Landowners Meet Drug Traffickers: Coercive Networks and Violence in Rural Colombia

Abstract The transport of drugs and the flow of drug proceeds have a major impact on the social and economic configuration of the rural areas affected by them. Though this is widely acknowledged, the impact of illicit economies on agrarian social conflicts remains unclear. Using the case of the marijuana trade in the agrarian societies of the Magdalena department in Colombia, we show that drug trafficking fostered a narco‐bourgeoisie, formed by the intertwining of the legal and illegal worlds of landowners and drug traffickers. We argue that this process had a major impact on social conflict, as this new criminalised elite was considerably more prone to the use of violence. We propose three mechanisms to explain this: the exposure of this criminalised elite to multiple attacks, their proximity to the market for violence, and their political influence.