How the architecture of power underpins inequality in Colombia

Does measuring inequalities tell us what we need to know about their reproduction or possible reduction?

No one would deny that statistics communicate, and perhaps nowhere is this clearer than the case of Colombia. The country’s income Gini coefficient has stayed around 0.52–0.55 for three decades, making it the world’s third most unequal country. The top 1% owns about 40% of total household wealth. Extreme land concentration persists, with a rural Gini coefficient of 0.82. Meanwhile, over half of the country’s entire workforce – 56% – remains informal.

However, while these dramatic statistics capture something of the scale of Colombia’s inequalities, they do not capture the processes that sustain them. We therefore raise the question: do such statistics truly explain inequality, its reproduction, and its impacts – and therefore illuminate how to address these issues?

From measuring inequality to understanding its reproduction

Our forthcoming book, Elites, Power and Possible Reforms in Colombia (Bogotá, Media Pluma), begins from the premise that measuring inequality is necessary but not sufficient. To understand how it is reproduced – alongside enduring forms of violence – it is essential to examine how different kinds of power interact and mutually reinforce each other. Economic power is crucial but not by itself enough: political and intellectual power also play central roles.

We draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s efforts to understand how economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capitals shape fields of power. These overlapping fields define which ideas and values should guide the economy, society, and the state. Building on this, we use Mike Savage and Georgia Nichols’ (2018) concept of elite constellations. Rather than assuming a single, unified ruling class, this perspective highlights the interplay between economic, political, technocratic, business, and judicial networks that together set the limits of what is considered “natural” or “unchangeable” in social organisation.

From Thomas Piketty’s World Inequality Lab to the World Bank’s Gini index, most global measurements focus on income and wealth concentration: the top 10% or 1% of earners, the richest percentile, or the average gap between the rich and poor. These indicators are indispensable – but also incomplete. They describe the scale of inequality, not its architecture. In our book, we argue that to understand inequality, we must also examine who dominates whom – and through which fields of power.

Mapping Colombia’s elite constellations

We applied this framework to Colombia using qualitative interviews, historical reconstruction and a database of elite constellations from 1991–2022. Our findings show that most of Colombia’s wealth, political power and social prestige – across a country with a population of 53 million – is concentrated on just 932 individuals. They are predominantly white men, trained as lawyers or economists, and educated in private universities.

Historically, this concentration of power resulted from the failure to build an inclusive state capable of integrating citizens across territories and social groups. Although some elites sought reforms, these efforts rarely advanced. Factional pacts, transactional politics, and clientelism became mechanisms through which elites – mostly based in the Andean region, even if not born there – preserved a stable order. Despite internal disputes, they shared certain principles of domination that sustained this status quo.

Specifically, this social order rests on a consensus privileging macroeconomic stability, fiscal discipline, inflation control, and orthodox monetary policy aimed at keeping real wage growth tightly aligned with inflation, along with selective trade liberalisation and the framing of social policy as poverty alleviation rather than inequality reduction. These are further reinforced by gradualism as a governing principle, instrumental dependence on the United States, and a development model reliant on natural resource extraction.

The Colombian singularity

Conventional wisdom often portrays Colombia as one of the world’s oldest democracies – an outlier in Latin America for its institutional continuity, absence of hyperinflation, disciplined payment of external debt, and relative macroeconomic stability. Yet, alongside this image of order, Colombia has also been one of the most violent societies in the hemisphere. Far from a paradox, this coexistence is what we call the Colombian singularity.

This singularity lies in how fragmented elites – oligarchic, political, technocratic, business-group, and judicial – forge minimal consensuses that guarantee institutional continuity and economic growth in their regions of origin, while excluding vast areas of the country. The Andean region, where most elites are based and where state institutions are strongest, has absorbed the bulk of public investment and infrastructure. In contrast, peripheral and rural regions – home to most Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and peasant populations – remain marginalised, with weak state presence and enduring informality.

This uneven geography of power and investment helps explain how Colombia could maintain fiscal discipline and democratic elections while violence persisted on a massive scale. Between 1985 and 2022, 8.2 million people were forcibly displaced, 3,853 massacres were recorded, 120,000 forced disappearances documented, and 31 torture methods identified – including mutilations, electric shocks, and attacks with chainsaws or animals. These patterns stem from long-standing disputes over land ownership, political inclusion, and the control of illicit economies that have sustained armed conflict for decades.

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace also found that one-third of minors recruited by the FARC-EP guerrillas had previously suffered domestic violence, and that 6,402 civilians were extrajudicially killed by state agents. For many – particularly young men and children in rural or peripheral urban areas – illegality has become a means of survival and a source of status amid precarious employment and blocked mobility.

The persistence of violence is not an anomaly within an otherwise stable democracy – it is a constitutive feature of an order that combines institutional endurance with territorial and social exclusion, ensuring stability at the centre while perpetuating inequality and conflict at the margins.

Reform and resistance: The limits of change

President Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first left-wing leader, faces the formidable task of confronting one of the world’s most persistent systems of inequality and violence. His administration (2022-2026) has sought to move beyond poverty alleviation and tackle the structural roots of exclusion – through tax, labour, and pension reforms, land redistribution, and a transition away from fossil fuels.

Petro has explicitly challenged macroeconomic orthodoxy and the prevailing consensus on fiscal rules, social policy and the highly unequal distribution of public budgets, historically concentrated in the Andean region and major capital cities – the same territories from which most of Colombia’s elites originate and maintain their influence. He has also pursued symbolic transformations, appointing women, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and LGBTIQ+ leaders – and others with diverse sexual identities – to key ministerial and diplomatic posts.

Some of these initiatives – especially the tax and labour reforms – have been recognised by institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and OECD for aligning with international standards of equity – even as they have provoked strong domestic resistance. For instance, Colombia’s technocratic and oligarchic elites, along with business associations, have depicted these measures as economically irresponsible, fiscally unsustainable, and a danger to the country’s democracy.

Towards a new debate

Where does this leave us? Statistics remain valuable, but they cannot capture the complexity of what must change to address inequality. Meanwhile, transformation is impossible within a single political cycle. It demands a profound national debate on whether Colombia’s prevailing structures of power and wealth – and the narratives that legitimise them – can ever build meaningful lives and livelihoods for all, rather than only for its elites and the limited groups mobilised to defend them.

This piece was first published on the International Inequalities Institute blog.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.