Abstract
An analysis of violence using data from 2018 to 2019 in the village of Altavista in Medellín, Colombia, concludes that economic globalization and a crisis of the social state have led to an increase in inequality and structural violence. This phenomenon, culturally reinforced by the acceptance and normalization of these events, constitutes a window of opportunity for the entrenchment of violent entrepreneurship using extortive economic activities to accumulate capital, resulting in increased precarity for the inhabitants of the village.
Un análisis de la violencia en la aldea de Altavista en Medellín, Colombia, utilizando los datos de 2018 a 2019 concluye que la globalización económica y una crisis del estado social han dado lugar a un aumento en la desigualdad y la violencia estructural. Este fenómeno, culturalmente reforzado por la aceptación y normalización de dichos acontecimientos, constituye una ventana de oportunidad para el afianzamiento de una violenta cultura económica basada en la acumulación de capital a partir de la extorsión, lo cual exacerba la presencia de la precariedad en las vidas de los habitantes del pueblo.
The dismantling of policies promoting the social welfare of Colombians has been a gradual process amidst the armed conflict that has strengthened security forces, insurgencies, paramilitary groups, and drug traffickers. Government deregulation, the increase in drug trafficking, failed pacts with armed actors, and the social and economic impoverishment of the population have consolidated the markets of violence pursued by the rackets. Making security an illegal profit-making service that is not freely chosen constitutes extortion under the threat of physical violence and thus expands the development of illicit activities. Among the principal illegal profit-making activities in Colombia are the micro-trafficking of narcotics, the sexual trafficking of minors, forced intraurban displacement, and forcible occupation of property. With this type of entrepreneurship in what Bedoya (2009, citing Finckenauer, 2005, and Volkov, 2002) calls “violent protection,” fostered by the lack of social protection and weak government control, control of a sector is contested among adversaries in order to guarantee diversification of their services.
Altavista is disputed by rackets seeking to gain position and control of the area. These disputes have tragic effects on the population, whose homicide rates rank it as one of the most violent villages in the city of Medellín and the one in which the most young people are killed. During the past decade, there were 11,826 homicides in Medellín, 272 of them in Altavista (Policía Nacional de Colombia, 2019), representing 2.3 percent of the city’s homicides while the village population represents 1.6 percent of its total inhabitants. In this context of economic and weak state presence, government deregulation advanced by neoliberal policies has strengthened the institutionalization of the rackets, which in turn have created a portfolio of services for capital accumulation through the use of violence.
To develop this idea, we have divided this article into four sections. In the first we describe two types of violence (structural and cultural) that overlap in Altavista and a third concept that encapsulates the new agent generating capital accumulation through dispossession: the rackets. In the second we present the methodology of political ethnography, displaying the tools and issues that allowed us to conduct our research. In the third section we contextualize the village, taking into account socioeconomic data, municipal planning, public participation, and social vulnerability as effects of government deregulation substantiated by testimonies that reveal the institutional vacuum. Lastly, we show the activities of the rackets as a generator and collector of revenue through the market of violence and the use of coercion as social control that completes the cycle of violence in Altavista.
The Conceptual Framework
We consider violence a situated practice—one in which the spatio-temporal context determines the variations in the ways it is utilized, internalized, or legitimized (Weber, 1964). We agree on the absence of a theory capable of providing a universal explanation of the forms of violence, given that its understanding changes according to the setting being analyzed (war, larceny, homicide, or vengeance). As a result, a multiplicity of meanings of violence forms a polysemy for understanding the socio-historical events upon which social relations are built. This is the salient issue in the case of Medellín, with the violent protection (provision of security through extortion) of the rackets trapping the residents of marginal or vulnerable neighborhoods. These residents are treated as second-class citizens, forced to live in internal exclusion in the national state, as is pointed out by Balibar (2013), just like the dispossessed, poor, and underdeveloped elsewhere in Latin America (Escobar, 2007). For this reason we wish to conceptualize the types of violence that overlap in Altavista.
Structural Violence
Johan Galtung’s (1969) concept of structural violence posits an unequal distribution of power and resources that is part of the social structure and inherent to its operation. It is closely linked to the causes of social injustice and operates through the legal system of every society.
As expressed by Galtung (1998: 5), this type of violence “is the sum total of all the clashes built into social and world structures and cemented, solidified, so that unjust, inequitable outcomes are almost unchangeable.” In spite of the explanatory power of this concept, its use tends to exempt actors from responsibility for their actions, attributing to them no intention to harm but simply allegiance to their task within a certain structure. Some of the actors included in this view are the multinational companies and industrialized states that have been deemed not responsible for the production of violence or whose activities in aid of their cardinal tenets of exploitation (Galtung, 1969; Weigert, 2008) and capital accumulation are treated euphemistically as “collateral damage” (Bauman, 2011).
One manifestation of structural violence is social exclusion (Moser and McIlwaine, 2006). According to Levitas (1996), this is a matter of the limitation of participation in common and legitimate social activities. It occurs through the monopolization of the assets necessary for the free development of individuals. This monopolization has occurred through the plundering of lands formerly used for farming by small producers and gradually converted over the past 30 years to agro-industrial use with effects such as those documented by Scheper-Hughes (1997) in Brazil and Villegas (2009) in Colombia. This is the type of imperial globality articulated by Escobar (2004: 215), consisting of the interest of transnational industrial capital in Colombia, which “has a long historical base, particularly in the structure of land tenure. Today, 1.1% of landowners control over 55% of all arable land (and as much as one-third of this may well be linked to drug money).” It has led to a Gini index of 0.88 percent in land concentration in Colombia (Salinas, 2012), one of the highest in Latin America. According to figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization, as of 2017 the region had the most unequal land distribution on the planet: the Gini coefficient applied to land distribution in the region was 0.79 compared with 0.57 for Europe, 0.56 for Africa, and 0.55 for Asia. 1 Land concentration, drug trafficking, and armed conflict have caused major population flight from rural areas to the periphery of large cities and contributed to the impoverishment and social vulnerability of the inhabitants of Altavista.
Cultural Violence
Returning to Galtung, the notion of cultural violence refers to “those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence—exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics)—that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence” (Galtung, 1990: 7). In Galtung’s view, cultural violence enables legitimation of structural violence through acceptance of the acts of violence that arise as the social structure evolves. Thus it fosters the perception that violent situations are normal.
Cultural violence goes beyond social inequalities (Weigert, 2008), and therefore it is of paramount importance that homicide, extortion, and all the other instances of violence in the lives of the poor be considered of little social or political significance. This is a form of naturalizing and legitimizing the exploitation and plunder of which they have been victims and dehumanizing them. Making them “disposable” means that the harm done to them need not be punished. This is the only way to understand the silence, ostracism, and inaction on social issues such as those mentioned above and the abandonment of discussion of institutional arrangements for the redistribution of wealth.
In short, one of the types of violence comes from above, with an institutional racism (Balibar, 2004) that calls into question institutional preferences in providing security, particularly those regarding the ones chosen by the state to guarantee public safety, thereby instituting something like apartheid. The other comes from below, legitimating structural violence by accepting the acts of violence that arise in the development of the social structure. Structural violence is apparent in exploitation and cultural violence in indifference, silence, discrimination, and social distance. At the same time, there is a juxtaposition of the two types of violence when people act in collusion with those exerting coercion or provide extortive services, accepting controls and orders parallel to those of the legal authorities. Collusion can also be a means of adaptation—adopting the habits and practices of the illegal economic market, requesting loans, paying extortion, or seeking mediation by violent actors in resolving neighborhood disputes.
For Arteaga and Dyjak (2006: 51), the distinctions established by power groups create violence as they reinforce their own cycle. Those who are discriminated against and stigmatized find less room for participation within the legal framework. Illegality offers them recognition, power, and the possibility of increasing their capacity for consumption, making it very attractive to profit from illegal businesses that benefit from violence, and the perception is created that the services provided by the rackets are indispensable.
The Rackets
In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 30) identified rackets as “systems for extorting protection money [or] groups securing the system of power,” embedded in the last command posts of both legal and illegal economies and always alert to “the indefinite continuation of the status quo.” In addition, they pointed out (123) that the permanently hopeless situations which grind down the spectator in daily life are transformed by their reproduction, in some unknown way, into a promise that they may continue to exist. One needs only to become aware of one’s nullity—to subscribe to one’s own defeat—and one is already party to it. Society is made up of the desperate and thus falls prey to rackets.
This situation observed in a specific historical context is accurately demonstrated in Altavista, since the population has fallen victim to the rackets and their violent protection for legal and illegal objectives of accumulating capital (Volkov, cited in Bedoya, 2009: 112–113): The art of extracting a stable extortion income is based on the constitution of a forced association between the victim-clients and a central group that Volkov calls “violent entrepreneurs.” This is a new type of illegal nonspecific business with specific organizational patterns and practices. . . . The violent businessman strives to establish permanent tax relations with the inhabitants of his territorial or sectoral domain, and provides certain services that justify his demand for tribute.
This associative form of violence is in keeping with the form of capital accumulation formulated by Harvey (2004), accumulation by plunder or dispossession. Latin Americans have been deeply affected by the implementation of the neoliberal policies of the 1990s—consistent with an extractivist economic model and the privatization of health care and pension funds, flexibilization in hiring practices, tax increases, higher prices for public services such as water, energy, and transportation, foreign indebtedness, and the defunding of public universities.
This has exacerbated impoverishment and increased the concentration of wealth of the few—the national and global business and financial elites and the large multinational corporations. As a result, according to Harvey, the state, as a mediating institution that is also a product and a producer of capital accumulation, has fulfilled its function by allowing the penetration of companies with national and transnational capital engaged in the appropriation and devaluation of the country’s assets (environmental and social assets, among others). At the same time, it has permitted the development of criminal structures that jeopardize the physical integrity of its citizens.
Violent entrepreneurship is one of the methods of accumulation by dispossession—in this case, dispossession of the right to physical security that should be guaranteed by public institutions and is now being offered as an illegal private service. In Medellín, the apparent onset of this form of dispossession can be traced to the early 1990s, when neoliberal measures expanded with them privatization as a violent-protection business venture. This extortive violence is not an isolated expression of the desire of some groups to control a micro-territory. On the contrary, it is an illegal mechanism of capital accumulation embedded in the core of modern capitalism and government deregulation that increases instability and social vulnerability.
Methods and Tools for Analysis
To understand the configuration of violence in Altavista and the way in which this violence affects the dignity and patterns of coexistence of its residents, we undertook an inquiry in the form of a fundamentally qualitative political ethnography consisting of daily immersion and interaction in the area for more than a year (in 2018 and 2019). As data collection tools we used interviews with academic and administrative leaders of an educational institution and some staff members of the Colombian National Police, field observation and eight participatory workshops with young residents of the village (average attendance 30), and secondary sources such as the press, studies, and consultant reports. Together these activities provided categories for analysis and a reading of various cases of extortion and physical violence, the actors involved and their relationships, and modes of territorial control and their economic benefits (forms of social control and usurpation of the state). The accounts shared in the workshops allowed us to substantiate the link between the infringement of fundamental rights, the presence of armed actors providing protection by extortion, the increase in the number of residents coming from other parts of the city in recent years because of displacement resulting from Colombia’s armed conflict, and the absence of social programs, employment opportunities, education, and fulfillment of basic needs.
The Case of Altavista: Violent Surroundings or Insecure Life?
The village of Altavista is located in the western part of the city of Medellín, the capital of the department of Antioquia and the second-most-industrialized area of the country after the Bogotá capital district. Medellín has a population of 2,945,034 (República de Colombia, 2019b). Altavista has 39,725 people, 1.6 percent of the total population of the municipality. Men constitute 47.8 percent of the inhabitants. Children make up 25.6 percent, with 9.1 percent adolescents, 19.9 percent youth, 16.7 percent young adults, 23.4 percent adults, and 5.5 percent older adults. The socioeconomic distribution 2 is 75.7 percent low (1 and 2), 12.0 percent middle (3 and 4), and 12.3 percent high (5), suggesting that the majority of the people in this section of the city suffer from structural violence.
Despite the fact that Medellín has higher living standards than the national average (República de Colombia, 2019a), this is not the case for the village, which is ranked by the Multidimensional Index of Living Conditions below the municipal median in perception of quality of life, freedom and security, mobility, environment, income, work, household physical capital, recreation, and vulnerability (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2018). Antioquia and Medellín concentrate a considerable amount of the country’s technological, financial, economic, and political capital, and this fosters the inclusion of illegal income in the circulation of transnational capital through the laundering of assets and other forms of legal economy (see Alcaldía de Medellín and Instituto Popular de Capacitación, 2019; Emmerich, 2015).
Village planning began only recently, making it necessary to consult the municipality for data on the relationship of state deregulation to the steady impoverishment of its residents. Since the 1990s, Medellín has developed two territorial management plans and nine municipal development plans. 3 During this period, Altavista’s population has grown by 375 percent and public investment by merely 100 percent 4 (Almario et al., 2017; Patiño, 2015; Zambrano, 2017), demonstrating a historical liability in the ratio of investment to population. The Social Vulnerability Index dropped 17 percent in 1998–2019 compared with 35 percent in Medellín, and there was a 68 percent deficit in housing (see Almario et al., 2017; Coupe, 2009; La Red, 2019; Patiño, 2015; Policía Nacional de Colombia, 2019); Zambraño, 2017; Interview 6, Medellín, November 2019).
In addition, with regard to the fight against the drug cartels, it is fair to say that Medellin’s criminal history has been replicated in the village of Altavista. Since the incursion of the drug cartels in the 1980s, Altavista has been the strategic corridor for the transit of weapons and drugs (Sepúlveda, 2017), and according to Patiño (2015) it has served as a refuge for middle-level commanders of the criminal organizations as police raids have increased in the metropolitan area. This has not only consolidated the criminal organizations but also placed violence at the core of social interaction and transaction. Proof of this is the homicides (Figure 1).

Homicide rates in Altavista, Medellin, and Colombia, 2010–2019 (data from Policía Nacional de Colombia, 2019).
Since 2011, homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants in Altavista have been higher than the averages recorded in Medellín, Colombia, and South America as a whole. In 2018 the homicide rate for Altavista was 135.9 per 100,000 inhabitants (Policía Nacional de Colombia, 2019), while Colombia’s rate was 25.1, that of Medellín was 24.5, and that of South America was 23.2 (World Bank, 2019). The World Health Organization (WHO, 2002) has determined that the threshold for considering homicide a pandemic within a nation is 10 per 100,000, a figure that the village has exceeded since 2010.
Extortion and Accumulation by Dispossession
A network of individuals and groups specializing in the use of violence for collecting criminal revenue has developed for collecting the revenue procured in more insecure and vulnerable areas of the city. In addition to this are the armed organizations engaged in the sexual exploitation of minors, drug trafficking, extortion, and the collection of fees (called “vaccinations”) for legal commercial activities (Giraldo and Naranjo, 2011) and the guerrillas and paramilitaries that are part of the Colombian political conflict (Duncan, 2005; 2006). All this makes Altavista a place of constant conflict (Dávila, 2013), with organized crime groups trafficking arms and drugs (Giraldo and Naranjo, 2011).
The existence of rackets in the village underlines the structural violence and its interrelation with the lack of government regulation. When we asked residents about the local authorities, their ambivalence toward the criminal groups was evident (Interview 2, community leader, Medellín, August 2019): Before, control in Colombia meant the guerrillas versus the state. The paramilitary came in to fight the guerrillas, but that was when narco-trafficking gained strength. That’s when the guerrillas started to use drug trafficking as a war economy. . . . The legal actors say that in the recent conflict, there is a link: for example, the police have ties to this trafficking, because it’s impossible for them not to. They’re either saving their hides or they’re getting something, because they’re not stupid. Other actors are community leaders.
Also, the area is known for recruiting minors to take part in regional criminal organizations (Casa de las Estrategias, 2017; Giraldo and Naranjo, 2011; Interview 3, teacher, Medellín, August 2019): 5
Where we see it [recruitment of youngsters in school] is in the way they act, what the kids know about the gang, its power. . . . There’s a boy who left this year [dropped out of school]—as far as I know, he’s running from the police. They arrested him, and he escaped. He used to say, “I want to be a hitman, a bad guy.” There’s another boy who’s also in jail, but for a different crime, but it was always about those kinds of crimes. But I think it’s mostly in the sixth and seventh grade. . . . A kid who gets to the eleventh grade [last year of high school] who doesn’t spend all his time on a street corner is a kid who has a goal in life. At first kids in school didn’t think about upper-level education, and now those kids do want to keep studying.
Interviewing residents and workers from Altavista in 2018 and 2019 allowed us to see the uncertainty, distrust, and fear felt by those who live in a disputed territory (being fought over by Los Chivos and Los Pájaros). Contradictorily, we also saw consolidation when we inquired about the charges and “services” offered by the rackets. Those interviewed said that the rackets have imposed a set of charges for protection and freedom to carry out various activities of daily life: (1) use of the land, through a residency charge similar to the property tax levied by municipalities in Colombia; (2) the right to carry out commercial activities in the area, similar to the tax on business and industry (where the criminal organizations sometimes also take a share of the profits); (3) the right to move around within the area; (4) the right to use public transportation; and (5) access to justice in disputes among neighbors. Payment for one of these services does not exempt one from payment for another, and even minors are charged (these charges are applied at the discretion of the members of the criminal organization).
To consolidate this profitable territorial control, the rackets have resorted to coercive violence with three tactical objectives: to guarantee that the entire population uses the “security” services that regulate residency practices, to defend the control of its territory and its criminal income from other criminal organizations that want to take them over, and to enforce discipline on members of the criminal organizations and resident offenders. These organizations charge not only for the right to live in their area of influence and control but also for protection from their own and other criminal organizations. Residents pay about COP$5,000 weekly (US$1.70) for their homes. In addition, if the person or the household has a formal or informal business in the neighborhood the charge is COP$ 10,000–$50,000 weekly (US$3.33–16.70). We are talking here about informal economies that do not enjoy large profit margins and are located in an area where the customers lack significant purchasing power. The charge for movement within the neighborhood, which averages about COP$1,500 (US 40 cents) weekly, is not collected from all residents because it is usually connected with the intention to expel the person charged.
The charge for public transportation, collected from bus drivers, is payable to four criminal organizations, two of them outside the village, and in 2019 amounted to COP$300,000 (US$88.23) weekly. Approximately 40 formal carriers that are not part of the city’s public transit system make this payment. 6 In addition, informal carriers are required to pay an additional charge, and the criminal organizations go so far as to regulate their prices and their frequency and routes. Sometimes, in order to gain legitimacy, they may order price reductions, and sometimes they raise prices so that the informal carriers (“pirates”) can pay their assigned fees. At any rate, those who charge unpermitted amounts are punished with threats to leave the area or perhaps lose their lives.
The charge for the administration of justice in the neighborhood is perhaps one of the most sophisticated in that it involves coexistence codes designed to maximize the organizations’ profits and enhance their control, criminal codes specifying the punishments for behavior considered punishable (a combination of structural and cultural violence), and legitimacy. From interviews with the police we estimate that the annual total of these charges is COP$2,196,000,000 (US$650,000), and this is aside from the proceeds of drug trafficking and contract killings, which sustain a much denser clandestine structure that is impossible to quantify. The figures suggest an enormous capacity for adaptation and profit from this business, “since racket protection is produced like a commodity subject to the laws of the market, the basis for an enormous accumulation of capital obtained through the exploitation of cheap labor” (Bedoya, 2009: 129).
Residents of Altavista acquiesce in this market of violence, naturalizing and legitimizing it with obedience and silence. At the same time, the government is not interested in and institutionally incapable of maintaining a presence through comprehensive social programs that guarantee the fundamental rights of residents, and the usurpation of state functions such as the administration of justice and violence produces economic benefits through intimidation and relentless social control. This situation is facilitated by macroeconomic policies whose effects have yet to be quantified.
The Violent Protectorate: The Fluctuation of Social and Coercive Control
The violent entrepreneurs or racketeers in Altavista have incorporated into their exercise of domination practices and knowledge from the armed conflict and from gangsters such as Pablo Escobar, organizing alliances and social assistance for some residents such as paying for funerals and for public services such as water and electricity. In this regard we transcribe part of two conversations with residents reflecting this situation (Interview 1, staff member of an educational institution, Medellín, May 2019; Interview 4, professional psychologist, Medellín, September 2019): In the neighborhood and mostly with the schoolchildren we see little accompaniment by parents. Actually there is little interest in the children’s issues. This clearly opens the way for criminal organizations to approach them. They already know who the most vulnerable children are, so they devise a strategy. For example, they give them gifts. If the child is hungry, they give him food; they listen to him and cheer him up. They employ strategies to make the child loyal and grateful to them. Sometimes these groups take on a father’s role with some children. Because of this paternal filiation, many of them join these gangs. I have two children to whom the gangs are giving gifts. They gave one a video game console. The boy is only 10 years old. Later they gave him a BB gun. You can imagine that this child is very popular because of these toys. I called the parents in, and they didn’t see anything wrong with these presents, so what else can we do? This child will surely end up working with them.
These testimonies capture some of the residents’ mechanisms of adaptation and negotiation in the face of the latent threat and the fluctuating authority of the rackets, which are also confronted with collective action (Alzate-Zulaga, 2012). 7 Also evident is the vulnerability of the boys and girls in this environment, which ensures the continuity of this cycle of violence (Figure 2).

The cycle of violence in Altavista.
Social inequality is exacerbated in places like Altavista because of the lack of government programs or action by local companies and mainstream society. During July and August 2018 hundreds of children could not go to school because of the simmering threat that existed for anyone moving about in the village. Thousands were prohibited from leaving their homes, despite attempts by the local authorities to reinforce public safety—revealing the enormous power of the violent entrepreneurs to maintain control over a broad swath of territory. The violence functions by establishing a hierarchy of social relations through which these groups achieve their economic goals without any interference from “the force of law.” The result is rampant impunity in this local arena.
Final Reflections
The violence experienced in Altavista showcases the interrelation of a structural violence characterized by poverty, social exclusion, and marginality in an urban setting displaying some institutional attention in the city center but great deficiency on its edges, with cultural violence marked by social distance from the rest of the residents of Medellín. Under these circumstances the villagers live in a cycle of violence promoted by the rackets, having to shoulder the economic and social costs of essential public assets such as physical safety and freedom of movement in an impoverished area that is suffering the perverse effects of capitalist institutional arrangements. The incursion of drug-trafficking organizations creates a context for criminal activities in the village whose elements include (1) the possibility of circulating economic capital due to the existence of productive activities with a high revenue potential such as quarries for extraction of raw materials; (2) the strategic potential of the territory because of its location and the areas it connects (urban and rural); (3) the presence of people willing to participate in criminal profits because of their meager incomes, their displacement, or their violent co-optation by the organizations; and (4) social isolation with respect to the social policies of the rest of the city.
The case of Altavista lays bare the glaring governmental deficit of regulation and the guarantee of citizens’ rights. Drug trafficking and the various criminal activities of capital accumulation associated with it, both economic and politico-territorial, and the impacts of market inequities (Castells, 1998) combine with this deficit of regulation to transform the village into the receptacle of the pathologies of a neoliberal market that promotes competition, exploitation, and speculation.
Footnotes
Notes
Mary Luz Alzate-Zuluaga is a postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad Nacional Autonóma de Mexico and an associate professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Williams Gilberto Jiménez-García is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Universidad Técnológica de Pereira and the director of its knowledge network on violence and criminality. This article presents part of a research project entitled “Strategies for Community Participation and Conflict Resolution in the Post-Accord Context Based on an Understanding of the Harm Suffered by Social Groups in the City of Medellín, 2018–2019” carried out by both authors with the participation of members of the Semillero de Investigación Acción Colectiva, Ciudadanía y Problemas Públicas, to whom they are grateful for their work and dedication: Laura Bonilla, Mariana Rojas, Alejándro Patiño, Carolina Villa, Miguel García, and Gerardo Parra of the political science program of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia at Medellín. The authors are also grateful to those who facilitated the progress of the research, the educational community of the Débora Arango de Altavista Educational Institution, and the public servants, village residents, and former members of criminal organizations interviewed. They thank the LAP evaluators and Gerardo Parra for their suggestions and critical and conscientious readings. Victoria Furio is a conference interpreter and translator located in Yonkers, NY.
