Kasanaire Farmers' Self-Defense Team

The Paramilitary Peasants of Casanare was an armed organization that imposed rules on local governments in eastern Colombia, turning municipal budgets, contracts, infrastructure, and political affiliation into instruments of its control. Its demands show how paramilitary authority could replace public administration with extraction, even in Casanare, a department whose oil deposits made it one of Colombia’s most prosperous regions.

Territorial Power and Municipal Government

The organization’s authority is documented through an agreement imposed on the mayors of Tauramena, Aguazul, Maní, Villanueva, Monterrey, and Sabanalarga, municipalities in Casanare Department. The pact set out obligations for local officials, making clear that municipal government operated under the armed group’s demands. The evidence does not describe the organization’s internal structure or membership; it does, however, record how its power reached into the everyday administration of several municipalities.

The group demanded 50 percent of each municipality’s budget for it to manage, as well as 10 percent of every municipal contract. These provisions gave it a direct claim on public funds and procurement, rather than merely influence over policy from outside government. They converted municipal revenue and contracting into channels for paramilitary control.

Its demands also reached beyond money. Mayors had to attend every meeting the organization called and include it in every infrastructure project. They were required to affiliate with the political party formed by the group and carry out their own governance programs. Taken together, these rules bound local officials to the organization through finances, public works, political allegiance, and compulsory participation. The pact therefore depicts a system in which formal municipal institutions remained in place, but their decisions and resources were subject to an armed power.

Casanare’s Resources and Extraction

The organization’s hold was connected to the material value of the region. Casanare was not a poor department: significant oil deposits gave it the highest per capita income of any Colombian department. The book identifies precisely this kind of resource wealth as an attraction for paramilitaries. In this setting, control over municipal budgets and contracts offered access to public resources in a region already made valuable by oil.

The wider account describes paramilitary expansion as coercive and costly to civilians. These groups fought the FARC, killed civilians, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The account estimates that, in early 2010, nearly 4.5 million people—around 10 percent of Colombia’s population—were internally displaced. It also characterizes the functions assumed by paramilitaries as a takeover of government, with taxes collected for their own pockets rather than used to provide public services. The Casanare pact supplies concrete terms for that broader pattern: a fixed share of budgets, a levy on contracts, and a required role in infrastructure.

The evidence also places the Casanare organization within a larger pattern of expropriation. Once paramilitaries gained power, they intensified the systematic taking of property. Salvatore Mancuso was reported to have accumulated urban and rural property worth $25 million, while estimates placed paramilitary expropriation as high as 10 percent of all rural land in Colombia. Those figures concern paramilitary activity more broadly, not the Casanare group alone, but they illuminate the context in which its control of municipal resources operated.

State Authority and Political Consequences

Colombia is described not as a failed state on the verge of collapse, but as a country whose central government lacked sufficient authority over all its territory. In major cities such as Bogotá and Barranquilla, the state could provide security and public services. Elsewhere, it offered few services and little law and order, leaving alternative groups and individuals to control politics and resources. Casanare’s municipal pact exemplifies this uneven reach: the local authorities existed, yet an armed organization prescribed how they should handle money, projects, meetings, and political affiliation.

This arrangement had consequences beyond the municipalities named in the pact. The broader account argues that national politicians could exploit lawlessness in peripheral regions while paramilitary groups were left to act with little interference. Violence and weak central authority thus became mutually sustaining, alongside political actors who benefited from the arrangement. The Casanare rules make that relationship legible at the local level: public offices and budgets were not simply absent, but subjected to an alternative authority that redirected their resources and constrained their choices.

The organization’s significance lies in this conjunction of territorial power and extraction. Its demands show how a paramilitary group could appropriate the functions and revenues of government without abolishing municipal institutions outright. In a wealthy, resource-bearing department, public budgets and contracts became points of leverage; the resulting order weakened meaningful state authority while channeling public resources toward the armed group. This case illustrates the book’s broader concern with political power that is neither adequately centralized nor accountable across a country’s full territory.