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.The presence of the oil industry hadtransformed the character of the conflict in that region; few couldremain immune from this corrupting process, and many who tried losttheir lives.8The situation in Arauca would inevitably have consequences forCasanare, but Casanare had many of its own particularities, and know-ing these well was probably the only way to manage the impact of oil.The Colombian state should have been in a position to alert the multi-national to the context and its responsibilities.But policy makers andpolitical élites had their minds on the oil revenues, which in the courseof the 1990s would compensate for the decline of traditional exportssuch as coffee and reduce the public sector deficit in a decade in whichthe internal armed conflict reached unprecedented levels of intensity.Ironically, oil revenues also contributed indirectly to the intensificationof that conflict.There are two parts to the Casanare case study that follows.The firstwill trace the rise of what is called a process of multi-polar militarisa-tion in the department, and its relationship to territorial claims, rentseeking and wealth accumulation.The second explores how this mili-tarisation interacted with civil life and institutions, particularly afterthe arrival of oil.By 1998 the interaction between the two had resultedin a situation reached by Arauca in 1988 that is, armed domination ofcivilian political and social life although in Casanare this took formsof its own.TERRITORY, RENTS AND ACCUMULATION: ECONOMICFACTORS IN THE MULTI-POLAR MILITARISATION OFCASANAREBP drew the lesson from Arauca in the early 1990s, that it should notmake any deals with the guerrillas.It turned to the Colombian armedforces, which had a long history of human rights violations, for protec-tion.9 But it failed to draw an important additional lesson from Arauca,about the way oil interacted with the pre-existing patterns of politicaland social life.In Arauca, guerrillas had manipulated these patternsand forged implicit and sometimes explicit alliances with competingpolitical élites in order to gain de facto control over oil revenues.Theparticularities of these pre-existing patterns would be different inCasanare, but should have been taken into account in terms of the waythe discovery of a huge oilfield would impact on them.[ 229 ] OIL WARSThe war in Colombia evolved in new ways in the 1990s.On the onehand the ELN and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia(FARC) enjoyed a new lease of life, the ELN through its strategic focuson oil and the FARC through its involvement in drugs.The rent-seek-ing element was vital for both, and by the end of the 1990s wouldbecome more important than strategic military objectives for an ELNthat was struggling to survive.The FARC saw rent seeking as a meansto further its territorial claims and respond to the paramilitary expan-sion of the 1990s.The paramilitaries had their origins in private armieswhich were formed in the 1980s to enable élites to defend themselvesfrom guerrillas in the face of what was seen as the failure of the armedforces.10 These became known as self-defence groups.In Arauca, thefirst such group appeared in Saravena in 1993, a vigilante group knownas the Saravena Self-Defence, or Los Encapuchados (The Hooded Ones).It targeted unionised workers, particularly members of the peasantorganisation (ANUC) and political opposition leaders.11 A number oflocal and regional self-defence groups emerged at this time in differentconflict zones, including Casanare.They were facilitated by legislationin 1994 to authorise the Convivir, civilian armed groups that weresupposed to support the army in preventive, defensive and intelligencework.The abuses committed by these groups led to the revocation ofthis legislation, but by then self-defence or paramilitary groups hadmultiplied.In many cases, the armed forces colluded with or activelyencouraged these groups.12At this time BP, like the Colombian state, saw the threat to oil extrac-tion in Casanare as coming exclusively from the guerrillas, whose pres-ence was not as strong as in Arauca but was clearly growing.Theposition was understandable given the experience of Arauca, the factthat the ELN had publicly declared that the oil industry was a militarytarget, and that the guerrillas were clearly enemies of the Colombianstate.But it misjudged the complexity of politics in Casanare, and failedto understand that the ELN was only one of a number of armed actorswith interests in the region, and only one of the problems the oil indus-try would face.While the paramilitary right did not formally target theoil industry, its abuse of the civilian population and criminal extortionof local BP contractors had serious implications for BP and the militari-sation of Casanare.In the course of the 1990s, oil interacted with a vari-ety of agendas of at least four organised armed groups seekingterritory, rents and accumulation for a number of distinct purposes.The department of Casanare is a disarticulated territory, whose centraleconomic axis and identity had not been formed before the arrival of oil.The region is normally divided, rather like Arauca, into a plains area, thellanos proper, and the foothills or piedemonte region, itself dividedbetween the Andean slopes, or cordillera, above 1000 meters and thefoothills themselves.As in Arauca, the foothills are the most densely[ 230 ] COLOMBIApopulated area.Eleven of Casanare s 19 municipalities are located there.13In the llanos extensive cattle ranching predominates, in the piedemontesmall peasant farming
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