the drug war. Columbia (and the rest of LA) should legalize drugs and let the gringos deal with their own problems at their own borders.
Thanks. That answered the question I asked in my review in The American Conservative of the semi-Colombian film “Maria Full of Grace,” which had to relocate to film in Ecuador because of endemic violence in Colombia: “Why has Colombia long been notorious for people chopping each other up with chainsaws, “Scarface”-style, while Ecuador clings to respectability?”
If you are interested in how Latin American individualism holds back the economy, see my current American Conservative story “Fragmented Future:”
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_01_15/cover.html
We look at the twig in another mans eye, before realizing the log in our own. How do we judge a culture for the very same attrocities all capitalistic cultures have performed? Capitalism is the cure not the crime. Governmental corruption is the disease whether in Columbia or America!
Um, this might seem pedantic, but, it’s spelled “Colombia,” not Columbia, as in the district. The fact that most people commenting can’t get that right shows how seldomly they’ve seen the word in print–that is to say, how little they’ve read about the topic before. As a Colombian in slef-imposed exile, I’ve never really found myself in position where I have to “defend” national image, and hopefully that’s not what I’m about to do. But I would like to correct some misrepresentations in the Thoumi piece and the debate that followed.
Thoumi, in general, isn’t a very big scholar of Colombia. And he’s certainly not the best thing you can read in English on the topic. For an accessible, well-written analysis, I recommend Alma Guillermo-Prieto, the New Yorker’s Latin American correspondent. Her books of essays on Latin American politics have won her tons of prizes. And for an excellent review on the Literature on Colombia in a comparative Latin American framework, you ought to read James Robinson’s piece, “Colombia: A Normal Latin American Country?” at his Harvard gov dept. website.
Thoumi also says that Colombian scholars have been trying really hard to understand why people there don’t respect social norms. Well, maybe a couple of Colombianists, here and abroad, have been doing that, but it is not the sort of national effort of self-understanding that Thoumi suggests. Most scholars of Colombian history, politics, and economics I know, whether it is at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota, or Mary Roldan at Cornell, John Womack at Harvard, Herbert Braun at UVA, etc., would scoff at this kind of cultural explanation. The only prominent guy who has advanced that kind of “rule-averse” hypothesis is Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogota. He’s a politician, not an academic, try hard as he might to appear like one. The argument was part of his platform, not a rigorous theory. And his views are nowhere near generally accepted. You might find Colombians talking about themselves in that fatalistic, essentialist way over dinner or while making small talk, but it would be silly to think that is a solid explanation. As for the privatization of taxes? That’s called “tax farming,” and it is near universal in the third world, not only a phenomenon of medieval times.
Governmental corruption, moreover, is not by any standard higher in Colombia than elsewhere in Latin America, I’d like to see any serious evidence for this. (It is is odd that Thoumi, a specialist on the drug trade, neglects to mention that an essential part of these rings of corruption consists of American DEA agents).Colombia’s twentieth century, in fact, was completely devoid of the type of personalist, populist regimes that were the rule in Latin America. If you want to think seriously about corruption, you need to study the phenomenon of state capture, of single guys or cliques practically owning the state. Colombia, as f–ed up as it has been, has never approached anything similar to that. Thoumi mentions the 1953 coup as yet another example of Colombia’s culture of corruption. What nonsense. If at all, this was an expression of Colombia’s remarkably resillient bipartisan tradition. It is the only Latin American country I know of that has had the same two parties from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, as opposed to having any new populist fool start his own pseudo-party. The three years follwing the 53 coup were the only interruption in democratic elections in the twentieth century. And this regime had the amazing feat, for a military dictatorship, to have shrunk! military expenditures every year it was in power. Scholars often emphasize the exact opposite point: that Colombia, all things considered, has a startingly strong tradition of legalism. Finally, how could one explain that a country that is allegedly so unique in its political corruption never developed the kind of massive deficits driven by patronage spending that happened elsewhere in the continent? Colombia’s public and foreign debt was comparatively so small that ti didn’t even miss a single payment on its foreign commitments during the Great Depression. This is also something economic historians of Colombia have been trying to explain. On the topic of corruption and cronyism, it’s also important to note Jagdish Bhagwati’s quip, that “cronies” are just the term Americans like to use for third world “lobbyists.”
And while it is true that Colombia has had a rather gruesome civil war as of late, it is not what the racist remark said earlier suggests about Colombians having a penchant for chainsaw massacres (That’s in Texas). Brutal things have happened, but Colombia is not exceptional in this regard. It is certainly not worst than Peru and the Shining Path. Colombia never had the kind of torture-and-disappearance kind of authoritarian state that was the rule in Latin America. Most violent deaths in Colombia don’t have anything to do with the civil war. Most are the result of urban crime. Clean, simple, gun violence, of the kind you’d find in any American inner city.
All these problems, moreover, are very historically specific. They have only really been the case in the last twenty years. Before the 1980′s Colombian crime and murder rates were on par with the latin american average for a good, say, 2 centuries. A big deal has been made out of the kidnapping and the governmental corruption. Kidnapping is a phenomenon of the 90′s. And there was nothing exceptional, or even unexpected, about it. You would have gotten the same result anywhere with a resillient guerrilla (which numbered under 10,000 at the time) suddenly flushed with cash (an unexpected consequence of wiping out th major capos was that the guerrilla took over the coca fields) trying to gain political leverage. The peak in violence was also completely explained by the surge in cocaine production and consumption worldwide in the 80′s. This is also a global phenomenon, so common that it has its own name, “The Resource Curse.”
I am rambling for far too long, but I’m trying to give some sense of how narrow and thin of evidence this discussion seems. To be sure, I think Colombia is f–ed up, but in your garden-variety, third world country with an insurgency kind of way.
“capitalism and the illegitimacy and weakness of property rights in the country.”
I don’t know if you can confer the legitmacy of calling Colombia a capitalist society since it has weak property rights and little rule of law.
Sounds more like an anarchy/ kleptocracy to me.
In this case there might be alittle too much “civil society” and not enough government.
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