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Armed Actors, Violence and Democracy in Latin America in the 1990s: Introductory Notes
KEES KOONINGS1
Utrecht University

Democracy and violence in Latin America

In July 2001, the police forces of the Brazilian State of Bahia went on strike. For some commentators, rather than a strike it was a mutiny. Military and civil police officers occupied barracks and police stations, wielding their arms and wearing face-masks that made them look rather like members of the FARC or the EZLN (or ETA for than matter) than civil servants disputing a wage hike. As a result, violence erupted especially in the poorer districts of Salvador, the state capital and fear took hold of the city. Armed gangs roamed the streets and looted shops in some cases with men wearing police uniforms or insignia in their midst. After a few days, the federal government decided to deploy army troops to restore a minimum of order and a sense of safety for the frightened citizenry. The press published relieved reports of confraternization between the policemen and the federal troops; earlier, fear of a violent confrontation between the two forces had been aired. The `strike' in Bahia was settled, but police dissatisfaction was spreading to other states. The federal government considered new legislation to give the army permanent policing prerogatives throughout the national territory.2 Despite its many problems, Brazil is ranked among those Latin American countries where democracy has taken hold. With the demise of military authoritarianism and left-wing armed opposition, commitment to the consolidation of democratic governance and the rule of law appears to have become widespread throughout the region during the past decade. Already in the late 1970s the institutional dictatorships in South America had started to show fissures and cracks. From the mid-1980s onward, civil governments also came to the fore in Central America, notably in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Although severely constrained by military tutelage and civil conflict, these new regimes proved to be one of the factors that facilitated Central American peace
1 2 Associate Professor of Development Studies at Utrecht University. This author was in Brazil during that month. See Jornal do Brasil, 28 July 2001 (`FH: Exe rcito com poder policial', p. 3).

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Kees Koonings agreements in the 1990s. Throughout Latin America, during the 1990s emphasis shifted towards the mechanisms and conditions of democratic consolidation as, with a few exceptions, elected governments regularly succeeded one another. Any effort to strike a balance of the results of democratic consolidation in Latin America at the beginning of the twenty-first century is bound to come to mixed conclusions. Open military rule has indeed been absent from the region since the demise of the latter-day `patriarchs' Pinochet and Stroessner more than ten years ago (Fitch, 1998). The formal apparatus of democratic governance appears firmly in place and generally enjoys a sufficient degree of support among various social categories and actors within political society (Diamond, Linz and Lipset, 1995; Dom nguez and Lowenthal, 1996). And what is more, the adoption of often severe programs of economic adjustment seems so far not to have led to the breakdown of democratic politics (Demmers, Ferna ndez Gilberto and Hogenboom, 2001; Gwynne and Kay, 1999). But three further issues related to the political and institutional dimensions of democratisation are more problematic, at least in a number of countries (Agu ero and Stark, 1998). First, political culture and political practice within the new democracies of Latin America have often been criticised for retaining clear particularistic (neo-patrimonial and personalistic) features. In addition, political culture in many Latin American countries combines a peculiar type of neopopulism with exclusionary technocracies and privileged and socially conservative elites. Second, the institutional prerogatives and political power of the military and related security forces within the domestic arena have not been sufficiently reduced in a number of countries (Fitch, 1998; Kruijt, this volume; Loveman, 1999; Silva, 2001). Finally, the stigma of social exclusion in various guises (mass poverty, informality, disempowerment on the basis of class and colour, and disrespect of citizenship rights of the underprivileged) casts serious doubts on the more substantial qualities of democratisation as a socially transformative proposition (Koonings and Kruijt, 1999; Me ndez, O'Donnell and Pinheiro, 1999). Against this background the articles brought together in this volume look at various dimensions of yet another but closely related problem of present-day Latin America: the continuation of social and political violence and the ongoing presence of so-called `armed actors'. One fundamental issue with respect to democratic consolidation one that has been gaining more attention recently in the international scholarly debate is the problem of regaining and maintaining the monopoly of the legitimate use of force by accountable, democratic governments under civilian control. In a number of Latin American countries, this poses a problem despite the prevalence of formal political democracy. This is due not only to the legacy of authoritarianism and state-induced repression, (leftwing) armed opposition, and open civil war, but also to the continuous proliferation of armed violence by a variety of groups sometimes linked to the state or linked to social resistance or organised crime. In theory, full democratic consolidation not only means the subordination of the security forces under civil rule. It requires the effective maintenance of the 402
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Armed Actors in the 1990s state's monopoly of the means of coercion and its deployment to secure public order, the rule of law, and citizenship rights on the basis of accountable norms and procedures. This ideal-type is far from established in many Latin American countries. Instead, social and political violence appears to have been maintained even in countries where democracy as a political form has made considerable headway. It is hardly necessary to elaborate upon the relevance of this problem for the long-term prospects of democratic governance. Wielding an effective monopoly over legitimate coercion is at the core of the modern nation-state. Democratic politics cannot be sustained unless the basic condition of the rule of law is upheld. Without it, governance becomes arbitrary and ineffective; support for any such regime, and indeed for the public cause itself, will be jeopardised even if democracy prevails in the electoral sense. In addition, democratic politics imply, by definition, a peaceful encounter of diverging social interests through institutional channels. The principle of non-violence is crucial for guaranteeing voice, mobilisation and effective influence over policymaking. Elsewhere we have referred to this phenomenon as the `new violence', although many of its manifestations are in fact far from new (Kruijt and Koonings, 1999: 12). This notion can make sense, at least as a heuristic tool, in delineating this specific configuration referred to above. The basic empirical characteristic of the new violence is that it is increasingly available to a variety of social actors and no longer solely a resource of elites or security forces. Its `newness' lies first and foremost in its contrast with the norms and expectations derived from the democratisation process currently underway. Another clear characteristic is its variety: different forms of violence and conflict are subsumed under this notion, such as everyday criminal and street violence, riots, social cleansing, private account settling, police arbitrariness, paramilitary activities, post-Cold War guerrillas, etcetera. By definition, the new violence implies the failure of the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of force. Instead, a variety of actors takes to coercion and violence to pursue certain goals or simply to reproduce their own existence and way of life, or to pre-empt the usufruct by others of rights acquired through participation in the democratic process.

Armed actors and the politics of coercion

This implies that Latin American democracies have not been able to free themselves completely, or at all, from the presence of such armed actors. This presence means that political procedures, interest mobilisation, and the build-up of civil society within the canon of democratic governance may be and often has been disrupted by the use of extra-legal and non-legitimate force. In this particular panopticum, different types of armed actors play out their part. I propose a simple typology.3
3 The following draws in part on Koonings (forthcoming).

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Kees Koonings First, there are those armed actors that belong squarely in the public domain: the military, the security forces, and the police. Under ideal-typical circumstances, these forces are the tools of the use of legitimate coercion by democratic states, externally, against possible military opponents, and internally, against infractors of the rule of law and public order. As is shown by Kruijt in this volume as well as by others (Koonings, forthcoming), these state-related armed actors have in a number of cases been instrumental for the erosion or `freezing' of full democratisation. The military and the security and intelligence forces have been doing this mainly through the preservation of semi- or extralegal constraints on civil rule. The police, in many Latin American countries, is still prone to arbitrariness in targeting social `enemies' rather than upholding the rule of law, and to the use of violence rather than operational competence and respect for citizens' rights (Chevigny, 1995; Soares, 2001). Second, we see the proliferation of `extra-legal violence' in the name of `law and order' but in the shadows and the interstices of the state, that is often used by private interests to pursue their goals (Huggins, 1991). In many cases a murky symbiosis has developed between the official security forces and paramilitary and vigilante-type actors. This is clearly the case in the Colombian and Guatemalan conflicts, the Peruvian pax fujimoriana, or the particular methods of law enforcement against the `marginal classes' in large Brazilian and other countries' cities (Pinheiro, 1996). In the specific case of rural `self-defence' patrols peculiar combinations of subordination to state terrorism, particularism of local powerholders, and more ore less justifiable instances of community defence, have emerged in countries such as Guatemala and Peru. Third, old and new forms of guerrilla forces or opposition social movements may still employ violence as one of their options. Conventional guerrilla groups have become scarce in post-Cold War Latin America (Wickham-Crowley, 1992; Gaspar, 1997) Shining Path and the guevarista Tupac Amaru revolutionary movement in Peru have been significantly weakened, while the Central American guerrillas have been transformed into political forces after the peace settlements in the region. Only in Colombia do left-wing guerrilla armies still bring considerable military power to bear against the state and paramilitary forces. The typical post-Cold War and `post-modern' guerrilla movement of the EZLN in Southern Mexico has hardly done any fighting at all and should rather be seen as a guerrilla-turned social movement pursuing basic social and political reforms, alongside greater dignity for Mexico's long-ignored indigenous populations. Nevertheless subcomandante Marcos and his colleagues qualify as armed actors because their initial show of force and their permanent use of guerrilla symbolism have been an important aspect of their overall strategy. Fourth, we have the phenomenon of `uncivil society' (Payne, 2000). In some instances, social or political movements have shown a potential to radicalise, or in other words, have discovered that the use of force may be employed to back up economic or social claims. Violence is employed to make sure that particularistic interests will not have to yield before the common good or because of the operation of legitimate procedures. Clear examples are the tactics of the landless 404
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Armed Actors in the 1990s workers' movement in Brazil or Ecuador's indigenous movement in the 1980s and 1990s.4 It is not surprising that these movements have been cited among the new security threats identified by the military and the military police in these countries. In a number of cases there has been right-wing counter-reform violence as well, most notably in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil.5 Here, there is obvious room for different opinions on the acceptability of the use of force depending on political or ideological preferences. For instance, many may deem the coercive tactics of the MST in Brazil acceptable given the huge power of the landed elite and the application of blind repressive force by the military police against the actions of the movement. It has become clear, however, that the use of violence always tends to erode the wider support for even the worthiest cause and is always prone to divert the orientation of such armed actors away from constructive politics. Finally, large- and small-scale organised crime, linked to the international drug trade or to local racketeering, has managed to mount parallel systems of violence and order on a national scale in countries such as Colombia and Mexico. This logic has been reproduced on a smaller scale by the drug bosses and their gangs in the Brazilian favelas or by the maras, the criminal youth gangs in several Central American countries (Leeds, 1996; Peralva, 2000). In close relation to this perversion of the rule of law, a myriad of armed actors already alluded to earlier have come to the fore within the realm of everyday violence and the failure of the overall rule of law These include street criminal gangs, vigilante and mob justice, civil patrols in poor neighbourhoods and rural communities, as well as the arbitrary and sometimes even criminal actions of police forces.

The contributions: armed actors in Guatemala, Peru and Colombia6

These manifestations of the new violence and armed actors involved can be found in varying degrees across the region. Throughout Latin America armed actors continue to put democratic political institutions and civil society under strain. Still, important differences in kind and degree exist among the countries of the region. In
4 5 Hammond (1999) makes this point with respect to the Brazilian landless workers' movement (MST). See the thorough analysis by Payne (2000) of the Brazilian Rural Democratic Union, a landowners association with paramilitary dimensions set up to counter the threat of land reform and MST invasions after 1985. She also refers to the Nicaraguan Contras in the same study. The contributions (with the exception of Kruijt's article) were originally presented as research papers at the session `Armed Actors: Security Forces, Militias, and Guerrillas in Latin America during the 1990s', organised by this author within the XXII International LASA Congress in Miami, March 2000. I am grateful to the LASA Programme Committee for facilitating the session and to the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) and Utrecht University for providing funds for the contributors' participation in this event.

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Kees Koonings the three countries examined in particular in this volume, Guatemala, Peru and Colombia, the consolidation of democratic politics is facing the challenge of dealing with the fragmentation of armed actors that is reproducing situations of violence and fear, causing uncertainty as to the prospects of peace building and democratisation. The cases embrace a variety of such situations. Not only do we face the legacy and ongoing perversion of regimes and states by their own security forces, arbitrary rule, and terror (notably Peru and to a lesser degree Guatemala), but also the continuing presence of armed actors who challenge the political status-quo or have been undermining the institutional make-up of the polity (Colombia and Peru). Notably in Peru and Guatemala, regimes of violence have created new armed actors within the rural communities who continue to influence post-conflict reconstruction efforts. In Colombia the overall proliferation of violence not only consumes the body politic from the inside, but is also putting hard-fought-for advances in terms of specific and localised entitlements in danger. The contribution by Dirk Kruijt gives a vivid account of the persistence of the political clout of official security forces in both formal and informal ways. He makes a basic distinction between two scenarios, that of gradual democratisation, and that of the emergence of neo-authoritarian regimes. In the latter cases, notably in Peru and Colombia, self-legitimising interference of the security forces in formal democratic politics tends to lead to its eventual perversion (see also Koonings and Kruijt, 2002) and submission to shady armed actors embedded in the core of the polity. In a slightly different way, the continuation of the institutional weight of the military in Guatemala has led to a permanent situation of tutelage and to ruthless actions in order to protect the interests of the corporation (as in the case of the recent investigation of the Gerardi murder). Of the three countries, Guatemala also stands out because of the 1996 comprehensive peace agreement that seeks to reform, inter alia, the security forces, most notably the police. The article by Marie-Louise Glebbeek provides a critical assessment of this reform effort. Through looking at the overall results of the reform as well as at the details of the new recruitment and training practices of the Pol cia Nacional Civil, founded after the Peace Accords of 1996, she points at the difficulties involved in the transformation of the police into an armed actor that can support peace-building, democratic governance and the rule of law. The deployment of a new kind of police force in Guatemala, when effective, may be an important prerequisite for restoring a more peaceful and lawful order at the local level. During the height of the civil war, local-level violence had been amplified by the proliferation of self-defence patrols. Simone Remijnse shows in her contribution that, while the rural self-defence patrols were set up by the military to bolster their control over the countryside, they also played a role in local patterns of resource appropriation and political power, usually under the sway of leading local ladino families. The patrols were widely involved in arbitrary violence throughout the western highlands. Personal accounts recorded in the municipality of Joyabaj bring these episodes to life. At the same time, for many people, the memory or the threats of resurrection of the patrols continue to instil fear and mistrust, despite their dismantling. 406
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Armed Actors in the 1990s Peasant patrols in Peru possibly had even more complex and more diverse origins and trajectories than their Guatemalan counterparts. Mario Fumerton shows in his article that the early manifestations of rondas campesinas can to a large extent be explained by growing peasant dissatisfaction with the coercion and violence inflicted upon them by Shining Path. When the state, in particular the military, realised the potential of the peasant patrols, the latter were actively promoted and incorporated in the official counter-insurgency strategy. Still, in many cases these patrols continued to act as semi-autonomous armed actors; efforts to control them met with limited success, and patrol commanders took on local prominence in many communities. In the current `post-conflict' context, many patrols have sought to re-invent themselves as local developmental committees (once again with the active support of the security forces). These committees find themselves at a disadvantage, however, vis-a -vis other local actors such as the conventional authorities or NGOs. Unlike Guatemala and Peru, nothing remotely resembling a post-conflict process seems to be imminent in Colombia. With the generalised violence of the late 1980s and 1990s, the institutional integrity of the state, the legitimacy of the political process, and the effectiveness of public policies, have been on (or past) the point of collapse. In Colombia, the use of raw force to further past interests has been rampant. The state proved either incapable of stemming this tide or has been actively involved, e.g. through alleged ties of politicians with the drug mafia or of the military with paramilitary violence and their strategy of social cleansing on the basis of indiscriminate terror. Mieke Wouters shows that this spiral of violence has started to clash head-on with initiatives to secure certain rights through peaceful and legal means. The black rural population of the western department of the Choco has been gaining collective land titles on the basis of extensive mobilisation, making use of constitutional reforms established in 1991. These collective entitlements have been the object of paramilitary and guerrilla violence since the mid-1990s up to the present day. The violence not only jeopardised the effective appropriation of communal resources but also the organisational effort of the peasants and their nascent sense of ethnic identity that lies at the very heart of the entitlement. Taken together, the contributions in this volume disclose multiple ways in which the prevalence of armed actors and the legacy and continuation of violence cast shadows over democracy, the rule of law, and peaceful citizenship in Latin American countries. Today, the biggest challenge for civilian, elected governments lies not so much in the maintenance of civil rule itself or in the subordination of the formal security forces to democratic principles, although this continues to be unfinished business in a number of countries. It lies rather in the effective construction of the public monopoly of legal force, to be used to pursue human security through the indiscriminate rule of law. Only in this way can the current everyday arbitrariness and extra-legal violence inflicted by armed actors on their own people be dealt with.

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