El don en la incorporación a un grupo paramilitar. Análisis de un caso emblemático

Clara, a university student from Bogota had financial problems. To solve her situation, she accepted the request of an acquaintance to do errands and carry packages, which would be paid for with “gifts”. Little did she know that those errands and gifts would be the way to join the paramilitary group known as the Bloque Capital (Capital Block) of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, according to its acronym in Spanish). Nor did she imagine that Carlos Castano himself would announce this news. This emblematic case serves as the basis to analyze a type of recruitment used by the AUC from the perspective of the analytical category of the gift proposed by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and re-conceptualized by other authors.