Casanare Department in eastern Colombia shows how resource wealth and weak central authority could coexist with extensive local political control by paramilitary groups. The department had Colombia’s highest per capita income, driven by oil deposits, yet its municipalities became arenas in which paramilitaries dictated budget allocations, influenced political affiliation, and expropriated property.

A wealthy department under paramilitary control

Casanare was not poor: its significant oil deposits gave it the highest per capita income of any Colombian department. The same resource wealth also made the region attractive to paramilitaries. Once they gained power, they intensified the systematic expropriation of property. The book cites estimates that paramilitaries took as much as 10 percent of all rural land in Colombia, while Salvatore Mancuso was reputed to have accumulated urban and rural property worth $25 million.

Rules imposed on municipal government

An agreement between paramilitary leader Martín Llanos and the mayors of Tauramena, Aguazul, Maní, Villanueva, Monterrey, and Sabanalarga set out requirements imposed on those municipalities by the Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare. The rules prescribed that 50 percent of each municipal budget be managed by the group and that it receive 10 percent of every municipal contract. They also required affiliation with a new political party formed by the paramilitaries and compliance with the mayor’s governance program. These provisions reveal control operating not only through force, but through demands embedded in local budgets, contracts, and political organization.

Local power and incomplete state authority

The book places Casanare within a broader account of Colombia, which it distinguishes from a failed state on the verge of collapse. The national government could provide security and public services in major cities such as Bogotá and Barranquilla, but in significant parts of the country it offered few services and little law and order. There, alternative authorities, including paramilitary leaders, controlled politics and resources. Casanare’s municipal rules exemplify how that gap could be converted into direct influence over public institutions and public money.

Significance

Casanare complicates any simple equation between regional wealth and secure, inclusive government. Oil made the department prosperous by the book’s per capita measure, but it also attracted armed groups that used local political control to extract resources. Its example supports the book’s wider argument that economic outcomes depend not only on the presence of valuable resources or on national averages, but on who exercises authority and how institutions distribute power and property.