If you head west from the Colombian capital of Bogotá, just after dropping off the central plateau you will find a number of small, isolated, mountainous coffee-growing towns. In the 1990s, FARC guerrillas came to these towns, massing their forces as part of their strategy to eventually cordon off and lay siege to the capital. These towns were subjected to pressures and violence that many had not experienced since the bipartisan violence of the 1950s. No known formal civil society peace organizations emerged to respond to the conflict. Yet even in this region, could the variation in the social and organizational landscape have impacted how this new period of armed conflict would affect the civilian population?

This chapter explores additional town cases in the department of Cundinamarca that were selected with the aid of universal data and statistical models (as discussed in Chapter 6). The cases are similar or “matched” on many of their characteristics except for differences in their historical densities of junta councils. The goal of this exercise is to further test theory as well as assess the accuracy of the statistical analysis.

I compare here the neighboring rural towns between Bogotá and the Magdalena River of Quipile (key-PEE-lay), which historically had a low number of junta councils, with Vianí (vee-ah-NEE) and Bituima (bee-TWEE-mah), which together are similar in size and population to Quipile (and were historically the same county) but had many more juntas in 1985 relative to their populations.