War-Time Economic Orders and the Politics of Illicit Market Regulations in a Cocaine-Producing Colombian Region

Although the 'criminal rebels' debate has moved forward substantially from the earliest iterations during the heyday of the so-called economic theory of conflict, the ways in which engagement in different funding opportunities affect rebels' behaviour and/or political project remains a matter of contention. By looking at the policies and politics of the FARC-EP rebels who did not demobilised in 2016 in the Colombian region of Cauca, we will discuss, from a war-time economic angle, how involvement in the drug industry -although not as extensive as the media or the government claims- has provided them with far more than financial opportunity, opening a space for governance, for building a constituency and to engage in rural development. Based on several interviews across the region and extensive fieldwork in one particular cocaine producing village (Betulia, Suárez), we will discuss the ways in which this involvement (which includes taxation, environmental regulations, price control and access to markets) affects their interactions with the local population, their engagement with forces of the state, and the prospects of overcoming the armed conflict in the country. We will claim that illicit drugs have provided an opportunity to the FARC-EP historically to engage in governance measures and solidify a peasant constituency in regions of recent colonisation, which is fully in line with their politics in favour of agrarian reform and the protection of the smallholders. However, we will also argue that, given their control of only the lowest links in the value-chain, their policies on price control are bound to have contradictory effects, while the latest government's crackdown on traffickers rather than the producers, have demonstrated the limits of their partial control on the industry and the interdependence, in the context of the wartime economic order, of various contradictory actors.