Introduction

Analytical approach: shared sovereignties and criminal governance

The circumstances of violence, security, and crime in Colombia, for state actors as well as groups outside the law, allow for a novel approach to the study of sovereignty, security, and governance. Orthodox notions of security and sovereignty are insufficient for analyses of the violent and criminal enclaves in the country. These run parallel to the processes of pacification and territorial control agreed upon with communities, resulting in a complex web of motivations and emotions. In other words, Colombian territorial reality does not fit into traditional schemes and frameworks of the political and conceptual theory of the state. There are irregular actors with governing capacities and state institutions with the political will to build bridges between the legal and illegal worlds in order to establish controls, norms, and rules over society. This is a constant phenomenon in the architecture of the roles between actors, violent methods, criminal acceptance, and the sharing of territorial power.

The epistemological construction of sovereignty has been diluted by the wear and tear of this term related to the process of state configuration (Rees 1950). That is, it is understood in contemporary political dynamics that sovereignty is fundamental for the existence of the state. However, in certain aspects, sovereignty is still a pending issue in states like Colombia, even while the romantic notion of sovereignty as an unbreakable institution continues to survive in terms of the architecture of the republic (Woody 1968). Nevertheless, from the perspective of McVeigh (2021), sovereignty is assumed to be a form of authority and a practice of deliberation, dominance, and government, an approach that considers that sovereignty can be understood as a practice and expression of responsibility between society, territory, and institutions (McVeigh 2021). In effect, Colombia has shared sovereignties in relations between non-state (violent and criminal) actors and state actors, demonstrating collusion in which, instead of competing for territorial power, criminal and state structures share certain legitimacies that allow them to coexist. While the construction of sovereignty in the Colombian context attempts to follow this classical notion, in reality, many of its vital structural elements are absent, bringing into question the nature of sovereignty in the country.

After the signing of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian state and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, with the Spanish acronym) in 2016, the constellation of armed actors has seen important changes. On the one hand, the former FARC desecuritised (Knudsen 2001), while on the other, violent enclaves and armed remobilisations represent new dynamics in the capacity of some armed groups to configure structures of territorial power and criminal sovereignty (Gutiérrez 2020). Consequently, shared sovereignty is understood as the capacity of legal and illegal actors to forge orders and arrangements of legitimacy over the population without competition with other parties (Schultze-Kraft 2016a). These arrangements allow state institutions and criminal groups to share sovereignty and to enjoy transactional benefits like territorial dominance, the definition of the rules of the game for the population, the administration of justice, and security (Blattman et al. 2021).

Based on the above, the relationship between state institutions, criminals, and society takes on a special meaning in the Colombian case. With the formation of shared sovereignties, the defining and core element of this relationship gives rise to the architecture of a kind of criminal governance. Although for Lessing (2020), the existence of criminal governance is usually clearer in marginal areas across the planet, a wealth of conceptual approaches has generally focused on cases in Latin America and Africa.

A first dimension appears in cases linked to the criminal conditions of para-state notions in sync with insurgent logics, internal conflicts, drug trafficking, prisons, and armed groups, as well as violent enclaves after the end of certain armed conflicts. Indeed, the phenomenon has even reached the stage in which criminal groups achieve political discourses and politicise their structures (Badillo and Mijares 2021).

It is worth highlighting some of these approaches. For example, the works of Barnes (2022) and Desmond (2006) in Rio de Janeiro concentrate on violence and patterns of subnational criminal governments. The works of Duncan (2014) regarding drug trafficking and modes of parallel economies in Mexico and Colombia allow an analysis of illicit economies as fuel for the projection of power in central and peripheral areas of the two countries. Similarly, Lessing and Graham (2019) concentrate on prisons and struggles for power in the streets of Brazil, Schulte-Bockholt (2013) attempts to decipher the corruption of Fujimori in Peru as a criminal governance that comes from the establishment, and Ferreira and Richmond (2021) emphasise how criminal governance creates blockages that prevent peacebuilding in Latin America. These final authors suggest that criminal structures do not reduce violence and, in fact, take advantage of cultural and structural violence to achieve their political, social, and economic objectives (Ferreira and Richmond 2021, p. 161).

A second dimension relates to power tensions in areas of mining, indigenous and minority ethnic groups, and strategic natural resources, as well as ethnic conflicts and authoritarian orders in Africa. In this category, the works of Asmal and Suresh (1998) on apartheid and its idea of social control in South Africa stand out for their emphasis on the key elements of transitions and the logics of otherness. Likewise, the work of Meagher (2012) on the hybrid governance hypothesis in Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo offers an interesting comparison and contrasting of local security systems, the forces involved, and the construction of legitimacy with social impacts. This study suggests that pacts and arrangements between the establishment and criminal groups work for a balance of forces and territorial control. This line allows certain lights to be shed on the dynamics of the Colombian case.

In studies of criminal governance and approaches to shared sovereignties, both of these dimensions have common elements like the corrosive forms of power and non-state order, as well as the struggle to define legitimacy (Meagher 2012). Other common and shared characteristics are a weak state, the absence of institutions in marginal territories, low cohesion, the militarisation of civil spaces and the emergence of forces rivalling the state. Thus, criminal governance has two main areas to be studied: the imposition of rules and underground legitimacies within a population, and the internal government within the group (Schultze-Kraft 2016b; Lessing and Graham 2019). Together, these two areas represent a symbiosis sufficiently dangerous for the rule of law anywhere in the centre or periphery.

In this way, criminal governance operates under institutional schemes to the extent that it exercises control over territories, administers justice, establishes patterns in the illicit economy (Cruz 2016), redefines the social contract, and has mechanisms of power over populations (Campana and Varese 2018). In addition, within this configuration, dimensions of criminal diplomacy and sovereignty can be attributed (Liu 2019), catalytic (Hocking 1999), and subnational (Duchacek 1984) when it is these groups who build communication channels with other actors outside national borders. Criminal governance tends to occur where the state is weak or absent (Canter and Youngs 2016; Müller 2018) and sufficient spaces to emulate constructions of underground power are produced.

Lessing (2020) concludes that, in many scenarios, the local criminal organisation is the relevant authority. However, it is interesting to note that the state is far from completely absent, as citizens pay taxes, vote, and even report gangs as punishment for abusive behaviour (Schultze-Kraft 2016b; Lessing 2020). Criminal governance thrives in pockets of low state presence, but that does not mean that the state and criminals are competitors or rivals (Breuer & Varese 2023). Indeed, criminal governance differs from that of state, corporate, and rogue governments because it is embedded in larger domains of political power (Lessing 2020, p. 1). This governance can contribute to the construction of the state when it does not compete with the legal forces but rather permits the coexistence and consent of the different parties.

All of the above suggests the need to rethink the notion of sovereignty in certain contexts associated with the intertwining of the state and criminal actors: contexts that complicate civic-institutional and civic-criminal relations and allow conventional and irregular structures to build different types of non-exclusive governance and legitimacy. In certain cases, while the state is absent from some territories, criminal structures act as the state and operate in harmony with this absence. After the Covid-19 pandemic, the Colombian state faced institutional decentralisation, including the shaking up of priorities on the public agenda with healthcare displacing traditional issues of security and violence. Based on this, armed groups assumed informal roles of social and territorial control while the state dealt with health issues. In other words, the circumstances of the health emergency produced by the pandemic allowed acceleration in the sharing of sovereignty and criminal governances.

The pandemic has prompted the formulation of research lines that have proposed the analysis of the correlation between Covid-19 and the strengthening/adaptation/weakening of the state and criminal organisations (Global Initiative 2021). The cooperation practices mentioned previously are not formalised through explicit alliances that could provoke a media scandal, but are instead managed through strategies in which each actor can offer their services according to their capabilities. This is the case of the Medellín “combos”, where it has been shown that although the combos are not an absolute power, they do know how to share assistance and social control functions with the state (Blattman et al. 2021).

Methodology

According to the postulates of the previous section, the research question of this article is: How were shared sovereignties and criminal governances configured during the Covid-19 pandemic in Colombia?

It should be specified that social isolation implied a restriction of research activities with instruments like ethnography and field work in areas where discourses and practices between legality and illegality converge. However, this also strengthened the influence of digital narratives in making visible actions in which the relationships between state institutions and para-institutional actors were articulated, weakened, or strengthened in an ambiguous but harmonious way.

Materials

Through a digital ethnography exercise and its possibilities of identifying elements of reality that are not captured by traditional information gathering exercises (Ruiz 2019), we built a database that tracks narratives of shared sovereignty and criminal governance in the context of the pandemic. The working hypothesis suggests that both criminal organizations and armed groups were strengthened during this period of time, as agents capable of meeting the social and economic needs of the most vulnerable populations affected by Covid-19 by guaranteeing health control and coercive order within these territories.

This research is of an exploratory nature, laying the foundations for a more exhaustive analysis of spaces of shared sovereignty and criminal governance during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our period of analysis is from April 2020 to April 2022, understanding that this is the period in which Covid-19 had the greatest impact on “normality” in daily life.

The data analysed consists of a total of 182 online narratives which were collected through clipping using automated aggregators (Google News and Bing News). The search strategy was undertaken by means of keywords established according to the parameters of the research objective –criminal governance, violence, criminal organisations, armed groups, drug trafficking, and pandemic–, using the Boolean operator «AND» to parameterize the search. For this reason, the word pandemic was used in each of the Boolean equations (see Table 1). The narratives obtained were filtered manually, by reading the title and body of each text.

Table 1 Boolean search equations
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As a means of obtaining data, the advantages of hypertextuality, interactivity, continuous updating, instantaneity, ubiquity, hypermediality and the contextualization of some or several events at the same time were considered (Zamith 2008). The digital environment has become an inseparable part of today's society and research processes; new information technologies allow information to be obtained not only at a local level but also nationally and internationally.

Taking the above into account, we undertook the information collection procedure through a digital ethnography. This was a useful tool for tracking and collecting data and opinions, allowing us to expand the panorama of observation of the interactions and correlations between different spaces and variables. (Murthy 2011) Thus, a prototypical structure is formed for the analysis of the narratives contained in the digital world, in this case, regarding shared sovereignties and criminal governances in the context of the pandemic.

Digital ethnography is an innovative method, but it is known that it presents some limitations compared to fieldwork. That is, it was not possible in this case to undertake a direct experience or understanding of the space of the phenomenon under study. However, as (Londoño 2012) suggests, digital narratives now become a metanarrative, leading to the understanding, description, evaluation, and analysis of a particular fact or event, so that the narratives found in digital spaces become an alternative ethnographic resource that opens space for interaction and discussion, avoiding simplifications and generalizations (Gómez 2017).

Method

After tracking the digital narratives that report on shared sovereignty (SS) and criminal governance (CG), we undertook a systematisation exercise in line with the proposal of Garzón (2021), highlighting how the variables (SS) and (CG) achieve relevance and impact insofar as they materialise in governability practices (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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Three dimensions of local governability

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According to this approach, data analysis follows three criteria. The first, the Geographical Criterion, aims to identify the places where illegal actors exercise political, economic, and social control which can be narrated or investigated from digital narratives, as key tools to achieve spaces of public recognition. It is necessary to clarify that the results did not intend to frame a visibility exercise, where the spaces in which this type of narrative has not been recorded necessarily imply that the phenomenon of shared sovereignty and criminal governance does not exist. On the contrary, this would invite us to think that data collection techniques should be used to go deeper into the identification and location of (SS) and (CG).

The second criterion is the Scenario Criterion, considering settings that participate or are considered within the digital narrative from a prototypical narrative structure (Ruiz 2019), configured from a story that assigns narrative roles –heroes, villains, helpers, opponents– who fulfil a specific mission. The aim of this criterion is to look at the times and spaces in which the roles are undertaken, in line with the proposal of Garzón (2021).

The third criterion, the Actions Criterion, considers the actions of those who represent narrative roles. These are configured from the missions, objectives, and sanctions that the actors impose or have imposed on them within the digitised narrative, or from the conjunctural events that impact the territories in which they operate or have influence. This performative framework indicates the points of view and trends that guide (SS) and (CG), following the methodological development of the dimensions of local governability (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Three scenarios of local governability

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In line with the proposal of Garzón, Scenario A indicates cooperation between the Community (C) and the State (S), with low impact capacity of criminal organisations (CO); Scenario B presents an agreement where (S) and (CO) cooperate while (C) seeks survival mechanisms to adapt to the institutional rules of (S) and the organisational restrictions of (CO); Scenario C shows (CO) with the power of coercion and consensus in the face of (S)’s lack of interest in disputing control of (CO) or meeting (C)’s demands, meaning (C) legitimises (CO) as an actor in everyday life.

The results presented below are intended to identify trends in the ways in which organised crime implicitly and explicitly sought to adapt to the pandemic, achieving a public relations strategy that would keep them relevant as actors and which strengthens cooperation strategies with state institutions and feelings of empathy and/or apathy in the sectors of civil society that live under their influence or are informed of their actions via digitised narratives.

Results

Our central finding in this research is that the circumstances of social isolation contributed to digital narratives becoming a primary source for the identification of practices of shared sovereignty and criminal governance. Although this evidence does not replace ethnographic work and observation in the field, it does constitute analytical elements to understand how narratives are resources that have been incorporated by the state and criminal organisations, and which are complemented by de facto powers like violence and territorial control. In short, the visibility that digital narratives achieve is not an impediment or risk factor for the consolidation of alliances and implicit cooperation between the legal and illegal dimensions.

Geographical Criterion

A relevant point in the systematisation of the data is that, although the phrase “drug trafficking” was included in the search criteria, it represented less than 50% of the news stories. Even with this precision, we confirmed that Mexico and Colombia lead the digital narratives on the articulations between illegal, state, and social actors (Fig. 3). It seems that drug trafficking is a fundamental driver but that it has been able to transform into other forms of criminalisation and governability, with the Covid-19 pandemic being a (at first, surprising) factor.

Fig. 3
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The geography of digital narrative on Criminal Governance in Latin America

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This does not mean that such relationships do not exist in other countries or that their frequency is necessarily lower, but it does indicate that the visibility and legitimacy of criminal discourses and strategies in Colombia have positioned themselves and even become part of the narrative landscape. In other words, although the cases of murders and censorship of the press and field researchers is a serious problem in contexts of shared sovereignties and criminal governances, their exposure and mythologising also serve as catalysts of authority, reputation, and leadership in the areas they control (Fig. 3).

In the Colombian case, it is evident that the regions –known in the country as departments– of Antioquia, Cauca, Nariño, and Norte de Santander register the highest number of narratives that mention the articulation of criminality and institutionality (Fig. 4). This fact, although it does not have to be a direct correlation, does deserve to be investigated: if one looks at recent data on the increase in illicit crop productivity, they coincide with these areas that have been called productive enclaves (UNODC (2021)), and with those in which the exercise of coercion (selective murders, massacres) is combined with strategies of consensus (territorial control, pacification, job creation).

Fig. 4
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The geography of digital narratives on Criminal Governance in Colombia

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Scenario Criterion

Our results suggest that the digital narratives are aimed at normalising and interiorising the collusion of the state with criminal organisations, including mutually beneficial situations that could result in accusations against them from sectors of both civil and illegal society, although the both the state and criminal organisations appear to accept this relationship in order to not lose more control than they are willing to give up. Although there are no records of Scenario A (with a strong state capable of managing social demands), it can also be noted that Scenario C does not present a relevant percentage and, on the contrary, this indicates the tendency of criminal organisations to avoid acts of violence that expose them to public opinion. To paraphrase Eduardo Pizarro’s theory of a mutually painful draw (Pizarro 2015, 2017), a mutually beneficial draw is observed (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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Frequency of digital narratives by scenario in Colombia

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In this case, prototypical narratives are (re)created which rotate the intervention roles of each actor and give them a complex moral and ethical relativisation that makes it impossible to demarcate the limits of the legal-illegal, illegal-legitimate, and legal-illegitimate. Thus, while an illegal actor could see itself as a hero during the pandemic for the provision of basic services, it was at the same time presented as a villain who prioritised its income through territorial control and violence exercised against those who challenged its power. Parallelly, the digital narratives showed an institutionality that offered itself as a helper in the provision of prevention systems and public vaccination policies but, in turn, was perceived as an opponent, by not offering possibilities of economic sustainability and employment generation.

Actions Criterion

As suggested in the previous criterion, it is noteworthy that Scenario C is marked by violent actions that involve the recruitment of minors, bringing about the question of the permissiveness of the state in a context of social isolation in which one would suppose greater social control (Fig. 4). The problem becomes more complex when these minors accede to these dynamics voluntarily or as part of the axiologies of prestige and recognition granted by the territory they inhabit, and the survival mechanisms validated by the community.

This situation is reinforced in Scenario C, confirming that the objective of criminal organisations is far from replacing the state: it is, in fact, to make their areas of control more sophisticated, to open spaces for state intervention, and to organise new forms of legitimate-illegality that know how to blend into everyday interactions (Fig. 6). Covid-19 is not presented here as a determining variable, but rather as a catalyst that justified the need for varied resources in order to face the uncertainties of the institutional framework to deal with said crisis.

Fig. 6
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Criminal governance actions from the digital narratives

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Although the digital narratives do not account for the diversity of relationships that occur across the territory, they do structure indications of the actors that intervene but are silenced in the mutually beneficial draw. For example, in Scenario B, the community that requires the state to be present and to resist criminals, deteriorated due to the breaking down of the face-to-face ties imposed by health restrictions (Fig. 7), giving way to a sector of the community that opted for the cost–benefit ratio that would offset the Covid-19 contingencies.

Fig. 7
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Actors present in each scenario

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Our results also show that there is a certain instrumentalisation of the denominations with which the actions of the state and para-institutional institutions are labelled. Field work could contribute to other denominations for power phenomena that go beyond armed conflict or ideological dispute. In this sense, there was a skilful strategy of mimicry that, during the pandemic, was accentuated in the case of illegality, centralized for legal actions, and adapted into survival mechanisms for the community.

Discussion

This section presents five discussion threads in line with the theoretical position, the methodological design, and the results of the exercise.

Thread 1. Naturalisation and interiorisation

In Colombia, the interaction between a highly centralised political, administrative, and economic system, and the historical inability of the state to have an effective presence across the territory has stimulated the consolidation of strong criminal structures (Serres 2007; McDougall 2009) which, for decades, have fed on all kinds of illegal income. On the other hand, the endemic situation of violence in the country, both criminal and political, has revealed the shortcomings of the state in exercising effective sovereign control in a large part of the territory. As Garay-Salamanca and Salcedo-Albarán (2012) argue, the consolidation of armed groups in Colombia is due to the low coercive power of the state over large areas of the country, added to the inability to defeat insurgent and emerging groups that operate and consolidate across the country.

This scenario has allowed a consolidation of criminal governances that determine both the rules of coexistence, security, and pacification, and the productive and economic model in the areas where they are present. In other words, as Duncan (2014) indicates, oligopolies of coercion have been established in Colombia, so that criminal organisations and groups have superimposed control to regulate social transactions without facing a constant clash with government armed forces, because in most cases the legal and illegal actors in power maintain agreements on the modes of social regulation.

The unity and formal authority of the state coexists with a material destructuring of the same in the regions of the country. The empowerment of criminal governances has generated a reinterpretation of what is legitimate in those areas where the state has become a contemplative actor without the capacity to react, and it is the same social environment presented by Waldmann (2007), in which criminal groups have a presence “that supports them and keeps them alive”(2007, p. 594). Of course, these dynamics –perfectly naturalised in the territories where criminal governances are the referent of authority– are incomprehensible for the political and social centre, where the formal state is still identified with the “should be” of its material actions (Gutiérrez 2008; Thoumi 2012).

From the political and social centre, the consolidation of the phenomenon of criminal governances in the regions is not only incomprehensible, but unacceptable. The disruption between weakness in the exercise of state legality and the strengthening of new legitimacies is perceived as unacceptable and constantly condemned by public opinion led by the media (Waisbord 2007). However, the critical exercise of digital narratives on the state’s inability to restore a Roussonian status quo in the regions has become more the echo of the indignation and impotence of public opinion in the face of a phenomenon that, despite the difficulty to understand it, has been consolidated as natural and quasi-legitimate by the communities that reside there.

Thread 2. Adaptation and rearrangement in the “new” normality

The Covid-19 pandemic forced a reorganisation of many social and economic activities (Tisdell 2020; Inglet 2022). The public health emergency implied not only a pause, but also a setback, in significant parts of the productive processes on which the well-being of different social sectors is based. In Latin America, and Colombia in particular, drug trafficking has not escaped these same challenges. However, far from drug production and commercialisation becoming stagnant, they remained active thanks to their impressive ability to adapt (Guerrero and Wilches 2020).

The concentration of the efforts of the state in addressing the challenges of the health crisis implied a deepening in its inability to attend to and manage traditional problems from before the pandemic. As argued by Swed (2021), criminal groups took advantage of any vulnerability that came to light because of Covid-19, allowing them to “earn legitimacy and popular support by engaging in pro-social activities unique to the pandemic”(2021, p. 1307).

Thus, while public attention focused on containing the pandemic and its socioeconomic consequences, challenges like the effective presence of the state in historically forgotten territories were relegated. This situation was skilfully exploited by illegal groups, which found in a “distracted state” the opportunity to continue their drug trafficking activities at levels equal to, or even higher than, those recorded in pre-pandemic periods.

Although official figures show that the fight against illegal crops remained operational during the pandemic, even registering a 7% decrease in the total number of hectares of coca leaves cultivated, this did not imply an effective reduction in cocaine production. On the contrary, the adaptation of drug trafficking in this period represented an increase in the net production of cocaine, meaning an increase in the correlation of cocaine production per hectare of coca leaf cultivated (UNODC (2021)).

On the other hand, the social and economic crisis caused by social isolation measures made illegal groups and the drug trafficking industry a viable means of subsistence for regions plagued by unemployment and left aside by the state mechanisms that granted help, for example, economic and employment subsidies through the Formal Employment Support Programme and the Solidarity Income programme. These two programmes were widely praised, but the aforementioned lack of effective state presence across the country combined with the presence of criminal structures impeded their effective application in various parts of the territory. This phenomenon consolidated criminal governance dynamics in those territorial enclaves where illegal groups achieved social legitimacy by adequately standing in for the role expected of the state (Swed 2021). For example, armed groups imposed.

Curfews, pamphlets ordering people to stay at home, restrictions on freedom of movement, control of the distribution of governmental assistance, and delivery of food or medical parcels are just some examples of strategies deployed by organized crime groups across Colombia to exercise local governance during the pandemic. (Tamayo 2021, p. 13)

Thread 3. Governability Scenario A: Absent but formal state

The historical absence of the state in much of the Colombian territory has exposed many communities to different scenarios of vulnerability (Serje 2013). Poverty, the lack of development opportunities, and the absence of operational means of communication between urban and rural areas have become fertile ground for the deterioration of the legitimate monopoly on violence in the periphery. The weakening of the Hobbesian exercise of sovereignty by the state in these regions has caused a kind of tacit, and even complacent, transfer of territorial administration to illegal groups. As suggested by Tamayo (2021), criminal organisations have been more effective in providing help to the communities under their control, assuming the role –both emotionally and effectively– of public institutions and their duty of care.

As Skaperdas (2001) argues, the established criminal structures in these territories have found in the incapacity of the state the opportunity to strengthen all kinds of illegal activities, by covering the power vacuum caused by state absence. Similarly, the neglect to which these territories are subjected leads to the creation of mutual benefits stemming from illegal activities. González and Lobo (2017) suggest that criminals offer subsistence alternatives and residents choose to accept and validate them, regardless of their illegal nature.

The consequence of these interactions is the consolidation of a shared sovereignty between the state and illegal groups, in which the population tends to support the latter because they find responses in them that the institutional framework is unable to grant: security and employment (Tamayo 2021). Thus, the distrust of civilians in the state impedes the cooperation networks necessary to confront illegal structures. On the contrary, government weakness leads to the state becoming a passive actor and a simple spectator of a dynamic in which the cornerstone of the social fabric ends up being active cooperation between illegal groups and the civilian population.

Thread 4. Governability Scenario B: A mutually beneficial –but painful– draw

The weakening of the exercise of sovereignty by the state in areas with the presence of criminal structures linked to activities like drug trafficking has led to new dimensions in the coexistence of the actors in these zones. In these territorial enclaves, institutionality is formally present but does not play a material role.

This logic is understood by illegal organisations which, not formally aiming to replace state sovereignty, establish express or tacit agreements with more fragile local authorities that are “more exposed to corruption by the difficulty in applying institutional controls,” (Duque Daza 2021, p. 352). This allows them to maintain fluidity in their criminal operations without mayor obstacles or shocks. The pact between criminal groups and state forces reveals that the current nature of the Colombian state allows criminal activities without significant obstacles (Civico 2012).

In the context of the pandemic, the capacity of the central state to maintain a fluid line of communication and control with the subnational sphere became increasingly complex. It can be affirmed that the high level of concentration required by the central government to manage the pandemic led to, in different subnational scenarios, not only increased neglect of the civilian population and inability to effectively face criminality, but also the necessary support for local civil and armed authorities. For this reason, many government activities were undertaken by illegal organisations, thus generating, as Campedelli et al. (2021) posit, an identification by the community of their true benefactor.

The pandemic exacerbated the already traditional disconnect between the centre and the regions. In the shadow of a distracted state incapable of exercising sovereign control, the de facto logic of non-aggression and cooperation between criminal groups and local authorities, legitimised by the needs of the civilian population, gave rise to a complex model of coexistence incomprehensible to public opinion in the urban centre.

Thread 5. De facto power and de jure power

Relations of non-aggression and even cooperation between criminal groups and local authorities are not immutable. The prolonged inability of the central state to provide the necessary support for the authorities to adequately exercise their authority at the local level has deteriorated progressively the exercise of political legitimacy and, therefore, the ability to react to the threats of illegal groups. This is the case of the recruitment of minors through intimidation strategies or offers of social recognition and economic advancement.

The inability of local authorities to react to the needs of the civilian population, as well as to the security challenges imposed by illegal groups, necessarily undermines their legitimacy. In this way, the deterioration in the capacities of state representatives to exercise power at the local level empowers the social, political, and economic influence of criminal structures, as well as their role as the “saviours of the people” in areas of high inequality and poverty, where the criminal groups demonstrate that the state is not necessary to reinforce order, to guarantee the rule of law or to provide well-being (Tamayo 2021).

Thus, in a zero-sum equation, a kind of transfer is generated towards criminal organisations, firstly of authority and sovereignty from the state, and secondly of legitimacy from the civilian population. This scenario generates a kind of “phantom state” at the local level (Niño and González 2022), in which social control is exercised almost fully by the application of regulatory structures imposed by criminal groups. In this scenario, local authorities –often co-opted by illegal groups– become a simple nominal label, without effective legitimacy of the state’s presence in the territory.

Conclusion

Shared sovereignties and criminal governances found in the pandemic an ideal scenario in which to consolidate processes of cooperation, territorial influence, and differentiated relationships with communities, allowing criminal groups to accommodate themselves and to find instruments which legitimise the actors of power who provide the rules of coexistence and economic support in their own interests.

The local governance models proposed by Garzón (2021) provide an interpretative framework in which the community has a leading role, and in which a correlation of heterogenous and non-static forces is evident. In this sense, the digital narrative information collection technique becomes an indicator of the rearrangement of dynamics that are woven into everyday interactions permeated by priorities of the cost–benefit ratio in offers of state assistance and para-institutional control.

The Geographical, Scenario, and Actions criteria reaffirm that Colombia has one of the highest rates of the persistence and consolidation of alliances and pacts that are not formalised in explicit agreements, as this would imply judicial and public sanctions. This trend is complemented by the tendency for these interactions to occur in areas that lead figures of the cultivation and production of illicit drugs. In this way, the underground agreements have the risk of being infringed and causing disputes and wars between corrupt factions of the state and actors outside the law. However, at the same time, they have the ease of slipping away from investigative tracing or judicial sanctions, while gaining authority, reputation, and leadership to the extent that they are made visible in the digital narrative.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the non-identification of digital narratives across the territory does not indicate the consolidation of Scenario A. In this case, the need for other research techniques is specified. This article is projected in another phase of research, where the usefulness that legal-illegal actors have found in legitimising their actions through discourse, either through the magnification or stereotyping of their exercises of order and social control. This is the case of criminal governances with a global character or transnational para-institutionalities which, in the Colombian case, are beginning to be visible with the impacts of criminal groups originating in Mexico, Venezuela and the United States.

To conclude, it is opportune to comparatively investigate the practices that will be transformed or established in post-pandemic times. This would contribute to studies that analyse the transformations of shared sovereignties and criminal governances over time and space. In the case of Colombia, Covid-19 implied changes in the legal structure of the state, lessons learned by criminal structures, and rearrangements in the survival mechanisms of communities: a mutually beneficial –but painful– draw.