The Drug Trafficking In Colombia’S Economic Crisis In The 80s

The drug trafficking in Colombia’s economic crisis in the 80s

Organized crime in many areas of society has the need and ability to combine coercion and consensus. Its validity and proliferation do not lie only in the provocation of fear, but also relies on associations and connections with the objective of integrating and being recognized from society. This makes it possible to become a social actor.

From this perspective for the analysis of this topic part of the question:

How institutional weakness, the economic and social crisis of the 80s makes it possible for drug trafficking to permese in the Colombian political sphere?

During the 70s the annual export of cocaine to the United States was approximately 14 and 19 tons. In 1982 the amount rose to 45. For the beginning of the 21st century he had reached 400 tons. In the Colombian context, drug trafficking is functional to neoliberal capitalism of its society, to the point that some analysts consider it "narco capitalism" (Figueroa, 2011). Historically, drug trafficking has been accentuated in Colombia’s economic and social life, taking advantage of the spaces of revolutionary prominence in a society marked by inequality, with precarious institutionality, political polarization and wrapped in neoliberal globalization.

It is important to take into account aspects such as the transformation of the economic system in Colombia, because in the eighties the liberalization of foreign trade would occur, as part of the implementation of the neoliberal economic model promoted by the United States.

Neoliberalism brought vital changes in the state-economic relationship, and also between these and society. On the other hand, fresh capitals that were entering the country product of the drug business would accommodate a new socio -economic actor, articulation important sectors of the country’s business or politics elite with drug trafficking. In the field of politics. Drug trafficking capitals. From its appearance. They have financed council electoral campaigns. Mayors. Deputies. Governors. Representatives. Senators L, J Presidents of the Republic (Nieto López, 1995).

Former Minister of Justice Fernando Londoño has syndicated that macroeconomic policy has given itself to the evidence that Colombia was dominated by the so -called “hot money” from drug trafficking for 25 years (Callejas, 2003). A first evidence was the "sinister window" during the administration of President López Michelsen (1974¬-1978), considered the largest dollar laundry room in Colombia, drug trafficking posters entered to move the country’s economy, to the point ofget to propose the payment of Colombia’s external debt, in order to get amnesty on the "swallow capitals" that until then was one of the greatest income in this country. In this sense Callejas confirms that for more than half a century, the country’s balance of payments has been nourished by the dollars that come from the smuggling of narcotics.

This mutual relationship between the neoliberal political regime and organized crime has altered the social relations of production within the accumulation regime, giving way to the emergence of a new form of state: the "narco state", whose phenomenal expression as a political regimeNeoliberal, authoritarian and client list is crossed by narco activity (Smith, 1997: 135–136).

Colombia internally experienced economic crises, institutional weakness, political changes, democratic ups and downs. (Loyal Buitrago, 1990. p. 39). The proliferation of organized crime at the different levels of Colombian society has also translated into an alteration of the relations of class political domination, which according to Smith (1997), modifies the dependency/domination relations that link to the state -nationColombian with the set of states -nation in the international scene and weakens its positioning in the same.

Throughout the 80s in Colombia the prominence of drug trafficking would begin to permeate in many ways a society historically controlled by liberals and conservatives. The "revolutionary" discourse of the narco’s left is legitimized in society as the character who enters the house of the rich to give the poor. But in reality as Tokatlian & Alfonsín (2000) states, the ideology is little or nothing, since the canon of organized crime is deeply pragmatic with a utilitarian vision of reality and how to take advantage of it to legitimize in society. The background objectives of the narco as explained by Sarmiento (1990) is reduced by avoiding the application of extradition signed in 1979 between the United States and Colombia before the weak judicial system that the latter presented. However, for when it was approved in 1980 or bribes, intimidation or kidnapping were sufficient. In this regard, Camacho (1988) explains: “Within this campaign, the systematic effort of some spokesmen of the old traditional bourgeoisie is notorious to clarify their differentiation with what they have decided to call“ emerging class ”constituted by the set of sectors that to theShadow of economic development and accumulation of capital, and under the protection of the negotiated and corruption, they have been ascending on the social scale to the point of competing seriously ”that is to say the political class presented resistance and neutralized the aspirations of the narcos. From that moment on, terrorism would become the mechanism with which it is intended to bend the authorities under the interests of the narco (Tokatlian & Alfonsín, 2000).

An indirect way of "territorial legitimation" was that used by posters such as Medellín, through the purchase of land and farms in the Magdalena Medio, Córdoba and the Eastern Llanos, which eventually became a safe investment, large centers ofConcentration of power whose main element were the alliances of three fronts: traffickers, important landowners, and finally low and media commanders of the military forces, which found in this union an effective response to the incessant problem of insurgency (Uprimny, 1997)