"The Self-Organizing Periphery: A Colombian Perspective" with James Robinson

- So again, welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for this masterclass with Professor Robinson. And we're gonna go ahead and get started. I'll do a brief introduction and then turn it over to Professor Robinson. In this session, "The Self-Organizing Periphery" with Professor James Robinson, you will learn about his research using data on the organization and behavior of Colombian paramilitary groups. A little bit about Professor Robinson, as Institute Director of the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, he's guiding the institute's research agenda, engaging the international, academic and practitioner community through the Pearson Global Forum, and setting the curriculum for the next generation of leaders in scholarships. He is the co-author of "Why Nations Fail" and "The Narrow Corridor". Professor, I'll turn it over to you. - All right, thanks very much and welcome to everybody. Yeah, I changed the topic of my talk because I've been doing, we've been doing this work on the impact of bombing by the Germans. You know, there's amazingly good bombing data by the you know, during the Second World War in England on, and the looking at the impact on inequality and the kind of long run political dynamics. But then I thought, like, when did I ever meet an English student at the Harris School? I don't think I ever, but there's all these Latin American students, so I kind of, I refocused and I'm gonna talk about this other project, which we just, even though it's been going on for 10 years, I can tell you a little bit about the history. We just have some results on, with some results on. So I've been working in Colombia, oh my gosh. I first went to Colombia in 1992. Pablo Escobar escaped from prison when I was there, from his phony prison in Medellín when I was in Colombia for the first time. And I've been teaching every summer at the University of the Andes since 1994. So I have a summer school, so I have a lot of connections in Colombia and I've done a lot of research on Colombia over the years. So this is just a recent, I try, I'm always trying to disengage from doing research on Colombia but my students won't let me. So this is the outcome of, you know, so let me, what should I do? I should, let me share my screen instead of rambling on endlessly. And this is, okay, all right. You can see that? Yeah. This is, so this is joint work. The title changes every an hour. This is the first time I've ever talked about this project, actually, but I've been working on it for 10 years, since I was on sabbatical in Bogotá, actually in 2011, 2012. And it's called "The Self-Organizing Periphery". You'll see what it's about. And it's joint work with Maria Angélica Bautista, who's actually my colleague here at the Harris School, and Juan Sebastián Galán. Juan Sebastián Galán was a, he was my RA in Bogotá. He did his PhD at Harvard. I supervised his master's dissertation in Bogotá. I supervised his PhD dissertation in Harvard, and now he's a professor at the University of the Andes. And he is actually visiting the Becker Friedman Institute at the moment so we were just hanging out earlier today. And so, you know, so this is a topic that I've been fascinated by ever since I started going to Colombia, which is how does the state actually work in Colombia? Like how does the state kind of function and the ways in which this seriously diverges from a kind of Western social science idea of how the state ought to work? And the project is really trying to use Colombian paramilitarism as a sort of, as a lens to look at that, okay? So, and I think the way, the way I talk about this, you know, is, and you know, is there's a sort of core and a periphery, you know, in the hegemonic social science tradition, or you could say of Hobbes, you know, and Weber is, there's a thing called the state, you know? And Weber defined the state as the entity that has the legitimate monopoly of violence in society in a given territory. You know, so we think about the state, we think about an entity, a bureaucracy, you know, a military, it has sovereignty in a given territory and it controls that territory. But in reality, you know, most states are not like that. I work a lot in, I was in Nigeria, I was working in eastern Nigeria for a month this summer. And the, I can tell you the state in Nigeria is not like that at all. You know, the places that I was working in the rural east, the national government does absolutely nothing. You know, there's not one functionary paid by the national government. And if they were paid, it would only be in inverted commas 'cause they never actually receive their salary. The society self-organizes, they provide their own public goods, they provide security, they provide, they build schools. You want a health center, you have to raise the money, you build it yourself. You maintain the roads. They self-organize. And I think that's the reality in most developing countries. And it's certainly the reality in Colombia. So think of a core, you know, there's a core, there's a kind of place where maybe the state, the modern Western state does govern and provides public goods, and then there's this far less governed or ungoverned periphery. And, you know, and in Colombia that's where you've had all these Marxist guerilla groups, the drug cartels, the paramilitary groups, which is the main thing we're gonna study in this project. So what we're interested in is, and I think that's an equilibrium, you know? It's not that there's a core and there's a periphery and the periphery, you know, is there's some process via which the core is taking over and sort of gradually, you know, integrating the periphery in. No, it's been like that for 500 years, you know? And the Colombia is a fantastic example for that because I'll talk more about this later on, but you know, when President Uribe sort of finally, you know, decided he was gonna defeat these Marxist guerillas, you know, he did. Did that, you know, did in less than two presidential terms. Did that lead the Colombian state to kind of expand and integrate the periphery into the core? Absolutely not. You know, the same situation is going on like as ever now. It's, so it sort of, it stabilized the equilibrium. So there's an equilibrium between this core and the periphery. And that's sort of what we're trying to study here, okay? So in the periphery, the state does few things, provides few public goods, but the periphery self organizes, you know? Colombians in the periphery provide public goods. They organize collectively, you know, they do things. And in some sense that's what paramilitarism was, as you'll see. And these actors are not really controlled by the state. I'll give you some examples. Of course, they interact with the state, they have connections to the state, you know, the state manages them and they interface and they make deals. And so the data we have allows us to see a little bit of that. We're working on that. But you'll see when I get into it how that works. But so think of the core, the periphery, the periphery self-organizes, it provides public goods, it grows drugs, it kills, you know, people get killed. And then there's these interactions between the core and the periphery. And, you know, we're interested in sort of studying this self-organization in the periphery, the different forms it takes, the different consequences for the welfare of Colombians living in the periphery and also the interface with the state, okay? So, you know, so here's a, you know, here's a very, this famously the most paramilitarized town in Colombia, Puerto Boyacá. And here's a expression that I'm gonna tell you where all the information's gonna come from in a bit. Here's a, this is a quote that I really like from Ernesto Báez who's a, he's a paramilitary, he's a kind of one of the intellectuals of the Colombian paramilitary movement, you could say. And in a court, you know, in a court, he was giving testimony in these transitional justice. Most of the evidence I'm gonna talk about comes from transitional justice process in Colombia. And, you know, and he sort of makes this sarcastic remark to the judge, how could a small, independent state work inside a lawful state such as ours? So the independent state was the paramilitaries, the lawful state such as ours was the Colombia national state, you know, and, you know, he's sort of saying exactly what we're interested in, you know? He's saying it sarcastically because he's sort of saying you know, basically we did whatever we liked and the Colombian government didn't care. And, you know, and how do we think about that relationship? And his testimony is very, very interesting on that. And here's Puerto Boyacá, you know, the land of peace and progress, the anti-subversive capital of Colombia. And welcome, welcome to Puerto Boyacá, the anti-subversive capital of Colombia. Okay, so the, in 2006 Colombian paramilitary groups go back at least to the late 1960s, early 1970s. Some, they self-organize. They spread very rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s. And in 2006, President Uribe kind of managed to get most of them to demobilize. Some of them never demobilized and they're still operating more or less in the same form, but most of them demobilized. And in fact, we have, I'm not gonna show you kind of results with that today, but we got all the data from this demobilization. So we have 20, we have the information of 20,000 people who entered into this demobilization process. Most of them walked away without, because they weren't really accused of serious crimes. And about 4,000 of them went into this transitional justice process. And they've been more or less nonstop since 2006 giving testimony about, so in exchange for reduced sentences, they had to kind of tell the truth about how the paramilitaries operated and organized. And a lot of this is about crime and drug production or whatever but a lot of it, as you'll see, is also absolutely fascinating information about how they organized and what they did. And, you know, that's provide, I mean, it's all in hundreds of thousands of pages, if not millions of pages of court documents. But nowadays, you know, we have things like Python and, you know, so there's lots of ways of dealing with court documents that you didn't have 10 years ago when we started. I don't know, maybe Python existed 10 years ago, but I had no idea what it was. I thought it was a snake, you know? So that's the data. I'll, you know, you'll, I'll get into like how, what some of that looks like. You know, it comes from this transitional justice process. And what we're really gonna do is, so we're gonna have this very rich information about paramilitary groups. There was about 34 paramilitary blocks, and within the blocks there was over 100 fronts. There's missing information. So we don't have information for quite a few of the fronts, but we have over 100 fronts. And we're gonna, we're interested in, you know, in some sense the variation in how these fronts behave. You know, did they provide public goods? Did they engage in violence? Did they engage in kind of illegal activities? You know, I'm never, I've never been very, I've never written a paper about coca in Colombia after all these years, you know, because I always feel there's a great Colombian writer called, late Colombian writer, R. H. Moreno Durán, who made the very deep remark, I've always thought as a very deep remark, that in Colombia politics corrupts drug dealing. Think about it, politics corrupts drug dealing. So I think that's the right sort of causal arrow. So that's my justification for never writing a paper about drugs. But here it's gonna look, it's looks a little bit more interesting than I usually think as you'll see, okay? So we're interested in how these over 100 fronts behaved. We have enormously rich information on how they were organized, who was in them, you know, what did they do in terms of providing public goods. And I'll give you a reality check on providing public goods in a minute. Violence, you know, they taxed, they provided justice, they were little states. That's what Ernesto Báez said. And they were in some sense, you know, but there's enormous variation in which they operate, in the way in which they operated. And there's enormous variation in the extent to which they were connected with the national state. So in what I'm gonna show you today, the main thing of interest is gonna be to see, you know, like how, you know, what's, if we think of more or less connected to the national state, then who, you know, how does, how do they, what kind of variation in the way they operate does that cause? Okay, so, and you might think, you know, in some sense, like a natural conjecture would be to say you know, like, ask yourself the question, okay? So these paramilitary groups are kind of organizing, they're taxing people. You know, I'll show you some data on taxation in a minute. They're taxing people that, you know, they're providing public goods, but that there's a lot of differences in the way they're organized. And think of, you know, this axis of some of them are much more connected to the state than others. Why are they connected to the state? Well, they're not really controlled by the state, but quite a few of these fronts were commanded by ex-military officers, for example. So whereas many of them, about 50% were commanded by, you know, what in Colombia would be called a campesino, like that word, you know, translate, I don't, I think it's fairly untranslatable into English. You know, in English you translate that word as peasant, but at least for an Englishman, that really doesn't mean anything. Like, there's no such thing as a peasant in England, I don't think. And, you know, and it doesn't have the same connotation as campesino does in Colombia. So, you know, it's, you know, it comes with a whole package of sociology and kind of values and culture. It's a culture, you know, and which is missing from English, so England or the United States for that matter. I don't think there's any peasants in Illinois. You'd never use that word. It has a kind of very archaic kind of feel to it in English. So, or even pejorative, you know? Which is not true in Colombia. Quite the opposite, you know, it's almost like a badge of honor. You know, you are proud to be a campesino. So I'm gonna tell you how we measure that, but think of campesinos of people like kind of very disconnected from the state and think of ex-military officers are people who are connected to the state, you know? So who would you think is more likely to provide public goods, for example? So I think a natural conjecture would be, you know, if your image is, you know, like if you go to the bank or if you go to like the ministry of (speaks foreign language), you talk to some, you know, government somebody, some minister in Colombia, you know, they'll sell you the image that oh, the government is, you know, gradually providing public goods and it's extending its scope into the periphery and, you know, and so who would you expect, you know, to provide more public goods, you know, as a paramilitary leader? Well, you think, well, people who are more connected to the state, you know, and so this is in some sense almost like a surrogate expansion of the state. But I would say, you know, based on my experience with doing research in Colombia for almost 30 years, you know, that seriously underestimates that image, you know, seriously underestimates the scope for extremely perverse interaction between the core and the periphery. So I've done a lot of research on this. We've done research on the impact of paramilitaries on election results, for example. We've done a lot, we did work on the so-called false positives. We published a paper last year on the false positives, which was when President Uribe introduced high-powered incentives for the military. You know, the army went up, you know, rounded up civilians, dressed them up as rebel combatants and assassinated them for pay rises and holidays. You know, so the kind of level of impunity and the sort of perversity of the relationship between the core and periphery I think makes this a somewhat naive hypothesis, okay? And in fact, I personally think, you know, the way to think about the reaction, the relationship between the core and the periphery in Colombia is like the core thinks the periphery you know, it needs to be managed, it needs to be pacified. It's a bit like that kind of game whack-a-mole, do you know whack-a-mole, you know? So if something from the periphery jumps up in your face, you kind of whack it down, you know? But that's kind of all you do, you know? And of course you whack its one down and another one jumps up, you know? But I think that's a good image to think about the relationship between the Colombian state and the periphery. So actually, you know, our working hypothesis, you know, or you could say conjecture, is that it's the opposite is true, actually. The fewer connections you have to the state and the more isolated from its influence, you know, the more likely you are to actually work in the interests of kind of what the average person in the periphery in terms of providing public goods and being less inclined to use violence et cetera, okay? So you could say that's just a conjecture. It's a working hypothesis. And, you know, this is a map I'd like, which I always think this shows you. I call this the political economy of "La voragine", which is a, it's a fantastic novel from the 1920s, a very famous Colombian novel. So if you want to learn something about the way the Colombian state thinks about the periphery, you should read this novel, "The Vortex", you know, the vortex, the vortex is the periphery. This is a map from a book about by the Reyes brothers. So these were late 19th century, three brothers, one of whom went on to be the president after the War of a Thousand Days. And you can see this is the way people think about the periphery in Colombia. You know, it's like savages, the skulls and things like this. This is still pretty much how people think about the periphery in Colombia today. If you've read "One Hundred Years of Solitude", also, you know, that's a view from the periphery. You know, that's Aracataca, that's up in the Caribbean coast. And it, that's very much the, that's the costeño view of the periphery. There's different peripheries, but it's certainly you know, read it. Yeah, okay. So what's the sort of, I hate it when people do this, okay? So what are we gonna find? Well, we're gonna compare, you know, in the simplest exercise, we're gonna compare paramilitary fronts that were commanded by campesinos, let's say, and paramilitary fronts that were commanded by former military officers, okay? And we're gonna come, we're gonna investigate what's the consequences of that for public good provision? I'm gonna give you some examples of public goods in a second, public good provision, violence and illegality. And what we find is that precisely a front which is commanded by a former military officer is less likely to provide public goods, more likely to engage in violence, including against civilians, and far more likely to be growing coca, okay? (indistinct). - Professor, I'm so sorry to interrupt you, but we can't see the slides. - Oh no, you're kidding me. - [Maria] No. Could you? - Let me try again. - We could, sorry about that. We could see your title, but couldn't see as you were advancing the slides. Oh, there we go. - [James] Okay. - Perfect, thank you. - All right, okay. - [Maria] I'm sorry. - Let me go back. You, nothing is important other than the map for the Reyes, (speaks foreign language) Reyes, you know? Where this is, you know, this map is sort of interesting also because you know, for the, for those of, for the connoisseurs of the kind of farcical Colombian state, because you know what? One thing it shows is the project for an intercontinental railroad, you know? So if you study the history of the Colombian state, you know what's really striking is these endless imaginary plans of how they're going develop the country and build infrastructure and ports and connect here and connect. And it never happens, you know? It just never happens. So here's the intercontinental railroad, which of course never got built. And, you know, here's the, you know, the skulls I was trying to point out, this is the, you know, this is how the, this is down in the Rio Caquetá. This is, you know, this is the periphery, you know? This is the, it's a jungle out there. Anyway, so I didn't want you to miss that. All right, so the main results, you know, think about the comparison is just gonna be very simple. We have in mind complicated econometrics, but we're not there. I'll give you a flavor of that, but we're not there yet. What I'm gonna show you some results on this. What we find systematically, if you compare fronts that are commanded by campesinos, they're far more likely to provide public goods. They're less involved in violence and they're less involved in illegality, okay? Whereas fronts commanded by former military officers, and I'm interpreting that as connected to the state, they're much more, much less likely to provide public goods. They're more likely to engage in violence and illegality. There's an interesting sociological story here. I think, you know, I mentioned that campesino is a sort of identity, you know? There's a sociological aspect to it here. In fact, we, when I was there in 2011, 2012, we did a lot of field work and we talked to quite a lot of these ex-commandantes of these paramilitary leaders. And actually what's really interesting is like after you get their kind of confidence a bit, you know, after they, after you convince them you're not a drug enforcement agent and you're not, you don't work for the CIA or something like that. And they sort of get, oh, professor, you know, they get who you are and they look at your webpage and they kind of think, okay, that this guy is for real. Then you get them thinking about, you know, you can get them thinking about this. And they actually, it's really interesting. They all give these very sociological explanations for why people behaved in different ways. And I think, you know, why are we emphasizing leaders so much here? Well, because these things were, these fronts were very personalized, you know? So I think, again, this is sort of based on our field work, you get the sense that what the, you know, what the leader wanted to do, a lot of the variation is being driven at this leader level. That the variation in how these fronts were organized and what they did and how they behaved had a lot to do with the kind of project of the leader. And so I think, you know, this is, there's also, I don't have much to say about that because it's this sociological aspect of things is difficult to sort of conceptualize with the tools that I have as an economist. But we are thinking about it. I think it's like undeniable in reality. But, you know, but we're thinking about it, okay? So that's, I'm not, I won't talk about the literature that's, I would tell my students never talk about the literature, okay? So let me tell you a little bit about the history of paramilitarism in Colombia. You know, you could tell a, you know, I'm gonna tell a story starting in the 1970s, but of course the history of paramilitarism, if you go back to the 1950s, there was a big civil war in Colombia called La Violencia. And it was packed full of paramilitary groups all over the place. You know, you could go back even, you know, so there's a long history of paramilitarism. And I think you, the image you should have in your mind is in the core, you know, there's a core in the periphery, there's all sorts of groups kind of organizing armed, you know, not armed, collectively providing public goods or security, but also engaging in violence in, you know, in illegal activities. And so that, you know, that history is very persistent. You know, I mean, if you can go back, I have one paper where we, you know, the late colonial period, if you look at the late colonial period, there's very detailed information on where the state was, where state functionaries were, you know, where the population was. And the core and periphery has basically been, you know, it's the same place that now as it was in 17, you know, 94 when that data was collected. So here's Puerto Triunfo, you know, this is the kind of heart of one of these groups that we did a lot of work, kind of investigated a lot, which is the outer defenses, del Magdalena Medio. So this is a region called the Magdalena Medio. It's down in the, in between the kind of Cordilleras with Bogotá and Medellín. It's like near the Magdalena River. And you know, and this is where Puerto Triunfo is a municipality where this guy on the right, Ramon Isaza was from, and he founded this group in 1977. It's an interesting story about connections, you know, because he was a former soldier, but a private, you know, so when I emphasize, you know, military officers, I mean not privates but, you know, military officers, ranking military officers. And in 1977, he was just a farmer, you know? In Puerto Triunfo and the FARC opened a bloc, you know? So I'm gonna tell you this story just so you get the history of these, many of these paramilitary groups. The FARC opened a bloc in, the FARC was expanding. The Marxist guerilla group was expanding, and they opened a bloc in the (indistinct) Antioquia where he was, and they started shaking people down. So they started coming to his farm and asking for money. And he didn't like that so he went to the local military base at La Dorada and said, look, you know, the FARC are here, you know, give me some guns and some backup and I'll, and they told him to take a hike, you know? So he got together with some of his buddies and they got 10 shotguns. They called themselves (speaks foreign language), like the shotgun-ers. And the 10 of them went up into the mountain and figured out where the FARC were and started ambushing them. And then they stole their guns, you know, and their, and then they, that's how they got going in 1977. So this was really kind of bottom-up collective action, you know, by the periphery, you know? There's disorder, there's the FARC, you know, you've gotta provide security. You want to provide public goods. That's how they got going, okay? The guy on the left, Diego Vecino, he's an ex-military guy. That's a very, you know, so, and here's a, you know, this is a quote that I like you know, there's two ways to rule. This is from a demobilized combatant in a book on San Carlos, which is a municipality where there was a famous and horrible paramilitary massacre. You know, there's two ways to rule people, fear or dreams, okay? And it, the, it goes on to say we chose the former, you know, fear. So, you know, and that's, you could say public goods or violence, okay? So by the time, you know, by the time they demobilized, whoops, that's another massacre. You know, here's the, so this is a map that we constructed basically using testimony from the truth and justice law, from the transitional justice proceedings. And, you know, we have data of, the data is very incomplete on some of them, but like, at the maximal amount of data we have would be on 120 different paramilitary fronts. And you can see like color coded here, they sort of spread, you know, they spread all over, they spread all over the place. So some of these, you know, you might think, what's all this? You know, this stripey, can you see that, Jenny? You can see it when I move my cursor about, yeah. So, you know, what's all this stripe-y stuff? Well, that's the same, that's one bloc, that's a bloc which was commanded by you know, Carlos Castaño, who was the sort of the great, one of the great entrepreneurs of Colombian paramilitaries, the three Castaño brothers. And they actually had fronts all over the place. They had a front, you know, in Catatumbo, near the Venezuelan border, you know? They had, this is where they started in the so-called Bajo Cauca, that's where they kind of got going. That's where they lived, in a town called Amalfi. But then they also spread, you know, into the Los Llanos, into the Eastern Plains. So they sent guys there. So they sort of spread around all over the place. Some of the other ones were more kind of compact, you know, this guy, these guys here that (speaks foreign language) they never actually demobilized. So, you know, and if you go there, people will tell you they're still running everything. In fact, you know, the, I won't go into that. So some of them are much more contiguous. Some of them are sort of spread around, and, you know, these, this is kind of at the blocs. And then within that, there's all these fronts. So what we are interested in is sort of trying to exploit this front, you know, within front variation in how these people behaved, okay? This is another very famous massacre in El Salado. So I think, you know, I talk about, I'm gonna talk about public goods or whatever, but one should not forget the amount of violence and chaos that went along, you know, went along with all these activities, okay? So we start with the violence, you know, but what else did they do? Well, lots of dispute resolution, again, public goods. This is the Estatutos. So this is a group from the Magdalena Medio, I showed you Ramon Isaza. So one of the fronts of Isaza was, so he was the commander of this bloc and he had six fronts, and one of the fronts was run by his son-in-law, okay? And this was the Jose Luis Zuluaga front, okay? And these are the estatutos. This is like the kind of constitution, if you like, of the Jose Luis Zuluaga. Who was Jose Luis Zuluaga? He was the brother of the commander who was Isaza's son-in-law, who was murdered by the ELN, a guerilla group. So, you know, so a lot of these people had grudges, you know, and that's led them to mobilize. And, you know, and so this is, you know, I don't wanna go into this in details, you know, but there's an ideological platform you can see. And you know, and if you read through this thing, you know, it gives page after page of discussion of how you should, you know, what's the objective of the front? How's the front organized? How should the front treat individuals, you know? The front had, you know, so there's a sort of legal code if you like. The front had a radio station, it was called Integration in Stereo. They even gave out medals, you know? They gave out medals, the Order of Santander to kind of, you know, people who were outstanding in pursuing the ideological agenda. What was the ideological platform? They were really fighting the FARCs. So they got mobilized to fight the FARC and the ELN, these Marxist guerilla groups. So this is society self-organizing. So why doesn't the government in Bogotá do anything about this, you know? Well, they don't need to. They just wait for peripheral society to kind of self-organize and that contains the problem. You know, why is it that the FARC went on for so long you know, with like nobody doing anything about it? Because the Colombian government allows the periphery to self-organize to contain the problem. And that's absolutely fine that you only have to do something when things get really out of control. You know, when Pablo Escobar started bumping off presidential candidates, you know, and it spread to Bogotá, you know, Luis Carlos Galán was murdered in Soacha, you know, in the south of Bogotá, then you hit the panic button and you have to do something about it. But this is fine. You know, this is all going on on the main road in between Bogotá and Medellín, no one bats an eyelid, you know? It's self-organization of the periphery is containing, containing the FARC, containing the ELA. You don't need to do anything. You don't need to raise taxes, you don't need to provide any resources. You don't need to do anything. Society does it, okay? So you sort of, it's like the state free riding off society, you know, we think of people free riding, it's the other way round, you know, in Colombia. Here's some examples. This is from the Magdalena Medio. You know, I could show you lots of data on this, but this is just some sort of reconstruction of their finances. So here's the frente Jose Luis Zuluaga that I was showing you there, estatutos. This is their spending over the period 2000, 2006. That's the kind of period we kind of focus on. So the paramilitaries demobilized in 2006. This is the period for which there's best information so we kind of focused on this period. There's a lot of flux. You know, these guys started in 1977, but of course they changed their organization a lot over time, you know, so tracking keep, we're not gonna be able to keep track of all of that in the empirical analysis. So we focus on this period. So here's, you know, here's the income, you know, here's the incomes of the, you know, so of the frente Jose Luis Zuluaga. What was their main source of income? $10 million gasoline trade. So there's huge amounts of gasoline smuggling in Colombia. Mostly it comes over the border from Venezuela. So gasoline is almost, you know, free in Venezuela, and it's at the world price in Colombia. So there's a huge amount of money to be made by you know, importing gasoline illegally from Venezuela and then selling it. So these guys were on the main road, you know, between Medellín and Bogotá. So they would tax this cartel the gasoline, you know, and they, most, the fronts, these are the other fronts here of the, there were six in total but there's data for four of them. There's like $10 million a year. They taxed farms, $700,000, businesses, you know, they taxed businesses, you know, in the towns where they were controlled. There's some money from coca production, a million dollars. So, you know, there's a lot of variation you can see here, even within the fronts, you know? The other ones relied much more than that on this, you know, and there's a lot of variation in total revenues, you know, so this front raised, you know, over twice the revenues of these other fronts, the Celestino Mantilla, for example. And here's what they spent, you know? We have all this detailed expenditure data. So in the transitional justice process, the magistrates and judges were kind of tasked with reconstructing these finances. Again, there's a lot of variation in the quality of information, you know? But here, you know, we know about, you know, salaries and, you know, in the case of this front, social works, okay? So though they spent $3.5 million, you know, about 26% of their budget on social works. So what does social works mean? Well, let me come back to those characters. Here's a road they built in a municipality called San Francisco, which is kind of a little, you know, east of Medellín, down the mountain. So they built, you can see this road here, they built, this is a road they built. It's Sonsón is the, here's a school, they built a school. This is in the Vereda called Piedras Blancas. They built a health center, you know, so this is a clinic they built, you know? So this was from field work. So I think that, you know, of course you have to check what people tell you. So we went and we did field work here. They built poor people's houses. They built these kind of barrios for people. And in 2006, they all sort of demobilized. I'm gonna go back to this slide here. So this is, you know, one thing we have, I'm not, again, I'm not gonna show you, just give you a flavor of some of the evidence that we have. We have this amazing amount of information on these sort of (indistinct) of these different groups. So this is the so-called Bloque Norte. So this is, you know, this is Vicente Castaño. So this is one of the three famous Castaño brothers. I don't know how famous he is, but anyway, here's Mancuso. They all died, they all sort of disappeared. Here's Mancuso, he was extradited. He's now back in Colombia in Ibagué feeling sorry for himself. Here's Jorge 40, like, you know, another kind of famous paramilitary boss. And you know, and so this is sort of, you know, now we can go down, you know, to this guy, Edgar Fierro Flores. I'll show you his sentence in a minute. And you know, kind of like looking at the, we have a lot of information on the construction, you know, these are the commanders of the different fronts, okay? But, and within the fronts, you know, this is the bloc that had the most fronts. But within the fronts, we know a lot about the kind of, how many layers there were, you know? How did, to what extent did you know, did Edgar, you know, did he delegate activities to other people or did he try to control everything himself? So we know like how many, the proportion of people that reported directly to him, you know, we also know, well, how much specialization was there? So in the frente Zuluaga I talked about quite a bit. For example, there was a separate fiscal wing. There was a separate military wing, and there was a separate political wing. And the people in the fiscal wing were the people who collected the taxes from the farms and the businesses. And they were instructed like never to wear military fatigues. You know, you should always be, tax collectors should be in civilian clothing because otherwise, you know, people think you're intimidating them. And it, and that's not good. You know, we're not intimidating you, we're providing services and protection and, you know, we're not, you're giving us money to provide these services, not because if you don't give us money, we'll shoot you, you know? So that's the rhetoric, anyway. So, you know, we, one of the plans in the future research is to we're gonna try to exploit the variation in these (indistinct), which is sort of super interesting. So I don't have Cucu Vanoy here, but there was a gentleman called Cucu Vanoy who was a big commander in the Bloque Mineros. And what, he was illiterate and what's interesting about his (indistinct) is you see like here, you know, Castaño delegated, you know, to these characters, but Cucu Vanoy, you know, he was illiterate. So he interacted, he had everyone reporting to him, you know, because, so that's an interesting source of variation, I would say. You know, Mancuso was, he went to university, these guys were elites. All right, I talked about that. Okay, so the data, I sort of kind of, I gave you a flavor, you know? Here's Edgar Ignacio Fierro Flores, you saw him, you saw his mugshot on that previous (indistinct). This is, you know, this is his sentence, you know? So these sentences have kind of basically brought out a huge amount of information, you know? What was his (speaks foreign language), you know, what was his crime (speaks foreign language), you know? So like, just to emphasize, you know, there's a lot of violence associated with these characters, even if there might be roads and, you know, schools and things like that, you know? So, and you know, so these things are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages long with enormous amounts of information, both about the history of the different fronts, the people in them, the activities, what they did. So we've been basically turning that into a data set. That's the idea. You know, and we can get all sorts of stuff from that. I think I've given you a sort of flavor of it and, you know, but we also have data from the University of the Andes, you know? Which has a lot of information on violence and conflict, you know, which is data that we've used a lot before in different research projects that I've done in Colombia. And there's, you know, there's data on drugs 'cause you know, in Venezuela, the Venezuelans think that everything is explained by oil. And Colombians think that everything is explained by coca, you know? But I always tell the Colombians, no, look, the Venezuelans woke up one day and they discovered that oil under Lake Maracaibo. The Colombians never, you know, the Colombians went to Peru and Bolivia and they brought the coca to Colombia, you know? So that's, you know, this is what Moreno Duran had in mind. You know, it's kind of, the coca economy is endogenous to Colombian society, you know? And it's connected to this core periphery structure also, you know? Why was it that the Medellín drug cartel, you know, brought all the coca? Because Rodriguez Gacha could build some massive coca plantation, you know, in the east and air, and runways and fly it all out. And, like, nobody noticed, like nobody battered an eyelid because that's, you know, that's the periphery, that's the vortex. You know, we don't care what goes on there, we don't do anything and so go for it, okay? So, and as I said, I gave you a flavor, you know? We've done a lot of field work and it's really, and many of the hypotheses that we've kind of formulated come from like talking to these commanders. And some of them are extremely intelligent and sophisticated, you know, even if they're not educated. All right, so again, so let's go back to the map. I showed you the map before the, oh my gosh, what time should I shut up? I'm talking far too much. - It's okay. - [James] I like talking about - If you wanna go until 5:20, then we can start taking some questions. - All right, so let me, I haven't even got to the econometric model yet. You know, I like talking about Colombia, that's my problem. Yeah, okay, so you know, I gave you the idea. Let me sort of jump, go through this very fast. You know, so this is just, you know, we can classify these different fronts we have information on, into, you know, those that were commanded. There's lots of complications here in, you know, 'cause some of these fronts had multiple commanders. So, you know, you have to make a decision about, you know, what we try to do is say, you know, if a front was commanded half the time by a military guy, then we just look at the kind of what was happening in that period. And so, you know, that's the simplest way to think about it. But there's a lot of coding decisions here that we're still kind of playing with. And, you know, and this is, you know, how do we define what a campesino is? Well, we could do that in different ways. We have a lot of information about people's activities, you know, what job did they have before they went into paramilitarism? What job did their parents have, even, where were they from? And, you know, so this is just one cut that's sort of saying, you know, were you born in a municipality which is sort of predominantly rural in terms of the classification in the census? So again, you know, this is sort of spread out all over the place. It's not kind of just clustered in one place or another. You know, there's a lot of variation here. And the different colors represent the fact that, you know, the different proportion of times that a front might have been controlled by a campesino, okay? So what's gonna be interesting from the empirical strategy eventually is that these things have boundaries, you know, so this is just some, this is just some kind of quotes from this is like, if you wanna read something about Colombian paramilitaries, then the best book is by Maria Teresa Ronderos, who's actually a friend of the Pearson Institute. She and I gave a seminar about inequality and social mobility in Latin America you know, recently to, you know, just to sort of brainstorming between me and her. She's a journalist, very prominent Colombian journalist. She has a wonderful book about Colombian paramilitarism with a title which is very, very, very interesting for the topic of my talk here today, which is "Recycled War" is the title of the book, "Recycled War". So she points out this immense kind of persistence of conflict and violence and, you know, and how many, you know, many of these conflicts kind of recur. And that's very much the sort of theme here of the Colombian periphery, okay? So for the econometricians in the audience, you know, where we're going with this is looking at regression discontinuity analysis using these boundaries between these fronts. So we can look at the causal effect of having a campesino commander, for example, or having a former military commander by looking at these kind of boundaries, these relatively arbitrary boundaries. And the assumption here is that, you know, it's conditional on covariate, sorry, putting my econometrician hat on, or my econometrician face mask, you know, conditional covariance. It's sort of randomly assigned who's in charge of which bloc or front. And you know, that's a, that's, we can, I could talk a lot more about that, but I won't, okay? So what do I wanna say? You know, we have some, I told you what the, you know, we, there's lots of statistics now coming, but I told you the basic results, you know? If I show you some regression tables, here's public goods, you know, we can classify different sorts of public goods. I showed you some housing, I showed you a school, you know, I showed you the health clinic in (indistinct), the Zuluaga front. You know, what we find is that military people kind of more or less across the board are systematically less likely to provide any public goods, whereas campesino, peasant campesinos are systematically more likely to provide public goods, you know, the fear or dreams, you know? So there's much more fear here and there's much more dreams here. I think the way we're trying to think about this is of course, you know, as a social scientist, you're interested in the kind of welfare, you know, of the average person, let's say kind of utilitarian perspective in the Colombian periphery. But the Colombian elites don't care about that. They're just interested in kind of managing or pacifying the periphery. So it could well be that military people are like actually much better for them. It's not really under their control. But from a kind of welfare point of view, obviously, if there's two ways of providing order, you know, you can stopping people join the FARC or the ELN, you can provide public goods or you can, you know, you can kill people, you know, so you know, you can, like the military are involved in much more violence than the campesinos, then obviously from a welfare point of view, it's much better to have campesinos organizing these fronts. So I guess, you know, some sense here, the most kind of provocative finding is that the people who are most connected to the state are actually the ones that are providing, you know, much worse governance in the sense that it's less public goods, more violence and, you know, and more coca production, okay? So far more coca production. So peasant commanders, you know, you saw in that data, there's a bit of, there's certainly a bit of income coming in from coca production in the Magdalena Medio, but the average picture is, you know, there seems to be no correlation between coca production and, you know, whether or not you had a campesino in charge of the front. Whereas for the military, there's a whopping effect of ex-military people are much more likely to get into drug dealing. What's the, let me just say what, you know, what's the mechanism? I think that's kind of obvious, you know, like the drug economy is, it's illegal. You know, you have to enforce contracts, you have to punish people who cheat you. The military are much better at doing that. Like they, because they use, they're specialists in violence, you know? They're much better at kind of enforcing contracts in this illegal world than some campesinos. It could be that they also have better connections and they know how to get stuff done at the ports and things like that, you know, but that could be true. But, you know, I think there's, you know, that there's lots of reasons why you think the military might have, a military guy might have a comparative advantage in getting involved in the drug economy too. But, you know, so again, fewer, more connected to the state, fewer public goods, more violence, more drugs, okay. So that's, you know, here's my last slide. You know, I think you know, it's a little bit of data about a big topic, you know, which is I've been trying for years to kind of understand this equilibrium between how things work in Colombia, you know, how this equilibrium works between the core and the periphery. And it's, I think it is an equilibrium, you know? That's what's so fascinating about this whole experience with the FARC, you know? Which is that, you know, the FARC were basically defeated and gave up, but then the equilibrium reasserted itself. What's going on in Colombia now is just absolutely like it always has been. It's the same kind of chaos. And so, you know, and so this is not, like, it's not, there's not a sort of (indistinct) state expanding and waiting to kind of integrate the periphery, but it's not collapsing either. You know, Colombia's been like that for hundreds of years. So it's not like the state collapse either. That's not the right way to think about it. There's an equilibrium. And the comparative statics of this equilibrium, I guess you could say, can be extremely perverse. You know, the state doesn't do anything unless it really has to sort out a problem. Like I mentioned Pablo Escobar earlier, okay? And it's not that the state lacks capacity to sort the problem out. In fact, when they wanted to sort Pablo Escobar out, they killed him, you know? When President Uribe decided they had to get rid of the FARC, they got rid of the FARC in five or six years and the FARC gave up and got nothing in exchange. So there was all this theatrics in Cuba and whatever, but that's the story. You know, that's the big story. They got no political representation, the FARC are history, they gave up their guns, that's it. So it's not that the state lacks capacity, it just has no interest in deploying it in the periphery. Think of that map of the Reyes brothers with the skulls. The periphery is left to organize outside the core, okay? And, you know, and I think, you know, we can just say a little bit about that, but you know, what I got excited or what we got excited about with this, all this information being generated by the truth and justice process, it gives you a window into that. And when we were doing field work, you know, in the Magdalena Medio, that's what we all thought. Like this is like, it's a window. It's a window into how this whole equilibrium hangs together. And, you know, it's only kind of one perspective, but I think it's an interesting perspective. So let me shut up now. You'll realize the University of Chicago professors talk far too much. - Professor, you have a lot of good questions that are coming in the chat that are specific to this, to the presentation that you gave. So let me just go ahead and pull the first one we have from Pao, would you consider your approach to research as mixed methods, or are you working mainly with quantitative data and then you kind of talk to people more on the side? So I guess, you know, are you working with this quantitative data and then these conversations you've mentioned are something that happens on the side, or how do you approach that? - No, I mean, I'm, you know, my training is as an economist, you know, my training was actually an economic theory. My early work was all kind of in economic theory. And I think you know, there's a lot of path dependence in academia. Like when you are young, you kind of learn, you know, you learn what a question is and how to answer the question. And once that's in your head, it's very difficult to change. That's my experience. But what I also learned is that I, like economists don't understand anything. Like, you know, no, when I went to Colombia and I started talking to economists, I realized like very fast they don't know anything about what goes on in Colombia. You know, if you want to know what goes on in Colombia, you have to talk to journalists, you have to talk to political scientists, you have to talk to anthropologists. You have to go and ask people and do field work. So I just, I've always felt in my own personal research that I just really haven't, you know, I just don't know enough. You don't know enough and you can't read it, you know? You can't read it in a book. So how do you, what do you do then? You could just give up and just kind of go about your business, or you could do what you have to do with, you know, to, if you want to really learn something, you know? So I think the same is true in Africa. You know, I've been working in Africa for 22 years and I just was reading books, reading, reading, reading, reading. And I felt I just didn't understand anything. So, you know, so that's why, you know, I was in Nigeria for a month in the summer, just working with these Nigerian academics at the University of Nigeria, just doing field work, trying to understand these local political institutions and yeah, you know, there's lots of wisdom in anthropology about things like that, especially in Africa. Not so much in Colombia, but I think you, yeah, but at the end of the day, you know, you come back and you wanna construct a data set and you want to test hypotheses, but you don't need to do that. I mean, I think qualitative research is fine, you know? You can run any regression you'd like, but like, how do you interpret the coefficients? You know, you have to bring all sorts of tacit knowledge and information about the world into the project to interpret the coefficients. You know, like the data doesn't tell you, you know, that it doesn't give you a output, which says think of it like this. It just says, no, it's 0.25. And the standard error is something. - Professor, another question we have, Kylie is asking in the late 20th century, were we seeing paramilitary income affect the Colombian GDP? - I don't know about that. I mean, there are estimates about, I, yeah, I don't know what the, I mean, there are estimates of how large the drug economy is relative to GDP, but I've never seen anyone look at their paramilitary. I mean, one could do that. We, one could, you know, one could do that, I guess. I mean, I haven't thought about it. We could add up, you know, we could add up across these fronts, you know, the estimates of what their revenues were. But what I haven't, I hadn't really thought about that. But we could probably do it, yeah. But I have no idea what the answer is, so don't ask. - Professor, there's a number of questions that are coming in about, like, asking about how this research could apply to other countries. So rather than read like five different questions, I'll note that some students are asking, is this research or does this apply or is there a periphery in countries such as Nicaragua, Afghanistan? And then someone is asking have you looked also at the South Pacific for this? - Yeah, I mean I think certainly, you know, I think there is, there are peripheries. There's certainly a periphery in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You know, my colleague Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, you know, works in the Eastern DRC, and that's certainly, you know, there's a, that's very peripheral. There's a periphery in the north of Nigeria. You know, I think in many parts of the world you have the state has this kind of core periphery structure, you know, and I think, you know, think Afghanistan, it's a great example. You know, if you read about the history of Afghanistan, you see there's never been a state in Afghanistan that's controlled, you know, the mountains, basically. You control the river valleys, you know, or the plains, you know, but, you know, no one's ever controlled or taxed or regulated the mountains, you know? So I think that, you know, so I would think that that's a fairly common structure. That being said, you know, there's a lot of variation in the nature of the periphery. And you know, like in Africa for example, you'd have, you know, very strong traditional institutions, you know, in a way that you don't have in Colombia, you know, which is a force, you know, for stability in many parts of Africa. But, you know, so yeah, I would, I think, I mean, my idea, you know, this is all about Colombia, but my idea would be that, you know, this is a fairly common organization of states, yeah. - Another question a student has asked, oh, this is a student from Spain, so I apologize if I'm mispronouncing anything, but this student asked, let's see, you mentioned it's difficult for economists to incorporate sociological explanations into models but that some progress could be made. Could you elaborate a bit on this? Do you have any preference among these emerging methodologies? And then the student couldn't help but see some parallelisms between the Colombian core periphery dynamics and the development of mafia in Italy after the Risorgimento, and what do you think about this? - Yeah, I mean, that's a good, that's an interesting example of a core, you know, because sort of the core and periphery Sicily or the Calabria or the south of Italy, and I don't, you know, I don't know much about Italy, but I, you know, that does seem like a plausible case. I mean, my comment about, you know, is that, you know, just doing this, you know, talking to these paramilitary commanders in Colombia, you know, they really have this sort of very sociological story about values and you know, this campesino and they talk about the kind of norms of a campesino, whatever, and, you know, but I think it's very hard to give that micro foundations in an economic sense, you know? So if you are gonna write down a kind of economic-y type model of what a campesino identity means, I find it very difficult to conceptualize it. Actually, you know, we're having a meeting with Steven Durlauf, who's one of my, another of my colleagues here who's a very distinguished, you know, kind of economic theorist, econometrician, but Steven's also obsessed with sociology. So we've been having an ongoing conversation about how to think about this campesino, like what would a model of that look like? Because I feel like it's definitely here, but I don't know how to conceptualize it, you know? And I think, you know, being in the military also obviously socializes you into particular way of thinking about the state and society in Colombia, you know, like Maria Teresa Ronderos for example, she told me, you know, she interviewed Pablo Escobar and the Castaño brothers, every kind of gangster, you know, that's ever, that's been in Colombia in the last 30 or 40 years. And she said, the only, she told me once the only time she's ever been scared for her life, you know, she's been threatened by all sorts of people. The only time she was ever really got threatened, she really felt in danger was when she started investigating the military. The military is a very pernicious institution in Colombia, you know, so they kill people, you know, they so, you know, that's also socialization. I don't think that's selection. That's about what they do to you when you join the military, yeah. - Professor, there are so many other questions, but we're at time and I wanna be mindful of your time and thank you. Those of you who are on the chat, we have some other upcoming events. I mentioned an event that we'll be doing with Alex Carr, the Pearson Institute. Also, Alex shared a link to some of the discussions that happened recently at the forum that could be of interest to some of you. So those are accessible. If you had other interests, you can email Harris admissions and we can try and direct you to other conversations. But Professor, I just wanna thank you so much for your time today. This was really great and lots of really interested students here. So thank you so much. - Okay, yes, so my pleasure and very nice for everyone to tune in and look forward to meeting you all in Chicago, in sunny Chicago. - Thank you so much, Professor, have a good evening. - Okay, bye-bye.