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This essay analyzes violence perpetrated by paramilitaries in Putumayo, Colombia, as instrumental to the same armed group’s establishment and maintenance of control over the production of cocaine. It is suggested that paramilitary terror has taken a particularly prolonged form in this region due to a need to accumulate and preserve political power rather than, as in other regions in Colombia, do ‘social cleansing’ or evict peasants from their land. By taking Marx concept of primitive accumulation as point of departure for a reinterpretation of Bourdieu’s notion of political capital, it is suggested that the last six years of terror in Putumayo and the parallel changes in relations of production in the cocaine economy in the region can be accounted for as accumulation and conservation of symbolic power instrumental and continuously employed to regulation of the cocaine trade.