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  • Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia
  • Luis Van Isschot
Jasmin Hristov , Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press and Toronto: Between the Lines 2009)

Jasmin Hristov's book, Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, makes valuable contributions to the study of contemporary Colombian politics, as well as to interpretations of the Colombian conflict, the role of the state, the role of paramilitary forces, and relations among them.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez has been linked to political terrorism on an order unseen in Latin America in more than a generation. This parapolítica scandal, as it is known in Colombia, has been ignored by European and North American leaders. Instead, President Uribe has been acclaimed and rewarded for his hard line against insurgent groups. The governments of Canada and the United States have defended Uribe and sought to negotiate free trade agreements with Colombia during his tenure. According to Hristov, President Uribe has overseen the integration of criminal paramilitary networks with formal politics, rather than the [End Page 281] defeat of the guerrillas. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colomiba (FARC) merit nary a mention in Hristov's book. As she makes perfectly clear, social movement and human rights activists, students, progressive intellectuals, indigenous peoples, and the urban poor have been the main targets of paramilitary violence.

Hristov commands the reader's attention with her bold and well-documented arguments. Her tone is appropriately impassioned and engaged. The book will be of interest to researchers, students, and activists interested in contemporary Latin America. Completed while Hristov was working on her doctoral dissertation in political science at York University in Toronto, Blood and Capital reads like an urgent treatise on a very contemporary and constantly changing crisis.

The book is divided into seven chapters, the first of which deals with the interlocking themes of capitalism and violence. Hristov is critical of the mainstream contemporary social science literature on Colombia. She argues that the main thrust of scholarship on Colombia has overemphasized the concept of armed conflict as a "meganarrative" for explaining Colombian history. The focus on armed conflict among belligerent forces has had the effect of overestimating the role of armed actors, just as the focus on drug trafficking has tended to exaggerate the role of the United States. She then makes a brief but important appeal for students of Colombia to recognize the contributions of socially engaged Colombian intellectuals such as trade unionist Francisco Ramírez, journalist Alfredo Molano, and sociologist Eduardo Pizarro Leongómez. Inspired by these authors, Hristov proceeds to discuss how the rise of paramilitarism has paralleled the rise of neoliberalism in Colombia.

Hristov's points are well taken. For many years, the idea that violence is pathological or endemic in Colombia, without remedy, even without explanation, has indeed become mainstream.

One of the most important contributions of Hristov's book is that it discusses paramilitarism as a complex set of interrelated phenomena, rather than a singular force. Hristov takes the reader on a journey deep into the details of political violence in Colombia. This allows the reader to imagine paramilitary groups as complex networks. For decades Colombian civil society groups working on the front lines of the dirty war have been insistent that paramilitary forces work in collaboration with Colombian state forces, with the acquiescence of high-level government officials. Under the government of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, whose top aides have been linked to paramilitary financing and intelligence systems, there is an opportunity to demonstrate that collusion has been practised by people at every level of government. Against all evidence, the veracity of civil society claims concerning paramilitarism are often questioned by the international community. Many observers have instead attempted to explain the Colombian conflict as the outcome of the breakdown or weakness of the state. Hristov delves into this key debate in Colombian social science by laying out systematically the main features of paramilitarism and how these relate to Colombian economics, politics, and justice.

The second half of the book deals with the nature of paramilitary crimes, recent judicial measures introduced by the Colombian government to obfuscate these, and the case of the undeclared war...

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