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Paper short abstract

Colombian ranchers became key state intermediaries by positioning themselves as operational and political allies of the armed forces. Through counterinsurgency collaboration, they secured delegated authority over coercion and land control, transforming brokerage into a development strategy

Paper long abstract

In Colombia's agrarian frontiers, cattle ranchers emerged as pivotal "coercive brokers" operating at the interstices of state formation and capitalist development. Confronted with peasant mobilization and guerrilla insurgency, the Colombian state strategically outsourced violence and territorial governance to landed elites through frontier governance via indirect rule, delegating coercion, surveillance, and land adjudication to ranchers rather than governing through centralized bureaucracy.

Drawing on archival materials including ranchers' periodicals and organizational records, this paper demonstrates how ranchers positioned themselves as indispensable operational and socio-political allies of the armed forces. They actively promoted security privatization, lobbied for counterinsurgency legislation empowering civilian participation in anti-subversive efforts, and consistently defended military autonomy against judicial oversight. National Security Doctrine frameworks provided the institutional architecture enabling this alliance, transforming ranchers from traditional patrons into fully articulated counterinsurgency actors wielding both delegated state authority and independent territorial resources—land, private militias, and patronage networks.

This brokerage operated across multiple registers: politically (mediating state authority in contested peripheries), coercively (deploying paramilitaries to suppress dissent), and infrastructurally (controlling land adjudication to block agrarian reform). Crucially, ranchers' power derived from their structural position as indispensable intermediaries, not merely from state delegation.

The analysis reframes brokers as pivotal agents actively shaping development trajectories rather than liminal byproducts of state weakness. Ranchers' alliance with security forces incentivized territorial control over productivity, systematically blocking agrarian change that threatened their dominance.