A crude conflict: oil, armed conflict and crime in Colombia
| Autor | Angelika Rettberg and Juan Diego Prieto |
| Páginas | 133-189 |
A crude conict: Oil, armed
conict and crime in Colombia*
A R J D P**
Introduction
T the relation between oil and society i s conictive is hardly nov-
el. Dierent cases all over the world show the political, economic and social
tensions associated with the exploitation and dist ribution of what is known as
“black gold”. A tendency for corruption, inequality and underdevelopment; in-
stitutional weaknes s, the atrophy of other productive sectors, the squandering
of resources, disorderly processes of colonization and migration; and t he onset
of social and armed con icts have all been associated with oil. It is an es sential
resource to the functioning of t he global economy and a source of great wealth,
yet burdensome in terms of its contribution to the progress and stability of the
countries which produce it.
As in other parts of the world, Colombian oil has generated large revenues
for the state and specic social actors, but it has also been linked to political,
economic and social tensions, corruption and inst itutional weakness. e fear
that the royalties wi ll be wasted, the risk of coming down with t he “Dutch dis-
ease” and the many ways in which oil is related to armed con ict and dierent
forms of criminalit y periodically dominate analy ses of the Colombian economy
in the news.
* To cite thi s chapter: h ttp://dx.do i.org/. /..
** We would like to thank S ergio Guillermo a nd Daniel Quiroga Á ngel for their valuable help
with our resea rch.
e “Dutch disea se” refers to the process w hereby external bo oms, like thos e derived from oil,
lead to the accelerate d contraction of sectors wh ich produce marketable good s, as a result of the
“growth of the rat io between the price s of non-tradable and trad able goods and of the tra nsfer of
manpower and capita l from the latter to the former” (P uyana and orp , ).
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different resources, different conflicts?
Map . Oil infrastr ucture of Colombia
Source: Map drawn by Paola Lu na, Cartogr aphy Laboratory, Universidad de lo s Andes, based on in-
formation from the au thors, and updated by t he authors
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: ,
Dierent kinds of evidence show that all of t he illegal ar med groups which
have operated in Colombia — ranging from the leist g uerrilla groups, the Ejér-
cito de Liberación Nacional (ELN) and the Fuerzas Armad as Revolucionarias de
Colombia (FARC), to the right-wing paramilita ry and self-defense groups and
the so-called “crim inal gangs” (Bacrim) or organized armed groups (GAO), as
well as ordinary cr iminals — have participated in the looting of oil wea lth. e
forms of looting have ranged from the the of oil royalties through extortion
or collaboration with politicians, state ocials and local social leaders, to the
existence of oil wells and artisanal reneries controlled by rebel groups. e
many expressions of the relationship between oil and the armed actors have
been marked by high levels of violence and have entailed a high human and
material cost.
At the same time, the manifestations of these phenomena have consider-
ably varied in accordance with the particularities of the dierent oil regions
of Colombia. For example, while the looting of royalties in Arauca has been
dominated by the ELN (and, to a lesser extent, the FARC), in Casanare it has
been carried out by paramilitary groups, and each group has used dierent
mechanisms to seize oil wealth. In dierent contexts, armed groups have de-
veloped varying st rategies which have combined intimidation and extortion
(pipeline bombings, kidnappings, selective assassi nations, and massacres) with
the co-optation of social and community organizations and the capture of
local institutions.
is chapter seeks to explore the relation between oil a nd the armed conict
and its regional expressions from an instit utional standpoint, placing an empha-
sis on how the formal and informal instit utional arrangements which surround
the extraction of the resource and have a long history aect the preferences
and behavior of illegal armed actors as well as state and private ones (North
; Snyder , orp et al. ). e point here is not only to state that oil
has eects on the armed conict but also to ask how it causes them and how
these eects var y between regions in accordance with particula r institutional
e extraction of cr ude oil by the FARC was documented in Put umayo: it took place in the
elds which remai ned closed aer the Texas Petroleum C ompany le the region. at gu errilla
extracted oi l “to sell it for the processi ng of cocaine” (intervie w with Andrés Peñate, former d i-
rector of the Admi nistrative Securit y Department [DAS], the now abolished state intell igence
service, Oc tober , ). is was conrmed by Héctor M anosalva, vice-president for de vel-
opment and production at Ecope trol and former high cou nselor for Energy Inf rastruct ure of the
Presidency of Colombia (inter view, November , ). e existence of ar tisanal re neries used
by the FARC has also been doc umented; they use d them to obtain deri vatives from the cru de oil
stolen from the Transa ndino Pipeline i n Nariño. “Ejército destr uye dos ‘renerías’ de pet róleo de
las FARC en Nariño” (Army dest roys two oil “reneries” of t he FARC in Nariño). El Espectador,
September , , ht tp://www.elespect ador.com/noticias/judicia l/ejercito-destruye -dos-rene-
rias-de-petroleo-de-farc-na-articulo-.
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