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Guest post by Shauna N. Gillooly and Philip Luke Johnson
In 2020, a university campus in Bogotá, Colombia was festooned with flyers threatening “the children of professors that indoctrinate their students into communism.” A year earlier, a campus in Medellín was plastered with pamphlets, this time threatening students that engaged in political activity instead of quietly getting on with their studies. Both messages were signed by the Águilas Negras, a notorious criminal band. While the strength of this group has been disputed, for those targeted by the threats—and many besides—these messages could hardly be dismissed as anything less than terrifying.
These messages are hardly an isolated occurrence. Hundreds of threatening messages signed by the Águilas Negras have appeared across Colombia in recent years. Gangs in Brazil have published threatening messages in newspapers, while in Mexico, criminal actors sometimes use “narco-messages” to threaten rivals, officials, or other members of the public. Although the practice is relatively widespread, it raises questions about the behavior and power of criminal actors.
Most scholarship shows that criminal actors maintain a low profile, wielding power through clandestine means of coercion, corruption, and cooptation. Keeping a low profile reduces the costs of run-ins with rivals or the law. Criminal actors certainly do make use of public, sometimes spectacular violence, but primarily when the government is incapable or inefficient at punishing (or protecting) organized crime. Even so, most criminal actors moderate the frequency and visibility of their violence most of the time.
Threats are a particularly useful way to exert subtle power, as they leave no mark, no “smoking gun.” For a group with an established reputation, the mere whisper of a threat may be enough to induce compliance on the part of their targets (indeed, some actors with established reputations expend considerable resources to prevent pretenders from issuing threats in their name). Publicizing threats thus seems to undermine one of the main advantages of threats; the ability to coerce while reducing the risks associated with the actual use of violence. Why, then, would criminal actors publicize their threats to far wider audiences than the intended targets?
Our new research takes up this question by analyzing the content of threatening messages from four different criminal groups in Colombia and Mexico. These range from neo-paramilitary groups in Colombia, such as the Gaitanistas, to the pseudo-evangelical cartel, the Caballeros Templarios, in Mexico. Breaking the messages down into a “grammar” of their core elements—such as who is the target of the violence, what conditions are placed on the violence, and on whose behalf violence is threatened—we identify consistencies and variations in the use of public threats across these varied cases.
We find that when criminal actors publicize threats, they are projecting order; delineating their rules on the ground, dictating who (or what) is welcome and who will find no place on their turf. The threats may also induce compliance from the target, but the publicity serves this important additional function. The orders projected by different groups share some common elements: they position the criminal actors as mediators between the in-group of decent society and the out-group of deviants from that society (the threateners are also defining—sometimes with extreme prejudice—who they consider deviant). In positioning themselves as violent mediators, criminal actors displace other possible mediators, such as rival groups as well as non-violent civil society actors.
At the same time, the specific order projected varies across groups. Some groups threaten future violence that is conditional, while others threaten violence as the inevitable continuation of actions already occurring. Similarly, the specific in-group and out-group projected by threats varies. The Gaitanistas and Águilas Negras in Colombia both use the language of social cleansing, but the Águilas target an expansive out-group of leftists and alleged guerrilla sympathizers while barely mentioning an in-group, while the Gaitanistas invoke a national in-group but target only localized rivals.
Public threats can be quite low-tech, like the flyers that blanketed campuses in Colombia, but regardless of the medium, they aim to maximize publicity. This highlights the vital role of the media in impeding or permitting the projection of criminal orders. Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with criminal actors threatening and sometimes killing media workers to shape the flow of information (officials are also deeply implicated in this). Preserving the safety and autonomy of the press—even where reporting uncovers uncomfortable truths for those in power—is thus absolutely vital to limiting the influence of public threats and criminal orders. In interviews, however, journalists told us that the government protection mechanism is unreliable and often conditioned on favorable reporting.
Criminal governance is often treated as damaging the “fabric of society.” While we often think of this damage in terms of the direct use of violence, we need to examine not only how criminal actors kill, but also how they talk, persuade, and project. We also need to think about violence beyond the act itself; the hint or threat of violence can have powerful effects on direct targets and wider society. From a safe distance, we might question the low-tech or seemingly unsophisticated threats—pundits in Mexico initially mocked the poor spelling of narco-messages—but this does not mean that they are ineffective tools. Nor does it means that the people closer to the threats can afford to discount them.
Shauna N. Gillooly (@ShaunaGillooly) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Research Institute housed at William and Mary, and an affiliated researcher with Instituto PENSAR at Pontifica Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia. Philip Luke Johnson (@phillegitimate) is a lecturer at Princeton University.
Guest post by Shauna N. Gillooly
The last time the Colombian government and the leftist rebel group the National Liberation Army (ELN) began negotiations in 2018, they were disrupted by a car bomb set off in Bogota, which killed 20. The ELN claimed responsibility for the bomb, which immediately ended negotiations. Now, the government and the rebels are back at the negotiating table.
The ELN formed in the 1960s, and has since established a transnational presence across Colombia and Venezuela, and controls much of the illicit economies along the border of the two countries. A peace accord with the group could significantly improve security in both Colombia and Venezuela, but the obstacles to peace are significant.
Official peace negotiations tend to reflect the ways that war is waged, and ownership of these processes often reinforces pre-existing power structures and dynamics in a society. Social inclusion and integration can have positive consequences for the sustainability of peace accords and their implementation, but peace processes often exclude rather than include. Past research shows that women’s exclusion in peace processes can be seen as the canary in the coal mine—“a highly visible marker of the broader exclusivity of such processes, and the complex dynamics of elite capture in war and peace processes.”
Women’s participation in peace negotiations and peace processes creates more durable and lasting peace, and peace deals signed by women have higher rates of implementation. Yet, women continue to be primarily excluded from these processes. Between 1992 and 2011, only 2 percent of chief mediators and 9 percent of negotiators in peace processes were women.
With many Colombian citizens unhappy with the implementation of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC, another leftist rebel group), the negotiations with the ELN face a new challenge—skepticism. What can experience from the peace negotiations with the FARC tell us about the likelihood that women—and other groups—will be involved in this new round of negotiations with the ELN—and thus, about the durability of the negotiated peace?
In my new research, I conducted interviews with 25 members of both the Colombian government and the FARC negotiation teams who participated in peace negotiations in 2016, to understand how they viewed women’s participation. I interviewed main table negotiators, negotiators who were at the gender and ethnic sub-committee tables, people who worked as researchers and secretaries, and women who gave testimony during negotiations.
I found that initially, no women were included in the negotiations between the FARC and the Colombian government. In fact, it was through civil society pressures, primarily from feminist and women’s organizations, that the government appointed female negotiators. Some interviewees—both men and women—agreed that women’s participation in the 2016 accords was more than sufficient, with one stating that “this is the most involvement that women have ever had in a peace process before.” Others disagreed, stating that the creation of a sub-committee for gender had allowed gendered concerns to be siloed during the negotiation process, and that the final product of the accords reflected that. Still, others said that neither the government nor the FARC were committed to gendered concerns, and that it was only through the pressure placed on both parties by civil society organizations that women were included at the highest levels of negotiation and that gendered concerns were “taken seriously” at the main table.
I found that with a few exceptions, in Colombia, most women were mid-level negotiators, advisors, spokespersons, and secretaries. It was only through the mobilization of women’s and feminist groups that there was some representation of gender diversity at the Havana negotiations.
While conducting interviews with government and FARC negotiators, I included some questions about the ELN negotiations as a way to examine if negotiators felt that the inclusion of women at the table would continue to increase in future peace processes. Respondents were dubious about both the ELN’s and the government’s commitments to gender inclusion in this process.
Despite the benefits, women’s participation in peace processes is still not taken seriously—and not only in Colombia. Feminist activists in Eritrea have lamented the lack of women’s inclusion in nascent peace processes between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and women’s contributions to the Northern Ireland peace process are still downplayed today.
With the new Colombian administration’s commitment to “total peace,” there are many lessons to be learned from the FARC negotiation and implementation process. If Colombian President Petro and his administration want to achieve its ambitious goals toward creating sustainable peace, more robust social and gender inclusion from the ground floor of these peace talks is key.
Shauna N. Gillooly (@ShaunaGillooly) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Research Institute housed at William & Mary.
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