Colombia, an “Anomic State": mind the Gap between Law and Reality

I experienced my first cultural shock in Colombia the very first night I arrived. I took a cab from the airport to the city around 11 p.m. and the driver did not stop at too many traffic lights, not accidentally, on purpose. I just assumed he was a reckless driver. But as it turned out, he was very much careful because during nighttime, at some crossroads, if you wait for the red light to turn green, you risk being mugged. As justified as the decision might have been, it was still quite a shock to me. And an even bigger shock I experienced during the following months in Bogotá was that many people did not stop at traffic lights even during the daytime.?

I don’t know why this particular breach of law, more than any other law transgressions I have been told, read about in the news, or witnessed, stuck in my mind and made me think of anomy, a term that the French sociologist émile Durkheim introduced in his study of suicide to describe a state of instability resulting from the breakdown of values and social standards necessary for regulating behavior. So I began to research this phenomenon with the hope of better understanding Colombian society.?

The German-British sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf said that "Rules have always been violated, and all societies have had difficulties enforcing them."

But why are rules in Colombia violated so often and why does the country seem to have more trouble than other countries enforcing the law?

?? Colombia is the 20th most dangerous country in the world according to the Global Peace Index 2022

?? The country's Corruption Perception Index score was 39 out of 100 in 2022, with 0 being highly corrupt        

It has been seven years since I have been asking myself these two questions and investigating and I believe it will still be a long time until I will be able to understand with more clarity the why of it all. But at least I can argue that the country is, in reality, an "anomic state", even though it ultimately serves to describe, more than to explain the situation.

Colombia isn’t an anomic state in the sense that laws and regulations are absent; on the contrary, much of the literature suggests it is very much an over-regulated country.?

??? In 2020, a new law was adopted every five days. Between July 2019 and June 2020, 69 new laws were approved by Congress, among which five were constitutional reforms

?? Since 1991, one-third of the Constitution has been modified, with more than 50 changes to it?        

Nevertheless, this doesn't mean it is not an anomic state, the way Peter Waldmann describes it, the sociologist who coined the term in his book, "Law, Public Security and Everyday Life in Latin America". He argues that societies that are unable to create and consolidate a system of norms that are clear, stable, sanctionable, and acceptable to preserve the public order and represent a guarantee of security have an anomic character. What’s more, they are, on the contrary, a primary source of insecurity originating from fundamental functioning deficiencies that manifest themselves through the struggle to maintain the monopoly on violence and difficulties collecting taxes.

If you’re not convinced yet that Colombia is an anomic State, just think about the following:

?? Illegal armed groups like the National Liberation Army or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia replaced State institutions and authorities in some parts of the country for decades. Despite the 2016 peace accord between the State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, some communities in rural areas have witnessed HIGHER levels of violence or coercion than before the agreement. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, armed and criminal groups have become even more successful than before at recruiting minors and gathering resources by strong-arming communities, thus destroying social cohesion in many rural areas

?? The size of the informal economy of the country, the shadow economy that is neither taxed nor monitored by the government, is estimated to be 33.3% of the GDP, according to World Economics. The OECD considers labor informality a critical challenge for Colombia, with more than 60% of workers in informal jobs, a phenomenon driven by firms looking to evade fiscal and regulatory authorities. This has dramatic consequences for the country, resulting directly in lower tax revenues and limited scope for government expenditure        

Robert K. Merton, in his 1938 study “Social Structure and Anomie”, emphasizes that anomie occurs when institutional regulation is weak and it is replaced by the limits of the calculation of personal advantage and the fear of punishment. Ralph Dahrendorf too draws attention to this aspect of anomie, describing it as a loss of the sanctioning capacity of norms that, what's more, leads to widespread cases of impunity.

This gap between law and reality that encourages a state of “normalized anomie", as Victor Reyes Morris called it, translates into a society heavily buried in crime, violence, corruption, and distrust of citizens, breaking the relationships between rulers, public institutions, and the governed.

Let us not forget the positioning of certain social groups outside the applicable legal and social normativity, even more so in opposition to it, for various interests or reasons, a phenomenon that Victor Reyes Morris identifies as a normative conflict. This too helps to understand the Colombian social structure, as it was consolidated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in terms of the configuration of normative conflicts and how they determine anomic spaces and times that prolong in the twenty-first century.

The difficult development towards the rule of law, in addition to the difficult consolidation of the political system of Colombia as a democracy, led to the emergence of alternative systems of norms to the existing legal order, implying normative conflicts that constitute a source of disorder for citizens.

Criticizing the third wave of democratization that occurred in Latin America in the 1980s, that "did not exactly re-establish the rule of law", but the inequality of citizens before the law, Peter Waldman argues that these normative conflicts have increased especially in recent decades due to this wave of democratization.

I will mention just a few normative conflicts and anomic spaces in Colombian society, some of which have been vastly investigated and some of which not sufficiently so, all of them illustrating how the Colombian state, in its effort to regulate all social spheres, results limited:

?? Drug trafficking

?? High-level prostitution in Bogotá's society

?? The "sanandresitos", markets for contraband goods

?? No man's lands, urban slums        

The Colombian Constitution makes explicit the desire of the state to resemble an all-powerful Leviathan: paradoxically it is analytical and open at the same time, and it has the vocation of an encyclopedia. Its ambition is to completely regulate the matters covered by the Supreme Law, but at the same time it is open, it includes extensive and heterogeneous articles, in addition to many polysemic clauses. This determines an even more alarming need to develop the jurisprudential and legal aspects of the country, according to Hernando Valencia Villa (Colombian jurist and author of the book "Battle Letters: A Critique of Colombian Constitutionalism"), resulting in legislative inflation and then confusion, contradiction and above all, room for different interpretations of the norms, a strong incentive to non-compliance.

Given the recent events in the Colombian political landscape, precisely the 2022 presidential elections, which numerous have called "historic elections", I will leave you with this question: could the newly elected president, Gustavo Petro, the first-ever Colombian left-wing president AND an ex-rebel fighter, restore the state's legitimacy through his inclusion plans?