Blood and capital
Subtitle: the paramilitarization of Colombia
By: Jasmin Hristov.
Series: Ohio University research in international studies, Latin America studies series -- No. 48
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Athens
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780896802674
Subjects: Paramilitary forces -- Colombia; Torture -- Colombia
Description: "In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state's coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the process of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. She addresses, as well, issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies. Hristov documents the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population. Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism in Colombia and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe's advances in the wars on terror and drugs."--Back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Neoliberalism or neopoverty? The promises and the reality of the neoliberal agenda; title: The war on the internal enemy : the origin, structure, mechanisms, and activities of the state's coercive apparatus; title: The paraextension of the SCA : looking at the paramilitary monster; title: The debt to humanity; title: The legalization of illegality; title: One of Colombia's "internal enemies" : the indigenous movement of Cauca; title: Features of the new para-narco-state.