Extractive Capital,Imperialism,and the Colombian State

Globalization, U.S. Empire, and the State

For at least three decades, political economy research on the nation-state has been dominated by “globalization” theory (Held and McGrew, 2003). Commonly taken to refer to qualitative changes in the world market characterized by the rise of multinational companies, the growing importance of foreign direct investment, and the liberalization of global trade, among other processes, “the retreat of the state” has been a central theme of the discussion. This is understood as a decline in domestic state power and the loss of control over national economies and territorial boundaries. The political conclusion accompanying this theory is that globalization has brought about a new international order based on the rise of multilateral governance. The implication is that the nation-state as an explanatory tool and a political force has become increasingly redundant.

While the surge in foreign direct investment in mining in Colombia and the problems associated with this form of economic development have received much attention among scholars and policy analysts, the most common explanation is that the phenomenon is reflective of the erosion of the power of the state in the face of globalization. As Garay (2013: 8) sees it, the rise of “mining extractivism” in Colombia is related to a new process of “transnational management of public resources . . . operating under a logic that transcends national spaces and the nation-state.” This analysis suggests that the rise in mining is evidence that national economies are increasingly dominated by global forces and that emergent transnational power structures are undermining state sovereignty. The implication is that states should be seen as victims of new global power structures or that national sovereignty is threatened by the power of transnational mining corporations and multilateral institutes. The presumption is that a distinction can be made between an uncivilized globalization—the predatory and lawless activities of mining companies—and a civilized one with a better balance between states and markets achieved through transnational regulatory bodies and a global civil society.

Yet this analysis overlooks the class and elite composition of states, the relation between states and markets, and the active role of the state in facilitating capital accumulation. It contains little historical analysis of the sociopolitical power conflicts surrounding the neoliberal restructuring that has taken place since the 1970s. As Weiss (1998: 4) writes, “rather than counterposing nation-state and global market as antinomies, in certain important respects we find that ‘globalization’ is often the by-product of states promoting the internationalization strategies of their corporations, and sometimes in the process ‘internationalizing’ state capacity.” In this sense, the common framing of the globalization debate as a question of finding the right balance between states and markets is misleading. Rather, we must look to the role of states in facilitating capital accumulation and elite class formation.

An alternative interpretation common among Marxist scholars depicts mining in Colombia as an example of U.S. imperialism in an updated version of the theories of Lenin and Bukharin. According to this argument, the expansion of mining in Colombia is related to the strategies adopted by the United States to “ensure access to the world’s largest resources” (Leech, 2006: 3; see also Klare, 2012). This paints a picture in which the U.S. state carves out spaces in Latin American territories in order to obtain access to natural resources for U.S. corporations and thereby secure their continued profits (Petras, 2012; Villar and Cottle, 2011). These views have stressed the use of U.S. militarism through Plan Colombia and the War on Drugs to defend U.S. territorial control over oil and natural resources.

This interpretation provides an important analysis of the centrality of natural resources in geopolitical power struggles and the role of U.S. imperialism in propelling the Colombian armed conflict. The problem with this view is that it tends to take an instrumentalist approach to the actions of imperial states, which are seen as directly intervening to defend the particular interests of their national capital. Such reverberations of the classic theories of imperialism as territorial domination through the export of capital understate the dynamics of the global expansion of capital under neoliberalism. As Kiely (2010: 157) points out, “in the current period, neoliberalism entails increased openness rather than the sealing off of colonized spaces from all but the colonizing power.” In other words, viewing the emergence of the mining economy in Colombia as the result of a drive by imperialist states to gain control over natural resources or even a “resource war” between imperialist rivals pays insufficient attention to the fact that no single state is in a position to “control” natural resources, militarily or otherwise (Bieler and Morton, 2015; Bromley, 2006).

The emphasis on competition and rivalry also neglects the dynamics of transnational coordination of capitals and the integration of production, trade, and consumption of raw materials on the world market. In this sense, Avilés (2008: 413) is correct to point out that

the economic policies furthered through Plan Colombia, such as a secure and stable business environment, the liberalization of capital markets, and the opening of markets to foreign direct investment, are not simply policies that benefit U.S.-based TNCs [transnational corporations], but they represent an economic agenda from which TNCs from around the world can benefit.

Understood in this way, the role of the U.S. state in Colombia is not so much defending its own corporations as defending the system as a whole and “maintaining a stable supply of crucial energy onto the world market” (Stokes, 2005). While contemporary multinational mining corporations are certainly nationally based and depend on the actions of imperial states to facilitate their entry into territories abroad, this does not mean that they are also united along national boundaries, defending national interests against foreign competition. Their operations are spread out all over the world, with degrees of international integration and financialization that, although often exaggerated by globalization theorists, extend far beyond those observed by classical-era Marxists (Bieler and Morton, 2014; Kiely, 2010). This analysis suggests that imperialist interventions in Colombia are best conceived less as strategies for gaining direct control over natural resources in defense of the interests of national capital than as strategies for maintaining territories open for global capital accumulation. Instead of as a defense of national interests abroad against rivals, U.S. imperialism should be seen as the promotion of the spread of capitalist relations throughout the world.

An alternative position within the Marxist tradition has emphasized the relevance of transnational production and finance to an understanding of the contemporary world political economy. The most influential writer in this line of research is William Robinson (2004; 2008), whose theory of global capitalism has posed an important challenge to the classical Marxist theories of imperialism in the context of the rise of a new global rather than international economy and the formation of a new transnational “historic bloc.” For Robinson, “globalization” is a qualitatively new phase of global capitalism linked to neoliberalism that is associated with (1) the rise of a transnational capitalist class “tied to globalized circuits of production, marketing, and finances unbound from particular national territories and identities [whose] interests lie in global over local or national accumulation” (Robinson, 2004: 47) and (2) the transcendence of the nation-state by a emergent transnational state or architecture of multilateral institutions (Robinson, 2004: 85–144).

The implication of this theory is that traditional notions of U.S. imperialism cannot explain the dynamics of this emergent transnational hegemony or the role of the transnational capitalist class in promoting neoliberal expansion across the globe. A related argument is that even if the nation-state does not disappear entirely, it is no longer the necessary or predominant form for securing capital accumulation. The state has been not only transformed but also superseded as an organizing principle of capitalism by a transnational state apparatus. In Robinson’s conceptualization, the nation-state is a historically specific form in the development of world capitalism that has been transcended by the forces of global capital. It is not static or immutable but “a specific social relation inserted into larger social structures” (Robinson, 2004: 100). Nor is it “immanent to capitalist development”; rather, it may take different institutional forms at any historical moment (93). This provides the grounds for the argument that a new configuration of global capitalism is giving rise to an incipient transnational state that is coming to supplant the nation-state. “Power . . . shifts from groups with interests in national accumulation to those whose interests lie in the new global circuits of accumulation” (Robinson, 2004: 109). Robinson’s proposed alternative for political economy research is a framework that does not regard the nation-state as the chief arena for capitalist development or class formation. In this vein, Avilés (2006: 113) has argued for a framework that sees the Colombian and Latin American states as “components of transnational states.” His analysis provides important evidence for new processes of elite class formation as well as reconfiguration of the state in relation to new forms of capital accumulation in Colombia.

However, the problem with this framework is that it tends to view nation-states as “transmission belts” for the interests of global capital and the transnational elite (Robinson, 2004), with capital and the state developing more or less in parallel. This notion is based on a problematic understanding of the historical relation between the nation-state and capitalist development. It presumes that the state is the “institutionalized political form of the capital relation” (Lacher, 2005: 44), but if this were so it would suggest that “the territorial state rises and falls in more or less mechanical response to the movements of capital” (Wood, 2007: 154). This misleadingly implies an incompatibility between global capital and the nation-state, with the conclusion that transnational capital must operate primarily through a transnational state. States do not simply respond to the demands arising from capital accumulation but actively develop capacities and mechanisms to promote capital accumulation and manage its contradictions. This would suggest that instead of the nation-state’s being eroded under global capitalism “the form of state intervention in the economy and society has changed considerably” (Barrow, 2005: 129).

In this regard, Panitch and Gindin (2003: 35) have criticized the tendency among globalization theorists to see states as “passive victims of globalization” rather than “its authors and enforcers.” The increased internationalization of capital that has taken place since the postwar era is not so much bypassing or eroding states as being instigated by state activity (Panitch and Gindin, 2012: 4–5):

It is . . . wrong to assume an irresolvable contradiction between the international space of accumulation and the national space of states. Rather, when looking at the role that states have always played on the international economic stage, we need to ask how far their activities have been consistent with extending capitalist markets internationally—and also consistent with the actions of other states.

Since the postwar era, the establishment of the international world order has depended on the role of nation-states both in “reorganizing and reproducing their respective countries’ social relations and institutions of class, property, currency, contract, and markets” and in “promoting the accumulation of capital in a manner that contributed to the U.S.-led management of the international capitalist order.”

At issue here is the separation of the political and the economic under capitalism, a historical notion that cannot be straightforwardly characterized as the former’s reacting to the needs of the latter. The actions of states may have specific characteristics under capitalism, but they are not dictated by its needs. While states do not play a direct role in the organization of production, there is nonetheless an interdependent relation between capital and the state, with the latter taking responsibility for “maintaining property rights, overseeing contracts, stabilizing currencies, reproducing class relations, and containing crises” (Panitch and Gindin, 2012: 2). As Panitch and Gindin (2003: 35) point out, “Capitalism could not exist unless states did these things; and states are impelled to do them by virtue of their dependence on private accumulation for their own tax resources and the material foundations of their legitimacy.” It is because of this particular relation between capital and the state that, as capitalism expands globally, it does not supersede the nation-state but rather “depends more than ever on a system of multiple and more-or-less sovereign national states” (Wood, 2005: 141) for its reproduction.

While the notions of the transnational state and the transnational corporation emphasize that the growing interpenetration of capital renders territorial notions of imperialism redundant, it is unnecessary to conclude that the United States has lost its leading role in the world order. For Panitch and Gindin (2012: 9) what distinguishes the “U.S. informal empire” from the imperialism of the past is that, rather than simply defending its interests, the United States acts in favor of “the expansion, protection, and reproduction” of the global capitalist system as a whole. The distinctive feature of U.S. imperialism is not only promoting the interests of U.S. multinational corporations abroad but taking “responsibility for creating the political and juridical conditions for the general extension and reproduction of capitalism internationally” (6). While promoting the hegemony of U.S. capitalism, the United States creates the conditions for the spread of capitalist relations across the globe. In this sense, it plays a unique leading role in the world order without taking direct territorial control of other states in that order.

Within this United States–led world order, other states such as Canada have assumed the role of secondary or “sub-superpowers” that, despite not having the influence and resources of the United States, nonetheless play an important role in facilitating the entry of capital throughout the world (Gordon, 2010). Canadian imperialism has played a central role in natural resource extraction in Latin America, as Gordon and Webber (2016: 29) have argued: “The Canadian state is assertively pursuing the conditions amenable to Canadian investors: liberalized markets, weak environmental regulatory regimes, and contained or repressed social movements.” A further problem for the transnational state theory is the presumption that global expansion of capitalism merges all states into the world market in similar ways. According to Robinson (2001: 529), “the processes of uneven accumulation are unfolding in accordance with a social and not a national logic.” The territorial differentiation of states is being ironed out by the conditions of uneven development. Although Robinson may accept that uneven geographic development takes place both within and across states, he argues that the notions of center and periphery and uneven development should be reconciled through “the point of insertion into global accumulation rather than their relationship to a particular national market or state structure” (2008: 44). However, as Bieler and Morton (2015: 113) emphasize, this leads to a “a flattened ontology” removed from “the spatial and territorial logics of capital accumulation” and “the class struggles extant in specific locations.” The notion overlooks the point that the internationalization of capital is accompanied by a simultaneous differentiation of capital into nation-states for the reproduction of class power and capital accumulation. As Wood (2007: 155) argues, “there are fundamental characteristics of capitalism that reproduce and benefit from the fragmentation of political space and uneven development, so that the current association of capitalism and the territorial state—with all its attendant contradictions—is not just a historical relic but is reinforced by the essential dynamics of capitalism.” Rather than positing the inevitable formation of a transnational state, what is required is historical analysis of the territorial dynamics of capital accumulation, the role of states in making markets, the power struggles between elite factions, and the class struggles from below.

This paper is based on historical materialist investigation into the role of imperialism and the processes of state and class formation in the making of Colombia as a mining country. Far from representing a neoliberal “withdrawal” of the state, the liberalization of the Colombian economy has been accompanied by considerable deployment of state power in the form of crisis management, institutional reform, security measures, and social repression to create the conditions for this form of capital accumulation. In particular, the growing dependence of the economy on foreign direct investment in mining has led the state to establish new mechanisms for guaranteeing the conditions of territorial security for these investments. This is evidenced in the strengthening of the Colombian state, the increase in military power, and the adoption of statelike functions by paramilitaries that took place between the late 1990s and early 2000s, in large part to attract and protect investments in mining.

The State and Extractive Capital: the Case of Colombia

Colombia’s conversion into a neoliberal mining country is an important illustration of the way nation-states act as the agents of the expansion of global capital. This is demonstrated in the reconfigurations of class relations and the state apparatus that have taken place in order to promote this new form of accumulation. During the postwar era, state policy on mining emphasized the role of this sector in import-substitution industrialization. In line with the developmentalist policy orientation of the time, the hydrocarbons sector was of key strategic importance for industrialization and the diversification of the economy (Hirschman, 1958). The state-owned company Ecopetrol maintained a monopoly on oil and limited foreign participation in oil production. This in turn supported the developmentalist agenda, allowing the government to use profits from high oil prices in the 1970s to modernize infrastructure, subsidize other sectors of national industry, and import capital goods.

A distinctive feature of the industrialization policies implemented in Colombia during this period is that, in contrast to the situation in other Latin American countries, they were not associated with left-leaning “national-populist” regimes. Rather, import-substitution policies from the 1930s on were introduced under conservative hegemony and the National Front power-sharing agreement of the ruling parties (1958–1974). In conjunction with the continued importance of primary commodities exports in the Colombian economy, this meant that rapid economic growth could take place without destabilizing the power of traditional elite forces. During this period, state protections and subsidies allowed for a rapid concentration and centralization of industry and finance, while highly capital-intensive technologies and limited worker rights served to depress wages (Avilés, 2006: 28–35).

The goal of developmentalist policy had been the use of oil rents generated by high prices to establish a national industrial base. However, by the 1980s the model was increasingly less sustainable because of the growing inefficiency of state enterprises such as Ecopetrol, a large management bureaucracy, high labor costs, the lack of international competitiveness, and the lack of investment in exploration. The exhaustion of many important oil fields coincided with a slump in oil prices in the late 1980s, which resulted in a major drop in oil production. The rapid growth experienced by Colombia in the postwar period was now giving way to stagnation, low levels of savings and investment, balance-of-payments problems, declining commodity prices, and capital flight.

This scenario provided the background for the consolidation of power in socioeconomic blocs and a reorientation of the economic development agenda. The powerful economic groups abandoned their support for state protections and sought to rejuvenate their profits by joining the ranks of the transnational elite, pushing for trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization (Kalmanovitz, 2003: 466). They found ideological backing in an influx of liberal technocrats from MIT and the University of Chicago in economic development institutes such as Fedesarrollo, the Andes University, the Asociación Bancaria, and the Banco de la República. These intellectuals and technocrats operated through what in Colombia is known as the “carousel” or “revolving door”—circulation through transnational neoliberal networks oriented toward attacking protectionist policies (Estrada, 2006).

Pressure from the United States and multilateral institutions was also mounting. Although Colombia was never subjected to the debt crises and structural adjustment programs that plagued most of Latin America in the 1980s, pressure to liberalize the economy was magnified by an International Monetary Fund (IMF) macroeconomic program and the conditionalities that increasingly accompanied U.S. military aid in this period. Under the principle that internal conflict could be resolved through the expansion of international commerce, accompanied by enhanced access to foreign markets and free-trade agreements that attract foreign and domestic investment, U.S. military aid was granted on the condition of the implementation of a series of stabilization measures and the privatization of state companies (Leech, 2004).

In response to economic decline, on his 1990 election President César Gaviria introduced the “program for economic opening and modernization of the state,” which liberalized trade in a bid to attract new foreign direct investment. His aim was for half of economic growth to come from foreign direct investment during his presidency, and the mining industry was singled out as the most dynamic sector to attract that investment (Semana, 1992). By 1998 the level of foreign direct investment had risen to US$3 billion (six times that of 1990), most of which went to the oil, coal, and nickel sectors (Giugale, Lafourcade, and Luff, 2003: 314).The surge in investment was a product of reorganization within the state. Connections with multinational mining corporations such as Drummond and Glencore were tightened (Cuervo, 2012), and the result was a new configuration of power involving the prioritization of apparatuses responsible for dealing with international capital. The liquidation of the state mining company, Minercol (along with the national mining union), and the sale of the state coal corporation, Carbocol, to a foreign consortium composed of Exxon Mobil, Anglo American, BHP Billiton, and Glencore International (Ismi, 2000) were reflective of the changing balance of power within the state apparatus, with the eventual subordination of the internal mining policy bodies such as the Industrial Development Institute and the prioritization of the section of Ecopetrol that had aligned its operations with multinational corporations such as Exxon.

By the late 1990s the declining productive base and increasing financial speculation had created a crisis in the economy and a soaring fiscal deficit. Against this backdrop, the state began to intervene with increasing force in an effort to maintain the conditions for global capital accumulation under neoliberalism. The economic crisis and social repression softened political resistance to policy change, and the government initiated a sustained and far-reaching program called the “second wave of reforms” (Estrada, 2006). The acceleration of liberalization measures was a direct response to conditions laid out in agreements with the IMF in 1999 and 2002, and the international financial institutions increasingly directed economic policy as the crisis grew (Estrada, 2006). Policies were designed as a means of crisis management, federal budget deficit reduction, and the restoration of investor and business confidence by increasing exports. They centered on liberalizing trade and attracting foreign capital, largely in the sectors of biofuels, oil and coal mining, and mineral extraction.

The neoliberal consensus on mining policy was enshrined in the adoption of the new mining code, Law 685 of 2001, which involved an agreement between the Colombian Ministry for Mines and Energy and the Canadian Energy Research Institute. The code reconstituted the property and contract law surrounding mining, opening up the titling process on a “first come, first served” basis, with equal access granted to foreign and domestic firms. It removed entry barriers for private investment such as taxes, restrictions, and environmental regulations. State participation in extraction was ruled out, and the role of the state was relegated to regulation and rent collection (Fierro, 2012: 38). With regard to minerals, mining royalty rates were reduced from up to 10 percent to a minimum of 0.4 percent (Pardo, 2012). These developments represented not a withdrawal of the state but its active reorganization and reorientation to create the conditions of reproduction of international capital. As the former minister for mines put it, “The role of the state is . . . to support businessmen, facilitate their work, and guarantee the stability and viability of the large-scale investments that the mining industry demands” (quoted in Fierro, 2012: 39).

The liberalization of mining policy triggered a flood of foreign investment in the sector, with 1,717 companies—mostly multinational corporations—obtaining licenses to mine in Colombia. While in 1996 the mining sector had represented only 2.2 percent of total foreign investment, by 2001 this had risen to 26 percent (Fernández and Valencia, 2010: 11). In particular, Canadian investment in the mining and petroleum sectors skyrocketed from US$1.4 million in 1999 to US$663.9 million in 2000 (Banco de la República, 2015). A major result of the liberalization of mining policy was to make the mining sector a source of export growth that from 2002 on recorded growth rates far above the national average. Between 2002 and 2010 the mining sector’s proportion of total exports rose from 13 to 24 percent (Banco de la República, 2015).

By the turn of the century it was increasingly clear that the neoliberal policy orientation had thrown the country into turmoil, with a decline in both industry and agriculture and a dramatic rise in unemployment, which reached 20 percent in cities by 2001 (Lozano, 2001). Alongside this, a crisis of legitimacy for the government was associated with the rise of illegal armed groups and unprecedented levels of civil conflict. The urgency of crisis management spurred greater dependence on the extractives sector as well as new processes of elite class formation. The increasingly unstable social climate generated by civil tensions provided the basis for the strengthening of alliances among the far-right sectors of large landlords, rural politicians, narcotraffickers, and paramilitary groups and the economic elites and multinational mining companies. This bloc, described by Richani (2007) as a “reactionary class configuration,” also underwent major changes in terms of social composition and function during this period. The rural caudillos and private regional armies with origins in the Violence of the 1940s and 1950s were reconstituted as a reactionary social force of land speculators, agribusiness, multinational corporations, and the narco-bourgeoisie. Fearful of the incremental growth of the guerrilla forces throughout the countryside, other sectors of the industrial-finance elite and the political classes allied themselves with this rural bloc, which they saw as the only bulwark against guerrilla insurgencies.

Right-wing armed groups associated with the traditional elites were transformed into key strategic forces for securing the conditions of global capital accumulation, violently implementing repressive labor practices and dispossessing rural communities from strategic areas. As Hristov (2014: 97) points out, this paramilitary activity focused on “forced displacement of populations from areas of strategic economic and/or military importance such as: land high in fertility; territories containing valuable natural resources such as minerals, gold, oil or precious woods.” The land grab that ensued displaced an estimated 6 million predominantly rural inhabitants from 10 million hectares of land and initiated antiunion violence that saw the assassination of over 2,800 unionists between 1986 and 2010 (ABColombia, 2011). Paramilitary terror devastated workers and rural communities, but it was key to also securing and maintaining the conditions for this new form of capital accumulation. Through mechanisms of violent displacement and repression of labor, coercive state and parastate forces acted as the enforcers of a new system of coercion that allowed for Colombia to emerge as a mining country.

This violence did not take place strictly outside the sphere of the state but was a vital component of its activities. Paramilitary violence was often carried out in conjunction with military operations and state control, combining violence with legal mechanisms to ensure social control, surveillance, restrictions on civil liberties, and the criminalization of dissent. As Hristov (2014: 151) notes, “The relationship between the concentration of wealth and the use of violence has become more important than ever during the epoch of neoliberal restructuring.” The increasing interconnection between the political classes and paramilitary groups went beyond corruption to become a systemic part of their operations, which were often formalized through pacts. In this sense, while the armed conflict in Colombia is rooted in the historical trajectory of class conflict, it has also been specifically adapted to new forms of state power in the neoliberal and extractive economy.

The United States played a major role in supporting and facilitating this reorganization of class and state under neoliberalism. In the late 1990s it intervened with the US$7 billion military aid package known as Plan Colombia, which integrated the Colombian conflict into the international War on Drugs by supporting a military (and, indirectly, paramilitary) offensive against peasants in the agrarian frontier zones. The result was the creation of the second-largest military institution in Latin America, with 500,000 soldiers and police officers, at a cost of 6 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), and seven U.S. military bases (Villar and Cottle, 2011).

The 2002 election of Uribe represented the culmination of the rise of the far-right elite from their origins as rural warlords to the capture of hegemonic state power under a repressive authoritarian regime (Hylton, 2014). Uribe embarked on a “scorched earth” strategy for defeating the guerrilla insurgents that enjoyed support from factions of the industrial and finance elite as well as the United States. Uribe’s mining strategy was based on two chief pillars (Sankey, 2014): legal reforms and state-sponsored violence. Foreign investment was promoted through further privatization of public resources, labor flexibilization, new labor laws including the extension of the work day and flexible dismissal, and incentives for extractive industry. Under the Democratic Security program, the Uribe administration raised the defense budget to 5.6 percent of GDP in 2008, up from 2.2 percent in 1990, increasing the numbers of public forces to around 250,000. The program saw extensive and systematic violation of human rights and constant confrontation with the judicial branch. While coercive state power was justified as a strategy for containing the guerrilla insurgency, it was predominantly a matter of securing the conditions for the entry of extractive companies. Two-thirds of the troops were dedicated to protecting oil and mining industry infrastructure, and labor flexibilization was enforced through physical violence. Colombia has the largest number of unionists murdered in the world, and the mining sector has been a particular target for violence. Between 2002 and 2011, 401 human rights violations were recorded among workers in the mining and energy sector, including 40 assassinations, 8 disappearances, 21 kidnappings, 5 cases of torture, and 180 death threats (Villamil, 2012). According to research by the unionist and lawyer Francisco Ramirez, 74 percent of human rights violations take place in mining and oil regions (which currently represent 32 percent of the national territory), and 87 percent of the people currently displaced originate from these zones. Between 1995 and 2002 there were 7,500 assassinations in these regions (Ramirez, 2015).

By the mid-2000s, the mounting costs of the military program and the growing fiscal deficit pushed Uribe to expand the mining industry further. Foreign investment and the prospect of new oil discoveries provided life support for a failing war economy, and Uribe desperately sought to attract foreign mining companies to make up for the shortfall. “Colombia will be attractive for investors,” he announced at one mining conference in Medellín: “Colombia is ready to be a major mining country” (Harris, 2006). A 2005 report from the national planning agency for mines and energy entitled “Colombia: A Mining Country” aimed to make Colombia’s mining sector the third-largest receiver of foreign direct investment (UPME, 2005) through an array of reforms surrounding taxes and investor protections. The regional president of one oil company in Colombia went so far as to observe that “the government is literally desperate to attract companies by presenting all types of concessions to entice them” (New York Times, 2004, quoted in Richani, 2010: 133). Uribe also expanded the war apparatus, provisioning a second phase of Plan Colombia entitled the “Social Recovery of Territory.” This extended the military presence into 53 new regions of strategic importance where major companies such as BP, Repsol, and Harken were operating, and two new battalions were created to protect the mining and energy companies (Ismi, 2000; Ramirez, 2015).

Uribe proceeded to extend free-market policies, implementing labor and pensions reforms and public-sector cuts to all areas except the military and initiating free-trade agreements with the EU, China, the United States, and Canada. Ecopetrol was divided into three companies, and in its place the National Hydrocarbon Agency was made responsible for administering concessions for multinational corporations. What remained of the parastate institute persisted to provide the infrastructure, pipelines, and transport (Quevedo, 2007). Protesting oil workers were met with fierce repression. The various measures had the expected effect of dramatically increasing foreign direct investment in mining and energy, which expanded tenfold, from US$466 million to US$4.5 billion, between 2002 and 2010, increasing its share of total foreign direct investment from 42 to 67 percent (Banco de la República, 2015). While during the Andrés Pastrana administration (1998–2002) 221,000 hectares of land were under mining concessions, during the Uribe administration this rose to 7.4 million (ABColombia, 2011).

Under the Santos administration, mining continued to expand as a result of favorable legislation and high commodities prices. While the cornerstone of Uribe’s mining strategy was a militarized securitization of resource-rich territories, Santos’s discourse has focused on institution building and stability. The National Development Plans of 2011–2014 and 2014–2018 both aimed at establishing the political and material conditions that would place Colombia as one of the top destinations for foreign investment in mining in Latin America through mechanisms of juridical stability, institution building, competitive fiscal policy, combatting illegal mining activity, and provision of physical infrastructure. As a result, mining remained the most important export sector of the economy, representing 20 percent of total exports between 2010 and 2015 (Banco de la República, 2015).

However, since 2013 the slump in commodities prices has increasingly revealed the contradictions inherent in this economic growth strategy. Dependence on the extractives sector has exposed the country to the volatility of world markets. In 2015 foreign direct investment fell to US$500 million, a quarter the level of 2010–2014, resulting in declining rates of economic growth and an increasing fiscal deficit. The Santos administration responded to the devastation of the country’s productive base by deepening the country’s dependency on raw-material extraction. “The mining locomotive is going to run full steam ahead,” Santos declared in a meeting with the country’s 13 largest mining companies in 2013, and soon afterward he laid out a strategy of regulatory changes, tax cuts, and tributary benefits for mining corporations with the goal of expanding mining activities (Bermúdez, 2013).

Whereas Uribe represented the far-right elite bloc, Santos comes from the transnational elite of business owners and financiers. The transnational elite bloc had made an alliance with the far-right faction and supported the war as a means of repressing social opposition and paving the way for neoliberal reforms and extractive capital. Yet it is clear that the interests of the elite bloc predominantly lie in the termination of the conflict and regional stability. The war continued to represent a major drag on the economy, with the military budget absorbing around a third of GDP, while the national debt remained unchanged at half of GDP. Moreover, the threat to foreign investment posed by the war increased in 2011, when the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia–Ejército Popular (FARC-EP) stepped up a military operation targeted at the extractives sector. The treasury minister estimated that if peace negotiations were successful Colombia’s GDP could grow by 1 to 2 percentage points annually (Sequera, 2012). In this context, there is little doubt that the peace negotiations that took place between Santos and the FARC-EP between 2012 and 2016 were largely motivated by the exigencies of the neoliberal extractive economy. The peace negotiations are a reflection of the shifting alliances and balance of forces between elite power blocs, representing the Santos administration’s turn away from the overt militarism of the far right toward a focus on democratization, stability, and institution building as the chief means for securing the conditions for the continued accumulation of global capital.

Imperialism and the Transformations of the Colombian State in the Neoliberal Era

Poulantzas (1974: 73) pointed out that “the current internationalization of capital neither suppresses nor bypasses the nation-states” but “deeply affects the politics and institutional forms of these states by including them in a system of interconnections.” Multinational mining in Colombia is an example of the way the entrance of foreign capital is promoted by transformations of internal bourgeoisies and state apparatuses, but it would be misleading to view such transformations as the dismantling, bypassing, or weakening of the state. Rather, the Colombian state has taken active initiatives and implemented new forms of social repression to create and maintain the extractive economy. What the neoliberal project involves is not the dismantling of the state but a kind of reconfiguration of it to ensure the conditions for its own continued reproduction (Graf, 1995). This implies a major internal reconfiguration, with the expansion of institutes with functions such as debt management, accumulation, structural adjustment, and surplus extraction, alongside a severe contraction of social rights (Graf, 1995).

The institutional reorganization of the state has involved selectively dismantling or subordinating all or part of the internally oriented institutions and functions of the state, such as the Industrial Development Institute and Minercol, and promoting others that are responsible for the planning and implementation of the internationalization of the economy, including the Advisory Council on Economic Policy, the National Planning Department, the Geological Service, and the Fiscal Policy Institute. Since the economic opening of the 1990s, the Colombian state has exercised a significant degree of power in realigning state apparatuses with transnational capital by reconstituting property and contract law and implementing and enforcing the provisions of international trade and investment agreements. Meanwhile, state and paramilitary forces have increasingly engaged in violent territorial expansion. The Colombian state has not been “weakened” by global forces but has been a principal agent of global capital accumulation.

While the conversion of Colombia into a neoliberal mining country has been closely linked with authoritarian styles of governance and state-sponsored violence, corruption, and dispossession, it would be wrong to conclude that this is the only political form the mining economy could adopt. Under Santos there has been a slight retreat from Uribe’s authoritarian type of regime toward an emphasis on institution building and infrastructure paying lip service to peace and democracy. However, the shift in Santos’s policy and peace agenda has taken place in the context of severely limited room for maneuver in economic policy, with the economic development agenda limited to macroeconomic stability, high levels of foreign debt, the destruction of the country’s productive base, and dependence on foreign direct investment for economic growth. It is an attempt to establish something akin to what Gills and Rocamora (1992) described as “low-intensity democracy,” which involves the minimum elements of democratic participation required to maintain stability, reduce class antagonisms, and preempt the struggle for more radical change.

The nation-state has always been a contested terrain between various blocs of capitalist classes. The growing dominance of foreign direct investment and the transnational elite within the economy is not so much a sign that a “transnational capitalist class” has delinked itself from its national territorial boundaries in favor of a transnational state as an indication of new alliances and realignments within elite power blocs. The fact that implementation of neoliberal policies has entailed a rise of social struggles, civil conflict, and a crisis of legitimation has in fact led Colombia’s so-called transnational elite to ally itself with the forces of the far right in the exercise of unprecedented levels of state power in the form of social discipline.

As a final comment, it is also worth emphasizing that the dynamics of the mining economy place severe limitations on the requirements for domestic legitimation. Critics have described this model as “predatory extractivism” because the costs of economic growth are placed on natural resources, precipitating ecological disaster and dispossession of their lands of peasant and indigenous communities by multinational corporations. According to government estimates, the current mining policy is set to come into conflict with 5.3 million rural inhabitants (El Espectador, January 25, 2011). Meanwhile, mining provides few jobs, brings no linkages to other sectors of the economy, and poses a threat to the economy’s productive base. Thus, despite the peace accords, the transformation of Colombia into a mining country will continue to require strong state authority, since it requires prioritizing the demands of multinational corporations over domestic concerns and popular needs. In this context, the peace and democracy envisaged by Santos can at best only be weak, an effort to contain the legitimacy crisis and quell the social conflict surrounding the mining economy.

Conclusion

The rise of neoliberalism and the extractive economy in Colombia are associated with both the restructuring of the state and the realignment of sociopolitical forces, but this does not amount to the retreat or end of the state. The Colombian state should not be seen as defenseless against the immutable forces of the global market, U.S. imperialism, or the power of transnational corporations. It is not that foreign capital has been imposed on the Colombian economy but rather that the state has exerted considerable power and played an active role in providing the political and territorial conditions for an increasingly globalized economy and the penetration of resource-seeking capital. Under changing conditions of the internationalization of capital, neoliberalism, and extractivism, the Colombian state has adopted new mechanisms and actively developed new capacities and mechanisms to pave the way for this form of accumulation through crisis management, realignment of institutes with transnational capital, revision of property law, free-trade agreements, flexibilized labor laws, and state-sponsored repression to deal with the legitimacy crisis.