Preface. This is a pattern you see over and over again in civil wars and collapsing bits of nations no longer under government control
Abadfeb’s editorial reminds me of feudalism. Until the rise of state-level armies in the 17th century, the nobility had their own soldiers to keep the peasants in line. Now, rich landowners hire vigilantes to fight guerrillas and drug cartels, which leads to vigilantes also dealing in drugs and killing civilians, and they become indistinguishable from the guerrillas, and too strong to be defeated by state level armies. Here’s a summary of what Abadfeb describes is happening in Columbia and Mexico, which applies to many other countries as well:
- The army, blessed by central authorities, looks for an ally
- Compared to the evil guerrilla army, the vigilante self-defense groups look great — they have popular support and the state army gives them permission to fight the guerrillas.
- The government ignores the fact that some of these vigilantes might be financed by a rival drug gang.
- When the state tries to reassert order, they can’t. The vigilantes have turned into a powerful armed power and are now indistinguishable from the guerrilla army and gangsters they’re fighting. Abadfeb says the outcome is “outlying territories turn into battlefields where life is impossible for defenseless civilians. The legitimate economy and tourism disappear, death tolls soar, and the final winner, inevitably, is not the state but some local narco-dictator with his own army of mercenaries”.
- “The vigilantes might begin by killing kidnappers, drug dealers and extortionists, but soon they begin killing their relatives, and then their friends, or those they think are their friends, and then the friends’ families, until everyone is suspect and they might come knocking at your own door, as happened to us in Colombia — as happened to my own father, when he was gunned down in the streets of Medellín. To allow private armies, even if they are supposedly for self-defense, is to create a monster like the Hydra: If you cut off one head, two more grow back”
When the State breaks down, here’s what happens, it can only guarantee security and the rule of law in certain areas, which tend to be the big cities. The farther away you get from cities, the more likely police officers are corrupt, judges are threatened by local dictators with their private armies, and bribery keeps anyone from doing anything. This is a pattern that can be throughout history as Turchin describes in his book Secular Cycles.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
Abadfeb H (2014) Colombia’s Warning for Mexico. New York Times.
Most everyone agrees: The only thing worse than killing is being killed. If our lives are threatened, we have the right to defend ourselves, with force if necessary. In a civilized society, that defense is delegated to the state.
Vigilante self-defense groups arose to protect people in Colombia in the 1990s.
Because the state was losing the war against the guerrilla army — essentially a drug cartel — and drug lord Pablo Escobar’s private army, the state gave the green light to these groups. They were made up of agricultural laborers, trained by soldiers, and financed by landowners and agribusinesses. When the vigilantes began to extort money from the very businessmen who were financing them, they were declared illegal. But it was already too late. They had become clandestine paramilitary groups, using the same weapons as those they were fighting: kidnapping, murder of innocents, drug trafficking.
What has been going on these last few months in Mexico, in the western state of Michoacán, makes me fear that the same thing is happening there today. “Autodefensas” have organized to drive out the vicious local drug cartel, called the Knights Templar. After first demanding that the vigilantes disband, the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto has now sanctioned them as part of the Rural Defense Corps — at least nominally under the control of the military.
Sometimes the United States — which badly misunderstands Latin American realities — asks for elimination of illicit crops, total war on drugs or extermination of guerrilla forces. The most obedient governments ignore what might be real solutions — like cutting off the source of the cartels’ enormous wealth by legalizing drugs — and instead attempt to carry out these requests. They send their national armies to undertake the thankless task of fighting against their own compatriots. That’s what Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s previous president, tried.
But these wars to the death always fail.
This is what we learned in Colombia: When the state is not present, it is local tyrants who take power and brutally impose their rules, which are nothing more than the defense of their privileges. The old Hobbesian concept, that the natural state of mankind is that man is a wolf to man, seems confirmed in these involuntary Latin American anarchist experiments. The strongest and richest wolf (from trafficking drugs or illegal mining) dominates the other wolves.
The vigilantes appear to be a cure — they are seen as saviors — but in reality they are part of the illness, one more illegal army, acting without restraints and financed by dirty money.