By Teo Ballvé

For decades, the coupled dynamics of the drug trade and political violence have fueled the displacement of more than four million campesinos in Colombia. Agribusiness developments on these violently stolen lands have become favored conduits for drugmoney laundering and profit by narco-paramilitaries, while also affording them military, political, and economic advantages through territorial control (Castillo 1987; Reyes 1997, 2009; Ballvé 2009). Drawing on investigative ethnographic fieldwork into these dynamics in Colombia’s northwest frontier region of Urabá, I examine how the Colombian state and its territory are dialectically produced and how this process was marshaled by the convergence of narco-paramilitary strategies and reforms aimed at state territorial restructuring through decentralization.1 I argue that Urabá’s narco-driven economies of violence are not somehow anathema to projects of modern liberal statehood—usually associated with tropes of “institution-building” and “good governance”—but are deeply tied to initiatives aimed at making spaces governable, expanding global trade, and attracting capital.