The Demobilization Process of Paramilitaries in Colombia: Between Politics and Justice

The phenomenon of paramilitarism in Colombia has received an ambiguous treatment, balancing between political and criminal issues; an oscillation that has been intimately linked to the evolution of the Colombian internal conflict. This contribution analyzes the recent negotiations held with paramilitary groups by the administration of Alvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010). After a brief account of the dependency path that has determined this historical episode, I propose an assessment of the use of judicial categories by the various actors of the negotiations. The main argument is that those categories –war criminal, political criminal, drug smuggler, etc.– do not depend on the intrinsic nature of an armed actor, but are socially constructed by a conflictive process of material and symbolic struggles. The capacity to categorize private violence, as legitimate or illegitimate, political or criminal, appears as one of the basic manifestations of the state’s action, as well as one of the main conflicts presiding at the rocess of state formation.

Cooperación Sur-Sur entre Brasil y los Países Lusófonos Africanos (2003-2010)

La arquitectura de la Cooperación Internacional ha atravesado varios cambios. Entre ellos, el surgimiento de la Cooperación Sur-Sur dejó entrever el marcado interés de los países en desarrollo por hacer parte de la misma. En Brasil, el gobierno de Lula da Silva fue el gran promotor de esta cooperación, especialmente con aquellos países de habla portuguesa en África. En este contexto, la presente monografía pretende determinar de qué manera la construcción social de identidad incide en la dinámica de Cooperación Sur-Sur entre Brasil y los países lusófonos africanos. Mediante una perspectiva constructivista, se analiza el valor de diversos elementos sociales, culturales e históricos cuya interacción configuró determinadas percepciones entre Brasil y los países lusófonos africanos. Este proceso de interacción social permitió la consolidación de una identificación positiva entre ellos, fortaleciendo su acercamiento político y generando así un considerable aumento en el volumen y las temáticas de los proyectos de cooperación formulados de 2003 a 2010.

Natural resource windfalls and efficiency of local government expenditures: evidence from Peru

We study the role of natural resource windfalls in explaining the efficiency of public expenditures. Using a rich dataset of expenditures and public good provision for 1,836 municipalities in Peru for period 2001-2010, we estimate a non-monotonic relationship between the efficiency of public good provision and the level of natural resource transfers. Local governments that were extremely favored by the boom of mineral prices were more efficient in using fiscal windfalls whereas those benefited with modest transfers were more inefficient. These results can be explained by the increase in political competition associated with the boom. However, the fact that increases in efficiency were related to reductions in public good provision casts doubts about the beneficial effects of political competition in promoting efficiency.