Travailler dans la violence : le sale boulot paramilitaire en Colombie

Since the second half of the twentieth century, millions of people were reported missing, tortured and executed extrajudicially by paramilitary groups, also involved in the elimination of petty criminals and marginalized populations. In Colombia, paramilitary groups have been used by the state since the 1970s for the suppression of civil social movements, left-wing parties and guerrillas, which have emerged in the country since the 1960s. In the 1980s drug traffickers have begun to fund new organizations and suppress social struggles and deviance. Following a proliferation of these organizations in the 1990s, the federation of paramilitary groups United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) was created in 1997 to recover the territories controlled by guerrillas, perpetrating massacres, displacing civilians and imposing forced social control on communities, including the commission of sexual violence against women, target killings, torture and atrocities on the bodies of the victims.  Based on an analysis of the life stories of 30 former paramilitaries of the USDFC, my dissertation is interested on paramilitary social control in Colombia. Unlike the characterization of paramilitaries as rational actors, motivated by economic and illegal interests, which dominates the interpretation of their actions, my analysis of the representations of my interviewees raises the importance of morality in understanding paramilitary conducts. In the context of transnationalization of the legal and illegal economy of Colombia at the end of the twentieth century, paramilitary violence helps mantaining the conservative normative structure of society, through the elimination of transgressors of the political, economic and moral order. In such a context of economic and social changes, which transforms traditional economic activities, violence becomes a work for men from the lower classes, whose actions should be interpreted from their life experiences into a reality where violence is one of the few job opportunities. Inspired by research on the perpetrators of (para) state violence, by the work on armed trajectories and by the sociology of dirty work, my thesis invites to conceptualize paramilitary violence as a dirty work of social control. By studying the work of violence according to the experiences of the interviewees, I show that the paramilitaries create moral representations of their actions, which makes it possible to construct their reality, to divide the work by automating each of the functions and to build an identity in a dirty work. My thesis argues that the moral identity of the paramilitaries must be understood not only relative to the conservative discursive context about criminals, but also in relation to the position of paramilitaries in a gray zone between the legal public sector and the illegal private sphere, to whom is delegated the dirty work of repression of civil populations and guerillas. The paramilitaries have an ambiguous relationship to morality between, on the one hand, the idea that they help the state to defend the security of civilian populations and, on the other hand, the illegal nature of violent organizations and practices. Violence is an experience of embodyment and enjoyment of the adrenaline of power, but it is also a traumatic experience marking their identity. My thesis also analyses career trajectories based on the life stories of the interviewees, showing the existence of trajectories differentiated by region, in the temporality of participation and in the degrees of exposure to violence, but also shows the effects of economic and social changes and armed conflict on the careers of peasant men.

Keyphrases: violence, Paramilitary groups, Colombia, Former combatants, Perpetrators, Perpetration, Violence workers, Dirty work, Social control, Morality, Identity, Trajectories, Careers, Life stories, Moral