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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the devil's transformation in Colombia's Eastern Plains from folkloric figure into shadowy paramilitary protector, arguing this shift indexes violent capitalist intensification and experiences of alienation during armed conflict.

Paper long abstract

The devil has long wandered the Eastern Plains of Colombia, attending parties, playing music, seducing women, and offering pacts for wealth. Oral tradition, music, and literature of this rural region attest to his folkloric presence. Yet this devil differs radically from the figure with whom paramilitaries, right-wing armed organisations, pacted during the 1990s and 2000s, one of the bloodiest episodes of Colombia's armed conflict. This new devil does not party and crucially, he promises not wealth but life protection and supernatural powers to paramilitary combatants. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Colombian Eastern Plains examining the pervasiveness of the supernatural during paramilitary war, this paper analyses the ontological transformation of the devil figure and what it reveals about violent social rupture under armed conflict. Inspired by Michael Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, I argue that the devil, as personification of evil, acquires heightened social relevance during moments of capitalist intensification. In the Eastern Plains, this intensification occurred at gunpoint, as paramilitary groups violently restructured rural economies and social relations. Through close attention to representations of the devil and his relationships with humans described across tales, oral narratives, music, and ritual practice, the paper demonstrates how the devil's transformation externalizes social, economic, and psychic forces unleashed by armed conflict, articulating experiences of alienation and resistance among both paramilitary members and communities subjected to the military and structural violence accompanying the consolidation of neoliberal economies. The shifting devil thus becomes an index of capitalism's violence.