Parallel Governance in a Negotiated Peace: The AGC and State Displacement in Rural Colombia

Abstract

In the rural areas of Colombia, there are various areas where institutional weakness of the state has created a power vacuum that has been filled by non-state actors involved in the internal conflict in Colombia. One of those is the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia (AGC)- also known as the Clan de Golfo, the largest drug cartel in South America, a group of several armed organizations, including regional criminal structures, drug traffickers, and collection officers that control illicit economies involving narco trafficking, illegal mining, and extortion. The AGC takes advantage of weakened institutions to provide public services and regulate matters concerning civilian life. This is particularly significant because state authority is replaced; local power relations are reshaped and parallel forms of rule are legitimized. The historical context for the AGC can be traced back to the 1980's from the coming together of large landholders and business leaders, drug cartels, and the Colombian army to form paramilitary structures to combat leftist guerilla groups. Overlapping paramilitary groups would come in 1977 to form one national structure called the Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which would eventually demobilize in 2005. Disparate groups would then form, the most prominent being the AGC. The core argument of this paper is that the AGC estabished a durable parallel governance in rural Antioquia through selective violence, social regulation, insitutional co-optation and economic control, ultimately legitmized by a negotiated peace. Rather than functioning soley as a drug cartel or insurgency, the AGC derives legitimacy from governing everyday life where the state is absent or ineffective. Focusing on post-FARC rural Antioquia, the study traces how territorial control evolves into adminstrative influence, economic dominance and political leverage, revealing why conventional secuirity-centered responses fail to dismantle the AGC's negotiated peace and flaws with other implementations to upset the negotiated peace.