The Democratic Security Policy, Police Presence and Conflict in Colombia

This article assesses one of the fundamental components of the most iconic policy of the government of Álvaro Uribe: the Democratic Security. In particular we assess the impact on the intensity of the armed conflict, of police deployment and reinforces in municipalities with little or no police presence before August 2002. We use the difference in differences estimator to compare the change in the dynamics of the armed conflict after the allocation of new police forces in the receiving municipalities, relative to the simultaneous change in municipalities that did not receive police. Results are robust to using a matched sample and suggest that guerrilla attacks increase with police deployments and first increase and then decrease with police reinforcements. These results are consistent with a simple model that describes the fight for the control of valuable territories in the context of an internal armed conflict.