José Alexander Manjarres Márquez, Ramiro Enrique Salazar Ramos, E. Pérez
This article reviews the Colombian regulatory system, which has developed various forms of transferring resources from the national level to the local level for financing social expenditures, primarily in education, which is the sector with the highest allocation. Subsequently, the current system is described, which grants the most representative transfers from the nation to territorial entities to address sector-specific social expenditure. To analyze the resources allocated to the education sector in the Sucre department during the period 2010-2020 in practice and to determine if the transfer system effectively aims at fiscal decentralization, coupled with strengthening local and departmental capacities to autonomously manage transferred resources and efficiently manage tax collection and the acquisition of own resources. The work was developed using a mixed-method methodology, allowing for the approach of quantitative data to support qualitative analyses of the research using primary and secondary sources, as well as the observation of socioeconomic phenomena, establishing concurrent triangulation design.
The article focuses on ways to assess the origin and development of the first national currency in the world which was introduced into circulation in Venezuela in 2018.Besides, it sets the goal to find out specific features of Petro (PTR) and its operation as Venezuelan national cryptocurrency.The methodological basis consists of general scientific methods of cognition to include analysis, synthesis, and comparison.The special methods such as content analysis of official documents as well as economic analysis are also applied in the article.The research produced some key findings: recent surveys confirm its new function of becoming a convenient means of payment in the environment of the cash absence, and a means of survival for many families living in the environment of a deepening economic crisis and sanctions introduce by the USA.The main outcomes imply that the national cryptocurrency PRT has some advantages over other cryptocurrencies, one of them being the fact that unlike Bitcoin and other currencies it is issued by the Venezuelan government and has a state guarantee of reliability and stability when operating in the country.However, it is not without disadvantages, the main one being the possibility of its anonymous usage which has resulted in an increased flow of illegal transactions and a larger shadow economy which has grown significantly in Venezuela.The main conclusions drawn from the research are that the introduction of the national cryptocurrency had produced a positive impact on the economic development of the country.In fact, it resulted in an increase in the number of financial transactions within the country; it led to additional opportunities concerning exchanges with other countries and international financing of Venezuela by third parties; the cryptocurrency contributed to the integration of Venezuela into a new type of the world market.
This research focuses on the analysis of the Colombian multiculturalism through an operative characterization. In this sense, the assessment of multicultural policies goes beyond the traditional discourse analysis, and instead it empirically reviews the implementation of differential rights translated into concrete public policies. To meet this goal, this study first explores the different symbolic schemes of the relationship between the State-Nation and the indigenous populations. In a second stage, it analyses how the policies that recognize cultural difference since 1991, are articulated with a project of state modernization of neoliberal characteristics, that is exemplified by the territorial decentralization phenomena. Finally, this research presents an analysis of the actual effects of multiculturalism in the fields of health, education, economic production and political governance for the Misak people, specifically for the Resguardo Mayor de Guambia, an indigenous reserve located in the department of Cauca. From this case study, readers will be able to discover how in the Colombian context, there are un-meet aspects (des-encuentros) and paradoxical effects between the Government’s neoliberal vision on public policies, the dynamics of ethnic recognition promoted by the state and the communitarian autonomous processes advocated by indigenous organizations.
Since the 1980s, the conflation of political violence and the cocaine boom have devastated rural Colombia, fueling the displacement of some 4 million campesinos—mainly by paramilitary groups. Colombia's northwest region surrounding the Gulf of Urabá has been an unruly epicenter for this mass of dispossessed humanity. Established by narcotraffickers and agrarian elites, paramilitary groups simultaneously act as drug-trafficking private militias and counterinsurgent battalions, and they use land appropriation and agribusiness as conduits for money laundering and illicit profit. When paramilitaries assaulted Urabá in the 1990s, thousands of campesinos fled their homes and, to this day, await government restitution of their lands. Other peasants, however, have collectively mobilized and peacefully seized back portions of their stolen farms from the armed groups. The Afro-Colombian campesinos of the Curvaradó River, for instance, have established “humanitarian zones” and “biodiversity zones” as a way of protecting themselves and inching back onto their occupied farms. Few places in Colombia exhibit all these tendencies—forced displacement, campesino militancy, and violent forms of accumulation and rule—in such abundance as Urabá. Urabá, however, is not simply a tale of political disorder. My research argues that the region's combustible mix of narco-driven economies of violence, peasant struggles, and deeply contested forms of governance have converged into a deadly form of frontier state formation. “Frontier” is not meant in any originary sense; I deploy it critically to conjure the spatial production of places like Urabá in Colombia's historical geopolitical imaginaries as “stateless” and “savage” zones of irreconcilable alterity (Serje 2005). While all the region's social actors are implicated in producing the norms and forms of everyday governance in this frontier zone—despite evident imbalances in power relations—the violent incoherencies of this process stem from the political alignments and misalignments of the multiple, overlapping territorialities being produced. Dominant narratives in Colombia claim the root of the problem afflicting places such as Urabá is the historical and ongoing “absence of the state”. Paramilitary commanders explicitly couch their activities as the “creation of a state in its absence”, while local residents regularly lament their “abandonment” by the state. With this in mind, my research asks, how is “the state” produced in a region where it supposedly does not exist? In other words, how does the abstraction of the state gain its everyday socio-spatial dimensionality—materially and symbolically—through the confluence of paramilitary networks, economies of violence, and peasant struggles? And how do campesinos’ territorial assertions challenge Urabá's ensembles of organized violence, accumulation, and rule? Struggles over the state in Colombia are being expressed and conducted as territorial struggles; the various actors discussed in my research—whether peasants, narco-paramilitaries, insurgents, landowners, or government agents—are all in the “business” of producing territory (Brenner and Elden 2009). Indeed, the interconnected dynamics of frontier governance, narco-fueled economies of violence, and peasant resistance have made territory itself not only an object of political contestation, but also a collective springboard for peasants’ reclamation of stolen lands. Even by conventional conceptions of the state, Urabá has hardly ever been “stateless”. In fact, the efficiency with which paramilitaries seized the region in the late 1990s was in part due to existing structures of government. Municipalities had recently gained new political, administrative, and fiscal power under the decentralization reforms of the 1991 Constitution, which was widely seen as a peace offering of political inclusion to guerrillas. But it was the paramilitaries who harnessed municipal structures, becoming the local handmaidens of the decentralization process (Ballvé 2012a). Following practices pioneered by rebel forces, paramilitaries not only infiltrated Juntas de Acción Comunal (Community Action Boards)—the country's most subsidiary form of local governance—they also established Juntas where these did not exist. Commanders began implementing agribusiness projects on displaced people's lands through a complex circuitry of local institutions, narco-capital, NGOs, politicians, government grants, international aid, and private firms.1 The favored form adopted by these paramilitary-backed agribusinesses is a type of corporate-peasant contract farming dubbed “strategic alliances” that the government and aid agencies have sometimes negligently helped fund. Under Washington's antidrug and counterinsurgency program known as Plan Colombia, USAID supports “strategic alliances” with its “alternative development” programs in addition to municipally oriented decentralization projects aimed at “local development” and “institution building”. Taking advantage of the strategic alliance structure, paramilitaries engaged in widespread “land laundering” by divvying up vast swaths of land and parceling them out to front men and sham “peasant cooperatives” (Ballvé 2012b). Discourses of local, green, participatory, and multicultural grassroots development with their attendant institutional forms and practices became utterly instrumental to how the land grab was executed and laundered in practice. Paramilitaries churned up the old spatialities of production and governance while consolidating new ones that proved well aligned with government imperatives of counterinsurgency and export agribusiness. In short, paramilitary activities are not anathema to projects of liberal governance, usually associated with tropes of the “rule of law” and “institution-building”; they are deeply tied to initiatives aimed at producing governable spaces and subjects, expanding trade, and attracting capital. The ongoing social, spatial, and historical production of the state as a “realized abstraction” (Lefebvre 1991) in Urabá emerges from these intersecting and contradictory forces operating at multiple scales—from campesino mobilization and armed left vanguards, to narco-capitalist agribusiness and global geopolitics. Through the situated struggles of these intersections, distinct territorialities align and, fatefully, collide. After the violent displacements of the late 1990s, the peasants of the Curvaradó River began trickling back to portions of their lands, establishing small “humanitarian zones” and “biodiversity zones”. Despite constitutionally protected status as collectively titled Afro-Colombian property, most of the land remains controlled by paramilitaries. Nonetheless, the campesinos have slowly expanded the zones, incrementally encroaching onto their farms and forests. Marked by subsistence and mixed agro-ecological practices, the motley landscapes of the reclaimed lands stand in stark contrast to the grid-patterned plantations surrounding them. Under siege by Urabá's violent regimes of accumulation and rule, the Curvaradó's campesinos have articulated “global” discourses of humanitarianism, environmental conservation, and ethnic rights with localized political cultures in defense of their collective property, which they insistently call “territory”. While the discourses help peasants gain a modicum of protection through transnational advocacy networks, the state remains a central node of their political demands in so far as it is constantly hailed as the principle arbiter—and violator—of their rights. Despite being embedded in state-centric contemporary liberal praxis, the ethical-political registers of these discourses are being repurposed by peasants in ways that exceed liberal pretensions. Humanitarianism, environmental conservation, and ethnic rights have become springboards toward more inventive and affirmative political horizons that insist on the mutually constitutive integrity of life, land, and livelihood—in shorthand, a politics of vitalism. Territory, as they conceive and enact it, is the centerpiece of this political project. By trying to turn the tide against paramilitary dominion through the production of territory, Curvaradó's politics of vitalism is a lived critique of the necropolitical “spaces of death” surrounding them (Taussig 1984; Mbembe 2003). Indeed, when asked to define what “territory” means, they simply respond, “Territorio es vida” (“Territory is life”). This project emerged from 4 years in Colombia as a researcher and investigative journalist covering similar issues. Before that, I worked for 5 years as an editor and writer for the NACLA Report on the Americas, an independent left-wing journal on Latin American affairs based in New York City. It was at NACLA that my interests in research, writing, and politics first converged professionally; and it was with this same hope of convergence that I returned to academia in 2009. I am deeply honored and grateful to have received this generous award. It has already helped me organize a panel at the 2012 Latin American Studies Association conference. With perspectives from anthropology, geography, journalism, and literary criticism, we discussed the theoretical, methodological, and narrative challenges posed by the recent explosion of Latin America's drug wars. The award is also helping finance travel for interviews with jailed paramilitary commanders. Thank you, Antipode. A heartfelt thanks also to my advisors and fellow graduate students at Berkeley for their camaraderie and their imprint on this project.
Abstract Political decentralization has been promoted as a way to devolve responsibility, bring government closer to citizens, and improve accountability. The shift prompted new local elections, but were the elected officials responsive to citizens or to national party elites? This study examines unique survey data from 125 Colombian mayors to identify the factors they believe were critical in their victories and thereby to identify the people to whom they believe they owe loyalty: citizens or party leaders. Examining the relative value mayors assign to their own actions versus those of the party, combined with information on how they financed campaigns, sheds important light on subnational electoral dynamics in Colombia.
In recent years, decentralization and regional autonomy measures have figured prominently in negotiations designed to end some of the world's most important conflicts, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan. Reforms that shift powers to subnational units deserve the attention of those who are trying to promote security via institutional design, but the risks associated with these territorial reforms are considerable. When political and economic resources are transferred to subnational governments in the attempt to create meaningful access to the political system for former combatants, the great risk is that these same resources can be used to finance a continuation of the armed struggle instead. In response to the popularity of territorial reforms in many post-conflict settings, this paper sounds a cautionary note by evaluating the negative impact of decentralization on security in Colombia, site of Latin America's longest and deadliest armed conflict. After analyzing the design decisions of reformers who hoped that decentralization would help end the conflict, I argue that decentralization in fact financed the expansion of armed clientelism by illegal groups on both the left and right. Thanks to the weakness of the police in much of the national territory, guerrillas and paramilitaries have been able to use decentralized resources to destabilize the state, limiting even further its monopoly over the use of force and creating what are in effect parallel states on the left and right.
Open access
History and Politics in Latin America
Political Conflict and Governance
Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
In Antiguo régimen y liberalismo, Gabriela Tío Vallejo details the political history of Tucumán as it made the transition from colony to liberal provincial capital. Vallejo focuses on Tucumán’s cabildo and elections; she makes extensive use of census materials and a variety of other primary and secondary sources.In the first section, Vallejo sets the stage for the end of the colonial period by describing the type of society present in Tucumán, as well as the political institutions that supposedly carried out the crown’s wishes in that region. The most important political and social group was the vecinos—merchants and hacendados— which is not unusual in an area far from the Spanish centers of power. The vecinos occupied the important positions within the cabildo, and through their work represented all tucumanos.Politically, the two most important institutions within colonial society in Tucumán were the cabildo and the intendant system, instituted after 1796 as part of the Bourbon reforms. Tucumán did not have a governor or a corregidor. The cabildo’s members were elected by the urban vecinos, who thus wielded extraordinary authority and power over the political life of the city. Furthermore, in the case of Tucumán the powers of the creoles relative to the peninsulares increased with the intendant system and the Bourbon reforms. The most important creole families in Tucumán became even more powerful after the changes instituted after 1796. Vallejo argues that the Bourbon reforms did not bring about absolutism in Tucumán as they did elsewhere in Latin America. In fact, they did the exact opposite; they further decentralized political power and increased Tucumán’s autonomy vis-à-vis the crown.In the second half of the book, Vallejo discusses the impact of revolution and war on politics and the political process in Tucumán. She argues that war, which lasted from 1808 until 1819, caused only limited change in the city and that there was no political change. She observes that the cabildo changed with the times, forming ties that eventually enabled it to transform itself into a more autonomous institution. Additionally, indirect community participation increased in the post-independence period, though it had antecedents in the colonial regime.By the 1820s, Tucumán had its hands full dealing with provinces along its borders. Neighboring provinces often acted as foreign countries, and bandits roamed the frontier areas between provinces, usually supported by provincial governments on one side or the other. Military uprisings and liberalized electoral laws transformed politics in the city. Vallejo argues that during this period political leaders in Tucumán implemented liberal practices and principles that had evolved from traditional forms.Nonetheless, Vallejo contends that the organization of the provincial state suffered from two problems in the 1820s: terrible economic crises and the new reluctance of the vecinos to participate in politics. These problems had a direct bearing on the survival of the cabildo. Very few vecinos were willing to accept a political office that provided few benefits and in some cases could be dangerous. They thus became apathetic about the political process, evidenced by their poor participation in elections during this period. Furthermore, the institution that replaced the cabildo in the 1820s, the Sala de Representantes, did so only after the cabildo ceased to function as a political power precisely because its members, the vecinos, refused to hold political posts that could endanger their political and economic interests within the community.Vallejo’s point about the decentralizing effects of the Bourbon reforms is an innovative one that broadens our understanding of these reforms and suggests that we ought to revisit their local implications on a case-by-case basis. However, she offers fewer original insights about the postindependence period. Additionally, the book’s overly lengthy chapters make it difficult for a reader to follow Vallejo’s main arguments and conclusions. Nonetheless, this study provides a wealth of information about the political development and transformation of a city in a lesser-known and -studied region of Latin America.
Elections around the world have become a major international concern since the inception of modern democracy. It is a fact that the success of any democracy depends largely on its electoral process. In conducting a free and credible election, the process must be transparent to be adjudged credible. The electioneering process begins with the compilation of a voter register; this register contains the details of every eligible voter as stipulated by law or guild lines that guilds the electoral process. As part of what makes up, the guidelines are age restrictions for every intended voter. It is forbidding by law in most countries for a child to register as a voter, but this is not so in reality in most countries, especially in a developing nation. Because the age restriction is not obeyed, this has resulted in the incidences of underage voters and disputed election outcomes. This work provides an efficient and effective solution for the above concerns, using multiple digital solutions. The model will be integrating a deep learning Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), an Interplanetary File System (IPFS), and an Ethereum Smart Contract Blockchain. The role of the CNN is to detect any underage individual who intends to register as a voter. The CNN is built with a pretrained dataset, and it was trained with an age classifier that grouped the age on the images on the data set into eight distinct groups. This age grouping will help the age predictive algorithm estimate and place every image on the camera in a unique age group. This will only produce a binary result, which is "eligible to voter or not eligible to vote." This outcome is based on the preset threshold cut-off on the age group. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) will provide a large storage capacity that will allow for off-chain data storage and still provide the model with all the functionalities and benefits of the blockchain. It also provides a hashing function that will assign and identify every registered voter with a unique cryptographic Identity. This ID will prevent the storage of the same information into the database, in so doing, eliminating multiple voting. Finally, the blockchain will provide a voting platform where the model will be implemented. It will allow every registered voter with a unique ID to create an account and vote on the blockchain. The adapted CNN was tested and evaluated and shows 85.9% performance accuracy, and when compared against two other age predictive models, it recorded an increase of 1.2%. In comparison, the complete digital solution model recorded 95.3% in performance. We believe this model will perform even better when subjected to further research work.
Open access
Science, Technology, and Education in Latin America
Abstract The public sector in Latin America has been characterized by the proliferation of national semi‐autonomous bodies known as ‘decentralized agencies’. This article focuses on such agencies in Colombia from the 1960s onwards. Attention will be paid to their institutional proliferation and how this affected local government, particularly in the fields of water and sanitation. Such changes in state organization have not been problem free. The growth of ‘decentralized agencies’ has been associated with problems of inefficiency, administrative confusion and problems of social and political unrest. Indeed, such contradictions have resulted in the issue of decentralization being placed on the political agenda and the development of innovative and administrative reforms that could breathe new life into local government.