The roles of auditing in the construction of an exclusionary nation project: the case of Revisoría fiscal in Colombia

This article illustrates how auditors' professions shaped the Colombian nation-building project at the end of the 19th century. To highlight the conditions that enabled the Colombian local elite to create a postcolonial nation-state, a Latin American theoretical perspective was employed, which offers a better understanding of what occurred in countries like Colombia after their independence from the Spanish Empire. Drawing on the analytical framework of the colonial power matrix, it becomes evident how problematic it is to assume that the Colombian State was constituted in the same way as the States of Continental Europe, as often suggested in previous literature. This study describes how the Colombian local elite, far from decolonizing social relations, reproduced an exclusionary society divided by race, gender, and class to preserve their privileges. In this paper, I argue that auditing carried out by the revisor fiscal (statutory auditor) in the Colombian postcolonial context, beyond serving the nation's economic project associated with progress and social cohesion, functioned as a rhetorical artifact that legitimized an exclusionary civilizing narrative. Based on the primary and secondary sources analyzed, the revisor fiscal , through the rhetoric of inspection, enabled the distinction of an elite identity that recognized itself as superior/civilized while excluding women, indigenous peoples, racialized populations, and the poor from the democratic arena on the grounds of their supposed inferiority.