Cardona
MPSA 2004
9
response to the fiscal pressure toward integration into the global economy, was to design
state institutions responsible for providing internal security. The timing and nature of
these choices about institutional design fit into an overall pattern of state formation that
privileged integration into the world economy over conquest, as had been the case in
Western Europe (Mazzuca 2000).
To help us understand more concretely the interplay among constitutional
governance, institutional design of the public forces, and state formation, we can look at a
case study of one Latin American republic that faced particularly acute challenges with
respect to these three processes. Colombia suffered one of the most conflictual nineteenth
centuries in Latin America, with numerous civil wars carried out within a context of
partisan struggle for dominance of the political regime. Unlike many other Latin
American republics, however, the institutional solutions to this 19
th
-century problem did
not generate a lasting peace, although they did enable successful insertion into the global
economy via the development of the coffee economy. After forty-some years of relative
peace, the country exploded into one of the most brutal and longest-lasting episodes of
civil war, declared or undeclared, in Latin American history. La Violencia, as this period
has come to be known, claimed the lives of 200,000 people between 1946 and 1966. One
of the legacies of this period of conflict was to sow the seeds of the conflict among
guerrillas, paramilitaries, drug traffickers and the state that has wracked Colombian
society over the past two decades. Why did the Colombian solution work so well for forty
years and then break down so spectacularly?
To address this question, we can proceed in three stages: the first is to explore the
equilibrium—or lack thereof—of 19
th
-century Colombian politics, particularly with
Convention