Death Squads or Self Defense Forces? How Paramilitary Groups Emerge and Challenge Democracy in Latin America

Abstract

In Death Squads or Self Defense Forces? political scientist Julie Mazzei attempts to contribute analytical rigor to discussions of the emergence and evolution of paramilitary groups. She argues that much recent work has lumped together a range of violent actors without distinguishing among such forces. She describes these violent actors as emerging in the space between the state and civil society. In her model, groups who view themselves as protecting civilians are in fact defending the threatened status quo through tenuous alliances among factions of the political and economic elites and the state. She outlines a range of conditions giving rise to such forces, including restricted political systems, a history of employing armed civilians, shifting political challenges to the existing regime, external pressure preventing overt state repression, and divisions within elites with a faction expressing a significant sense of grievance. These factors are explored in two chapter case studies examining national political history and the recent emergence of paramilitary groups in Chiapas, Colombia, and El Salvador. This book is a timely and important contribution to the analysis of one of the primary sources of contemporary violent conflicts; however, the book suffers from serious weaknesses in the case studies, particularly in the chapter on Colombia.Mazzei focuses on the similarities of the cases, but the work would have been enriched by addressing their differences as well, such as the role of indigenous groups in Chiapas, which is not a significant factor in Colombia or El Salvador, or the historical context of the Cold War in El Salvador. The issue of scale complicates her comparison: she is comparing one region to two countries, one of 9 million and the other, many times larger, of 42 million. Her analysis would have been significantly strengthened if she had compared regions of similar size and demographics.Mazzei is most successful in her study of Chiapas, because the regional focus allows her to successfully examine the issues at stake. In her consideration of El Salvador, Mazzei’s conflation of “death squads” and “paramilitary forces,” using both terms to describe small groups of off-duty military officers committing selective assassinations, seems to replicate the catchall phrasing she purports to reject; elsewhere in the text, “paramilitary group” is used to label groups of hundreds of armed civilians who invade villages and massacre the inhabitants while paying off local military commanders with the proceeds of extortion and drug trafficking. A more comprehensive historical analysis of the use of indigenous irregulars in US and national military doctrine, mentioned only briefly in the Mexico and El Salvador case studies, would also enrich her discussion of such groups.By far the weakest case study is the analysis of Colombia. Mazzei’s sources are primarily from human rights organizations and downloaded from the Colombian paramilitary’s Web site. She focuses on drug trafficker and self-styled paramilitary spokesman Carlos Castaño but substitutes his self-serving interviews for critical analysis and a regional perspective that would have illuminated the complex histories of such groups throughout Colombia. She does not reference much of the growing literature by Colombian academics, who since the 1990s have been publishing regional studies with important insights into Colombian paramilitary groups. Her history of the paramilitaries is muddled and thin. Despite her call for detailed analysis of the phenomena she fails to adequately differentiate distinct periods of paramilitary growth and expansion, the role of the drug trade, and changes within the Colombian political system contributing to their rise. Her account describes restricted access to the political system, which she gives as the central explanatory factor in the origins of paramilitary violence (p. 69), focusing on the National Front power-sharing agreement that ended in 1974. She ignores the analysis of political scientist Mauricio Romero and others, who have convincingly documented the rise in paramilitary groups following the expansion of political participation through the electoral reforms of the late 1980s. Incorporating these findings into her analysis would support Mazzei’s thesis that paramilitary groups emerge in order to protect the status quo and elite privilege during moments of political challenge, and allowed her to more fully explore the subtitle of her book, examining how such forces challenge democracy in Latin America.Mazzei’s model outlining the factors contributing to the growth of paramilitary forces is an important road map for scholars and an important contribution to conflict studies. Readers hoping to find in-depth analysis of cases should look elsewhere.