Evil Hour in Colombia 9781844670727

Table of contents : Acknowledgments ix List of Acronyms xi Prologue, by Gonzalo Sanchez xiii Introduction: Remembering

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 9781844670727

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^f^

^-r4>

rilliant

iplex e

navigation of a

and tragic

history,

Davis

/ ^ y^J

Boston Public Ubraiy

Evil

Hour

in

Colombia

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2012

http://archive.org/details/evilhourincolombOOhylt

Evil

Hour

in

Colombia

FORREST HYLTON

NORTH END

V

VERSO London



New York

In

memory of Michael

First

Jimenez (1948-2001)

F.

published by Verso 2006

©

Hylton 2006

Forrest

All rights reserved

The moral

rights

of the author have been asserted

13579

8642

10

Verso

UK: 6 Meard USA: 180 Varick

Street,

WIF OEG

London

New

Street,

NY

York,

10014-4606

www.versobooks.com

J

^-,

Verso

^1

is

the imprint of

New

Left

Books

ISBN- 13: 978-1-84467-072-7 (hbk) ISBN- 10: 1-84467-072-4

^60^ X A

ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-551-7 (pbk) ISBN-10: 1-84467-551-3 British Library Cataloguing ia Publication

catalogue record for this

book

is

available

from the

Data British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A

catalog record for this

book

is

available

from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Garamond by Hewer Text Printed in the

3/^/^ ^7-

UK

UK

by Bath

Ltd, Edinburgh

Press

Contents

Acknowledgments List

ix

of Acronyms

xi

Prologue, by Gonzalo Sanchez

Introduction: 1

Remembering Colombia

Radical-Popular Republicanism, 1848-80

2 From Reaction

to Rebellion,

1880-1930

xiii

1

15

23

3 The Liberal Pause, 1930-46 4 La Violencia, 1946-57 5 The National Front: Political Lockout, 1957-82

31

6 Negotiating the Dirty War, 1982-90

67 79 97

7 Fragmented Peace, Parcellized Sovereignty, 1990-98 8 Involution, 1998-2002

9 The Edge of the Precipice, 2002-5 10

War

as Peace,

2005-6

39 51

109 121

Conclusion: Amnesia by Decree

129

Notes

137

Index

165

Acknowledgments

Thanks

to Perry Anderson,

Anne

Beech, Robin Blackburn, Leslie Gill,

Greg Grandin, Nivedita Menon, Arzoo Orsanloo, Christian Raiil Prada,

Widener,

Parenti,

Marcus Rediker, Emir Sader, Jamie Sanders, and Danny

as well as

Susan Watkins and

Tony Wood

New Left Review,

at

for suggestions, support, and/or criticisms at different stages

of writing.

New Left Review essay into a book, helped me get it to press. Thanks to

Tariq Ali had the idea of turning the

and

Tom

Penn

at

Verso patiendy

Alison Austen for her care and thoroughness in copy-editing. Peter

Linebaugh gave good advice

early on, as did Aijaz

Ahmad

towards the

Mike Davis pushed the project from the beginning; without encouragement, it would likely have remained unpublished. Steele, son, wanted to help me finish, and gave me good reason to do end.

his

my so.

Gonzalo Sanchez corrected mistakes, helped with bibliography, rescued

me from

(some)

pitfalls

of pamphleteering, and explained

how

the

conditions in which Colombian intellectuals live shape their work. Errors of fact

and

interpretation, of course, are mine.

The book grew out of a terror,

ment

talk in

October 2002 on the theme of state

organized by graduate students in the American Studies Depart-

at

New York University. I am gratefril to Peter Hudson for taking and to my co-speaker Garry Leech for enlarging my

the initiative,

understanding of frontier setders in the coca economy.

2006,

I

was fortunate

chapters of the

seminar

at

to discuss the introduction

book with

Columbia

participants in the Culture, Power, Boundaries

at

New

York

introduction and several later chapters. at

NYU

made

In April

several early

University; at the International Center for

vanced Studies seminar

ICAS

and

reading, writing,

University,

I

Ad-

discussed the

The History Department and and

travel materially possible.

FORREST HYLTON

X although

it

took

far

Thanks

writing.

too

to

much

Sinclair

time away from dissertation research and

Thomson and Tim

Mitchell for their

patience. I

owe an unpayable debt

rights

and trade union

nizers, students,

and

to

ment

me

to

humane

human

principles

and

view things afresh each time

Their irrepressible sense of humor,

to

lawyers, journalists,

feminist activists, neighborhood orga-

professors. Their insights in formal interviews

informal conversations forced visited.

Colombian

activists,

- frequendy

like their steadfast

in the face

danger - continues to be a source of inspiration.

I

commit-

of life-threatening

List

of Acronyms

AAA:

American Anti-communist Alliance

ACCU: ANAPO:

National Popular Alliance

Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Cordoba and Uraba

ANDI:

National Industrialists' Association

ANUC:

National Association of Peasant Users

AUG:

United Self-Defense Forces

BCB:

Central Bolivar Bloc of

BCN:

Cacique Nutibara Bloc of AUC

BN:

Northern Bloc of AUC

AUC

CGSB:

Simon

GRIG:

Cauca Regional Indigenous Council

Bolivar Guerrilla Coordination

CTC:

Colombian Workers' Confederation

ELN:

National Liberation

EPL:

People's Liberation

FARC:

Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces

FEDECAFE:

Coffee Growers' Federation

FEDEGAN: FEDENAL: FENALGO:

National Federation of Transport Workers

National Coffee Growers' Federation

M-19:

April 19

MAS:

Death

MRL: ONIC:

Colombian National Indigenous Organization

PGC:

Army Army

Federation of Catde Ranchers

Movement

to Kidnappers

Revolutionary Liberal

Movement

PCG-ML:

Colombian Communist Party Colombian Communist Party-Marxist-Leninist

PRT:

Revolutionary Workers' Party (Trotskyist)

(Maoist)

FORREST HYLTON

XII

PSD:

Social

Democratic

Party:

name of

PCC

from mid-

1940s through early 1950s

PSR:

Revolutionary Socialist Party

SAC:

Colombian

UNIR:

National Union of the Revolutionary Left

UP:

Patriotic

USO: UTC:

Oil Workers'

Agriculturalists' Association

Union Union Catholic Workers' Union

Prologue

Gonzalo Sanchez, Professor Emeritus of History, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota

This book

is

the product of enchantment

-

the enchantment with

Colombia of this young North American scholar who

divides his research

between the Colombia of Alvaro Uribe and the Bolivia of Evo Morales.

The I

-

author's intellectual debt

expressed in the brief correspondence

have had with him - determines, to a large extent, his perspective.

Formed by

British social history (Eric

Christopher

Hill),

Chatterjee),

and the

Hobsbawm,

eye of

critical

Edward

to search for the logic

— of

Colombian

spirit,

the reasons for

the search

left

him with

dominated by an insuperable radical-popular

sion

-

armed

demands and

the sensation that oscillation

protest

if

you

like,

the

Despite his militant

Colombian

history

is

and the following wave of repres-

"military hypertrophy" of resistance. This

book

or,

between the emergence of

rebellion, via recurrence, translates into

this weighty, militant



conflict.

the inevitable response to which was

It is, I repeat,

Thompson,

Forrest Hylton's

Said,

enchantment led him critique

E.P.

South Asian subaltern studies (Ranajit Guha, Partha

is

armed

rebellion. Perhaps

what the author

at least

calls

the

one of the knots that

reveals.

a product of enchantment, but also disenchantment: the

author's disenchantment with the vagueness of approaches to violence that have

become

generalized

and according

to

which violence has

nothing to do with the socioeconomic situation, the closure of the political system, or the

poverty that comparative

Devoid of explanation, we have become mute privileging of what

we might

call

statistics daily reveal.

in the face of a type

of

the immateriality of violence. This text

FORREST HYLTON

XIV

is

a refutation of, and a vigorous response to, this emptying of reason and

sense,

and represents a

of the Colombian

clear search for the substance

conflict.

In the development of the

text, there are three

elements, or thematic

blocks, that stand out over the long term {longue duree). specific form,

The

first is

the

during the nineteenth century, of the construction of a

political order.

In

reality, elites

have been

as

fragmented

as the country's

topography, but forces contesting them have not escaped this fragmentation either

- whether

trade unions, peasant organizations, guerrillas, or

In this context, the "oligarchic democracy" based on

political fronts.

bipartisanism has been maintained with violence, but without the institutional leaps that led, in other countries, to populism, agrarian social revolutions,

or military dictatorships. Further, radical-popular

republicanism, which had a vigorous, promising burst between 1849

and 1854, and which, according vanguard of

liberal

to the author, put

reformism and republican

the Atlantic world, was disarticulated,

first

Colombia

at the

political mobilization in

with the Regeneration, and

again in the mid-twentieth century with la

Violencia.

although the author does not disregard ideological

Additionally,

he goes

affiliations,

against the grain of a tradition that has paid particular attention to them, since he

is

more

interested in the practices, rituals,

oi los de abajo (those fi^om below: indigenous, frontier settlers,

dynamic stamp

and everyday

artisans,

and peasant communities). This

politics

Afro-Colombians,

gives

an especially

to the changing scenes this important text describes

and

analyzes.

The second thematic

axis refers to the

dynamics of the

social order,

which, beginning in the nineteenth century, have revolved around land struggles side

and

and the processes of migration and settlement

bipartisan clientelism.. After repeated ups violence,

in the country-

fi^om country to city, as well as fruitless attempts to break with

and downs of reform and

on the cusp of the millennium the

social architecture culmi-

nates with a crushing agrarian counter-reform tion of the countryside

by

paramilitaries

and

-

a

modern

re-feudaliza-

narcotraffickers

-

that not

only represents the expropriation-concentration of property, but the reversion of democratic processes

and gains of preceding decades. This

involves the reconfiguration of hegemonies

and exclusions

in a large

number of departments (the territorial divisions of Colombia). The third nucleus of arguments asks about the structuring of power

EVIL and

violence,

HOUR

from the 1950s

COLOMBIA

IN

now, in a situation of competition

until

between the limited sovereignty of the sions to sovereignty

on the

XV

state

and the concurrent preten-

part of insurgents

concurrence the weightiest result of which

and counterinsurgents - a

is

the privatization of coercive

is

enormously decentralized,

power.

Of

course,

this

privatization,

which

brings other consequences along with

darkened the frontier between long before Michael IgnatiefFs

one of the

characteristics

Gomez in

the 1950s,

at the

it:

civilians

brilliant

the privatization of violence

and combatants

of contemporary wars. Presidents

and Cesar Turbay Ayala with

end of the 1970s, find

their cold

Colombia

in

The Warrior's Honor si^nAtd.

as

his "Security Statute"

war accents echoed today under

President Alvaro Uribe Velez's "democratic security" policies.

moments

it

Laureano

like

are of course distinguishable, but there

is

The

something that

all

these regimes, including the present, share: an irrepressible repugnance for ideas like civil resistance, peace neutrality, and, in general,

The population

is

communities or

territories,

indigenous

any type of separation from the armed

seen either as the extension of the

forces.

army or

the

insurgency.

Echoing Hobsbawm's findings -

"I discovered a country in

failure to

make

universal,

and omnipresent core of public

a social revolution

which the

had made violence the constant, life"

- perhaps

it

can be said

that for the author o^ Evil Hour in Colombia^ the history of Colombia has

involved the stubborn containment of a profound revolution; a social revolution that afi:er

the

after the

and,

Age of

Capital, at the

Second World War,

finally,

was defeated

first

demand

for social

by the Regeneration

end of the nineteenth century; aborted

especially during la Violencia

of the 1950s;

truncated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the

really existing socialism,

and the involution of revolutionary

crisis

of

cycles in

Central America. Between each historical cycle of revolution-counterrevolution, there have been brief reformist interludes.

Of

course the consequences of this historical trajeaory are long-

lasting.

was the

the

The

mentalities of a country that has

later interrupted (as in the cases

same

as those in a

first case,

had a revolution, even

country which has proven unable to make one. In

the exercise of popular power, even in passing,

enormous confidence

if it

of Mexico and Nicaragua), are not

in the transformative capacity

left

an

of collective action,

while a profound historical pessimism about the possibility of radical

FORREST HYLTON

XVI

change has been accentuated in the second, the case of Colombia. This

would

also explain

heavily

on memory

Obviously

this

why, in Colombia, memory

as

trauma weighs so

as heroic celebration.

not a question of evidence, pure and simple. Such

is

singularity turns out to be comprehensible only within the

framework of

The question "Where are we?" is only clarified for us to the extent that we can establish structural determinants, meaning an answer to the question, "Where do we come from?" It is true that during the nineteenth century, Colombia - with it numerous civil wars - was representative in Latin America, but in the twentieth century, careful historical reflection.

for

most countries

social

and

in the region civil wars

political experiences

populism (Vargas in

as a

become

Peron in Argentina). Yet Colombia suffered a

Brazil,



defined by Hobs-

"failed revolution." Thereafter,

Colombia would

prolonged, undeclared

bawm

complex

became an anachronism, and

of incorporation were opened up under

civil

war

called la Violencia

increasingly exceptional within the context of Latin

American

politics.

Taking note of this

singularity, this

the exceptional quality of

Colombian

book

is

history,

a voyage of discovery into

which only makes

sense,

according to the author, in the broader context of Latin American history,

and of the

the United States.

relations

between Colombia, Western capitalism, and

According to the laws, there

is

only one government.

President Alberto Lleras

Camargo (1945)

Remembering Colombia

Introduction:

element of the system,

Forgetting

is

a key

history. It

is

a factor of power.

as

it is

of Colombian

Jacques Gilard, Veinte y cuarenta anos

de algo peor que

some 300

soledad (1988)

Setting

I

In late 2005,

la

representatives

from indigenous

reserves {res-

guardos indt'genas) and Afro-Colombian communities {comunidades negras)

came together

in

Quibdo, the

capital

of Colombia's Choco

department, to outline strategies for survival in a war that targets them, the communities they represent,

and

their non-liberal, collective

mode of

administering resources and territory. According to the Colombian

Constitution of 1991, considered one of the most progressive in the

ment of land and cabildos,

cells

autonomy -

collective

manage-

political as well as cultural self-determination

through

world, indigenous peoples have rights to

of

local

Colombians secured

government. In 1993, under

Law

70, Afro-

rights similar to those enshrined in the constitution

managed by community councils. Both Afro-Colombians and the indigenous people built on non-liberal traditions of constituting themselves as democratic for indigenous peoples: inalienable collective land titles

citizens

and communities.

However, these a protest

collectives

were threatened with extinction. As part of

movement, and on the

basis

of existing

rights

- conquered

through processes of organizing that began in the 1970s and culminated in the Constituent

Assembly of 1991 - indigenous and Afro-Colombian

delegates drafted four letters that introduce the dramatis personae

and

FORREST HYLTON

2

outline the major themes of the current phase of Colombia's sixty-year

More than a decade after their conquest of citizenship, the Choco department still had the highest rates of poverty and infant mortality, in a country in which more than half of the population lived in poverty.^ Communities and reserves faced dispossession at the hands of conflict.

three groups: armed Left insurgencies, paramilitary counterinsurgents, and the Colombian Armed Forces and National Police - the latter

backed by the

US

government

to a

ftiller

extent than the

any countries except Egypt, Israel, Iraq,

The communities

armed

autonomy, and independence"

than the ones

territory, culture,

held by the groups

From

threatening their existence with "violent expropriation."

Army (ELN),

the

the country's smallest insurgency,

delegates asked for respect for political eignty: largely absent

of

represented at the 7th Inter-Ethnic Solidarity

Conference outlined a different vision of "identity,

National Liberation

forces

and Afghanistan.

autonomy and

from the region, the

ELN

territorial sover-

was told

to stay out

of

indigenous reserves and black communities. Founded in the mid-1960s,

and centered from the 1980s

and multi-

in the northern oil regions

ELN

national export enclave zones (coal, gold, emeralds), the

between 3,500 and 4,500 combatants, and unlike most they operated, the

ELN had only recendy arrived in the Choco. State and

especially paramilitary repression

weakened or defeated them had long

ruled,

and

their

urban

2005, they began preliminary

of their narrow support base had

The Revolutionary Armed

militias

talks

were

all

but decimated. Hence in

on peace negotiations with the

councils.

Formed

Forces of Colombia

in the

right-

Velez.

stay out of deliberations in indigenous cabildos

to

where they

in areas of the countryside

wing administration of Alvaro Uribe

community

had

which

areas in

(FARC) was

mid-1960s, the

22,000 combatants. By the mid-1990s,

it

told to

and Afro-Colombian

FARC

had a presence

has 18,000

in

more than

half of all county seats {municipios), with a stronghold in the jungles plains in sparsely populated frontier zones of the south

the late 1990s, the

FARC

and the

ELN

and

We

leaders, the

reject the

FARC

FARC's

came

it

in for harsh criticism:

intrusion into our

and Indigenous Councils

{cabildos),

By

together influenced politics in

over 90 per cent of frontier municipios. In the letter addressed to

Choco

and

southeast.

Community

Councils

which compromises our

by

EVIL

autonomy and our our daily

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

cultural identity;

3

impedes the

activities; serves as a pretext for

free exercise

of

the absence of the social

investments that the state should make; impedes the application of internal rules

and

regulations;

and

affects

threaten and stigmatize our people with that cannot be contradicted,

over those

who

travel

capitals, alleging that

reasons,

we

they are

reiterate that

communities or

and you

Army

own

security.

rural zones

to municipal

informants. For

you must not be present

of these

all

either in black

in indigenous reserves.

Insurgent attacks on and intimidation of Afro-Colombian

- however dation of Colombia's armed conflict nities

and indigenous

percentage of

AUC

You

create a cloak of suspicion

and from

to

our

unfounded accusations

reserves

human

rights violations

commu-

representative of the degrapale in comparison to the

committed by the paramilitary

(United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). This climbed from

roughly 65 to 80 per cent of the total during US-sponsored Plan

Colombia (2000-5).

Though

insurgencies

depend on

terrorist

tactics

kidnapping, selective assassination, and extortion,

understanding by applying the "terrorist" the country's problems

media -

is

label.

bombings,

like

little

is

To blame

gained in

the bulk of

on the insurgency - fashionable academia and the

to put the cart before the horse. It overlooks the fact that

throughout modern history,

state

terror has provided the

"oxygen"

without which insurgent terror "cannot combust for very long." Unlike Left insurgency, paramilitary dominance was intimately tied to official politics,

and most evident

in President Alvaro

Uribe Velez's

heartland, Antioquia, as well as the Santanders, the "coffee axis" {eje cafetero),

and the Atlantic coast

region. Paramilitaries are best defined as

private armies that

Collaborate with the military or undertake tasks that should be carried out

by the

fight: the

as fighting guerrillas.

Or, more

of the dirty and disreputable aspects of this

massacre of those suspected of collaborating with the

guerrillas ("paraguerrillas")

unarmed

such

military,

exactly, they take care

civilian

and the displacement of masses of the

population that can act as the "sea for the fish"

for the guerrillas, to use the

Maoist metaphor.

FORREST HYLTON

4

President Uribe was reminded that after communities denounced the

and

spread, under paramilitary auspices, of coca cultivation

narcotics

2003, the government did nothing about

it

other than target collectively held territories for "violent expropriation"

-

trafficking in the region since

under the pretext of combating the drug tion of paramilitary

trade. Recalling their

and military coordination

the implementation of a neoliberal agro-export

The our

African Palm puts our collective land fragile

in

denuncia-

2004, they protested

model

titles

at their expense:

in danger, afiects

eco-system, damages our agriculture, affects traditional

crops, creates an enclave

economy, aggravates the food

impUes a long process of

crisis,

and

accumulation that would only

capital

benefit large investors, to the detriment of our

communities

.

.

.

Far from being a prosperous alternative, the African Palm represents a counter-insurgent strategy that

in the

is

exacerbating the conflict

Choco.

The document

refers to investors, capital

enclave economies

US-dominated



crucial aspects

circuits

accumulation, and extractive

of Colombian integration into the

of production, consumption, and distribution -

the result of a shift away from coffee and protected industrial facturing that began in the 1970s.

manu-

Delegates mention a strategy of

counterinsurgency which, in violation of Protocol

II

of the Geneva

Conventions, demands loyalty and collaboration of citizens with police

and armed

forces,

and functions to help the spread of mono-crop export

agriculture with potentially ecocidal

The

letter to

and ethnocidal

military takeover in peripheral frontier regions

ment has never

effects.

President Uribe speaks to the state-sanctioned para-

ruled,

companies functioned

and where

oil,

as a resource base

which the

central govern-

banana, gold, and logging



a necessary condition for

insurgent expansion and consolidation. In keeping with a precedent set

during

la Violencia in

nalize parastate

the 1950s, President Uribe began to institutio-

impunity

in order to strengthen central

authority over frontier zones

- a dangerous

government

repetition of the past. Violent

dispossession was comparable to the earlier period in the 1950s, with 3

million displaced in the twenty-first century, mainly in multinational

export enclaves or areas of recent frontier settlement. For the most part, this

is

carried out in the

name of

fighting the "internal

enemy.

"'^

HOUR

EVIL Although

political party elites

-

paramilitaries

IN

COLOMBIA

no longer

J

led the process, right-wing

and, to a lesser extent. Left guerrilla insurgencies



continue to forcibly displace peasants from the land.^ Delegates to the Inter-Ethnic Solidarity Conference therefore

demanded an end

to

impunity, expropriation, and displacement, as well as reparations for crimes committed against their communities. While expressing support

of former paramilitary combatants into

for a plan for reintegration civilian

the letter to President Uribe

life,

demobilization could give

rise

"new

to

warned

that paramilitary

paramilitary structures,"

and

asked for "disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration into civilian life

.

.

.

within a framework of respect for truth, justice, reparations, and

non-repetition." In honor of their "autonomy," they asked that "reinsertion not

become

a

mechanism

for the expropriation

of our ancestral

truth, justice, reparations,

and expropria-

lands."

The emphasis on memory,

tion was a response to President Uribe's

Law 975 on As

demobilization, which offered none of the above.

Watch emphasized,

Rights

the law did nothing to dismantle paramilitary

and "flagrandy violated" international norms on and reparations

paramilitary

Human

to victims

and

their families.

web of

shoreline, thick jungle, dense

rivers,

issues

With

of truth, its

power

justice,

long Pacific

and mountainous border

with Panama, the Choco became a strategic corridor {corredor estrategico) for the counterinsurgency,

defeated the

which -

for the time being,

anyway - has

FARC. Both insurgency and counterinsurgency forced Afro-

Colombian and indigenous communities

to

pay taxes and

tribute,

and

fought to use their territory for coca growing, cocaine processing and transport,

and arms

The second

trafficking.

group,

it

bears repeating,

became

regulated their impunity, and

alongside the official state. to overthrow the

At

Colombian

worked with the Colombian

"demobilized" under a law that

military, infiltrated official institutions,

a parastate

-

a state within

least in theory, insurgents, state,

and

however, fought

and controlled over 40 per cent of

US

government has backed the

Colombian Armed Forces and National

Police against the insurgencies,

national

the

more

territory.

The more

the

powerftil the right-wing parastate has become. This, then,

is

one of the unintended consequences of a counterinsurgent policy to strengthen a

weak

state.

The Colombian war has

created the second-largest internally displaced

FORREST HYLTON

6

population in the world after Sudan, with Afro-Colombians comprising the majority of the displaced; indigenous peoples represented a disproportionately high percentage as well. ^ try,

The

^

coun-

region's third-largest

Colombia had the second-largest population of African descent

in

Latin America. Patterns of expropriation there reflect long-term historical continuities

of natural resources, and the use of

in landownership, exploitation

upon Under

parliamentary democratic republic founded

political terror in a

unresolved legacies of conquest, colonization, and slavery.^

Spanish colonialism, for example, African slaves were brought from Cartagena, the chief slave port of the

mines and on catde ranches

in the

Andean

region, to

work

in gold

Choco, which led to the displacement

or dispossession of indigenous groups. Seeking freedom from an extractive enclave

economy and

extensive, absentee-owned latifundios, the

indigenous, like manumitted slaves and runaways, fled into jungles that are today the eye

The

of the hurricane.

Inter-Ethnic Solidarity

Forum

called

on

all

parties to search for

a negotiated political, as opposed to military, solution to the war,

outlining a different vision of peace, security, democracy, justice

not

truth

least,

parastate, liberal

— than

and the Left offer a

on

way

citizenship,

is

Although Colombia's historical

its

state,

Communally based forms of nonlinked to a new Left electoral

and the reigning

neoliberal

civil

depth

war is

is

one of the longest-running and most

rarely

acknowledged. Considered the

earned

on the map of counterinsurgency planners

imperial landscape of the twenty-first century.

geographic proximity to the

US

military

scholarship

engagement

USA,

I

particularly historians

in the

it

new

Given Colombia's

as well as the length

and depth of

there, the relative silence in English-language

and public debate

In what follows,

least

of Latin American countries in the USA,

least studied

place

economic

Aim

understood and its

and,

the right-wing

blocked.

II

violent,

from the

forward, but because of the violent exclusive-

ness of both the political system

model, the way

offer

insurgencies.

democracy and

movement,

those



is

unsettling.

build almost entirely

and

on the work of

scholars,

social scientists, as well as journalists

and

EVIL

human

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

7

rights workers, in order to connect, as well as untangle, past

Literature

present.

on the contemporary period

and

typically contains a

chapter on the history of political violence in Colombia, but a deeper historical perspective

is

needed to understand the current moment.

Existing historical syntheses, however, give short shrift to radical-popular

movements, emphasizing instead actions of elite groups, the two parties they

dominated, and the

of the nation

rise

This book attempts to remedy

this

problem

political

state.

In

in the literature.

proportion to the progressive hypertrophy of armed Left insurgencies, is

true, radical-popular mobilization in

it

Colombia has been comparatively

weak and fragmented since the 1 960s, but it was not always so. popular movements have punctuated Colombian history at

Radicalspecific

conjunctures, with lasting effects, and an understanding of their history gives us a

more rounded view of nation

formation.

It also

of

and

state, party,

ruling-class

helps to explain Colombia's extraordinarily high levels

political violence,

which

set

neighbors during the cold war terror since conquest.

While

it

-

on

a different, bloodier course

from

Latin America's darkest era of political

radical

popular movements and social

democratic electoral parties came to power throughout Latin America

Colombia

in the early twenty-first century, in

invasion of more and

more public and

had become "the ordering-disordering

there was a "progressive

by a violence

private spaces"

factor of politics, society,

that

and the

economy.

The civil

conflicts

Past

book

central claim of this

war today,

it is

is

that to understand the

and the accumulated weight of unresolved

and present "illuminate each other

contradictions.^'^

reciprocally,"

Colombian case, of repeating collective Contemporary conflict in Colombia mirrors the

danger, in the

and

political

past,

another round of official amnesia regarding war crimes

the

name of "peace" and

debates

come

signal the

trauma.

with major

of property and territory to the wealthy and powerftil,

transfers as

Colombian

necessary to appreciate the multiple layers of previous

on memory,

before.

"national reconciliation."

truth, justice,

As one scholar of state

and reparations terror in Latin

"recovery begins with memory,', and this struggle against forgetting. ^^ terror in

One

effect

book

which

as well

legislated in

situate current

in light of

what has

America reminds

us,

offered as part of the

of the long-term use of poUtical

Colombia and elsewhere has been

political alternatives to

is

I

-

to erase the

terror responded.

memory of the

FORREST HYLTON

Themes

III

In poliq/^-making circles in Washington and Bogota, that

Colombia suffers from

had an

As commonly

innate propensity to shed one another's blood. sented, this

often argued

it is

a culture of violence, as if Colombians

pre-

an ahistorical and tautological explanation of why, in

is

contrast to neighbors characterized

by center-Left governments and

popular mobilization, Colombian politics are characterized by high levels

of

And

terror.

it

overlooks the fact that until the end of the

nineteenth century, Colombia, in contrast to Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina, was marked "not by

thereof

"^^

the region

its mass violence, but by the lack Whether focusing on comparisons with other countries in or on the difference between the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, scholars generally caution against interpreting late twentieth-

century violence as a logical outcome of nineteenth-century patterns.

There

is

scant historical evidence to support the idea that a "culture of

violence" explains

Colombian

politics.

two

In explaining Colombia's unusual path,

comparative Latin American history

classic

accounts of

stress the durability

of oligarchic

democracy, institutionalized through two cently, the idea

political parties.

More

of an "oligarchy" has been subject to skeptical

re-

critique,

yet remains useftil for understanding Colombia's violence in relation to

an exclusionary

political order. ^^

We

can understand the oligarchy as a

members enjoy privileges based on supplemented by the entrance of new

quasi-corporate group, most of whose birth

and something

like rank,

elements, mainly from the middle

working

class

and peasantry. With

work every four

years,

class,

but occasionally from the

presidential elections held like clock-

Colombia's oligarchic democracy boasts the

longest-running two-party system in the world. Liberal diarchy survived nearly

down

150

years,

The

Conservative-

remaining outwardly intact

to the twenty-first century, despite legislative elections

governed by

proportional representation. After 1848, fraction

when

Liberal

and Conservative

of the oligarchy united the

class

rule

as

was established, no

a whole,

along with

subordinate groups, in a hegemonic project; none could represent interests as those

of the nation. Though

this

Latin America in the nineteenth century, in the twenty-first century.

Elites

was

common

Colombia

it

in

its

Europe and

lasted

through

were therefore forced to enter into

EVIL political pacts

HOUR

capitalist

9

with subordinate groups that did not enact public

deference, let alone internalize the Instead, they

COLOMBIA

IN

demanded and fought

norms and

the rise of coffee export capitalism

but in

for equality;

hegemony, authoritarian Catholic

rituals

values of their

of bourgeois

lieu

clientelism, underwritten

and the Conservative

of

rulers."^

Party,

by

domi-

nated the fifty-year period after 1880, and reversed the tide of radical-

popular mobilization that had characterized Colombia during the "Age

of Capital" (1848-75).

Revanchism and increasing technological sophistication complemen-

boom, Colombia's own age of central government two political parties through which

ted each other during the coffee export capital,

which did not lead to an extension of

authority, but strengthened the

geographically fi^agmented, landed oligarchies maintained regional and local

supremacy

of challenges from below.

in the face

I

argue that the

short reach of the central government, the influence of the

pronounced regionalism based on landownership, and

two

parties,

ruling-class dis-

unity have been constants in republican history.

As the

coffee firontier

was

settled in the late nineteenth

and

early

twentieth centuries, sectors of the peasantry identified with whiteness

and

capitalist progress

into

one of the two

lism.

The

secured property rights and political incorporation

parties

through networks of patronage and cliente-

majority of peasants,

as

well

as

Afiro-Colombian and

indigenous reserves, had precarious claims to property

rights,

Umited

incorporation into the two parties, and lived under threat of violence

and/or dispossession. lization

When

reforms from above coincided with mobi-

from below in the 1860s, and again in the 1930s, landlords

launched reactions in the countryside, mobilizing racial-ethnic privileges, political

monopoly, and the

These movements of counter-reform,

ments to which they responded, were

Colombia -

The

firactured

contrast between

and mosdy

to protect

rule of property.

like the radical-popular

locally

This reflected the nature of landed wealth, in

clients

political

rural

Colombia and the

move-

and regionally organized. power, and authority

through the 1950s. rest

of Latin America in the

1930s and 1940s could not be sharper: Mexico under Cardenas, Argentina under Peron, Brazil under Vargas, Bolivia under Toro and Busch,

or, as recent scholarship

Dominican Republic under form of

politics

that

has shown,

Trujillo, or

Cuba under

Batista, the

Nicaragua under Somoza.*^

A

included those excluded from the oligarchic

FORREST HYLTON

10

republics in order to forestall real or imagined threats of revolution,

populism succeeded

working

brilliantly.

may

the old oligarchies

While the middle

class

and

fractions

and peasantry benefited more than they had

class

of

have benefited more than other groups, the before, or

since.

In Colombia, how^ever, populism W2.s beaten back in the 1930s and

When

1940s.

it

reared

head again

its

in the

1970s and 1980s,

it

was

decapitated by state and parastate terror. Ironically, this has only

weakened the already and strengthened,

fragile legitimacy

and

at least militarily

of the central government,

territorially. Left

insurgencies

and the right-wing counterinsurgency. By scholarly consensus, makes Colombia unique.

I

argue that

when

this

the central government

attempted agrarian reform under the pressure of radical-popular mobilization, reform was blocked in

regions

and counter-reform strengthened

and municipalities. As

sectarian warfare spread in

the

1940s and 1950s, hundreds of thousands of displaced peasant families colonized agrarian

either

regions, or carved out

intermediate

frontiers

zones

cities, in

sparsely

in

populated lowland

urban frontiers ringing Colombia's numerous far

from the radius of central government

authority. First

through factional warfare between two

parties,

and

later

through

cold war counterinsurgency, the central government delegated repression

when

faced with insurgent challenges. This was

common

in the counter-

insurgent terror states that began with Guatemala in 1954, Brazil and Bolivia in 1964,

and spread through the Southern Cone

elsewhere after the Second "distant yet terror

still

involved

was inextricably

Two

things

"

in the 1970s.

World War, US government

in Latin America,

As

patrons were

and "counterrevolutionary

tied to empire."^^

made Colombia's

terror state distinctive, though:

first,

part of the peasantry, linked to elites through middle-class intermediaries

and the dream of property ownership, drove others off the land through terror, dispossession,

Marx

and expropriation — roughly analogous

called the "primitive

countryside.

Second, over time, the paramilitaries obtained

autonomy from the

state

by becoming a

land in fewer and fewer hands, even as it

to

what

accumulation" of capital in the English

among a select number of subaltern

it

parastate.

redistributed a small

clients.

^^

Cities

relative

This concentrated

amount of

grew alongside the

settlement of an open agrarian frontier, where the previous dynamic of

HOUR

EVIL

years,

went from

the land

-

to

replicated. ^^

was

conflict

just fifty

which two-thirds of people

campesino-, criolloy mestizo, mulato, indio

which two- thirds

in

Colombians, in the course of

living in a society in

- patron and

one

Even

And

U

COLOMBIA

IN

lived

on

and negro

lived in cities.

Colombia has become

as

network of cities connected by

air

and

political traction in regions

a society that revolves around a and highways, landlords have retained

localities.

Colombian

politics

can be

envisioned as an authoritarian parliamentary system in which landlords,

coming

rather than

have

fiised

into conflict with rising merchant-industrial groups,

Commercial

with them.

unclear division between

licit

the oligarchy with outsiders

and

- and found -

sectors sought

and

by an

characterized

activity,

illicit,

has continuously provided

upwardly mobile

fresh initiatives, as

entry into the ranks of the oligarchy

through ruthless entrepreneuriaHsm.^^

New

manufacturing and commercial eHtes tied to the coffee export

business

joined with

century,

and

the

rather than

landed oligarchy in the

late

nineteenth

weakening the power of the landlordism

within the oligarchy, this strengthened

it.

The

reactionary alliance

characterized the coffee republic under Conservative rule after 1880,

survived intact the gaitanista challenge in the 1940s, provided the basis for National Front policies

continued

rise

US

through the 1980s, and, thanks to the

government's "war on drugs," took on

of the cocaine business in

new dimensions with the the 1990s. The drug export

mafia invested in construction, communication, and services, and

its

contraband imports undercut domestic manufacturing industry. As latifundistas, estate.

a

they

owned most of the

country's best land

and urban

real

Based on landownership, power continued to be dispersed from

weak

beyond the

center into the regions, especially in frontier areas,

reach of the state.

The "chronic scholars

deficit"

of the Colombian

and those Uving through the

with conflicting views of Colombian

weak,

state

is

this

must rank

insurgencies ally

its

state

is

proverbial

conflict. Specialists

among

and social

politics agree that the

actors

Colombian

authority britde. In any account of Colombia's violence, as a principal explanatory factor for the strength

and the

paramilitaries. Sovereignty has always

circumscribed and fragmented.

monopolized force the territory under

legitimately, its

The

nor has

jurisdiction.

central it

of

been region-

government has never

administered the majority of

This led to a long period of inter-elite

FORREST HYLTON

12

war through the

first

half of the

the end of the 1950s, however, the bipartisan grip

on formal

factional conflict that spilled into civil

twentieth century.

By

political representation

was backed by a shared commitment to

market economics, in which the

state

was

anti-communism cemented the two

to play a limited role.

parties together in the National

Front. Wealth, especially land, remained tighdy concentrated, tribution highly unequal,

liberal

Cold war dis-

its

although a period of sustained economic

growth - based on coffee exports and manufacturing market - broadened the urban and small-town middle municipios. Elite consensus without

for the

home

class in cities

and

hegemony absorbed segments of

subordinate groups through networks of patronage and clientelism.

modest middle working

class, as

well as subaltern clients

were increasingly tied to

class,

inalizing protest, dissent,

this

new

and the very poverty

A

from the peasantry and But by crim-

order.

that

government eco-

nomic policies reproduced, the National Front excluded the majority town and country.

in

National Front counterinsurgency spurred the growth of Left insurgencies. In the

without class,

1970s and 1980s, recendy colonized

state presence

became

rural

and urban

fertile terrain for national-level,

areas

cross-

multi-ethnic Left electoral movements. Since these were led by Left

open up - backed by

insurgents looking to

landlord militias

entrepreneurs

- fought

versive" threats

Created

as

the political system or overthrow a

new

ruling-class faction

it,

of cocaine

to protect private property rights against "sub-

by liquidating the broad

an auxiliary to the

Left.

state's military

and police

forces,

who

were unable to stop the spread of insurgency, paramilitaries were poised to

become

the

new rulers of the

land by the beginning of the twenty-first

century. Theirs was a "gangsterism that

had become

society itself"

Paramilitaries evolved into a parastate, penetrating poUtical parties as well as

government agencies, from the Constitutional Court

to intelligence

many

regions, para-

services

nominally under presidential control. In

militaries administered territory

and monopolized public

gencies functioned as tributary statelets, charging taxes rents

on the cocaine

landlords,

as

business, multinational extractive enterprises,

well as the inhabitants of their "zones."

"parcellized sovereignty"

humanitarian

crisis

office. Insur-

and protection

and

Regimes of

and "fragmented peace" led to an international

that overran national borders

and threatened the

EVIL

HOUR

sovereignty of neighboring states. history

US

and

politics

IN

COLOMBIA

These, then, are the outlines of the

of a country that has become the principal

government - and chief recipient of US military aid -

hemisphere.

I3

ally

of the

in the western

Radical-Popular Republicanism, 1848-80

We

should be treated

slaves

like citizens

of a republic and not

like the

of a sultan.

Afro-Colombian boatmen from Dagua (1851) This chapter introduces the economic, demographic, and

political out-

of early republican Colombia, and analyzes the social history of

lines

politics.

In spite of features of oligarchic rule

it

shared with neighboring

republics following the wars of independence, in the

"Age of Capital"

(1848-75), radical-popular poUtical mobilization put Colombia leading edge of Atlantic republican democracies.^

A

at the

closer look at the

Cauca, one of Colombia's key regions in the nineteenth century, demonstrates that, contrary to what scholars have

commonly assumed,

oppressed racial/ethnic groups and classes fought to claim places in the

new

republic.

They forged political

ongoing processes of conquest.

away from

static,

local

time,

dependent peasantry, revealing more

and regional dynamics. In contrast

reaction that followed

it,

as well as in

Colombia was notable

I

and

images of a united, all-powerful landed

ahistorical

oligarchy, ruling over a hapless,

complex

traditions that challenged slavery

A closer look at these traditions moves us

for

From

its

the

to the long period of

comparison to

its

neighbors at the

radical-popular politics.

Top Down

Colombia emerged from the wars of independence one of the most and economically depressed of new Latin Amer-

devastated, disunited,

ican nations, with miserable communications, litde foreign trade,

banking

institutions,

and low

fiscal capacity.

no

Public works were non-

FORREST HYLTON

l6

and the

existent,

internal

market was

transport coffee from Medellin

London.

to

1890,

tiny: as late as

it

more

cost

to

Bogota than from Medellin to

In the 1850s and 1860s, brief export

and tobacco, the latter of which peaked during the lead to socioeconomic transformation,

booms

quinine

in

US Civil War,

did not

and the penury of Bogota's

unproductive, overconsuming aristocracy was the subject of nostalgic

With

lament. oflF



periods fi-actions

fi-om

credit scarce,

Antioquian merchant-lenders - grown rich

from gold mining

profits

early republican

behind them. In 1854, they even made noises about separating

Colombia

become pan of

to

Extreme geographical

Colombian

USA.^^

the

differentiation has always

poUtics,

and has allowed

power

in land, political office,

and market share

levels.

The country

factor of

and

in the late colonial

acted as financiers, but did not try to unite other ruling

is

rent

from the south, themselves the southeast,

it

by

three great

split

been an inescapable

elites to

entrench their

at the local

and regional

mountain ranges fanning up

by the Cauca and Magdalena

To

rivers.

opens out onto a vast expanse of tropical lowlands,

straddling the equator, crisscrossed

the Orinoco and

Amazon

Caribbean and Pacific

by innumerable

basins.

coasts,

To

rivers

draining into

the west and north

the

lie

and the impenetrable jungle of the

Panamanian Isthmus, while the country's

principal oil reserves

lie

in

the easterly province of Arauca and Northern Santander, fronting the

Venezuelan border. The majority of the population has always been concentrated in the cooler, subtropical mountainous regions. Bogota, at

8,660

above sea

feet

But the

level,

has an average temperature of 57 °F (14 °C).

themselves were, for centuries, separated by tortuous roads

cities

and impassable mountains,

as

they remain for peasants in frontier areas.

Poor transport and geographical effect

on the

isolation have

had a

critical

shaping

ruling groups themselves. Centralized military control

inherendy more

difficult in

Colombia than

was

in neighboring countries:

army was always about a third of the size of Civilian parties — and the Church - thus became much more important as transmission belts of power than elsewhere. But they could not escape the logic of territorial fragmentation either. By delegating authority to local party bosses, Bogota's landlordrelative to population, the

that in Peru or Ecuador.

merchant-lawyers divisions

and

helped

inequalities.

intensify,

rather

than

mitigate,

regional

Citizenship in late nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century Colombia did not entail a sense of common belonging

EVIL

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

within the nation, represented by a central government, but rather an

membership

exclusive

in

one of two

political parties. Politics,

terms of friend-enemy, was a zero-sum municipalities,

and regional

and party parties

racial,

defined in

regions

and

ethnic,

class,

have often shed each other's blood, the

paradigm - structured, along Iberian

lines,

between Conservatives and Liberals - has

division

was

cut across

affiliations

the

in

lines.

While the two political

affair

characteristic

by an

persisted.

of the newly independent Latin American

early nineteenth century,

where a ruling

elite

classic

oligarchic

The system states

of the

of landowners, lawyers, and

merchants, manipulating a restricted suffrage in which those

who had the

vote were clients rather than citizens, typically split into two wings.

Conservatives were devoted counterparts in

Europe -

first

and foremost

religion, in close alliance

Church. Liberals declared themselves

in favor

and -

to order,

like their

with the Catholic

of progress, and were, on

the whole, anticlerical. Economically speaking, landed wealth tended to

be more Conservative, commercial fortunes more Liberal, although occupational differences were not particularly pronounced, decisive.

much

less

Aside fi"om Liberal anticlericalism, there were no major ideo-

logical fault lines either.

The

civilian division,

was punctuated by pronunciamientos and military chieftains, in the

name - but not

almost purely sectarian,

power by

seizures of

always with the assent

rival

- of one

or other of the opposing political parties.

Although the country was divided between two great ties,

these

showed no systematic

regional pattern.

political loyal-

A few zones did exhibit

a clear-cut predominance of one or other party early on: the Caribbean littoral

was

exceptions. level

Liberal;

Antioquia was Conservative. But these were the

The rule was an intricate quilt of local rivalries at the micro-

of small communities or townships, cheek by jowl within each

region.

Liberals

and Conservatives were, from the

start,

and have

remained, highly factional as nationwide organizations. Originally, the division

between Liberals and Conservatives had a

Colombian society. Liberals were layminded members of the landed and merchant elite, followers of Santander, and hostile to what was perceived as the clerical and militarist compromises of the last period of Bolivar's career as Liberator. Conservatives, who had closer links to the colonial aristocracy or officialdom, stood for centralized order and the social discipline of religion. Ideas rational ideological foundation in

FORREST HYLTON

l8

mattered in disputes between the two, starting with the Santander

government's directive that Bentham's legislation as

on

treatises

and penal

civil

be mandatory study in the University of Bogota,

1825 - inconceivable

England

in

itself

even

had been expelled from the colonies by the Spanish monarchy

Colombia was

and then

From

II

at the forefront

the

of

Furious

reintroduction of the Jesuits,

clerical reaction eventually led to the

to run the secondary schools;

as early

fifty years later.

who

in 1767,

their re-expulsion in 1850.

Bottom

Up

liberal revolution in the nineteenth-

century Atlantic world, and Liberal Party leaders, confident of their historical mission,

were committed to

and the

radical reforms. Slavery

death penalty were to be abolished. Church and state separated, quit-rents

lifiied,

divorce legalized, the

suffrage introduced. In

its

army reduced, and

view, Indian communities, seen as part of a

pernicious colonial legacy to be overcome, had

which was

to be

clerical

universal male

no

place in the republic,

founded instead on yeoman smallholders. This had been

the vision of Bolivar.

In the Cauca, Afro-Colombians, Indians, and

fi-ontier settlers

Antioquia pressed claims and participated actively in

from

A political

politics.

culture of "republican bargaining" developed after 1848. Subalterns

voted in elections, societies,

and participated

demonstrations, boycotts,

in

riots,

town and

councils,

civil

wars,

democratic

making Co-

lombia one of the world's most participatory republican democracies during the "Age of Capital" (1848-76). Nowhere

else in the Atlantic

world of the 1850s and early 1860s did descendants of African

and join Sociedades Democrdticas, and nowhere nity

members

else

slaves vote

did Indian

commu-

exercise the vote as citizens.

In the 1850s, no ruling faction was powerful enough to implant regional, let alone national,

aspired to state

hegemony

power had,

in

Colombia. Each clique that

to varying extents,

to forge local-

regional-level alliances with previously disenfranchised groups,

and

whose

demands included the end of inequalities that stemmed fi"om patterns of colonial domination and exploitation. Cauca's elites had to contend with artisans and rural worker-citizen-soldiers: Indians, Afro-Caucanos, and Antioquian frontier settlers. Rulers and ruled in Colombia did not have a shared understanding of republican democracy, nor a joint commitment

HOUR

EVIL

IN

and many

to equality. Conservatives

COLOMBIA

I9

elite Liberals

thought democraq^

should not give way to a leveling process and a "republic of equals" in

which "anarchy" reigned, whereas the

end of

slavery

and the

access to land of their

rule

for

own. For Indians

right to exist as a corporate

Afro-Caucanos, equality meant

of Conservative hacendados,

as well as

in the Cauca, equality

group exercising

meant the

collective stewardship

of

land and practicing village self-government. In the north, for Antioquian settler villages, equality

meant protection from Conservative merchant-

land speculators from back home.

The

clash

between Liberals and Conservatives, then, was not

questions of education, nor was

it

a purely intra-elite

affair:

just over

the Liberal

Revolution of 1849-53 was preceded and deepened by risings {zurriagos)

of mosdy Afro-ex-slave insurgents against Conservative hacendadosm the

Cauca Valley, with widespread

after

was occupied

looting, arson, fence-smashing,

1850.

at the

The

and land occupations

leading Conservative clan's hacienda, Japio,

end of the war

communal landholding and

in 1851, as

collective use

of

Afro-Caucanos practiced

and

forests

sought to produce and market tobacco and sugar,

free

rivers.

from the

They rule

of

hacendados. Radical republican artisans in the capital, Bogota, stirred by

the Parisian barricades of Blanc, mobilized as well.

1

848 and the writings of Proudhon and Louis

As

in

Europe, Colombian Liberals abandoned

their craftsmen supporters to the rigors

dissolve

communally held indigenous

Afro-Caucano

their

allies,

of

lands.

free trade,

and began

They did not

fomenting instead the spread of Sociedades

Democrdticas, which oversaw the performance of elected petitioned local and national government authorities

primary education, voting the

rights, pensions,

commons, and aguardiente taxes. on by racial

Liberal divisions, brought

Afro-Caucano 1853,

as

on

officials,

issues

and

such

as

land distribution, access to

fear

Liberals, led to a Conservative

and

rejection of insurgent

upsurge in the elections of

Conservatives forged an ephemeral alliance with Indians

opposed to the privatization of speculators

Melo

to

dispense with

hungry

for

common

lands for the benefit of

cinchona bark (quinine). In 1854, Jose Maria

led a Liberal rising that

found support among Bogota's

republican artisans, but which caused

many

elite Liberals to

radical

throw

their

weight behind Conservatives. In Cauca, Conservatives, redefining the civil

war

as

an outbreak of criminal banditry, took revenge on the newly

minted Afro-Caucano worker-soldier-citizens by tightening vagrancy

FORREST HYLTON

20

laws, reinstating the death penalty,

Democrdticas.

Though

suffrage rights

disenfranchise ex-slaves,

employed

to keep

and a

and trying

to

ban the Sociedades

were not abolished, the goal was to

variety of means, including terror,

were

Afro-Caucanos from voting. Liberals paid dearly for

their underestimation

of the weight of the Indian communities, but

Conservatives were not astute enough to design a counterpart to the Sociedades Democrdticas in order to

cement an

alliance

with Indian

resguardos.

In the late 1850s,

Tomas

Cipriano de Mosquera, leader of the Cauca's

Conservatives before 1848, and a descendant of "the royal family of New

Granada," led the Liberal insurgency. Along with the Conservative

Arboleda

clan, to

which they had

close ties, the Mosqueras were the Mosquera fought under Bolivar, and

largest landholders in the region.

occupied important posts under proto-Conservative governments, but in his bid to oust

looked for

allies

Mariano Ospina, he defected

among Afro-Caucanos,

Indians,

to the Liberal side

and Antioquian

and

settlers.

Liberals sought to repeal the hated vagrancy laws, the death penalty,

and

They recognized village

self-

stop the onslaught

on the Indian

resguardos.

government through Law 90 in

in 1859, and protected Antioquian setders Maria from Conservative speculators - with whom Conservative

Ospina had personal connections —

the mountainous Quindio,

in

blocking hated consumption taxes on liquor as well.

As Conservatives

failed to craft

munities, Liberals capitalized

Caucanos

on

durable alliances with Indian com-

mass following among Afro-

their

to defeat their rivals in a civil

war (1860-63),

in which,

according to one Conservative, Mosquera's troops were "composed of blacks,

zambos, and mulattos,

valley."

and

assassins

The dark-skinned popular

thieves

forces fought

of the Cauca

under Mosquera,

although of the indigenous groups, only the Paez (Nasa) openly sided

with Liberals; Conservatives alienated former Indian ing adult

men and hanging

those

who

base of support from mestizo smallholders

Once Mosquera became country's leading region, as states (thus re-enfranchising

allies

by conscript-

They counted on a thin and some Antioquian villages.

resisted.

president

in

1863, Cauca became the

Mosquera devolved

suffrage rights to the

Afro-Caucanos), sequestered Church lands,

radically decentralized the constitution, abolished vagrancy laws

death penalty, and recognized Indian resguardos

Judges and deputies in the state

and the

as well as settler claims.

legislature, as well as state presidents.

HOUR

EVIL were elected every two

years, as

IN

COLOMBIA

21

were municipal councils. Voting took

place throughout the year. Liberals controlled the elections,

but Conservatives

competed

in local elections.

The combination of a

won

seats

in

outcomes of

state

the state legislature

and

barrage of Liberal policies, electoral supremacy,

and the irruption of participatory, radical-popular democracy within the Liberal Party, forced a

more

and

intransigent clerical

internally colonial

Conservatism into being. With the divide between their subaltern allies

widening along

racial

and

elite Liberals

and

class lines,

and

clashes

growing over the meanings of republican democracy growing through the late

1

870s, the limits of the alliance had been reached.

Tropical Thermidor

Ill

were not willing to dismande the hacienda, which would

Elite Liberals

have radically reconfigured

political

power based on the ownership of

land and exploitation of slave labor. Determined to stop the swelling tide

of what they called "anarchy" under radical Liberals - private property

was under

attack; bandits

and rusders loomed

tenants and sharecroppers refiised to

known

Independents broke ranks. The holy

as the

property,

in nearby mountains;

work or pay

and

religion."

-

rent

elite Liberals

trinity

was "family,

Independents had support from formerly Liberal

Antioquian setders in Maria,

as well as

"white" and "mestizo" small-

holders in northern Cauca, while Indian communities remained neutral.

This allowed Conservatives to lead a bloody but successful religious

coup

in the

Cauca

in

1878-79, which brought an end to Cauca's, and

Colombia's, radical-popular republican experiment.

opposed

to

what they

called

"savage democracy,"

Conservatives, in

which "the

barbarous element predominated," eagerly backed Independents, and

were determined to

roll

back

as

many of the new

In the 1870s, they founded a political vehicle

changes

-

as

they could.

Catholic Societies

-

through which they enlisted the support of frontier smallholders, some of

them former

Liberals, for

such a project. By providing religious educa-

tion. Catholic Societies aggressively

tional

reforms.

combated

anticlerical Liberal

Revamped Conservatism,

pioneered

by

educa-

Caucano

Independents and popular republican smallholders, led to the backlash

known

as the

Regeneration under Rafael Nuiiez.

This view of the history of ethnic/racial and

class conflict reveals that

FORREST HYLTON

22

in

any search

for a

more

peaceful, democratic,

Colombians can look back

and equitable

to a political culture that featured

future,

ample

channels for subaltern participation, from the 1850s through the 1870s. It

shows that the spread of authoritarian clientelism that characterized

the end of the period evolved as a reaction against the threat to private property, racial privilege,

and

political

monopoly. The Regeneration -

the subject of the next chapter

-

century so profoundly that

often forgotten

tendencies that preceded

it is

it

affected political

had been.

life

in the twentieth

how vital

the democratic

From Reaction

Three

distinct races

.

.

.

1880-1930

to Rebellion,

form the population of the republic. Each

state has diverse climates,

customs, and labors. There are only two

links that unite: language

and

religion.

They have not been

able to

take language from us but they try to uproot our beUefs. Barbarians!

.

.

.

They threw God and law out of government and higher now you will be the result: if we are not already

education, and

irremediably ruined,

it is

because Christ

still

reigns in hearts

and

minds.

Monseiior Rafael Maria Carrasquilla (1885)

The implementation of an

authoritarian centralist project overseen by Church and the Conservative Party marked the fifty-year period after 1880. It proscribed radical-popular politics by strengthening a clientelism rooted in the coffee export boom, which began in the 1880s and brought the Conservative commercial and banking elites of Antioquia to national prominence. This group of entrepreneurs paid for and benefited from the setdement of the coffee frontier, which offered hope

the Catholic

of landownership to tenants and sharecroppers willing to migrate. idealized figure of Conservative Antioquia, symbolized

by the

The

light-

skinned, property-owning frontier setder, became the measure of national progress, in contrast to the dark-skinned tenant, sharecropper, or

communal landholder

I

Begun

in

in the Cauca.

Coffee Capitalism and Clientelism

1880, the Regeneration initiated

dashing the hopes of Liberals

who wished

five

decades of reaction,

to see

Colombia stand

FORREST HYLTON

24

alongside leading Adantic democracies. For the most part, "Colombia's

turned away from trying to incorporate a disciplined citizenry,

elites

instead focusing their efforts

on

ruling over recalcitrant subjects."

1886 strengthened the power of the

constitution of

The

center, giving the

president the authority to appoint provincial governors, and terms of office

two

were extended from two to

six years for the executive,

and from

to four years for the legislative, to reduce the frequency of elections.

Demonstrations were forbidden, Sociedades Democrdticas persecuted, and

The country was

"order" became the watchword of the day. gically

"ideolo-

imprisoned," and Catholic, Hispanofile grammarians like Miguel

Antonio Caro - the

1886 Constitution - were

architect of the

its

guardians.

Subalterns were forced to politics

was reduced

popular

militias,

property.

the

work

for

and obey Creoles, and the sphere of

to exclude them.

A

and the death penalty was

The new concordat with

professional

army replaced on

reinstated to halt attacks

the Vatican ensured a tight link with

most authoritarian currents of the Church, which dispatched

successive struggle

waves of battle-hardened zealots from other theatres of

- European

or Latin American

-

to fortify the faith in

Colombia

and run the public school system. At the end of the century, the Regeneration regime crushed Liberal resistance, associated with the rising coffee bourgeoisie, in the

(1899-1903), which

murderous

War

mestizo from an Antioquian peasant family jettisoned

Panama

went uncontested

to the

joined the

elite,

affairs

thereafter (except

War

who

USA, whose dominance of hemispheric

The Regeneration cemented tened during the

of a Thousand Days

100,000 dead. President Marco Fidel Suarez, a

left

from below).

oligarchic control

— not

seriously threa-

of a Thousand Days - and closed off avenues for

radical-popular democratic participation that a heterogeneous coalition

of

rural workers, provincial middle-class lawyers {tinterillos),

artisans

opened up

Colombians saw

after

and urban

mid-century.^^ Indians, artisans, and Afro-

citizenship rights restricted

under Conservatives, and

the Catholic raza antioquena^ mythologized in the image of the small-

holding Antioquian

settler,

became the

cultural

Hnchpin of the new

political-economic order.

Nunez's authoritarian, anti-democratic road was paved over the bodies of those

who

struggled for alternative,

republican projects.

It

set the

more

inclusive participatory

parameters for national politics

down

I

EVIL

HOUR

to the twenty-first century.

Colombia's

Conservative

The

geographical

since the onset of the Regenera-

has

configuration

an exceptional

elites

2$

reasons for such persistence have

do with topography:

evidently had to tion,

COLOMBIA

IN

awarded Liberal-

advantage in imposing

logistical

parochial clientelist controls fi-om above, while blocking or suppressing

nationwide mobilizations from below. After against their

own

elite Liberals

what the

contradictions in the 1870s,

on

horizontal cohesion, they gained in vertical grip

and

intense material

ideological forces of their

had run up

parties lost in

their followers.

The

mutual contention were

applied in intimate grass-roots settings; the exceptional strength of the clientelism established during the Regeneration

no doubt owes much

to

the particular localization of these pressures.

Another feature of the Colombian countryside both reinforced clientelism

and gave

from the 1870s, that

capitalist

an unusual

large parts

political twist. It

this

was the discovery,

of its highland frontiers were ideal terrain

of coffee that gave Colombian merchants a major

for the cultivation

export staple,

it

generating substantial earnings

transformation.

Starting in

Venezuelan coffee farms, peasant

and the prospect of

Santander

settlers

as

an extension of

planted westwards into

Cun-

dinamarca, and, by the end of the century, Tolima, Antioquia, and Viejo

Caldas (Caldas, Risaralda, Quindio). After the First

World War, Co-

lombia had become the world's second-largest producer the pattern of

its

coffee

temala, large plantations

economy was

earlier, as in

of cultivation, while ous, if not to the

but

and Gua-

worked by indebted peasants or seasonal wage-

laborers predominated. In

peaked

after Brazil,

distinctive. In Brazil

Colombia such

Santander, and had

medium

same extent

less

estates

were more modest,

weight in the overall pattern

or smallholdings were increasingly numeras in

Costa Rica. Compared with the great

fazendas of Sao Paulo, however, the social base of coffee agriculture in Antioquia, Viejo Caldas, and parts of Tolima offered tenants

-

if still

highly unequal

-

and sharecroppers hope of ownership and control of

production. Measured in terms of land distribution, the coffee export

economy was comparatively democratic. With important regional exceptions, such as Cundinamarca and eastern ToUma, production was controlled not by planters, but by peasant families working on small and medium-sized plots at mid-level altitudes, between 1,000 and 2,000 meters.

The

commercialization of the crop, however, was always in the hands

FORREST HYLTON

26 of a wealthy

anchored in Antioquia

elite,

credit to small farmers, tenants,

and financed conflict

export.

^

Small producers were thus often thrust into

with merchant-creditors and real-estate speculators over land

terms of sale for their crop, and contraband trade in liquor. Even

tides,

on

its

They advanced

after the 1890s.

and sharecroppers, purchased output,

large estates in

Cundinamarca, landlord-merchants,

like the hacen-

dados in the Cauca before them, had to contend with fractious tenants

who

poached, smuggled, squatted, dealt in moonshine, and rioted over

depended on the maintenance of an

Profit margins

tax hikes.

monopoly, in the market

much

oligarchic

as in party politics,

but the powerftil,

landed, and well connected were far from all-powerftil.

Nevertheless, in

as

the coffee axis of the western highlands, the general interconnection

between smallholdings below and powerftil distributors above

distin-

guished relations of production and exchange during the period of Conservative

rule.

It

reproduced colonial

ties

of dependence in

new

forms, reinforcing vertical clientelist bonds, and idealized the hardworking, deferential yet

independent — and most importantly, neither black

nor Indian — coffee

settler.

Elsewhere in Latin America,

this pattern

had

way to a largely urban-based politics, in which radical populist parties - forging cross-class coalitions composed of organized labor, expanding middle sectors, and mobilized peasants - called for structural

given

changes in the organization of the

II

The

richest

elite

and the economy.

Antioquian Ascendancy

and most powerfijl of

Antioquia, whose

state, society,

all

coffee regions in

Colombia was

was distinguished by allegiance to the Church, a

cult of "order," fetishization

of capitalist "progress," a devotion to white

supremacy, and shared commitment to a bipartisan, technocratic governance that excluded religiously intra-class sectarianism. Conservative forces of "order and progress" scientific racist

- during

The

rise

of

a period of

retrenchment in the Black Atlantic world (the

US

South,

Brazil,

Cuba), and ethnocidal liberalism in Meso-America and the Andes

- had

its

coffee

-

economic foundation

boom. Control of and distribution - helped the

in the coffee export

particularly transport, credit,

merchant bankers of Medellin become the country's leading manufacturers. Paisa (Antioquian)

eminence from 1910

until 1930.

elites

enjoyed national

industrial

political pre-

I

EVIL

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

2/

The movement of settlers onto coffee frontiers in the central and - generally regarded as the major historical transformation of the Conservative period - did not lead to greater equality of

western highlands

access

to wealth,

resources,

or political power,

smallholders into alignment with

boom

The

coffee export

and

credit institutions, the

erages, textiles,

also

glass,

and iron works -

migrant women's labor, and the construction of

Magdalena River

it

brought parties.

^

drove the development of modern banking growth of manufacturing industry - bev-

food processing,

structure.^"^ Rail

though

of one of the two

elites

initially

new

based on

transport infra-

connections linked Medellin to Puerto Berrio and the in 1914,

and Cali

1915, making Valle del Cauca and

Buenaventura and the Pacific

to

its

modernized sugar industry a

in

rival

pole of capitalist development.

To

boost coffee exports and industrial production for the

home

market, the Conservative government, supported by the opposition Liberal Party, sponsored public

works and education

for the first time.

Engineering, institutionalized in Medellin's Escuela de Minus ^htr 1888,

produced future presidents (Pedro Nel Ospina, Mariano Ospina Perez, Laureano Gomez) and guided implementation of technocratic

Modeled

after

UC Berkeley's School of Mines,

the Escuela de

the seedbed of socialization for leading cadres of the

school helped form a technocratic business eUte

experimental natural or social sciences, in the

much

- with

less

projects.

Minos was

new

order.

little

invested in

the arts



The

that thrived

deep freeze of the Regeneration. The doctrines of Pope Leon XIII

reconciled applied scientific positivism with traditionalist faith. scientific racist discourses

and

practices of internal colonialism vis-a-vis indigenous, mixed-race,

and

These developments were coeval with

Afro-Colombians on the regional periphery and the coffee sharp contrast to the Caucano

elites that

had

split

axis itself In

over the relationship to

Afro-Colombians, paisa rulers successfully integrated elements of popular culture into an internally coherent,

hegemonic

whiteness and entrepreneurial wherewithal



racial-regional ideology

Antioquian merchants benefited from extraaion of natural resources gold and

oil,

developed extensive

cattle

of

a tropical Yankeeism. like

ranches designed to feed a

burgeoning urban population, which quintupled between 1912 and 1951, and fostered a national culture of commercial coffee smallholding.

Given that US corporations controlled bananas, gold, and petroleum, the fortunes oi paisa merchant-banker-industrialists hinged

on control of

FORREST HYLTON

28

manufacturing, and real-estate speculation.

coffee, credit,

with coffee, in the firms,

US

government

policy,

and

US

under the leadership of the most

advanced elements of their

elite.

region. Conservative rule

capitalist

Just as organized labor, in

was given a new

jumped from

itself felt in

lease 1

-

refreshing the export

struggling hill-farmers, tenants,

of life by the growth of

and

proletarians.

As

in 1927, sion.

from

and

who

less artisans

by Walter Kemmerer, a

led a continent-wide mission to

US lending dried up

threw the Colombian economy into depres-

A decisive shift occurred in elite politics when coffee prices plunged pound in 1929 - a disaster for the consummated in October's Wall Street Crash. when Church leaders backed rival candidates in

thirty to seventeen cents a

export-based economy,

The

as the

of South American governments,

capital flight

Street

and sharecroppers, much

a result of the report issued

Princeton economics professor assess the finances

World War,

opened "Dance of the but bringing no respite to and Wall

known

elite,

socialist

million sacks in 1913 to 2

foreign capital invested in the coffee sector,

generous lines of credit in what became

its

the rest of the

million in 1921, and 3 million in 1930. After the First

Millions"

econ-

socially regressive, technically

and anarcho-syndicalist phase, was making coffee exports. Production

import

coffee consumers.

Colombians thus permanently re-entered the world

omy

Yet even

US

was exercised by

final instance, control

Conservatives

split

succession for the elections of 1930.^^

Ill

A New World?

The Antioquian bourgeoisie had "attempted but failed to make Colombia in its own idealized image," and signs of a new popular radicalism were stirring, even as coffee exports reached new heights. The authoritarian politics

of the Regeneration and Conservative rule worked by

settlers, and including them in bipartisan networks of patronage and clientelism. This measure of economic democracy reinforced political conservatism, but it left the majority of subalterns - Afro-Colombians, indigenous communities, and many frontier settlers - in the lurch, beyond the reach of the central

extending property rights to a sector of frontier

government, which subordinate groups called on to defend them from landlord power. In 1914, a sharecropper

named Quintin Lame was

nominated Supreme Leader of the Indigenous Tribes of Colombia,

I

HOUR

EVIL

IN

COLOMBIA

29

though he did not speak the native language, Nasa. Lame had fought on the Liberal side in the

War

of a Thousand Days;

peasant soldiers in this period, he and his

movement

like other

Andean

called for the state

to protect non-liberal, collective forms of citizenship in the face of

Due

reactionary landlord offensives.

Lame known as

to his organizing efforts,

spent a decade in and out of prison, but the

movement he

led,

the Quintinadoy gained ground through collective land occupations in

southern Colombia, passing from Cauca to Tolima in 1922.

The political mood was now markedly different, socialist ideas began to make headway in

and

as anarcho-syndicalist

following the Mexican and Russian revolutions and the First

and first

US

made

capital

political vehicle

its first

movement World War,

the labor

inroads in South America.

In 1926, the

independent of Liberal and Conservative party

tutelage, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR), organized proletarian

struggle in the multinational export enclaves of the Caribbean coffee frontiers.

hecha - a

tailor

The PSR's second

who,

like

and along

Eduardo Ma-

vice-president, Raiil

War USO, and

Quintin Lame, was a Liberal veteran of the

of a Thousand Days - helped found the Oil Workers' Union,

led a strike against Tropical Oil (a Jersey Standard subsidiary) in the

Magdalena Medio region

in 1926.

The

party's first vice-president

and

legendary orator, Maria Cano, daughter of an oligarchic media family fi-om Medellin, toured the countryside

and

from 1925 to 1927, organizing

With Mahecha, Cano

agitating for radical change.

led the 4,000-

strong banana workers' strike against United Fruit near Santa Marta in

November-December 1928. In the version of the 1928 banana workers' strike immortalized in

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's

One Hundred

Years

massacred and loaded onto boxcars, and the erased

by

official oblivion.

In reality, the incident was thoroughly

and publicized by a young lawyer recently returned from

investigated

Mussolini's

ofSolitude, thousands were memory of the repression

Italy.

A deputy in the Lower House of Congress, Jorge Eliecer

Gaitan used the massacre to launch his career as the first populist politician within the Liberal Party, cementing his alliance with left-Liberal

costenos.

In his study of Gaitan, Herbert Braun labeled him, accurately, a petit-

bourgeois reformer. But by giving

official

voice to popular

demands and

placing the "social question" at the center of national parliamentary debate, Gaitan earned the enmity of the dominant, oligarchic faction

of his party,

as well as that

of the Conservative

far right.

FORREST HYLTON

30

In

1929, the PSR's "Bolsheviks of Libano" rose up in a failed

insurrection in northern Tolima; the in

Colombia,

it

first explicitly socialist

rebellion

represented an alliance formed by radical artisans and

provincial intellectuals with tenants, sharecroppers,

and smallholders.

Indeed, peasants took the offensive, staging land takeovers throughout the coffee axis, and the export proletariat

waged

its

largest strikes to date

in the multinational enclaves. Coffee capitalism

under Conservative

Catholic rule created expectations of property ownership, workers' control,

and higher wages

that

it

could not meet, and

it

crumbled

in

the face of widespread radical-popular mobilization.

Regions were racialized

as relatively privileged sectors

of the peasantry

were incorporated into networks of patronage and clientelism. Those excluded from the benefits of coffee capitalism mobilized in protest. Indian peasant rebellion spread after 1914, organized labor struck the capitalist enclaves in oil

and bananas

after

1925, and a wave of multi-

ethnic peasant land takeovers swept across the coffee frontiers from

1928. Radical-popular movements achieved greater independence and

autonomy from

the two parties than in the past, through direct action

and the formation of revolutionary

Left parties.

\

The

Liberal Pause,

1930-46

Colombia was, and continues to be, proof that gradual reform in the framework of liberal democracy is not the only, or even the most that

plausible, alternative to social revolutions, including the

fail

or are aborted.

make

to

I

a social revolution

had made violence the constant,

and omnipresent core of public

universal,

Eric

A Although rested

gave

its

effects lasted, the

Ushered

in

from 1930

life.

Hobsbawm,

Interesting Times:

Twentieth-Century Life (2002)

long period of Conservative domination

on shaky foundations, and

rise to

suffered

from

a basic contradiction:

expectations of property ownership that

on

a

Liberal Party

it

could not

New forces

dovetailed with the Left

it

satisfy.

wave of mass mobilization, the "Liberal Pause"

until 1946.

Eliecer Gaitan

ones

discovered a country in which the failure

lasted

wing of the

- grouped around the charismatic leadership of Jorge - to constitute the first radical-popular movement with a

national horizon. Indeed, Gaitan's nationalism was cross-class, multiethnic,

come basis

and

its

allowing the Colombian working class to over-

anti-elitist,

weakness

vis-a-vis capitalist firms

of its inclusiveness.

middle and working

By 1945,

classes,

and entrepreneurs, on the

accelerated urbanization, politicized

and peasant pressure

for agrarian reforms led

to a decline in the political weight of landlords throughout the continent.

But

in

Colombia landlords defeated tenants and sharecroppers,

industrialists bested

mass mobilization created new legislation,

as

organized labor. Whereas elsewhere in the region parties, forced agrarian reform, labor

or overthrew governments,

populism nor agrarian

social

democracy

in

Colombia neither urban

lasted as a national force.

^

FORREST HYLTON

32

Incipient Populism

I

Organized labor, radical peasant movements, the Colombian

outside the Liberal Party in the in the

Commu-

and Gaitan experimented with organization and mobilization

nist Party,

half of the 1930s, before rejoining

first

second half In conjunction with

mobilization, which

now had a

and labor

agrarian reform

this

it

new wave of radical-popular

and focus, tepid Liberal met with strong opposition from

national horizon

legislation

the Conservative Party. Blessed by the Catholic Church, Conservatives

redoubled territory

efforts to rule

unopposed

won by Liberals

in rural areas in order to

make up

why, although

in the cities. This explains

democracy triumphed throughout Latin America

end of the

at the

Second World War, Catholic counterrevolution won the day

in

Co-

the economic basis of Conservative rule temporarily gone,

and

lombia through institutionalized

With

for

social

political terror.

door was

their political cohesion broken, the

open

left

for Liberals to

regain the presidency after fifty years in the wilderness. Their candidate,

Olaya Herrera, had been Ambassador servatives,

with

whom

than that of the Conservative policy departures.

in

he enjoyed good rivals

Washington under the Con-

relations,

and

his vote

was

less

combined. There were no standing

But Gaitan broke from the Liberal Party

in

1933

to

found the National Union of the Revolutionary Left (UNIR), and approved the founding of peasant leagues to compete with those sponsored by the Liberal Party - and,

crucially,

with those of the Partido

Comunista Colombiano (PCC).^^

The

PCC was

founded

in

1930 by

leaders of the

PSR, two of whom,

Gonzalo Sanchez and Dimas Luna, had led the

Jose

indigenous

movement

earlier struggles in

in the early 1920s.

Cauca and Tolima, and the

to peasant struggles

on the

Cundinamarca, where the

Quintinada

There was continuity with

PCC initially gave priority

coffee frontiers, especially in

largest plantations

Tolima and

were owned by merchant

bankers from Bogota, as well as Germans and North Americans.

It set

up

peasant leagues to capitalize on the wave of land occupations after 1928,

and

in the early

1930s gained

tionary agrarianism" based

mous stages

on

political legitimacy

through

smallholder communities."'^^ Gaitan accused the

of

historical

its

"revolu-

the "formation and protection of autono-

PCC of skipping

development: while communist peasant leagues

aspired to usher in the socialist revolution,

UNIR's were designed

to

EVIL

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

remove the feudal blocks on the development of

The

33

capitalist agriculture.

countryside was hotly contested political terrain in the early

and -

this

UNIR

was the Comintern's sectarian Third Period - the

as its principal political

1

930s,

PCC viewed

opponent, especially in Tolima and

Cundinamarca.

When

Liberals

the election rich

-

won

again

their leader

- unopposed:

the Conservatives boycotted

was Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo, the scion of a

banking family, and a former employee of a

US

investment firm,

USA, admirers billed him as the Roosevelt of the Andes. The "Revolution on the March" proclaimed by Lopez was a limited affair, more sweeping in its rhetoric than its Baker-Kellogg. Raised in England and the

reforms, but

it

hopes for populist redistribution and

raised

roads,

and labor

grov^

further

Most

state arbitra-

Taxation went up, more was spent on schools and

tion of class conflict.

legislation

was

liberalized,

which opened the

gates to a

had begun under Olaya.

in unionization, a process that

popular expectations of the results of political

importantly,

participation soared. in revising the Constitution of 1886 to Church and state, but, coupled with the other measures, this was enough to pull Gaitan back into the Liberal fold in 1935. It prompted the PCC, in line with Popular Front policies, to

was invested mainly

Effort

ensure separation of

throw

its

leagues

weight behind the Lopez regime, demobilizing

and renouncing

the support of the transport sector

its

its

peasant

revolutionary vanguardist ambitions.

PCC, which dominated key

and the export

enclaves,

With

trade unions in the

Lopez created the Colombian

Workers' Confederation (CTC), with the aim of turning organized labor into a clientelist bloc under the control of the Liberal Party.

II

Though

Two

Steps Back

the "Liberal Republic" lasted until 1946,

its

promise was buried

during the second Lopez administration of 1942-45. Embroiled in corruption scandals, Lopez repealed reforms, such as the eight-hour day

and

social security,

He

reversed limited land reform in

which had not been a dead

Revancha^' or "Revenge."'^^

Law 100 demonstrated

inability to resolve "the agrarian question" lords,

letter for

organized labor.

1944 with Law 100, known

and highlighted the weight of the

as

"^

the Liberal Party's

between peasants and land-

latter

within the ruling

class.

The

FORREST HYLTON

34

(FENALCO),

cofFee growers' lobby

the landlords' gremio, or business

lobby (SAC), and die employers' association (APEN) had

Law

100, which closed the door

smallholding.

It

legal to expel sharecroppers

it

for

would compete in the market, and and tenants. Older landed groups

were able to fashion alHances with the new coffee export preserve their privileges. In Cauca, Tolima,

war from above

elite in

order to

and Cundinamarca, where

peasant struggle had been vigorous in the 1930s, gates for class

pushed

protected landlord property and labor contracts, pro-

hibited the cultivation of crops that

made

all

on sharecropper dreams of independent

Law 100 opened

the

and

share-

that the anti-capitalist labor

move-

against mobilized tenants

croppers.

An

important interpretation has

ment,

it

with peasant and indigenous movements in the

allied

co-opted and institutionalized in the 1930s, even intensified leading

reform.

It

tenure,

and

it

was very

up

it

peasant struggle

200 of 1936. Law 200 was

to the passage of Law

occupancy of land

established effective

as

920s, was

1

has been argued that this partial victory of cofFee workers

partial:

landlords benefited far

frontier lands in the

1930s

led,

more -

ironically,

-

in securing access to

to the isolation

militant trade unions in other sectors, such as oil

a

as a legal basis for

and

transport.

of more However

strong the latter grew, they were unable to affect the central area of the

economy. Hence the subsequent fragmentation of the labor movement as a

whole, and, in consequence, the strengthening of the two traditional

Well before

parties.

class politics

la Violencia

had been

-

so the

argument runs - independent

eclipsed, as smallholders in the coffee belt gained

family plots, and were integrated into one of the two parties, while

Gaitan and organized labor Violencia, intra-class

by the

clientelist practices

fanatically

fit

within the Liberal Party

fold.

During

la

competition to avoid proletarianization, mediated

and the

coffee growers' association, took a

bloody turn, while the urban labor movement was beaten

back.

Whereas

in other parts

of Latin America a mobilized peasantry would

play a key role in radical coalitions, after

conquered

their family plots in the

Colombian

coffee growers

1930s and 1940s, workers'

solidarity

disappeared.^^ Although this explains key developments along the coffee axis, it

misses the radical challenge gaitanismo posed as the

popular

movement

nationally, across

first radical-

Colombian history to unite subordinate groups racial, regional, and class divides. It also downplays the in

HOUR

EVIL

IN

COLOMBIA

35

importance o^ gaitanismo s message of class struggle for rural proletarians, tenants,

and sharecroppers excluded from property ownership, on the

one hand, and the majority of urban workers outside the sphere of organized labor, on the other.

Following the recovery of coffee exports

1936, and nearly a

after

decade of a 10 per cent annual manufacturing growth, in the early 1940s a consensus emerged

among Colombian

ruling groups that

it

was time

to

return to liberal economic orthodoxy that had prevailed in the capitalist

world

no

until the

place. In

ANDI,

1

930s. Social reforms and pro-labor policies

1944 the

city's

Conservative manufacturing

the national industrialists' organization,

merchants founded

FEDECAFE. Though

and

in

would have

elite

formed

1945 coffee

they had their differences

over the next decade, these groups, joined by intermarriage, subsequently dictated

economic policy

to successive

governments behind the public's

The Union de Trabaj adores de Colombia (UTC) was set up by Catholic Church in Medellin in 1 946, and was to become the model

back.^^ the

for organized labor federations.

Liberal Alberto Lleras

Ambassador his

to

Camargo,

a former Marxist intellectual

time was up, and increased repression of organized labor. In 1945

Lleras

Comargo crushed

union,

FEDENAL, had

the

Communist-led

river workers' strike

been the most successful in the

the only one to achieve a closed shop. Linking the the Atlantic coast, dores, mechanics

position in the

-

FEDENAL's

workers

-

-

their

CTC, and was

Andean highlands

sailors,

to

shipwrights, steve-

carried coffee to the world market; their structural

economy gave them

the possibility of shutting

it

down.

Their defeat in 1945 represented a major step back for the working as a

and

Washington, took over when Lopez Pumarejo quit before

class

whole.

Toward

Ill

Gaitan was bound by his

own

Liberal Party, but could not

la Violencia

contradictions: he

would not

the oligarchic bipartisan system. Yet only Gaitan

lawyer of the day,

who had

leave the

meet the demands of his constituency within

-

the leading labor

occupied the posts of senator, city councilor,

mayor of Bogota, minister of education and of labor - contested developments through

among

official

the Liberal electorate.

channels,

Though

these

winning a huge following the

PCC

leadership loathed

FORREST HYLTON

36

him, Gaitan enjoyed support from Communist Party cadres and organized labor



rail,

oil,

and telecommunications workers backed him

When

enthusiastically.

own

his

ticket.

Though Gaitan took many

cities

Cali, Cartagena, Ciicuta, Ibague, Neiva, Santa split

the Liberal vote and

him out of

the Liberal establishment locked

contention as the party's candidate for the presidency in

let



946, he ran on

Bogota, Barranquilla,

Marta - the

the Conservative candidate,

Perez, through, as Conservatives

1

result

was

to

Mariano Ospina

had planned.

known simply, though misleadingly, as la Violencia - the defining moment of Colombia's short twentieth century - is often said to The

period

have begun with Gai tan's assassination in 1948. But that shorten

it

by three

years, if not

two decades.

To

understand

is

its

to fore-

roots,

it is

When

necessary to go back to the origins of the Liberal Republic.

Conservative rule came to an end in 1930, tensions long simmering in the countryside began to explode.

the

War

of a Thousand Days,

mobilized peasant militias to lives

Memories of the partisan slaughter of Liberal and Conservative notables

when

kill

each other in a struggle that cost the

of one out of every twenty-five Colombians, were

localities.

Scarcely

had Olaya Herrera taken

revenge in the Santanders and Boyaca.

from

irrational.

Once

office

early 1940s, Liberals turned the police into

that

would have

and

a menacing

far

In retaliation.

fi-aud.

down to

1 946. In the an appendage of their party -

dire consequences during la Violencia,

police were "conservatized."

polarization

many

wreaked

Conservative fears were thus

Conservatives boycotted every presidential election

move

vivid in

Liberals

Liberals were entrenched in power, they resorted

to persistent intimidation, police violence,

a

still

when

Throughout the "Liberal Pause,"

background of

and landlord

killings

violence,

the

in

though

still

municipios,

when

the

there was political

as

highly localized, spread

incrementally. If,

in

Boyaca and the Santanders, the

between embattled

local

logic of the "defensive feud"

communities, each with recollections or

fear

of

grievous injury, was in place fi-om the beginning, two national devel-

opments overdetermined shift;

this

in the electoral balance

underlying dynamic. ^^

between the two

The

parties,

moderate degree of urbanization — and in Colombia

it

first

was

moderate - had taken hold. The strength of Conservative

was the

once even a still

quite

loyalties

had

depended on the influence of the clergy, which was far stronger in small towns and the countryside. Once the proportion of city-dwellers passed a

HOUR

EVIL certain threshold in the

1

COLOMBIA

IN

940s, Liberals started to

majority at the polls. This became clear in the

which they

itself,

of the vote, a

On

lost;

1

37

command a permanent

946

presidential election

the two Liberal candidates totaled over

been the norm ever

level that has

60 per cent

since.

power had increased the influence

the Conservative side, loss of

of the most extreme wing of the party. Under the charismatic leader-

Gomez,

ship of Laureano

the party was bent

on increasing

the countryside in order to recoup losses in the

by

"creole Hitler"

Gomez was

his foes,

demagogue, driving

since, as a fascist

plunging the country into

Colombian

FEDECAFE attacks

and

ties.

He

ANDL 1

or Italian fascism:

all

What was

Hitler, 1

but he was a Catholic

940s was

Toro and Busch

distinctive

filled

integrist.

with movements and

in Bolivia, Vargas in Brazil,

Colombia was

in

Gomez and

religious version

his party

that the

toward Franco,

of counterrevolution,

populist connotations of the Italian or

was a

from the key gremios,

in Argentina.

attraction pulled

and

solid backing

of them reactionary, impressed by the successes of

not

German

and Peron

extremes and

In the ingrown world of the

In the mid- 1930s, he had written blistering

930s and

leaders,

alist

had

on both Mussolini and

Latin America of the

the

Eduardo Santos, and benefited from the

his successor,

former's financial

rule over

he had been a good friend of both Lopez

political elite,

Pumarejo and

its

Dubbed

seen at the time, and has been

his party to fanatical

war.

civil

cities.

German

rhetorical escalation, to Spanish Civil

enmities toward Liberalism,

communism.

now

free

same kind of as a tradition-

of any of the

regimes.

War

levels,

The

result

of historic

represented as indistinguishable from

and caricatures of Gaitan - as well - were unrelenting. Gaitan was known to Bogota's as "el Negro Gaitan," an epithet that played on his

Racist verbal assaults

as his followers

political elites

phenotypic features and large Afro-Colombian following in the Caribbean, causes for ridicule and fear. Blacks were "lazy," "unruly," and

"immoral." The Hispanophile, Catholic reconquista would put them

and

their leaders

-

in river, road,

and

rail

workers' unions

-

in their

place." Like Niiiiez, seventy years before him,

Colombian subalterns

Gomez aimed

to return

society to an idealized internal colonial totality in

knew

their proper places,

but

Gomez

which

lived in the age of total

war, and helped push political terror to previously unthinkable

levels.

FORREST HYLTON

38

The mid- 1940s

represented a brief moment of radical-democratic open-

ing almost everywhere in Latin America, with popuUsts swept into it saw an aggressive CathoUc counterrevolutionary on organized labor and radical peasant movements.

power. In Colombia, assault

La

La violencia

is

1946-57

Violencia,

unchained, ordered, and stimulated beyond

remote control. The violence most typical of our that

is

which atrociously produces humble victims

side, tow^ns,

and

slums

city

.

.

.

But the

fuel has

risk,

by

political struggles

in the country-

been given off by

urban desks, v^orked through with coldness, and astutely elaborated in order to produce

its

fruits

of blood.

Alberto Lleras

La

Violencia

ism,

(1946—57) was a mix of

and scorched earth policy"

"official terror, partisan sectarian-

that resulted

republic, the weakness of the central state, rights. It

from the

crisis

of the coffee

and the contest over property

was distinguished by the "concentrated terror" used

radical-popular politics

and confine

rising racial/ethnic

Long

within bipartisan channels.^

was

which broke out

and towns

class conflict

unleashed on the national level against

municipalities, violence

first

and

to suppress

a staple of politics in regions and

gaitanista insurrections, cities

Camargo (1946)

in the capital

across the country after Gaitan

and

in provincial

was assassinated in 1948.

Appreciation of the threat that the juntas gaitanistas posed to central

government authority -

as well as racial hierarchies

and property

allows us to register the magnitude of reversal suffered

national-popular forces.

La

Violencia

rights

-

by nascent

began in the coffee zones of

Santander and Boyaca, and was centered in the coffee heartland of northern Valle del Cauca, Viejo Caldas, and Tolima.^^ Mass slaughter

took place

as

it

had during the

bloodletting lasted longer.

of them displaced,

illiterate

when

it

War

of a Thousand Days, but the

Some 300,000

peasants, officially

had been ended

people, 80 per cent

killed,

in 1964.^

men, most

and 2 million It

forcibly

cannot be understood

FORREST HYLTON

40

without recognizing the dependent incorporation of the majority of coffee-growers into the cHentelist apparatus of each party in smallholding

of Boyaca, the Santanders, Antioquia, and along the coffee

areas

Colombian

participation in the cold

domestic: President Laureano the

US

Georgia. Three years

at

the

Army Ranger

1952,

the

first

group of

School in Fort Benning,

under General Rojas

later,

axis.^'^

international, but also

sent Batallon Korea to fight with

1951, and in

31st Infantry in

Colombians trained

Gomez

war was

Pinilla, the

US

govern-

ment sponsored chemical warfare - in the form of Colombian-made napalm bombs - against communist "independent republics" in the south. In coordination with US advisors, Colombian veterans of the Korean

War

led the campaign.

It

was to be the

of

first

many

counter-

insurgent failures.

I

Amidst growing

The Bogotazo

as Failed

sectarian conflict

Revolution

and partisan

polarization, in April

1948 President Mariano Ospina Perez hosted the Ninth Pan-American Congress in Bogota. Along with Latin American presidents and diplomats,

US

Secretary of State George C. Marshall attended in order to

clarify the role

of the

regional alliances

USA in

the postwar period.

and establishing the

Secretary Marshall's

visit,

Though

strengthening

OAS was the ostensible purpose of

Washington's chief priority was to maintain

its

long-standing power and influence in the face of a perceived Soviet "threat."

Colombian

rulers

players in world events,

were eager to be seen

as

important regional

and militant anti-communism dovetailed with

older Creole attitudes toward radical-popular mobilization. This was the

combustible setting in which Gaitan was

killed.

While attending a conference of anti-imperialist student

leaders, Fidel

Castro met Gaitan briefly in Bogota, and the two planned to meet again the following afternoon, 9 April, but Gaitan was assassinated lunch.

News of his murder

unleashed the largest urban

on

riots in

his

way to

twentieth-

century Colombian history, the so-called Bogotazo — a sociopolitical storm that swept the provinces as well as the capital. In the capital, after nearly

overwhelming a weakly guarded Presidential

Palace,

peripheral neighborhoods gathered in the city center.

hunger and speculation attacked businesses,

huge crowds

Food

especially ones

merchants of Middle Eastern origin, and perceived

fi-om

rioters against

as "foreign."

owned by As looting

EVIL

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

ensued, rioters directly appropriated food, clothing, consumer goods, tools,

and hardware. Arsonists torched Church and government buildings,

as well as

Gomez's newspaper. El

and

Gaitanista professionals

Sigio.

radicalized students from the National University seized radio airwaves, calling

for

the establishment of revolutionary juntas throughout the

-

a reference to the political bodies formed during the wars of

country

independence from Spanish colonialism. This helped to galvanize the provinces, and

after

9 April, radical-

popular resistance, organization, and rebellion in areas of recent

ment put

the political foundation of the repubHc in

case in the

Magdalena Medio, the

settle-

This was the

of Sinu and San Jorge on the

valleys

border of Antioquia and Cordoba,

crisis.

as well as northeastern

Antioquia,

Cali, northern Valle, Cundinamarca, and Tolima. Organized labor

established revolutionary juntas in Bogota, Cali, Remedios, Zaragoza,

Puerto Berrio,

Barrancabermeja,

was so intense and widespread

as to

Even

and dozens of municipios.

though goals were modest, popular mobilization

after Gaitan's

death

"transform" the "reformist content"

of the demands. In terms of power and authority, the world was briefly turned upside down: the persecuted became the powerful, prisoners executed guards, police took the side of the pueblo gaitanista, peasants rustled catde

and took over

land,

and

oil

workers held the refinery in

new

Barranca. Insurgents spoke of a revolutionary

order backed by

popular militias.^^

Lacking support from the

capital,

and

isolated

from one another, the

juntas were quickly vanquished, however. Although the Bogotazo

expression of popular rage,

it

the provinces, and then briefly. left

was an

did not lead to a seizure of power, except in

The populism Gaitan sketched on

the

flank of Liberalism was a growing threat to the country's oligarchy,

which he named relatively

as such.

Viewed comparatively, though,

weak. The dispersal of the big-city population into

regional centers, Bogota, Medellin, Cali,

it

was

still

at least four

and Barranquilla, none of

which had over half a million inhabitants by 1940, deprived a potential Colombian populism of a critical mass of urban, working-class organization.

Gaitan himself noted, in 1943, that

country's workforce was unionized,

around the country, they could not hold

than 5 per cent of the

it.

Secretar)' Marshall

saw

Union and its tool, "international communism," as the hand directing the Bogotazo. Fidel Castro left for Cuba on

the Soviet invisible

less

and though juntas took power

FORREST HYLTON

42 10 April, but

oflFered a different interpretation:

"No one

can claim to

have organized what happened on April 9 because what was absent on April 9 was precisely that, organization. This absolutely

program

is

the key: there was

Without preparation,

no organization."

leadership, or a

for self-government, gaitanista insurrections could not have led

to revolution.^ ^ Yet in light of

new

studies,

Violencia as

the

radical

a reaction

against

the classic view of

of gaitanismo

thrust

La is

persuasive.^^

La

II

Resistencia

and La Reconquista

Instead, partisan conflict spread across the coffee axis, following the

precedent

set in

Boyaca and the Santanders, beginning in 1945. Liberal

notables in coffee districts of Quindio and Tolima, fearing Conservative

- which materialized in a wave of local assassinations mobilized peasant clients into guerrilla militias, hoping for an outcome different firom the War of a Thousand Days. Unlike revenge for the upheaval

nineteenth-century military conflicts, dominated by oligarchic leaders,

during

la

Violencia Liberal

commanders were

peasants, with

noms de

guerre like "Sangrenegra" (Blackblood) and "Capitan Desquite" (Captain Vengeance).

The

goal of these Liberal-communist guerrillas was to overthrow

Conservative government, not establish a fiirther ignited the

new society. Yet

this resistance

counterrevolution in the countryside. "Order" was

restored in the capital

when

troops and volunteers

came from nearby

Conservative Boyaca to reinforce the Army, which remained loyal to Conservatives. locally in

The

volunteers,

known

as chulavitas,

were

at first

used

Chulavita County in Boyaca, where Liberal violence had been

widespread in the 1930s: but in 1949, Liberal presidential candidate,

Dario Echandia, was assassinated in Bogota. Thus Conservatives used chulavitas in later, in

Boyaca and the

capital

during and

after the Bogotazo, and,

the coffee axis further south: Tolima, Valle del Cauca, and Viejo

Caldas (Caldas, Risaralda, Quindio). Chulavitas were devoted to the Virgin of Carmen, as theirs was a "holy war" to rid the countryside of atheists,

masons, and communists

Backed by the



in a word. Liberals.

clergy, in Antioquia,

Gomez's Catholic legions mo-

bilized to "conservatize" municipalities before

Narino they did the same. Those from Nariiio,

upcoming

in turn,

elections; in

were recruited to

EVIL

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

43

help conservatize northern Valle, where Conservative advance was

communities defected en masse

Liberal

in self-preservation

total.

once Con-

1947^8, and were then

servative "civil police" replaced Liberal police in

organized into a professional force of political assassins in 1949-50.

When war broke out after Gaitan's death, by Ospina - focused on

armed

work

clandestine

In 1949

self-defense.^

its first

the

PSD - already outlawed

in the countryside, advocating

groups formed along the railway

line in Santander, in the oil enclaves

of Shell, Socony, and Tropical Oil

Northern Santander and

and,

Ariari;

in

most importandy, given the

subsequent course of events, in Tolima and Cundinamarca, where the

PCC

and UNIR's peasant leagues had been strongest

1930s. At the end of the year.

departmental governor,

as

well

Liberal

chieftains,

leading

as

proached the party for help in setting up

in

merchant-landlords, guerrillas.

ap-

By 1950, with

sectarianism operating at a feverish pitch, gaitanistas formed a

official

guerrilla front

with

PSD

by the Loayza

clan,

one of whose members, Pedro Antonio Marin,

Manuel Marulanda,

The

the

backed by the

fighters in southern

Tolima.

The

or "Tirofijo" (Sure Shot), leads the

force

FARC

was led a.k.a.

today.

^^

response to 9 April and the revolutionary juntas was barbarous

reprisal:

Conservatives cut out the tongues and eyes of at least forty

Liberals,

and disemboweled others

example. Gaitanista county seats

- were

-

in

San Rafael

there

subject to "litde jobs" {trabajitos)

carried out

by

los pdjaros.

Conservatives,

who

back" to daily

life

in Valle del

had been many

These were

,

towns

as

birdlike killers

working

for

and "flew

devout Catholic butchers,

drivers,

bartenders, tailors, laundrymen, or police inspectors. Their leader,

Maria Lozano, "El Condor," began

1948

or selective assassinations,

circidated in black cars wdthout plates, in the

Cauca, for

in Valle in

Leon

his participation in la Violenciawith.

- where he had erected a shrine to the Virgen Maria Auxiliadora — against gaitanistas in Cali. He would soon run the the defense of a chapel

largest,

most well-protected gang of Conservative Catholic gunmen

northern Valle.

He

in

brought in professionals from Boyaca, Antioquia,

Santander, Tolima, or Quindio, but recruited others from hamlets and municipios around Tulua.

When

he was a colonel in charge of the Third Brigade in Valle,

Gustavo Rojas Pinilla

Pinilla

appeared with El Condor in a photograph. Rojas

and the Conservative governor planned the suppression of the

gaitanista revolt that

had taken over

Cali's Palacio

de San Francisco. This

FORREST HYLTON

44 was an important step

down juntas

putting after,

Lozano and the

region.

Under

in

circulation of

"neutrality" tions, in

pdjaros,

working with

secret police, terrorized the

Diario del Pactfico,

Rojas

Pinilla's

killers

of

declaration

the face of spreading pdjaro violence

anonymous

was

which he secured by

Governor Nicolas Borrero Olano, owner of the

laureanista

right-wing daily, "neutrality"

in Rojas's political ascent,

revolucionarias throughout the department. There-

allowed free

hired to murder Liberals. Military

essential to the success

of the

jobs," or assassina-

"little

which the new Conservative police participated

in gangs

or four, with pdjaros. Coffee and cattle merchants, as well as

of three

medium-

sized landowners, rose in their shadow.

El

Condor was only

political assassinations;

As

the

most legendary of those

in the business

of

he had counterparts in Viejo Caldas and Tolima.

in Viejo Caldas, the business

Tolima created avenues

for

of

la Violencia in

upward mobility

for

northern Valle and

middle

The

sectors.

networks of patronage and protection in which the pdjaros moved were run by politicians

who

filled

important

ministerial posts after la Violencia ended.

The more more

"the partisan content of oppositions was emphasized, the

these were stripped of their political potential,"

"disagregation, disorganization, forces.^^

and

diplomatic,

legislative,

^

and

which

led to the

disarticulation" of radical-popular

In vain, the Liberal oligarchy, at the suggestion of Lopez

Pumarejo and the insistence of Carlos Lleras Restrepo,

tried to recuperate

the broken bipartisan consensus. In Bogota, the Liberal newspaper, El

Tiempo, as well as the houses of Lleras Restrepo and Lopez Pumarejo,

were torched by Conservatives in 1949, demonstrating the impossibility of slowing the

momentum

of Conservative extremism.

In coffee

smallholding zones, the aim was not to achieve victory on the battlefield,

-

but to expel the enemy from the region. Conquest of territory

the

accumulation of land, livestock, and coffee - was the goal, and killing

obeyed a

sinister calculus

disemboweled and party

of pain and cruelty. Pregnant

fetuses destroyed, so

new members of

women

were

the opposite

would not be born.

In Tolima, different cuts were used to send messages. In the "necktie cut," the victim's tongue

was pulled down through an opening

throat; in the "florists' cut," severed limbs

decapitation; in the

were inserted

in the

in the

neck

after

"monkey's cut," the victim's head was placed on

his

or her chest. ^^^ Mutilation of ears, fingers, penises, and breasts were

HOUR

EVIL

common,

were

as

thrown into

IN

COLOMBIA

45

Tens of thousands were disemboweled and the Cauca, which was said to have run red with

rapes.

rivers like

blood. Arson was another peasants either watched

common

their houses

tool of terror,

and crops burn or

and millions of left

them behind.

In Antioquia, where bipartisan consensus was a well-established tradition, levels

elite

of violence were lower than in the coffee regions of Valle

del Cauca, Viejo Caldas,

and Tolima.

Political

colonialism, and the location of natural resources

when and where

radicalism, largely

internal

determined

During

state-sanctioned terror escalated without limits.

the second phase (1950-53) o{ la Vioienda, those peripheries differed

from accepted

who

lived

on

regional

norms of whiteness

cultural

in the

Antioquian heartland. They suffered the consequences of army and

— or, in the east and Uraba, privatized landlord violence unknown during the first phase (1945^9), which had been

police violence to a degree

centered in southern and southwestern coffee municipalities like Fredonia. There, conflict was kept within

strict,

bipartisan limits, designed

to "conservatize" Liberal municipalities located in Conservative areas.

Middle-class poUticians, journalists, and intellectuals helped polarize politics

along bipartisan

lines.

In the second phase, Laureano

Gomez,

elected president in 1950,

determined to prevent a repetition of the Bogotazo and variants.

Once

laureanistas

was

provincial

its

took over, violence in Antioquia was con-

centrated in geographically peripheral, but economically strategic regions,

where Afro-Colombian majorities - organized

gaitanista railroad workers, miners,

opposition politics

and armed insurgency. There, the

regional state's institutional presence

armed (the

forces.

Where

was limited

these proved ineffective, as in

Lower Cauca, Magdalena Medio, and the

transferred to the contrachusma

proved even more

and the armed

difficult for



as

radical

central

and

to the police

and

Uraba and the

east

northeast),

power was

elites to

manage than

police

forces.

Gomez withdrew due

new

1940s

parastate forces that, set in motion,

Conservative

to

poor health soon

Roberto Urdaneta Arbelaez became the

October 1951,

in the

and road workers - supported

as la Violencia

after his

titular

term began, and

head of government in

took on a greater intensity, appeared in

regions. Gomez was the first president whose national program sanctioned the most reactionary developments

forms, and affected

in the regions.

new

The peasantry suffered the brunt of state violence: recendy

FORREST HYLTON

46

returned from Korea, for example, Batallon Colombia massacred 1,500 peasants in a rural area outside El Libano, Tolima, in 1952. Clientelist co-optation of smallholding petty producers

war

altogether, but frontiers.

The

tember 1952,

did shift their geography toward more recently settled

it

after a

organizations in

Law

up

in August,

in Sepguerrilla

which then

Movement of

organized a rudimentary justice system under

It

and military

use, as well as individual rights set

was issued

National Conference of the Popular

self-designated civilian

It

1

meeting of delegates from the country's

"Red Viota" (Cundinamarca)

First

National Liberation.

labor.

civil

class politics

eastern plains, for example, evolved toward an embryonic

agrarian revolutionary society in 1952-53.

became the

through

independent

in the coffee axis could not put a stop to

authorities, stipulating rules for land

and obligations regarding community and

guidelines for the establishment of dairy farms

"revolutionary" agrarian settlements, and regulated the cattle market

-

the economic lifeblood of the eastern plains. As efforts to establish a

Law 2 of

national guerrilla coordination advanced.

written by Jose Alvear Restrepo, regulated

and sketched designs

The law

for revolution

established a

life

the Eastern Plains,

in the vast liberated zones,

and a popular government.

government of popular assemblies and

district

councils in charge of planning production, consumption, and distribution. It laid

down

rules regarding the relations

civilians, expressly

that

marked

Conservatives.

la

Violencicu,

Communist

was not regulated by

women's

equality,

terror.

and mandating

civilized behavior

toward

enclaves were the only territories where

Law 2

life

also addressed civil marriage, divorce,

and indigenous

Plains represented "the

the

between combatants and

prohibiting torture and the scorched-earth policies

rights.

Laws

1

and 2 of the Eastern

most complete democratic project proposed by

armed movement."

Ill

Cold

When Gomez attempted to

War

resume

Dictatorship

his duties in 1953,

he was ousted by

Colombia's only military coup of modern times, in part because the Conservatives had split between extremists and moderates.

abhorred the parastate contrachmma and generalized persecution

its

variants,

The

latter

as well as the

and criminalization of upstanding Liberal

zens. General Rojas Pinilla,

now head of the Army,

seized

citi-

power with the

EVIL

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

47

support of Gomez's factional opponents within the Conservative Party,

with which he had close family and personal connections.

molding organized labor into a nationalist discourse has led to Argentina's

some

scholars to see

Juan Peron. But Rojas

servative bloodletting as a

him

the

plained that he "saw a red behind every coffee bush"

and

cattle

set

about

as a figure similar

Pinilla participated in the

commander - even

amassed a fortune in crooked

He

His anti-oligarchic,

bloc.

clientelist

Con-

US Embassy com-

and, as president,

real-estate deals.

He

personally intervened to free El Condor, leader o( the pajaros, from

also

in

jail

Buga.

With

heavier

and more decentralized

from extinguished under Rojas

had become part of regional,

it

central

Pinilla.

repression, rural violence

government

had become a national

was

far

Beginning with Gomez, violence policy.

No

longer exclusively

terror that increased rather than

decreased after the "guerrilla threat" was absent.

The foundations of the

cold war national security state were erected earlier in

Colombia than

meshed with

Creole traditions

anywhere

else in

Latin America, since they

of partisan sectarianism.

Under Gomez, partisan sectarianism had begun to open the fault lines of the bipartisan system

made Toward that Pinilla

itself,

however; and, to the delight of Liberals, Rojas

"reconciliation" between the

two

parties his first priority.

end, his most significant act as president was to declare a

general amnesty for Liberal guerrillas.

The first demobilization, backed by

merchants, landlords, and political bosses, took place in central Tolima.

It

was widely publicized as a means of enticing guerrilla chiefs in northern and

Commanders like Rafael who operated in the Magdalena Medio, and Captain Franco Yepes

southern Tolima to follow, which they did. Rangel,

in Antioquia,

were not far behind. After five years of fighting, the strongest

Liberal guerrillas, a force of some their arms,

1

0,000 on the eastern plains, turned over

under the leadership of Guadelupe Salcedo.

The movement of armed

Left resistance fragmented in response to

demowind was taken from revolutionary sails. Under intensified pressure, some communist militias demobilized. In southern

Rojas Pinilla's offer, and after guerrillas from the eastern plains bilized,

military

Tolima, a zone characterized by decentralized leadership, a micro-war unfolded between former party apparatus

the region.

allies, as

- succeeded

Liberals

- now

in expelling the

reintegrated into the

communists from much of

FORREST HYLTON

48

Those who had displayed an "exaggerated support or adhesion"

Gomez

To stamp

regime were amnestied in June 1954.

remaining communist redoubts, though, Rojas

War

to the

out one of the unleashed the

Pinilla

of Villarica in 1955. Batallon Colombia, the veterans of Korea,

targeted a highland municipality of northern to peasant unions

Tolima

that

had been home

and the Communists' Democratic Front

for National

Liberation. Rojas Pinilla ordered a blitz of 5,000 troops, with

US-

donated F-47s and B-26 bombers, and a torture center, known

"the

as

Napalm was sprayed on

Cunday Concentration Camp," was

estabUshed.

the "target area," as in Korea, and

was occupied by government

An

it

forces.

estimated 100,000 peasants were displaced. Half the communist

guerrillas fled to

Sumapaz, across the border

men and 200

column, with 100 armed

in

Cundinamarca. Another

families,

made

the legendary

"long march" over the eastern cordillera into the lowlands, to found the settlements of El Guayabero in western

western Caqueta,

became

military

as trade

commanders

Overall, la Violenciawsis a hostilities

Meta and

union or peasant leaders

new

in

huge

swamped not only

colonies

El Pato in northin the

on the

historical regression, in

military

which partisan

the legacy of Gaitan's populism, but also

the chance of mass-based independent class politics

spawned new modes of

mountains

frontier.

terror.

beyond

it.^^

It

In the nineteenth century, terms of

engagement were agreed upon, but during

ia Violencia^ neither

nor limits obtained — elderly men, women, and children were

rules

frequently targeted. ^^ Although cofiFee

frontiers

centuries

-

settled

as the case

in

its

geography largely coincided with the

the late

nineteenth and early twentieth

of Antioquia demonstrates -

la Violencia

was

about more than a generalized escalation of bipartisan competition and conflict over patronage, votes, land, labor

power, and commodities.

In

Antioquia, internal colonialism and the racialization of regional peripheries through terror tide

and expropriation were

crucial in beating

back the

of gaitanismo.

Though

la

Violencia received a decisive

election of Laureano

Gomez as president in

push nationally with the

1950,

it

was orchestrated and

controlled at the subnational levels. Regional guerrilla movements,

of which

left

offshoots that grew into durable

communist

some

insurgencies

during the cold war, formed in alliance with the Liberal Party throughout the country. Conservative parastate forces took over

and

village hamlets.

Through "the

many county

seats

agrarian question," the Liberal Party

EVIL

HOUR

had made important inroads

COLOMBIA

IN

49

in rural districts in the

1930s and 1940s,

challenging Conservative dominance of the countryside for the

Colombian

Gomez's reconquista aimed

to return

internal colonial totality in

which subalterns knew^

It

was during

la Violencia that

was

time

established.

Forms of

it,

society to an idealized their places.

the precedent for the bloody resolution

of the agrarian question, through sion,

first

1870s.^^^ Like the Regeneration seventy years before

since the

terror, expropriation,

cruelty that

and

disposses-

became widespread

in late

twentieth-century Colombia were institutionalized in Latin America's

most

regressive historical

part of the cold

ground

for

development

at

war counterinsurgent

endemic Left insurgency.

mid-century.

They

persisted as

repertoire, helping prepare the

The National

Lockout, 1957-82

Political

Is

there

them

Front:

no way that Colombia, instead of kiUing its sons, can make If Colombia cannot respond to this

dignified to live?

question,

I

prophecy a

and the earth

will

curse:

"Desquite"

will

come back

be spilled with blood, pain, and

to

life,

tears.

Gonzalo Arango (1966) National Front agreements signed in 1958 rebuilt the coffee republic on an axis that revolved

around the Liberal

Party, with

vanquished Conservatives

given half the spoils, and radical-popular expressions banned. Forgetting

was the "central leitmotif of the period, and the

memory" of ^

Violencia}^^

The

effect

was to

"kill

the

historical profession contributed to this

with its "private commitment to create collective amneGrowth without equity reigned, patterns of inequality were maintained or deepened, and clientelism was recreated. When USstate

of

affairs

sia."

sponsored, right-wing military dictatorships swept Latin America during the

1

960s and 1 970s, Colombia was held up as a showpiece of democracy in

the struggle for the "free world." In contrast to Venezuela,

whose

political

system was also praised during the cold war, the Colombian state succeeded neither in neutralizing nor defeating

the 1960s. In part, their longevity particularly peasant

- demands from

I

When

Rojas Pinilla

indefinitely,

its is

cracking

guerrilla insurgencies, intact since

due

to the exclusion of popular

-

the mainstream political system.

Counterinsurgency

made clear his intention of staying in power down on opponents and simulating populist

FORREST HYLTON

52

gestures for urban consumption, the oligarchy,

civihan rule, closed ranks. to control patronage

1957, not only both

They were

and build independent political parties,

and the Church wanted him

Two months

him.

but

by

his

clientelist bases.

attempt

By

early

industrialists, cofifee exporters,

out; a business-organized

Gomez -

later,

which had always prized

especially threatened

shutdown toppled

exiled in Franco's Spain

-

signed the

Pact of Sitges with Alberto Lleras Camargo.

This formally committed Conservatives and Liberals to create a National Front that would share power equally between the two parties,

with alternating occupation of the presidency and parity of representation at

of government. Supported by business leaders, the

levels

all

Church and party practice,

it

abandoning to unify the

Hopes

elites,

the pact was scheduled to

last until

endured, with minor modifications, until 1990. its

1974; in

The Church,

exclusive affiliation with the Conservative Party, sought

two formations.

for unity

^^^

among the nation's armed peasant groups across the when Guadelupe Salcedo was assassinated in

eastern cordillera died

Bogota

in 1957,

he returned,

and though Laureano

politically

where he put Rojas

Gomez

did not

last as president,

triumphant, in 1958 to preside over the Senate,

Pinilla

on

Since anti-communism was a pillar of

trial.

the world view he expressed as a political columnist. Conservative Party

and

leader,

"atheists"

president,

were

institutionalize

He was were

now

paranoid obsessions with "masons" and

his

Gomez

tolerated. Like Rojas Pinilla,

impunity

for

government-sanctioned

helped to

political violence.

thus the true victor in the contests of la Violencia.

The 1950s

nightmarish return to the nineteenth century, but

Gomez and

like a

his followers

were very

twentieth.^ ^^ Theirs was a merciless,

much of the

enforced forgetting, based on historical

myth and

fantasies

of

total

dominance.

The

had stunted and twisted the expres-

traditional two-party system

sion of political oppositions, but could not repress the 1930s Liberal

and 1940s,

in a replay

hegemony (1862-75), an

them

altogether. In

of the nineteenth-century period of

incipient left-populist

dynamic devel-

oped, and Conservatism was reinforced by a flamboyant defense of private property, the family,

escaped

elite control,

and the

altar.

In their way, each of these had

unleashing a sectarian conflict worse than the

War

of a Thousand Days, which eventually came to threaten the diarchy itself

The National Front

restored the two-party system,

now drained

of

EVIL any

between

real tension

Colombia, the

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

53

components. In cold war conditions

its

in

New Deal had been buried, and the Cruzada Nacionalista

was melded with a shared

referent,

anti-communism, that was

sufficient

unifying cement for the two parties.

The

result

demands,

to proscribe political expression of radical

was

as the state

apportioned

all

became

government

a

machinery of common

offices

and posts

and reformist

elite interests that

to Liberals

and Conserva-

advance. Coffee exports provided the basis of state budgets and

tives in

subsidized a protected domestic industry. As early as 1941, the private organization of the coffee growers,

National Coffee

Fund without

FEDECAFE,

began to direct the

public oversight, and this arrangement

continued through the 1970s. In spite of the interventionist regulatory

mechanisms introduced by Lopez Pumarejo that

in the

1930s and 1940s, the

became an executive committee of the bourgeoisie, but one

Liberal state

had no hegemonic

fraction

and no national

project.

Regional and local political power remained more important than central

government authority

officially forgotten,

small-town

life"

.

.

.

and though

places,

by the

Cordilleras

it

had been

formed the substance of rural and effects

were

proliferation of banditry: Conservatives,

Gonzalez, led gangs of young

and western through

most

through the early National Front.^^^ The

particularly evidenced like Efirain

in

"the Violence

men who roamed

the central

attempting to avenge the deaths of loved ones

atrocity. Just as Liberal guerrillas

and Conservative contrachusma

had never confi-onted one another during the second phase oi la in Antioquia (1950-53), the

Violencia

same was true of Gonzalez and Capitan

Desquite, the bandit captain hired by Liberal coffee hacienda owners in

Quindio

to stop Efrain

Gonzalez - the one

Gonzalo Arango mentions

moved back and

forth,

in the epigraph.

whom

The

from the western

to

Antioquian writer

bandoleros

and

cuadrillas

the central cordillera,

between Quindio and Tolima. With several exceptions, bandits in the coffee axis did not last under National Front arrangements.

Colombian Armed was supported by

Forces, led

The

by the army's Batallon Colombia, which

US military advisors,

training,

and funding, eliminated

them."«

movements under

the National Front were crimina-

state-of-siege legislation that

equated protest with subversion.

Radical-popular lized

by

Quasi-official

opposition forces, such as the Revolutionary Liberal

Movement (MRL),

led

by Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, had support

in

FORREST HYLTON

54

the countryside, and the Alianza Nacional Popular

Rojas Pinilla after his return

Both had

to run candidates

brought together Marxist

from

on

exile,

(ANAPO),

had a growing base

led

by

in the cities.

Liberal or Conservative slates.

The

intellectuals, radical writers, students,

MRL

excluded

public sector workers, and modernizing bureaucrats with peasants.

ANAPO,

in

which the Conservative bandit Efrain Gonzalez participated

actively until his death in 1965,

was

classic

right-wing populism: anti-

imperialism combined with attacks on birth control and, for Pablo VI's Papal Encyclical of 1968.

munists "spinal

into line behind the Liberal

fell

column" of National Front

under Lopez was

Low

later,

support

Banned from elections, comParty, which constituted the

poUtics, as the pattern established

institutionalized.^^'^

electoral participation rates

were an invariant feature of the

National Front. If Colombia was spared the experience of the military dictatorships that decimated middle-class, labor,

and peasant radicalism

elsewhere in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s,

because the

it is

National Front was a semi-authoritarian parliamentary dictatorship.

Though labor

mid-1960s, in a rapidly

labor militancy increased in the

deteriorating

economic

situation caused

by

falling coffee prices,

movement remained fragmented and weak

after la Violencia.

the

With

the closure of political space in the civilian arena blocking the re-

emergence of vibrant urban populism centered on the trade unions,

one avenue

for social protest

seemed

available.

In the 1960s and 1970s, just as the country's majority

went from

being rural to urban, the vehicle of choice for opposition forces became rural insurgency.

struggles

This was rooted in the long prehistory of the peasant

and land occupations along the

coffee frontier,

and

their

engulfing by the larger turbulence of la Violencia, which lingered as

banditry through the early years of the National Front. But there were also

still

enclaves of

communist

resistance. In

1961, Laureano Gomez's

son, Alvaro, at that time a senator, coined the term "independent

republics" to refer to sixteen areas over

did not exercise Lleras

territorial sovereignty.

Camargo - who crushed

handpicked by Laureano

which the

Under

central

government

the Liberal presidency of

the 1945 river- workers' strike and was

Gomez

as the

National Front candidate in

1958 - these "red zones" were surrounded by a military cordon that effectively isolated

Once

the

them from the outside world.

Cuban Revolution put Washington

into high gear, there

was

EVIL a

new urgenq^

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

55

Colombia. During the

to eradicate guerrilla forces in

moved

Alliance for Progress, anti-communist counterinsurgency

second phase,

as the

"hemispheric defense" to "national security."

from the Soviet Union was

Cuban

in the

An

country.

to be

The

^

its

"external threat"

handled by the USA,

as

demonstrated

missile crisis; while the "internal threat" of

subversion would be

into

mission of Latin American militaries changed from

managed by the

early veteran

police

and armed

communist

forces of a given

of Vietnam, Colonel William Yarborough,

headed the Special Warfare Center

at Fort Bragg,

and

led a military

mission to Colombia in 1962, and complained of its lack of preparation

and professionalism, recommending the organization of squads accountable only to the

A

territorially

US

government.

death

local

^

^

fragmented counterinsurgency confronted agrarian

re-

form when President Lleras Camargo founded a government bureaucracy, Incora, in 1961, to be run

Restrepo,

who formed

by the

president's cousin. Senator Carlos Lleras

a corps of young economists,

educated. Their power within the state was Incora.

But

their vision

still

many of them US-

nascent,

and confined

to

of progress entailed the elimination of the large

estate,

seen as backward and unproductive, and the conversion of "serfs"

into a

yeoman

citizenry.

^"^

The reform

process continued under Guil-

lermo Valencia, a poet from the former colonial slaveholding

city,

Popayan, but Valencia sympathized with General Franco and the Spanish Falange,

and one of

campaign promises was to eliminate

his principal

"independent republics." After steady industrial and commercial growth through the 1950s, in 1962, economic led to the lowest rates of industrial

crisis,

due to

falling coffee prices,

growth since the early 1930s, and

1964 urban unemployment became widespread. Future

after

fractures in the

National Front were thereby guaranteed. Plan Lazo, a "hearts-and-minds" counterinsurgent strategy that had at its

core a military-civilian force and specialized units, designed to hunt

and

kill

alleged

communist

be either collaborators or

supporters, determined that civilians ^^^

targets.

would

As General Alberto Ruiz Novoa

explained at the Conference of American

Armed

Forces in the

Panama

Canal Zone in 1963, the only way to defeat the insurgencies was by mobilizing and militarizing rural communities through "civic-military action." in Korea,

Ruiz Novoa had been the commander of Batallon Colombia

and fought the Chinese People's Liberation Army with the

Polar Bears of the

US

Army's 31st Infantry.

FORREST HYLTON

$6

that, in order to defeat Colombian peasant would be necessary to drain the sea in which they swam. To do so, the state would have to invest in regions of communist influence, as well as enlist civilian collaboration with the armed forces.

Ruiz was convinced

guerrillas,

it

General Ruiz thought of these "peasant self-defense" forces

as

an

elite

group, trained to coordinate with the army, particularly in intelligence

work able to

what Colonel Yarborough recommended, but answerColombian authority. Ruiz's plan, known as Plan Lazo, would

similar to

isolate the guerrillas

infrastructure, health,

from

by improving

their potential support base

and education.

^^^

Insurgency

II

National Front counterinsurgency operations unleashed a wave of armed migrations, from the central highlands to the southern jungles and eastern plains. In late

coordination with

its

May 1964, Plan Lazo failed dramatically when, in US allies, the Colombian Armed Forces launched

"Operacion Marquetalia" (Operation Sovereignty), to retake the municipality

of Marquetalia, a communist hamlet in the extreme south of

Tolima, on the border of Cauca and Huila. Another Korean veteran. Lieutenant Colonel Jose Joaquin Matallana, led an assault that featured the use of Huey helicopters,

two

T-33 combat

planes, seven

specialized counterinsurgent companies,

(GIL), designed to wipe out the leader, Tirofijo.

and

community and

army

battalions,

intelligence groups its

now

legendary

Here, and in other coordinated military attacks, territory

was captured, but only

briefly;

"the

enemy" remained at large. After more found their way either to

Marquetalia, families forced to flee once the

Cauca or

into the tropical lowlands of Caqueta

settle in their villages, fighters

formed a

guerrilla

and Meta. Unable

to

column.

Both Matallana and Tirofijo agreed that Marquetalia forced agrarian

communists mobile

to cease being a sedentary self-defense militia

force.

^^

US

advisors

and become a

had supervised "Operation Sovereignty"

a nearby military base, but soon after

it

at

was launched, comandantes from

Marquetalia, Rio Chiquito, and El Pato

came

together, as the

Bloque

new agrarian program. This "people's response to violence and militarist aggression" was later to be commemorated as the birth of the FARC, officially named in 1966. According to their historian, Sur, to issue a

through the 1970s, the

FARC

fiinctioned as a "regional structure of

EVIL social warfare,

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

57

of individual and collective survival," and developed in "a

setting for the building

of real

local

power.

"^"^

The

secret

of the FARC's

was the subordination of insurgent organizational goals to

early success

demands and movements of

frontier smallholders, tenants,

and

rural

laborers.

This emerges especially clearly in comparison with competitors on the

two other

Left, for

guerrilla forces

emerged

usually characterized as a middle-class,

followed Che's theory of the foco to the

in these years.

guerrillas

trigger

-

in place of the

la

was convinced

that,

letter.

Vioiencia,

working

class

an insurrection that would lead to

is

that

given the size of Colombia's peasantry, and

popular mobilization during

The ELN

university-based group

its

It

recent history of

armed

a small band of mobile and the peasantry - could

This was

socialist revolution.

of groups that followed Guevara in these years: for them,

typical

revolution was an act of consciousness and will, capable of overcoming

and

material

political determinations.

Strategic differences aside, however, the

history of popular liberalism,

than the

struggle

ELN was no less rooted in the

communism, and

FARC. The

patriarch

peasant-proletarian

of the Vasquez clan had

participated in the gaitanista takeover of the country's oil port, Barran-

cabermeja, in 1948, and led Liberal militias under Rafael Rangel during la ViolenciOy

where he met

his death.

The Vasquez

brothers, Fabio

and

Manuel, went to Cuba with a small group of scholarship students during the

Cuban

ELN

missile crisis in 1962.

On

their return, they set

foco in San Vicente de Chucuri,

guerrillas

had been

up the

first

Santander, where Rangel's

active, as Liberal guerrillas in the

War of a Thousand

Days had been before them.

The

ELN

Union,

counted on support from sectors from the Oil Workers'

USO,

following the strike against the newly formed state

petroleum company, squatters

ECOPETROL,

who had led the

in 1963, as well as elderly peasant

"Bolshevik Uprising" in El Libano, Tolima, in

1929, 3ind juntas gaitanistas in 1948.

Some early cadres had fought under

Rangel, while Fabio Vasquez started out in the youth

looking for a

way

wing of the MRL,

to avenge his father's death. Others, like

Vasquez and Rodrigo Lara, came to the

Manuel

guerrillas via student struggle at

the Universidad Industrial in Bucaramanga.

The

ELN

announced

its

presence with the "takeover of Simacota," a town in Santander, in

January 1965, and

later that year

accepted priest and sociologist Camilo

FORREST HYLTON

58

Torres Restrepo,

who was promptly

In 1967, the Maoist People's Liberation

of

this

Vazquez Rendon, had been the PSD's la Violencia

- he

martyr.

its first

Army One

matrix of armed agrarian radicalism.

Tolima during

combat

sent to his death in

1966. This provided liberation theology with

political

(EPL) was formed out of

its

founders, Pedro

commissar

in southern

suggested that Pedro Antonio Marin

himself Manuel Marulanda, in honor of one of the leaders of the the

1

920s.

The PCC-ML (Communist

from the youth wing of the

With

PCC in

EPL

set

up

a foco in

call

PSR in

Party-Marxist-Leninist) emerged

1965, following the Sino-Soviet

the help of former Liberal guerrilla

Julio Guerra, the

in early

^^

split.

MRL militant,

commander and

Uraba with the goal of waging

prolonged popular war. As Maoists, they believed that in rural "Third

World" countries like Colombia, the peasantry, led by a vanguard ^"^^ would play the leading role in making socialist revolution. In spite of the internationalist patina imported from

Moscow and

Beijing, the unfinished business of la Violencia gave rise to

insurgencies. Like society,

much of the

la guerrilla

rest

it

officially

rent),

home

Liberal bandit gangs, as well as the

Kidnapping,

and

la

Conservative

to

vacuna ("the vaccination," a form of protection

elboleteo (the charging

el

la

Vasquez family and

of war taxes via threatening

developed in Viejo Caldas and northern Valle. Given retencion,

three Left:

ended. Quindio and Risaralda, for

example, were coffee regions that had been

Tirofijo.

all

of small-town and rural Colombian

continued to be marked by the experience of

Violencia, decades after

gunmen and

party,

impuesto de guerra),

letters), first

new names

they were incorporated into

{la

the

repertoire of guerrilla tactics.

Both Fabio Vasquez and Tirofijo saw

their fathers

murdered by

Conservatives, and personal vendettas gave the guerrilla

movements

continuity with la Violencia. So did Ricardo Franco and Eribito Espitia,

who had both been with the

regional Liberal bandit chiefiiain, "Chispas,"

member of the commander of the FARC's IV Front in the

before going their separate ways. Espitia was a founding

ELN, and Franco became

the

Middle Magdalena.^"^^ In order to ward off what was correctly perceived to be a threat of rising conflict

(1966-70) -

in

the countryside,

who had been one of

President Carlos Lleras Restrepo Gaitan's staunchest opponents in

the Liberal Party, and presided over his fiineral

-

instituted a

new

agrarian reform program. Lleras also created a peasant organization, the

EVIL

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

National Association of Peasant Users

support for the

what

Lleras

initiative.

It

moved

drum up

to

ciientelist

in radical directions, far

beyond

Restrepo and the Liberal technocrats had envisioned,

especially along the Atlantic coast,

sive/^°

(ANUC),

59

Under

where latifundismo was most exten-

and Law 48, passed by

Valencia's Decree 3398, in 1965,

Congress in 1968, however, regionally based landlords organized death squads on the model of

los

pajaros,

and targeted the student and labor

Left for selective assassination in the cities/

matched by a of

Ill

The

was refined and systematized

civilians

whose

vision

in the cold war.

Counter-reform, Repression, Resurrection

ideological audacity

and

relative

popular legitimacy of the guerrilla

groups should not lead us to exaggerate their rapid demographic shift

1970s, the

This continuity was

similar continuity in the counterinsurgency,

war on

total

^

EPL was

from country to

size,

nor to overlook the

city in these years.

practically non-existent; Fabio

early years purging the

ELN's meager

ranks,

By

the mid-

Vasquez spent the

and the foquistas were nearly

eliminated by an onslaught of 30,000 troops at Anori, Antioquia in

1973.

The FARC were

confined mainly to the lowland regions

still

southeast of Bogota, which they had helped to colonize. In the

meanwhile, where two-thirds of Colombians ary education

and health

care expanded,

now lived, though

unemployment

cities,

second-

rose sharply

during the 1960s. Protectionist industrial policies failed to generate jobs, so the

working and lower-middle

dashed. In 1969

ANAPO won

class

saw hopes of

social mobility

majorities in municipal councils

and

departmental assemblies. Deterioration of the edifice of the National Front was clearly visible.

In 1970 Rojas Pinilla, running as a Conservative

on an anti-National

Front platform, mobilized an anti-oligarchic discourse reminiscent of Gaitan's that

- supplemented by a

CathoUc tradition mass-media influence - to win an

reactionary defense of a

was gradually losing ground

to

estimated 39 per cent of the vote, mainly from the lower-middle and

working

class.

The National Front

resorted to thinly disguised last-

minute fraud to deny him victory and impose

its

own

candidate.

Conservative Misael Pastrana.

Once

in office, Pastrana

sponsored public works and urban remodel-

ing in an attempt to generate

employment and the appearance of reform.

FORREST HYLTON

6o

but he also supported a process of counter-reform in the countryside. Cattle ranchers

(FEDEGAN),

as industrialists

(ANDI), were united

agribusiness

reforms initiated under Lleras Restrepo their advantage, just as landlords

reaction

was a response

to

and landlords (SAC),

- or,

as in

back

Uraba, to turn them to

had done with Law 200

ANUC

as well

in their determination to roll

in 1936.

The

land takeovers that swept Boyaca,

Tolima, Huila, Valle del Cauca, the Magdalena Medio, the eastern

and the Adantic

plains,

1971, in Toribio, Cauca, the Regional

coast. In

Indigenous Council of Cauca was formed to proposals based

on recuperation of community

had been incorporated into their goal as the attainment

self-consciously built

They

development

held

estates.

While defining

of indigenous autonomy, members of CRIC

on the

therefore focused

local self-government

large, privately

craft local

reserves {resguardos) that

of Quintin Lame and the PCC.

struggles

on land through

as the basis

cabildos,

of collective

life

and

culture,

and the formation of broad,

national-popular alliances with intellectuals, workers, and especially non-

indigenous peasants, in order to overcome regional, ethnic, and barriers to unity.

^^"^

On

class

the border of Uraba, in areas of extensive catde

ranching in the Sinii Valley in Cordoba, where gaitanista resistance had

been strong in 1948, and in neighboring Sucre,

ANUC led a third of

all

marches and land takeovers undertaken nationwide between 1970 and 1973.

The

was thus the hotbed of agrarian

area along the Atlantic coast

struggle in this period. Frustrated with the limits of reform

ANUC

had the firm backing of Left

movement

parties,

under

protesting the privatization of public education,

gencies attempting to channel the

Lleras,

a vigorous university

movement toward

and

insur-

sectarian ends.

In January 1972, Pastrana brought together leaders of both parties, as well as the key gremios, to forge the "pact" of Chicoral. In exchange for

paying

taxes,

landowners were promised easy

credit,

generous loans, and

even more limited land distribution. They were also given a free hand to organize violence against peasant and Leftist leaders, coordinating their efforts

with the armed

initiated agrarian

implemented

it

forces. In

reform with

as president,

1971, ten years after Lleras Restrepo had

Law

roughly

135, and five years after he had 1

per cent of lands that

under

fell

the reform's purview had been expropriated. Landlords with regional

power bases formed a

solid wall

of opposition. Like those of the

1

930s,

experiments with progressive legislation in the 1960s demonstrated that

reform-minded fractions of the

elite

lacked the capacity to achieve

EVIL

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

hegemony within the Colombian ruHng commerce and landed wealth, stood in

class.

6l

Regional power, based on

the way.

President Lopez Michelsen (1974-78), son of Lopez Pumarejo, had

been an

intellectual

decades,

and

as

and important

political player in his

founder and leader of the

MRL,

own

he had been a

against his party during the National Front. Technically, he

right for

fiery rebel

was the

under the National Front. Through popular caciques

to serve

last

like

Alfonso Barberena, a leader of squatter settlements in Cali, he courted the urban constituency that had supported Rojas Pinilla. Lopez outlined

two Colombias: the

first,

connected to coffee and manufacturing,

included Antioquia, the western Andean departments (Valle, Caldas,

and the Caribbean port of Barranquilla;

Risaralda, Quindio),

the bulk of government investment in infrastructure services.

The

5 per cent of the population that

it

received

and government

owned more than

half the

land received half of the national income, and they lived in and governed

from the

Colombia. The second, said to cover 70 per cent of

first

national territory, was where blacks, Indians,

the southern

and eastern

Atlantic coasts.

no

and

frontier settlers lived

and lowlands, and the

plains

These regions received

little

Pacific



and

investment and had virtually

even minimal infra-

state presence, electricity, public services, or

structure.

Though

coffee prices temporarily reached

new

highs in the mid-

1970s, inflating state budgets, debt service requirements, the nearcollapse of traditional industries

and

elite

opposition ensured that

Lopez Michelsen's promises of reform and national integration

mained

unfiilfiUed.

Colombia

into

Although Lopez announced

the

his

re-

aim of converting

"Japan of South America," he was the

first

president of the National Front to propose neoliberal measures: with Pinochet's Chile as a model, Lopez called for market Hberalization, privatization of state enterprises,

and

fiscal decentralization.

Rising

entrepreneurs in the marijuana and cocaine businesses helped the

change in direction by laundering money la

legally

through the Banco de

Repiibhca.

General Alvaro Valencia Tovar fought in Korea, at Marquetalia, and Anori; a follower of Ruiz, he was appointed head of the armed forces

under Lopez Michelsen. Like

his

mentor, he stressed the need for social

investment in education, health care, infrastructure, and credit, in areas

where communist support predominated.

General Luis

Camacho

FORREST HYLTON

62

Leyva, a lawyer

who saw

soon replaced Valencia;

radical ideas as a cancer in

was

this

need of extirpation,

end of "social investment"

to be the

as a

component of cold war counterinsurgency. Camacho proposed modifying the 1886 Constitution in order to pass a law regarding "thought

crimes"

{delitos

de opinion), specifically targeting

party-affiliated intellectuals.

unions and universities,

Convinced

as well

that

ANUC,

however, repressed,

movement, had been

and rent by Left sectarianism, and the other

co-opted,

to forge a nationwide coalition for radical

To the extent that they had survived the first phase

change.

By 1974,

guerrilla ties.

radical opposition

movements were hardly poised all,

communist propaganda, he

Marquez of having

main

the

academics and

community, neighborhood, and

as

peasant organizations were infected by publicly accused Garcia

Left:

most of Colombia's trade

rural insurgencies

(1964-74)

Simmering urban discontent, however, took dramatic form

when

new

a

election

M-19 - named

group,

had been stolen from Rojas

by stealing

Bolivar's

Composed of dissidents,

sword from the

after the day,

Pinilla

historical

museum

outset,

the communications

M-19 had a keen

media

its

in 1974,

when

19 April,

- announced

middle-class anapistas as well as

from the

at

were dormant.

the

appearance

in central Bogota.

young

FARC

and

PCC

sense of how best to exploit

to cultivate the

same aura of romantic

bravado that had surrounded the urban guerrillas of the Southern Cone,

some of whose veterans swelled M-19 ranks. An popular movement, with electoral ambitions in the

explicitly national-

tradition of Gaitan,

M-19's goal was not the overthrow of capitalism or the Colombian but the opening up of the existing tion; in this,

M-19 was

revolutionary Cuba.^^^

It

political

state,

system to electoral competi-

similar to Castro's

M-26 movement

in pre-

among

generated broad though diffuse support

the working and middle classes that had voted for Rojas Pinilla and

Lopez Michelsen, and proved or the

far

more "popular" than

either the

The mid-1970s saw borhood

the spread of protests over public services, led by

on

the urban peripheries, mobilizing through neigh-

associations

and cooperatives rather than trade unions. In 1977,

the working class

the three major trade union confederations staged a paro strike,

FARC

ELN.

civicOy

which General Camacho punished with extreme

Thereafter, high

and the

rise

unemployment, lower wages, decreased

or civic

repression.

social security

of the "informal sector" - in which more than half the

EVIL Colombian

HOUR

would be

proletariat

COLOMBIA

IN

toiling

63

by 1985 - further weakened an

movement.^

already divided labor

The crushing of the paro civico set the stage for a widespread crackdown under the next Liberal president, Cesar Turbay Ayala (1978-82). General Camacho was chosen to lead the assault on thousands in the targeted as "subversives" by the army, police, intelligence services,

cities

and a growing number of paramilitary organizations. Those tortured, imprisoned, or "disappeared,"

arrested

and death squads

were

AAA

like

(Anti-Communist Alliance) appeared on the Argentine model. ^^ litical

violence grew

much more

intense than

it

Po-

had been during the

previous decade, and General Camacho's forces struck particularly hard at

M-19. For the in the cities,

life

Colombia began movement.

The

1

time, counterinsurgent operations affected daily

to receive attention

from the international human

and

civic

1970s and early 1980s, with the urban

movements

was a propitious one

in retreat,

the

and

state repression

There was

for guerrilla growth.

discourse of "armed actors of the Left

by northern

rights

38

overall climate in the late

trade union rise,

first

and along with the countries of the Southern Cone,

and Right"

(as

analysts of El Salvador in the 1980s).

Turbay administration meted

the Nicaraguan revolution

and Guatemala, gave

guerrillas a

The

brutal repression

out, coupled with hopes unleashed

new

lease

different

on

no

would be pioneered

and the processes unfolding

Colombia under Turbay was no

on the

as yet

life.

by

in El Salvador

They argued

that

from the military juntas of the

Southern Cone, while in Nicaragua the Sandinistas had shown that

armed

struggle

was the way

to

overthrow dictatorship.

Despite the repression directed against operations in 1978 militants stole

it,

M-19

initiated

its first

urban

on General Camacho's watch. The following year,

its

4,000 machine guns from the armory in Bogota, and, in

1980, occupied the Dominican Embassy with the

US

envoy inside —

operations that were typically flashy and risky, and did not require a

broad

social base or mobilization.

^^^

For

its

part, the

EPL dropped

Maoism - which had led to innumerable internal splits - in 1980, and made headway in the cattle country of Cordoba and the banana zone of ^ Uraba, which it would later dispute with the FARC.^ This

latest

phase of guerrilla growa:h, however, took place within a

rapidly changing political-economic environment.

Restructuring had

begun within the fragmented oligarchy during the long stagnation of

FORREST HYLTON

64 industrial

manufacturing in the 1960s and 1970s. Important factions

away from production, toward speculation and

shifted their investment

the capture of rents.

New enclaves,

dominated by foreign

production of a single commodity for export, multiplied regions of Arauca

capital

-

and the

the petroleum

and Northern Santander, the coal sector of the Guajira,

bananas in Uraba. This

provided the guerrillas with the

latter shift

material basis for expansion.

The marijuana

business, initially organized

by Peace Corps veterans

and quickly taken over by Colombian smugglers, flowered Cesar,

and Magdalena departments, and La Guajira.^

and banking soared,

new

as a

acquire the wealth that

layer

of outlaw rentier

would allow them

^

in the

Cauca,

Construction

capitalists

began to

to ftind the counterinsurgency

The

and enrich themselves through the war economy.

Conservative

base continued to shrink.

While ftimigation of marijuana

in the

Cauca and the

Sierra

Nevada de

Santa Marta, and the extradition of leading marijuana traffickers to the

USA

began under Turbay, cocaine had already replaced marijuana

as

Colombia's most profitable export commodity. By the early 1980s, narcotics mafiosos entered politics,

Colombian government

relations.

and "drugs" became the pivot of US-

The

coffee sector

was

at the

beginning

of the end of its economic predominance, but the Liberal Party was given a boost with the drug trade,

Conservative Party

Bogota saw

all

their already limited

further, as

new

work with

the cocaine

to

which allowed

it

to survive, while the

but disappeared. Modernizing technocrats in

power over the departments diminish

- more corrupt, cynical, and willing to mafia than some of the traditional caciques - came

political brokers

dominate regional and

local political landscapes. Provincial clientelism

was revamped, and the military and police assumed more prominent roles as the It

upholders of "public order."

was within

this

new

context that the

ELN,

reborn after near

annihilation at Anori, began, from the early 1980s, to target multinational export enclaves as part of a analysis

of the country's

new

new "ABC"

surfaced in the petroleum regions of Arauca

model of

revolution, taken

based on an

They

and Northern Santander,

the El Cerrejon coal-mining zone of the Guajira, regions of southern Bolivar

strategy,

pattern of resource extraction.

and the gold-mining

and northeastern Antioquia, offering a new from Central America rather than Cuba.

Building on liberation theology, they joined popular movements and

HOUR

EVIL worked

USO,

closely with the

as

more

radical sectors

petroleum caught up to

What

FARC

coflFee as

had done

in

dropped Che sfoco theory and got

rid

export.

the

COLOMBIA

IN

its

65

of the

workers' union,

oil

Colombia's leading legitimate

ELN

early days, the

did once

of Fabio Vasquez. They built

it

local

power by supporting popular movements. This move came their

response to armed competition from the Left. At

as a

VII National Congress in 1982, the

strategy, in theory (they

FARC abandoned its defensive

had already done so

themselves throughout the national territory the

initials,

FARC

EP (Army

-

in practice), to project

a

change symbolized by

of the People), added to the group's name.

had already expanded from

its

bases in Caqueta, Meta,

Putumayo, into the Uraba, the Middle Magdalena, and southeastern plains

-

areas

The and

of the

- which had

Guaviare, Vichada, and Vaupes

indigenous majorities. This was the jump-off point from which, feeding

on

taxes levied

FARC

from the country's thriving new cocaine industry, the

would become

a military enterprise dedicated

to

territorial

expansion and control.

During the National Front, Liberal administrations to

tried

and

failed

implement agrarian reform and vanquish armed insurgencies mid- to

recently colonized regions. In the

radical-popular protest

by organized

the urban frontier, along with a

late

1970s, a

labor, students,

new urban

in

new wave of

and colonizers of

guerrilla insurgency,

was

back with state-sanctioned terror in the shape of death squads.

rolled

Designed to deal with the Colombian government's incapacity to stop the spread of insurgency,

these were

ravishing the societies of Central Sanctified tisan

structurally

similar

those

to

America and the Southern Cone.

by the Catholic Church, anti-communism glued the

bipar-

system back together.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, intensified repression

diminished

state authority

and created a climate

in

which Left

insur-

gencies thrived. Their flourishing, in turn, challenged death squads to

consolidate themselves as regional paramilitary forces.

criminal violence fed into one another,

cause of death

among

major economic

shift

Political

and

and homicide became the leading

males, especially in the urban frontier zones.

toward

rent, speculation in land

and urban

A

real

and cocaine exports heralded the death of the coffee republic. By moving the productive base away from manufacturing and coffee estate,

exports,

toward extractive export enclaves and coca

frontiers, the multi-

FORREST HYLTON

66

national corporations, the narco-bourgeoisie, in

and technocratic

politicians

charge of "modernizing" and "reforming" the Colombian state

created the necessary conditions for guerrilla resurgence. Accelerating state

and

parastate repression provided sufficient conditions.

Negotiating the Dirty War, 1982-90

It is

not only a punitive war but a preventive war ... a dirty war

...

It is

society;

not only a war against the it is

a

war of the

state or

of the

entire society with

state against civil

itself. It is

collective

suicide.

Gonzalo Sanchez, "La degradacion de

la

guerra" (1991)

Conservative President Belisario Betancur initiated a peace process with the insurgencies in 1982, out of which a broad electoral Left, tied to the largest guerrilla insurgency,

emerged

as the first national-popular ex-

pression since gaitanismo. In response, regional

and

local paramilitary

networks defied Bogota by implementing a "dirty war" - characterized

by high

levels

of torture, massacre, disappearance, and

with impunity.

When

against the broad Left spiraled

in

political

murder -

peace negotiations broke down, political violence

- sanctioned by

the executive ex post facto

-

proportion to the growing power of cocaine-exporting

entrepreneurs.

I

Centered, as the

Narco-politics coflFee

and Paramilitarism

export business had been, on Medellin, cocaine

processing and transport linked the

first

Colombia of the

central

and

western highlands to the second Colombia of the eastern lowlands and Pacific

and Atlantic

coasts,

through new

Villavicencio, as well as roads

and

airports.

cities

like

Florencia and

Medellin thus recovered

fading industrial glory, becoming the major hub for the one export commodity Colombians owned and controlled. This was facilitated by Antioquian migration to South Florida and Jackson Heights, Queens, its

FORREST HYLTON

68

which provided the works.

so-called Medellin cartel with distribution net-

^^^

The growing power of the mafia was first raised in the 1982 elections, when Pablo Escobar and others made inroads into national politics, mainly through the Liberal Party; cocaine had surpassed coffee and earned an estimated 30 per cent of Colombian exports.

became an

The

^

bosses).^

New

alliance

developed

after

old-style caciques

(political

Escobar had been expelled from

Liberalism," led by Luis Carlos Galan and Rodrigo Lara

both of

Bonilla,

Escobar

deputy in Congress under Alberto Santo-

one of the most corrupt of the

fimio,

"The

alternate Liberal

whom

publicly opposed the growing influence of

cocaine entrepreneurs and disputed the legitimacy of caciques within the Liberal Party, like Santofimio.

With their ties to the repressive organs of the state, and the two exports

parties, the paramilitaries

the Catholic Church,

were able to

profit

from cocaine

on a much grander scale than the FARC. They owed this

role to their origin as death

squads of the drug

lucrative

and the catde-

cartels

ranching anti-communists in the Magdalena Medio Valley. In 1981, traffickers like Escobar, the

Ochoas, Carlos Lehder, Victor Carranza, and

Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, organized MAS, or "Death

to Kidnappers," a

right-wing paramilitary force dedicated to ridding the region of "sub-

Amplifying the findings of the Prosecutor General's report on

versives."

MAS,

as minister

between

active

ranchers,

and

of

and

justice,

Lara Bonilla had exposed the connections

retired military officials, police, party bosses, cattle

narcotraffickers in the formation of MAS.

Like the pdjaros of the 1950s, strictly regional,

worked

but

it

as a lieutenant

MAS's

radius of action

was

at first

soon branched out. Gonzalo Rodriguez had

under Gilberto Molina

in the

Boyaca emerald

mines, where each capo had a rudimentary military apparatus to enforce control over labor and

rivals.

Rodriguez and Victor Carranza served

as a

bridge between narco-financed paramilitarism in the Middle Magdalena

and the southeastern lowlands of Meta - between the the second.

As head of the

first

cattle ranchers' association

Antioquia in 1983, Pedro Juan

Moreno

Villa defended

debate with Lara Bonilla in Puerto Berrio. stretching

from the Magdalena Medio

Uraba.^

The

He

Colombia and

(FEDEGAN)

MAS

in

in a public

built another bridge,

to northeastern Antioquia

and

regional oudines of a burgeoning paramilitarism were

increasingly visible.

EVIL

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

more

Paramilitaiy leader Carlos Castano describes a

formation in his 2001 autobiography,

him

internationalist

As an eighteen-

Confession.

serving in the ranks of MAS, his family sent

army scout

year-old former

My

69

to train in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1983. Detailing

how

he ordered and

participated in massacres of civilians, Castano insists, "I copied the

concept of paramilitary forces from the

As described below, the

Israelis."

Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza were applied

lessons learnt in

in the

Magdalena Medio. Castaiio worked there under the direction of

"Rambo,"

drug-trafFicking brother, Fidel, a.k.a.

Pablo Escobar's

who would soon

his regional counterinsurgent

devote himself full-time to

The "House of Castano,"

ing paramilitary death squads.

his

a business associate of

movement, had begun

its

command-

as Fidel called ^

ascent.^

In 1984, Escobar ordered the assassination of Lara Bonilla, Betancur's minister of justice. Lara Bonilla's offense had been to resist the influence

of the cocaine mafia in Liberal Party traffickers like

politics

by demanding that leading

Escobar be extradited to the USA.

The

repression of the

cocaine business after the killing of Lara Bonilla helped crisis

which

into

for example, in

it

had

initially

The day of Lara

Calamar (Guaviare) the price of a

200,000 pesos; a week land,

1983.

fallen in

later

it

cost

kilo

lift it

out of the

Bonilla's burial,

of coca paste was

800,000 pesos. Narco-investment

concentrated in the Magdalena

Medio

Valley,

in

grew

rapidly.'^'

Cocaine exporters struction,

who had also invested heavily in finance, conand communications - merged with "peasant self-defense"

forces in order to protect their also aligned themselves

and

as active

parameters for

retired military official

"New

tancur (1982-86)

and

Colombian

II

Supported by

newly acquired properties. Drug mafias

with Liberal Party bosses in the provinces, police.

poHtics.^

"Political

as well

they set the

Increasingly, ^

Opening"

Liberalism," Conservative President Belisario Be-

made

the

first

attempt to negotiate a cease-fire and a

peace agenda with the insurgencies; his Liberal opponent, Lopez Michelsen,

Once

had

called for their military defeat along

a follower of Laureano

establishment, Betancur was majority,

and aimed

to

Venezuelan

Gomez, but by temperament moved by the deteriorating

improve

it.

In 1982, as a

first step,

^^^ lines.

a loner in the plight of the

he declared an

FORREST HYLTON

70

amnesty and freed over a thousand

guerrillas

and

political

activists

imprisoned under Turbay's draconian "Security Statute." Betancur

named

social inequality as the culprit

and

guerrillas,

on

insisted

— although any proposed

cease-fire negotiations

to go

of the maladies spawned by the

executive, rather than legislative, supervision of

reforms would have had

through Congress.

This was the beginning of the period Betancur named the "political

Here was a window through which demilitarization of

opening."

political life

and a

serious discussion of problems

and

lack of education, services,

government neglect

the

in

failure

political exclusion,

infrastructure, violent dispossession

and

unemployment as well as the cities - could be glimpsed.

countryside,

shrinking industrial manufacturing jobs in

The

-

of the process

easily

is

With US-funded

explained.

counterinsurgency wars in Central America moving into

critical phases,

the international context discouraged a negotiated political solution to

Colombia's military

conflict.

US Ambassador

term "narco-guerrilla" in 1984, the year the suggesting that the

came during Bogota

FARC

was criminal rather than

a period in which, following

December 1982,

in

Tambs

Lewis

cease-fire

the "war

coined the

was implemented, political.

This

Ronald Reagan's

visit to

on drugs" became the

principle

theme of US-Colombian diplomacy. Betancur never had the support of the

Colombian Army, which opposed peace negotiations and on both

solution

institutional

a political

Nor

grounds and cold war principle.

did Betancur have strong backing from any faction of the ruling

and he was dependent on a reluctant Congress

Terms political

high

relatively favorable to guerrillas

for structural change.

bent on joining the formal

arena triggered a reaction from local landed

command

of the Colombian

Armed

Forces.

government policy using counterinsurgent

-

cocaine export revenues

like the

terror,

elites, as

elites

central

frinded in part by

^

In the Magdalena

Valley, the eastern plains, northeastern Antioquia,

Cordoba, older agrarian

well as the

They fought

Nicaraguan Contra forces fighting to

overthrow the national-popular Sandinista regime.^

Medio

class,

and southern

and the new commercial-financial-

industrial cocaine elite established regional

beachheads for private armies

and landed empires.

As

in

^

Violencicu, as

much

as the guerrillas themselves,

who were

present in the above-named regions, what galled traffickers and traditional landlords

alike

were processes of self-organization, of which

EVIL guerrilla insurgency

ing

demands

HOUR

was only one

for redistribution

IN

COLOMBIA

aspect. Self-organization led to escalat-

of land, reorientation of credit, and new,

state-subsidized technological improvements. chers' Association

with

civil

come

Jl

Led by the Cattle Ran-

(FEDEGAN), through which

paramilitary relations

society were organized, landed oligarchs decided the time

to silence popular

had

demands. This meant death to landless peasants,

indebted smallholders, rural proletarians, and the urban movements for

homes,

services,

The

and M-19 - saw

They

own

and public education.

three insurgencies that entered into negotiations

- FARC, EPL,

the state-sanctioned, public-private repression coming.

exploited contradictions in the peace process to strengthen their

position, calling attention to rising

army and

paramilitary abuses.

Firmly rooted in the savannas of Cordoba and the banana zones of Uraba, the groups.

EPL had

By

a major presence in trade unions

FARC had doubled its number of fronts, In

and community

the time an agreement had been reached in late 1984, the

from fourteen

to twenty-eight.

1985, hoping a general strike in June would turn into urban

insurrection,

M-19

and complaining of army

pulled out of the truce. In

violations

November

their

of the

cease-fire,

commandos

staged

a seizure of the Palace of Justice in the center of Bogota, capturing the

Supreme Court within

it,

and requested negotiations. The Army

responded by blasting the building in a tank assault that ended with the slaughter of all those inside. Betancur deferred to the high

command;

had he demurred, he might have been ousted. ^^ The massacre marked the beginning of the

end of M-19

Within the government, the

as a political-military force.

figure in charge of managing contact with

the insurgencies, Jaime Castro Castro, was the pohtical godfather of

the Liberal Party cacique, Pablo Emilio Guarin,

communist violence

who

supervised anti-

in Puerto Boyaca, a catde-ranching, paramilitary

Medio Valley. One of the paramilitary training by British and Israeli mercenaries, was named Guarin. During Betancur's peace process, the Magdalena Medio

outpost in the Magdalena

camps after

there, later staffed

became the

territorial

subversion"

- through

heart of the Medellin cartel.

disappearance,

was carried out. Active and

retired military

catde ranchers, coordinated with the across the departmental border

The

displacement,

XVI

from Boyaca

architect of "peace" in the

and

"Fumigation of

and

torture

police officials,

-

and

Brigade in Puerto Berrio, in Antioquia.^^^

Magdalena Medio Valley was General

FORREST HYLTON

72

Farauk Yanine Diaz, a School of the Americas graduate that the key to retaking the area

from the

who

recognized

FARC and the PCC in the early

1980s was a counterinsurgent "hearts-and-minds" strategy that would

whether

integrate the peasantry into the apparatus of repression,

others

him

had

failed in the

a "Super Star

.

1960s and 1970s, so Pablo Guarin considered within the army."

.

.

As the peace process degenerated, developments

Medio met with Boyaca's

town

a

Eliecer

Magdalena Medio."

Gaitan,

in

peace was understood to

and the armed

FARC

as a civilian front

formed the

Patriotic

electoral politics carried

and

PCC

high

cadres.

down

risks for

MAS

sowed

terror

for radicals.

Union (UP) with

But

arms.

UP

The

strategy of

of varying ideological

UP

became

a meeting

A

ianism of the 1970s.

the

supporters, especially

for activists

hues committed to progressive social change, the

new generation sought to overcome the Most had nothing to do with the FARC

sectar-

or the

so they did not adhere to the criollo Leninist doctrine of the

"combination of all forms of struggle." social justice,

their

Exemplary displays

as

designed to help consolidate a power base within

the formal political system prior to laying

trade unionists

forces.

common

^

In late 1985, the

PCC,

mean

counterinsurgency, based on "political cleansing" and closer

with impunity.^

ground

President Betancur

of the nation. Betancur

"the symbol ... of the resurrection of the

of public-private violence became more

armed

1985,

for the rest

Officially, then,

collaboration between civilians

PCC,

Magdalena

in the

a speech delivered in Puerto

in

"model of peace"

named General Yanine successfril

approval:

official

Plaza Jorge

declared the

as

Yanine succeeded where General Ruiz and

informants or combatants.

UP

militants

and "revolutionary change" through the

commitment

worked

for peace,

electoral arena. In

to finding a democratic path to revolution, they

similar to the Chilean

UP

of the 1960s and 1970s - and,

if

were

anything,

more doomed. Given the "correlation of forces"

{correlacio'n

de fuerzas), a social

democratic electoral politics tied to the nation's largest guerrilla formation resulted in widespread extrajudicial execution of Left politicians militants, especially in frontier regions.

The "orthodox"

FARC understood this and argued for increased militarization.

^

Jacobo

Arenas, the only proletarian in the overwhelmingly peasant high

mand, was the driving

force behind the

and

faction of the

UP. His dream was

com-

not, like

EVIL

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

73

Salvador Allende's, to find a parliamentary road to socialism, but rather to build a

and

US

modern war machine with which

two years

afi:er its

to fight the

Colombian

state

In tragic confirmation of the orthodox position,

imperialism.

UP

foundation, 500

militants, including presidential

- who had won more than any Left: candidate 1986 - had been assassinated.

candidate Jaime Pardo Leal in

Colombian

history in

UP and the trade unions had to be independent One PCC dissident

Pardo realized that the fi-om the

FARC

if

they were to effect reform.

reflected, "If we didn't

embrace democracy and peace

way

that

was

perfecdy open, but rather continued playing on both levels with the

UP

and the party

in the legal sphere

and the

FARC

in the war,

The orthodox wing of

headed for a holocaust."

in a

the

we were

FARC

had no

intention of letting go of their "political instrument," and their view

gained adherents as bodies piled up. Without analyzing

it

critically,

the

FARC justified their existence thereafter by referring to what the victims' families called "political genocide."

Most

killings

of

UP

supporters were the responsibility of Rodriguez,

Victor Carranza, and the Castano brothers. Adhering to the declarations

of the Colombian Armed Forces, to the effect that the

UP was merely the

"unarmed wing of the subversion," they declared war without quarter on the party as a way of fighting the FARC. The Castaiios, whose father had been kidnapped and murdered by the

FARC

aft:er

the ransom had been

paid,

had personal reasons

least,

Rodriguez and Carranza, his associate in the emerald mafia, took

for

waging

their

war on

revenge for a business relationship gone awry.^^^

civilians. Initially at

Toward

this end,

they

fiinded "political cleansing" operations to physically eliminate or forcibly displace those

who

mobilized for radical democratic reforms.

in

Closure

Within the FARC, only Alfonso Cano, the lone Chiefs of Staff, saw

how

supplant older, beleaguered landed paramilitarism.

The

intellectual in Joint

the emerging cocaine export elites in

politics

unacceptable degree of insurgent political advance. forces,

to

and democratic opening, considering

mass mobilization and progressive electoral

armed

had begun

regions through

narco-paramilitary right congealed as a bloc opposed

to Betancur's peace negotiations

the

elite

firontier

ranchers,

narcotraffickers,

evidence of an

With

factions of

Liberal politicians,

and

FORREST HYLTON

74

organized death squads coming together against him, Betancur lacked the

power

on

to insist

social reform,

which would have allowed him

to

undercut the insurgencies. The process of "political opening" undertaken by the central state was opposed by regional

regrouped in

elites,

defense of "private property" and "public order."

The

national political

community was not expanded

to include Afro-

slum

dwellers, femin-

Colombians, indigenous groups, frontier

settlers,

ists, human rights defenders, or green activists working through the UP, much less the Communist Left that had forced the opening. In Uraba

and the Choco, peasant communities,

either

made

strong Afro-Colombian presence,

the

Afro-Colombian or with a

UP

their political vehicle; so

did mestizo frontier setders in FARC-controlled areas in the south and southeast (Meta, Caqueta).

demands of

The

many

insurgencies supported

of the

the above-mentioned radical-popular groups. In spite of

insurgent efforts to use those struggles for their organizational ends, a

broad-based, mostly autonomous mobilization was conflated with "subversion" and suppressed by terror.

The overgrown armed

resistance contributed to the

movements most

vulnerability of the very

weakness and

likely to bring about changes

The pajaros had risen again, this time teenage assassins that made Medellin world-

necessary for a negotiated solution. in the guise of

MAS and the

famous. Unlike

and

t\\t

pajaros o^ \i\\t 1950s

1 990s were hired and protected

Miami by

by

H.W. Bush

then-Vice-President George

fight Left insurgencies



sicarios'm the

1980s

the cocaine mafia, not

With Reagan's "war on drugs" - organized

the Conservative Party. ^

out of

and 1960s,

(or killed)

narcotrafficking

in order to

and extradition would be the

main focus of US-Colombian government

relations.

Under pressure from Washington, the Barco administration that took over in 1 986 - a Liberal landslide on a low vote - pursued the extradition of the Medellin preferred "a

of

tomb

traffickers

extradited")

cartel.

he

in

led,

Colombia"

known

as

USA. He and

to a cell in the los

extraditables ("the ones

the group

who

can be

depended on informants within the armed forces and

intelligence services

on leading

In an oft-quoted phrase, Escobar declared that he

(DAS,

DOC,

judges, politicians,

ministers, newspapers,

and

F-2),

and responded by ordering

and law-enforcement

political factions

officials.

within both parties ex-

pressed public support for paramilitary "self-defense" forces,

them with ongoing

ties

hits

Yet key

to the Medellin cartel.

some of

EVIL

When

the paramilitary

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

movement

75

momentum

gathered

in

1987-88,

homicide had already become the leading cause of death among males. Social

movements staged massive marches in demanding progressive change, and

the

countryside,

attacks

tried

widened

to instrumentalize them.

include

to

wing of the

in the progressive

perennial

students,

The

moved

and the

and distinguished rights activist

Liberal senator (and

Horacio Serpa pointed out,

candidate)

presidential

FARC

human

As

Liberal Party.

and the

cases

scope of right-wing

professors,

Hector Abad Gomez, a

professionals like Dr.

cities

some

particularly the

closer to the guerrilla insurgencies,

ELN, who

in

"In

Colombia, thought crimes have become instituted on the ground,

and

are drastically

punished with nothing

alty."^ ^ In addition to those

"subversive," "disposable people"

than the death pen-

{los desechables)

were

{limpieza

and

operations

social)

users

were

killed in

ill

"social

became generalized

that

as

also targeted.

homosexuals, transvestites, the homeless and mentally

Prostitutes,

people, thieves, petty drug dealers,

cleansing"

less

whose words and deeds were perceived

in

Medellin, Cali, Pereira, Bogota, and Barranquilla. Active and former police officers were

Urban

as

prominent

traffickers

as

and

paramilitaries.

violence was dizzyingly plural.

The FARC, meanwhile, had begun statelet in earnest, as

its

metamorphosis into a tributary

kidnapping, extortion, selective assassination, and

forced displacement began to figure prominently in zones in which they

had recently

The

arrived.^

ELN

also

extraction of protection rents fi-om the

rapidly. By the mid-1980s, German company contracted to

grew

construct the Caiio-Limon pipeline in Arauca (with the covert aid of the

Kohl government),

as well as

multinational petroleum companies, gave

them the resources needed for expansion. The ELN found supporters and recruits in universities, neighborhood and community organizations, and trade unions. It grew by 500 per cent between 1983 and 1988, and, after the peace process, distinguished itself by its readiness to use terrorist tactics - like kidnapping, car bombings, pipeline and infrastructural sabotage - as a substitute for insurrection. Although on a

lesser scale

patchwork of regional and

ELN, which had not "kidnapping and

and

all

than the

FARC,

the

ELN

could claim a

local sovereignties. In a covert attack

joined the cease-fire,

the

FARC

forms of terrorism that threaten

liberty."^^^ In 1987, the

FARC

and die

ELN

on the

denounced

human

dignity

founded the Simon

FORREST HYLTON

jG

(CGSB) with M-19,

Bolivar Guerrilla Coordination

Lame, and the tiny Trotskyist PRT.^ proved

illusory,

since the 1930s lingered.^ ^ Nevertheless, the

gave voice to a guerrilla

movement

had become a formidable challenge

to the exercise of central

FARC had already

organizational transformation into a tributary statelet,

its

important to remember

how

^er

1980s and 1990s,

As part of an

the peace process had failed.

official

to

effort

democratize regional politics by in

1988

instituted for the first time since 1886, with the

and 256 municipal council

races.

elections

more

result

were

16 mayoral

was to increase

"political

cleansing"

These were meant to deal with the advance of the UP,

which threatened especially in

vists,

local

UP winning

The unexpected

leading to

violent electoral competition,

unionists,

it is

sharply the conflict deteriorated in the late

loosening the control of the center,

operations.

CGSB

economic and military terms

that, in

government authority. Though we have seen that the initiated

EPL, Quintin

however, as the atmosphere of sectarian competition that

had rent the Left at least,

the

Promises of insurgent unity

to break the bipartisan

monopoly

peripheral or frontier regions.

community

The

at the local level,

targets

were trade

organizers, students, professors, indigenous acti-

radio journalists,

and

teachers.

As

always, above

all,

they were

peasants.

In the banana, logging, and cattle- ranching region of Uraba, massacres started in April

on

1988

at

Mejor Esquina,

the orders of Fidel Castano

Boyaca.^

In

in

which

thirty-six peasants died

and Luis Rubio, mayor of Puerto

Remedios, in the gold-mining area of northeastern

Antioquia, where contrachusma forces had rampaged against gaitanistas in the 1950s, the

UP won the mayor's office in 1988. Fidel Castano sent killer, a former FARC combatant from the Middle

most methodic

his

Magdalena, on a homicidal spree the same year.^^^ According to an investigation undertaken

Liberal

one of the forces"

by the Attorney General's

intellectual authors

of the crime; paramilitary "self-defense

from Puerto Boyaca had

also participated.^^

Cordoba, where juntas gaitanistas had

in

the

Office, Cesar Perez, a

Congressman from the neighboring town of Segovia, had been

EPL and

the

FARC had

also

formed

In the Sinii Valley after the Bogotazo,

thrived alongside vibrant civic, student,

and

peasant movements. Fidel Castaiio bought land in Valencia in 1987, had the his

UP mayor killed, political

displaced

UP supporters,

dominion through

terror

and from there expanded

and massacres.^

Thus

the

HOUR

EVIL

and

municipalities of Valencia

by the Liberal

COLOMBIA

IN

Tierralta

77

UP

were reconquered from the

Party.

Liberal Party bosses

had most

to lose

from the

rise

of the UP, and

refused political extinction at the hands of a party founded by the

and the PCC. In

FARC

allying themselves so closely with the counterinsur-

gency, they repeated the mistakes the Conservative government had

made during

La Rochela massacre,

la Violencia. In

also in

1989,

at the

behest of Rodriguez, a team of assassins killed nine judicial investigators

looking into a paramilitary massacre committed in the Middle Magda-

This changed the relationship of the paramilitaries to the central

lena.

government, which

One

now

of Escobar's

declared

more than 200 of them

"New

candidate and leader of the

Liberalism," Luis Carlos Galan, in

Like Lara Bonilla, Galan had been intimidated into

August 1989. taking campaign

money from

Escobar, and then proceeded to fulminate

against traficantes in favor of extradition to the

won

in 1990,

and

USA. He was

the Left's

two

and Rodriguez shot

presidential candidates: Carlos Pizarro, leader of

M-19, and Bernardo Jaramillo of the UP.^^^ Here the

money

or extradition, but

social justice,

sure to have

was an occasion of national mourning.

his fiineral

Later that year, sicarios working for Fidel Castaiio

down

illegal.

then assassinated center-Left presidential

sicarios

demands

issue

was not

would make for system, and structural

Left candidates

democratization of the political

transformation.

One

of the UP's two chief enemies, Gonzalo Rodriguez, died in 1989

after the Cali cartel infiltrated his organization, in league

forces that

down Escobar

were to bring

responsible for the killings of Pizarro forces, fortunes,

his taste for

Twenty of

and land

modern

the forty-two

later.

with the same Fidel Castaiio,

and Jaramillo, continued amassing

in Antioquia

art in Paris,

four years

and Cordoba, while cultivating

New

York, London, and Madrid.

cadavers from the Puerto

Bello

(Uraba)

massacre in 1990 were found on his ranch in Cordoba, Las Tangas,

one paramilitary participant night.

testified

to

torturing victims there

In the four regions of Magdalena

petroleum processing and

all

Medio (dominated by

cattle ranching), northeastern

Antioquia

(site

of Frontino Gold Mining Co. and extensive ranching), southern Cor-

doba (ranching), and ranching and coca-growing zones plains, the regionally

pressions

based paramilitary Right kept

from entering formal

politics.

in the eastern

new

political ex-

The foundations of a

national-

FORREST HYLTON

78

level

counterinsurgency

movement had been

laid

down

over the corpses

of the tortured, massacred, and "disappeared" bodies too numerous to

count and too dangerous to

investigate.

In the late 1980s, paramilitaries erased the broad Left from the electoral

map, reinforced

clientelist

political

controls,

and began

to

acquire vast landholdings, chiefly through massacre and expropriation.

They became

ever

more enmeshed

explains, in part, the overlap

process

is

between

in

the cocaine business,

politics

which

and organized crime. This

described in three regions mentioned above in connection with

Magdalena Medio Valley, northeastern Antioquia, and Uraba - regional laboratories of what later became a national counterla Violencia: the

insurgent project.

By

the end of the 1980s,

it

was apparent

beefed-up insurgencies, cocaine mafias had the capacity to

two

parties, the police, military,

Through urban politicians, they

not

lost

on the

adjustment"

terrorism

and

and government assassination

intelligence services.

of leading judges and

brought the national government to insurgencies.

ftirther

weakened

Even before

neoliberal

state authority, a

that, unlike infiltrate the

new

shifted the center of the political field to the right.

its

knees

IMF

-

a fact

"structural

pole of sovereignty

7 Fragmented Peace,

1990-98

Parcellized Sovereignty,

"If we cannot

and do not want

to

modify the circumstances that

determine these manifestations of misery, marginalization and despair, then let us eliminate the victims!"

Estanislao Zuleta, in

Camacho, Ciudad y

The armed continued Left,

it

electoral politics that

had begun

after the closure, except that

at the

Camacho and

Violencia (1990)

end of the "opening"

with the elimination of the broad

was the paramilitary Right that was advancing. Great hopes were

invested in the progressive 1991 Constitution, but

its

passage coincided

with the highest homicide rate in Colombian history, as larger stretches

of territory became disputed call

"armed

among a

plurality

urban and rural frontiers in economic especially

of what analysts began to

actors." Neoliberal structural adjustment, however,

among young males, made

main engine of job recruiting high.

creation,

crisis.

the narcotics business the country's

and kept

guerrilla as well as paramilitary

Instead of expectations of employment, education,

property ownership, and political participation being

civil

ftilfilled,

they were

More and more people were

extinguished through violent dispossession. "displaced" by

mired

Lack of employment,

war, and rather than open

up the

bipartisan system,

demobilization of several smaller guerrilla insurgencies was followed by their physical or political disappearance

paramilitary forces,

-

or else incorporation into

which were responsible

for the va^t majority

of

massacres and acts of political violence. In spite of local defeats and the massive, almost indiscriminate violence inflicted

on

civilian supporters,

however, insurgent expansion surpassed previous records.

What

insur-

FORREST HYLTON

8o

gencies gained in territorial control

they no longer needed the ally

and

and numerical growth, they

lost in

but because of their renewable sources of revenue,

political legitimacy,

territorially.

latter to consolidate

themselves organization-

Hence "fragmented peace" did not

exercise of greater sovereignty

by the

lead to the

central government, but rather to

its

opposite: the "parcellization of sovereignty."

NeoUberalismo a

I

If multiple sovereignties

la.

and fractured

Colombiana

territories

had been a notable

feature of the poUtical landscape in the 1980s, both the insurgencies

made

the paramilitaries

qualitative

leaps

in

population, territory, and transport routes during the

was achieved through greater recourse to

and

control over resources,

terror,

1990s. This

especially

on

the

paramilitary side, as counterinsurgency operations were increasingly privatized

and subcontracted. Looking

role in repression,

and

US

for

ways to limit the

institutions

mix of

neoliberal

US

capital

of higher learning, actively contributed to

development. "Democracy promotion" was the

on drugs"

states' direct

modernizing, technocratic eUtes, linked to

economic

name

policies, political reforms,

that characterized the situation of the post-cold

this

given to the

and the "war war period.

Harvard-educated Liberal technocrat, Cesar Gaviria, elected in 1990,

convoked a Constituent Assembly to produce a new and more democratic

constitution

-

a second attempt to break the long political

The EPL, M-19, Quintin Lame, and PRT guerrilla insurlaid down their arms to participate in the process, and as a result

stalemate.

gencies

of an upsurge in indigenous mobilization, the resulting 1991 Constitution granted historic rights of territorially based recognition to indigen-

ous peoples.

It also

attempted to streamline the judiciary and limit the

authority of the executive, introducing proportional representation for senatorial contests

and popular

previously appointed military

by the

and police powers. Nor did

party system, for that was not Gaviria's efforts,

election of departmental governors,

president.

schemes had

and yielded

little

its

It

did nothing to curb arbitrary

break the stranglehold of the two-

intention.

of the moral impulse behind Betancur's

bitter fruit.

decentralization, including

it

The

constitution's rigid provisions for

compulsory central government

the provinces, strengthened the

power of

transfers to

local party bosses, especially

HOUR

EVIL Liberals.

This increased

political

deficit/ ^^ Decentralization

COLOMBIA

IN

8l

corruption drove the country into

opened

new

a

fiscal

arena for armed electoral

competition, since departmental governors as well as mayors were to

be directly elected now. Capitalizing on decentralization, the paramili-

were

taries

and

now poised to contest insurgent power by taking over regional

local office

through the Liberal Party,

Conservatives had done

as

1946.

afi:er

The

Liberal Party

had been dominant

had regained

all

the municipalities where the

EPL, which by the mid-1990s was military, the paramilitaries,

accepted a strong union and dispute the

monopoly of regional

wealth.

While the

with banana owners, the

it

bosses.

political vehicle, as

The

long

as

latter

had recuperated

its

bloc

they did not

politics or the concentration

Liberal Party

frontier regions like Uraba,

allied

and Liberal Party

EPL

UP

and shared them with the new

in the late 1980s,

of landed

position in

was increasingly dependent on

alliance

its

with paramilitaries tied to drug trafficking. Since there was no "political subject" powerful enough to guarantee their

implementation, even progressive

were dead

letters.

^^^

ADM- 19,

articles

of the 1991 Constitution

the legal political entity formed from

certain factions of the guerrilla group, faded into insignificance, with

many former M-19

militants either assassinated or co-opted into tradi-

tional politics. In Uraba,

former

EPL

cadres were integrated into Fidel

Castaiio's paramilitary "security" apparatus. Left:

Sectarian terror

on the

strengthened paramilitary-military positions in key enclaves like

Uraba. Between 1991 and 1994, 274 militants of Paz y Libertad (Peace

and

Liberty), the EPL's political party, were murdered there, mainly by FARC.^^^ After the EPL demobilized in 1991, the FARC fought to occupy its territories to combat their influence in the banana workers' union. This pushed EPL militants into the arms of former enemy, Fidel

the

Castaiio, sides.

which led

to escalating attacks against the

The EPL's urban

1993, so the

FARC

militias

murdered 17

massacred 35

EPL

union from both

PCC activists in December

supporters.

Signs of "banditization" and "lumpenization" of armed conflict were

unmistakable, as the

number of kidnappings and homicides broke world

records in the late 1980s

and

early 1990s, with lines

and criminal violence increasingly

indistinct.

between

political

In 1991, nearly 4,000

homicides were the cause of 42 per cent of all deaths in Medellin, which

had a

rate

of 325 per 100,000, more than

five

times higher than non-

FORREST HYLTON

82

Colombian competitors

Rio,

like

and eight times higher than Sao

In Latin America, only Peru had witnessed a comparable

Paulo.

degree of escalation and degradation of armed conflict, but Peru's

economy,

others in the region after the debt crisis of 1982,

like

imploded, while Colombia's economy performed to the standards

by neoliberal economists.

increasingly set

Gaviria implemented the platform Lopez Michelsen had announced in the

1

970s, shifting the

economy

further toward a

model of export

agribusiness, capital-intensive manufacturing, rentier speculation in land

and urban and

and multinational exploitation of petroleum,

real estate,

coal,

gold. Perhaps because of the influx of narco-doUars, in contrast to

most of Latin America, economic growth held steady despite the multiplicity of violences.

had yet

to fully absorb the

He

Consensus.

program

class,

1980s,

wholesome message of the Washington

therefore launched a fijU-scale neoliberal restructuring

to discipline

working

in the

But Gaviria believed that Colombia

the middle-class public sector, the organized

and the peasantry. With the help of Alvaro Uribe, then

a Liberal Party senator, Gaviria slashed the public-sector workforce and set

about privatizing health care and social security, establishing the

autonomy of sector,

the Central Bank, liberalizing the currency and financial

reducing

tariffs

flexibilizing labor.

nationals

One

on even

initial

drug

on

boom, which

led to rising inflation.

-

modern

exporters or financial services

far

more

An

OECD

business sectors, the

so than other groups of industrialists, landlords,

Church). ^^^ They prospered

The

all

were among the most consistently favorable to neoliberal

policies

producers,

and

of neoliberal restructuring was to fuel a narco-

Gaviria's reforms concluded that, of

cartels

taxes,

than before.

softer terms

effect

financed construction report

and import quotas, increasing turnover

Oil exploration contracts were signed with the multi-

who were

at the

ruined by low

(let

alone the armed forces or the

expense of food and cash crop tariffs

on imports.

narco-bourgeoisie helped bury what remained of the national

manufacturing industry, since contraband imports through Colon,

Panama, proved

to be a

major money-laundering

outlet.^

By 1988,

they accounted for an estimated $1 billion, or 22 per cent of total imports, and enjoyed the support or complicity of customs officials and politicians. Industrial, agrarian,

large

measure by the

interests

and

financial poUcies

were dictated in

of the narco-bourgoisie, which hastened

HOUR

EVIL

IN

COLOMBIA

the reorientation toward rentier capitalism

economic opening was thus a institutionalized"

''fait

83

and regional

accompli years before

The

reaction. it

was formally

under Gaviria.

Though at first he sought to negotiate with the FARC, by 1 992, Gaviria tacked to the right, pursuing a "holistic war" by bombing and occupying its

He negotiated with traffickers, who were given light

headquarters in May. sentences and

immunity from extradition in exchange

collaboration with the

would be prohibited

that extradition

for confessions

and

Colombian government. After receiving guarantees in the

new

constitution, Escobar

surrendered, and built himself a prison ("La Catedral") in 1991, which he staffed with his

By that time,

bodyguards of choice until he escaped in September 1992. of paranoia, Escobar had killed many of his closest

in the grip

business associates

and buried them

Survivors united against

him with

in the environs

Colombian police and intelligence services, the

of La Catedral.

DEA,

the CIA,

sectors of the army,

and DAS,

the Cali canel, the

Colombian equivalent of the CL\, FBI, and Bureau of Customs and

Immigration Service.

^^^

Escobar's frontal assault

on the

state forced

it

to buckle, but

power was

not so fragmented that a lone warrior-entrepreneur could survive the

combined

forces

many enemies. The Cali cartel employed a different

of his

strategy than Escobar,

against him. Instead

the

USA

as

institutions,

which ensured

its

temporary survival in the war

of relying on urban terrorism to

Escobar had done, the Cali

and high

society.

Their investments were more

their behavior discreet, and, unlike Escobar, they never

anti-imperialist populism,

fight extradition to

cartel infiltrated politics, official

donated housing or dispersed patronage to

subaltern clients, or publicly organized regional political

The demise of the Medellin to the Left, but above

fracturing

under

all

by

rities,

cartel

his inability to

whom

keep the Medellin

government

cartel

cartel

pressure.

from

Escobar

he suspected of working with autho-

and surviving members of the Medellin

with the Cali

movements.

was hastened by Escobar's leanings

US and Colombian

terrorized former associates

diversified,

experimented with

cartel allied

and the above-mentioned

themselves

US and Colombian

government agencies. Leading the "Persecuted by Pablo Escobar" group {bs

Pe'pes),

Fidel

and Carlos Castafio led

against Escobar's family, friends,

anyone

who remained

loyal to

assassinated, or "disappeared."

terror operations in

and employees and

Medellin

their families,

and

Escobar was systematically tortured,

FORREST HYLTON

84

When

it

came

to confronting the world's

who had

to groups

most powerful cocaine

Colombian government delegated

hdiion-cwm-latifundista, the

surgencies, in coordination with state "security"

The government's

repression

increasingly taken over the fight against the in-

and

intelligence forces.

counterinsurgent association with organized

close,

crime weakened government authority and

state sovereignty,

and the

influence of narcotics in politics did not end with Escobar's death, which

merely removed

Thanks

its

most

visible head.

to fijture president

Andres Pastrana and the

Liberal Ernesto Samper's presidency (1994-98)

the Cali cartel. Samper's in

supervision,

dismanded

ties

USA

to narcotics led the

on drugs," dismantle the

the "war

and even suspend Samper's

visa.

government. in allega-

campaign fund by

tions over multimillion dollar contributions to his

Colombia

US

was mired

to decertify

under

cartel

US

After the two cartels were

mid-1990s, hundreds of smaller, more decentralized

in the

and

syndicates proliferated,

their influence, especially in the Liberal

Colombia had become the second-largest

Party, continued unchecked.

producer of coca leaf following Bolivia, whose production plummeted after

1997,

as a result

of "Plan Dignity," a

US

government-sponsored

manual eradication program. As they had during the cold war, the

Colombian conflict.

US

government and the

military advocated a military solution to Colombia's political

The

fiiture

of the "war on drugs" had come into view, for in a

preview of Plan Colombia, "Operation Splendor"

-

a fumigation

campaign that used glyphosate without the pretense of development —

began

1995-96. In response, the to protest fumigation

demonstrating that they pickers

{raspachines)

.

FARC

and In

had strong

"threatening national security."



Lewis Tambs. Under "cartel,"

the tactic this

The

A severe

their

of

social investment,

ties to frontier settlers

idea was to paint the

first

and coca

it

FARC

as a

as a potential interlocutor in

employed by former Ambassador

scheme, the

FARC

would be

yet another

Fumigation economic base — or so the theory went.

and therefore criminal

would undercut

and

Putumayo, coca growers were accused of

"narco-guerrilla," in order to disqualify

peace negotiations

Caqueta,

unfulfilled promises

still

alternative

Putumayo in organized coca growers in 1996-97

Guaviare,

in

rather than political.^

tightening of monetary policy by the Central Bank,

mean-

while, cut into investment, plunging the construction industry into

EVIL

HOUR

recession.

The IMF, summoned

economic

crisis

its

since the

structural reform

1999

- making provision

for

1

IN

in

COLOMBIA

1998

85

to sort out Colombia's worst

more sympathetic,

930s, could not have been

program - accompanied by a $1.9

billion loan

the face of "events outside

in

"flexibility"

government control." Demonstrating the collapse of the productive base in rural areas, the percentage of

GDP

supplied by agricultural

production declined from 43 per cent in 1980 to 13 per cent in 1998, while coffee exports represented only 3 per cent of

GNP

in

1

996. Food

imports more than tripled during the 1990s, from $215 million to $715 million.

^^^

The area under coca cultivation

also tripled in the

second half

of the decade. Poppy production went from zero in 1989 to 61 metric

Colombia continued

tons in 1998, while

marijuana imports,

Given undiminished neoliberal

the drug

economic

economy,

in the countryside.

the 1960s,

its

US consumer demand,

on drugs" and

phenomenal growth of

coca farms became the solution to protracted

The

of the

failure

rural cash-crop

and deteriorated with the

shift

US

cocaine.

the "war

policies contributed to the

as

40 per cent of

to supply

90 per cent of

as well as

crisis

economies began

toward agribusiness

in

(soy,

cotton, rice) in the 1970s. Political violence intensified after the late

1970s and through the 1980s, and by the 1990s, for frontier

settlers in

Caqueta, Putumayo, Guaviare, Vichada, Guainia, Vaupes, Sucre, Cor-

-

doba, the Choco, Bolivar, the Santanders Antioquia, Huila, Tolima, Cauca, and profitable

enough

to

overcome the high transport

from the lack of infrastructure. ^^^

and allowed peasants

and, to a lesser extent,

Meta - coca became

It

yielded

up

to recoup investments in

the only crop

costs that resulted

to three harvests per year

one to two

years,

and by

1998, 80 per cent of the surface area of the FARC-controlled depart-

ments of Caqueta, Putumayo, Gauviare, Vichada, Guainia, and Vaupes was covered with

it.^^^

The connection between

neoliberal agricultural policies

— and

exacerbated the long-term decline of the countryside

— which

the spread

of illicit crops under insurgent sovereignty could hardly have been more direct.

A

peasant from southern Bolivar put

it

To market one sack of potatoes or yucca costs 3 and 5 mil pesos (about $3.50) and

is

10 to 12 thousand pesos depending on easier to plant

and process

.

.

.

there

is

succinctly:

the peasant between

sold in the market between

demand no need

.

.

.

Coca

is

much

for transportation

FORREST HYLTON

86

since the narco-traffickers

and export

paste

it

The FARC provided

buy

in the

town

at 1,500,000/kiio

of

to other destinations.^^

a minimal stabiHty for those

who might

otherwise

have been crushed by the Uberalization of agriculture and the hurricane of rural violence.

Insurgent Advance

II

During the 1990s, the two remaining

ELN,

FARC

insurgencies, the

and the

exhibited the fundamental paradox of an increasing political

accompanied

delegitimation,

Through

the 1970s

by

startling

and 1980s, the

guerrillas

growth.

organizational

counted on the sympathy

of a substantial minority of Colombia's cultural producers, and main-

some unions. In the 1990s they were mosdy on their own. November 1992, a group of the country's leading progressive writers and intellectuals, Gabriel Garcia Marquez among them, wrote an open letter to the FARC and ELN, calling on them to recognize that the wheel of history had turned, to lay down arms, and pursue reform through tained hnks to

In

peaceful means.

The

post-cold war conjuncture saw the

Sandinistas

and victory

stalemate of the

FMLN

for

US-fmanced

in El Salvador,

Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca collapse of the Soviet

and the decline of the Union

(URNG) -

and, not

least,

the

Union. While elsewhere insurgents tended to cut

patronage deals with neoliberal governments in the

democracy,

of the

defeat

electoral

neoliberals in Nicaragua, the

free markets,

and

globalization, the

name of

FARC

electoral

and the

ELN

concentrated instead on raising rent extraction and exerting political

power

at the local level.

global

and hemispheric trends was

seizure

in the past, their response to isolation to isolate themselves fiirther.

from

The

of state power faded firom view, but the prospect of controlling

the mayor's office

The FARC's links

As

and municipal councils appeared.

role in taxing the

coca paste market placed

it

in the first

of the chain of commodity circulation that ends in

European

noses.

US and

During the long reign of the Medellin and Cali

cartels,

coca paste production was carried out in the lowland coca-growing regions of Bolivia territory in

and Peru - and,

to a

much

lesser extent,

southern Colombia - where the coca leaf was

FARC

made into paste

EVIL by family farmers, flown

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

87

to jungle laboratories stocked with chemicals,

made into powder cocaine, then transported to storage depots, and moved to US and Colombian cities via cars, trucks, buses, boats, and light

and commercial

urban centers, the

aircraft.

FARC

Given

their occupation

set the rules

of territory outside

of market transactions, but could

not direcdy supervise the production of cocaine and secure distribution

networks abroad. Thus, contrary to what the term "narco-guerrilla"

FARC

suggests, the It

was nothing

acted like a statelet, and

working relationships with

like a cartel.

many narcotraffickers were it,

able to establish

signaling the centrality of the

position in the process of coca paste processing.

Without the

FARC's

rise

of the

economy in the south and southeast in 1970s and 1980s, the FARC would have had neither a geographically extensive network of

coca paste

semi-dependent

clients

war chest with which

to

on the open expand

frontiers,

nor a multibillion dollar

their operations.

would have been faced with the task of taking an

The Colombian Army isolated region, rather

than some 40 per cent of a national territory, divided by three Cordilleras

and countless For

many

rivers.

years, the

without their

relative

FARC

regulated the coca paste market,

monopoly on

violence, the traffickers

and

might have

destroyed each other with interminable mini-wars in the jungle. As well as

maintaining a reservoir of support in the frontier regions, imposirion

of law and order allowed the wealth by levying a tax

known

FARC

of extortion established during vacuna,

and

el boleteo

to siphon off fabulous

as elgramaje. la

Violencia, in

were employed

amounts of

This formed part of a pattern

which kidnapping,

la

as fund-raising tactics.

In attempting to answer why, decade after decade, the state failed to

come

break the back of armed resistance, other crucial issues

however: for decades, the settlers'

FARC

had been the armed

movement. However mediated by

rents, its ties to

many communities

clientelism

in southern

territories that the

Colombian government had never administered - no successive

booms

in

and protection

and southeastern regions

were long-standing. These were sparsely populated

public services; not even party clientelism

into play,

force of a peasant

infrastructure or

- but which had undergone

quinine and rubber. After the 1950s, they

filled

with

people fleeing partisan violence in the highlands. In the mid-1960s, the

FARC

upheld the

radical agrarianism that

1940s. Before die creation of die

had marked the 1930s and

ANUC in 1968 and die CRIC in 1971,

FORREST HYLTON they were the most important force

were organically linked -

calling

— apart from

PCC,

the

on the government

to

which they

to realize promises

of

land reform and infrastructural development, create credit cooperatives,

and provide technical

The FARC

assistance

inherited from the 1930s

FARC

la Violencia

economy of the

1

social

agrarian

FARC sovereignty was most consolidated.

democracy, in the context of the

970s and

1

democracy

of the 1950s and 1960s. This

illicit

cocaine

980s, provided a measure of security and a

guarantee of the means of livelihood for people

have had neither.

social

with traditions of

it

applies to historic redoubts in Meta,

politics

Guaviare, and Caqueta, where

This authoritarian

price supports.

and 1940s, combining

vengeance characteristic of description of

and

on the legacy of

carried

The absence of the

who would

allowed the

state

otherwise

FARC to establish

networks of patronage and clientelism, but they also built

vertical

infrastructure (bridges, roads, irrigation), offered or supervised limited

basic service provision

governed

(water,

sewage, health care, education), and

territory as well as populations.

In the 1980s, genuine sympathy in guerrillas

some of the

"liberated zones" gave

important support. Indeed, in Meta, Guaviare, Caqueta, and

Putumayo in the 1980s, hope of agrarian reform had been put to rest; the economy was the gold rush of its day. The FARC offered the only

coca

protection available against the arbitrary brutality of the traffickers in

Meta and Guaviare.

Debt-driven mechanisms of labor control, their

— whether

contracts enforced through assassination

rubber

boom

in the southeast or transplanted

mines of Boyaca^^^ -

cast the

FARC

as a

inherited from the

from the highland emerald

much-needed

arbiter

of labor

markets.

Until recently,

FARC

violence unfolded according to predictable, if

that could guarantee "order"

and

on the

ruthless,

rules

frontier,

whereas narco-terror led to "chaos" and "unpredictabiHty,"

particularly

where coca paste

regions of the south

had

istration,

were concerned. In those frontier

and southeast colonized by peasants

violence and agrarian state

prices

"stability"

crisis in

failed to perform.

the highlands, the

They were

the local

and regional admin-

and by any standard of living memory, even

were better than the national government or the Guerrilla financial

and

territorial

fleeing political

FARC took up tasks the at their worst,

they

traffickers.

expansion was accompanied by

higher levels of kidnapping, selective assassination, and car bombing.

HOUR

EVIL tactics first routinized fiiel

COLOMBIA

IN

by Escobar. As elsewhere,

89

state terror

without which insurgent terrorism could not

ignite,

provided the

but in Co-

lombia both were supplemented by the narco-terrorism of the mafia.

Whereas 1994

it

FARC

municipalities.

-

smallholders

fi^onts

^^^

Its

had 17

fironts in peripheral regions, by 60 per cent of Colombia's 1071 leadership continued to be dominated by peasant

in 1978, the

had 105

and operated

in

a middle-class intellectual and an oligarchic banker

provided the only exceptions. Only 10 per cent of the FARC's rank

and

file

were "middle

20 per cent were

class,"

and the

class," "students," or "schoolteachers,"

number

cent of their

working

to be

- mainly

"peasants"

per cent of combatants and mid-level leaders were

By 1996,

ELN

the

rural

proletarians

and/or coca pickers. While 30 to 40

as agricultural laborers

tained their grip over the high

"working

classified as

FARC considered 70 per

women, men main-

command.

had between 4,000 and 5,000 combatants,

extensive urban militias

and support networks, and a presence

municipalities. Protection rents, extortion,

in 350 bank robbing, and kidnap-

ping provided their chief sources of income. ^^^ Since they refiised to enter the cocaine business, the

ELN developed a notable dependence on

kidnapping, which earned them the undying enmity of the middle and ruling classes, particularly in the regions. Similar to previous Latin

American

EZLN),

guerrilla organizations (excepting the

high-level leadership positions

intellectuals,

but

sants. Recruits

ELN

commanders were almost

fi:ont

were mainly from smallholding

also successfiil in

FARC

and Mexico's

were the preserve of middle-class

families,

exclusively pea-

but the

ELN was

drawing in students and unemployed youth from

regional cities like Bucaramanga,

Barrancabermeja, Valledupar, and

Cucuta. Outside the Central Committee

— which,

like the

FARC's

Estado Mayor, remained a bastion of masculine privilege

— 20

ELN

numbers

leaders

rank and

were women, roughly proportional to

in the

file.

As they expanded, the

FARC

bureaucratic rationalization to consolidate

and

project

distribution networks, the

AUC

their

per cent of

-

itself.

ELN

"^^^

underwent processes of

aim of each organization was

Lacking extensive transport and

FARC was in no position to compete with the

in international markets.

ment, high-tech weaponry, a impoverished rural youths

and the

the principal

who

But

it

cell

phone, and a monthly salary to

offered food, clothing, employ-

did not want to be government soldiers,

FORREST HYLTON

90

The

peasant soldiers, spies, or paramilitaries.

FARC

average age of

combatants was nineteen, and they were paid $90 per month."^^^

Another element contributing of the rural family protecting

its

to guerrilla

members. Neoliberalism

had created a generation of

countryside, to a

in the

and the

midst of escalating warfare

without future horizons or

rural youth,

FARC

personal security: the both.^^"^ Since options

growth was the breakdown

cultural-economic unit capable of sustaining and

as a

ELN

offered the possibility of

were exceedingly limited for young

much

greater extent than the

ELN,

the

women

FARC

in the

offered

opportunities for the exercise of political-military power, especially to

those lacking secondary school education.

women

Many

uneducated young

in rural areas preferred the guerrillas to the prospect of displace-

ment, unemployment, or prostitution. In 1996-97, the

unprecedented in state sovereignty:

attacked

army

FARC

scale

launched a

and scope,

of military offensives,

dramatize the

with divisions of between 300 and 1,000

ability to

Jose.

6:1,

of

they

Doubts about the Colombian

respond were well founded. Whereas the average

of administrative personnel to soldiers worldwide was

was

fragility

soldiers,

bases in Las Delicias, Patascoy, San Miguel, Pueres,

Caguan, San Juanito, and San

Army's

series

as if to

and the army had

3:

1

,

motivation to defeat the

little

ratio

Colombia

in

guerrillas.

it

^^

Since a larger guerrilla threat, whether real or perceived, meant a larger military budget, scrutiny,

minimal regulatory oversight, insulation from public

and uncontested

beneficiary of

its

own

institutional centrality, the

army was the chief

ineffectiveness.

As under Turbay (1978-82), during Samper's term the Colombian

Armed

Forces cast themselves as the

last

bulwark of the

state.

Defense

expenditures rose sharply after 1995, and by 1998 they were three times higher than in 1994. Yet this failed to generate increased effectiveness in

combat - unsurprising, given

that

most of the money went toward

administrative expenses. In 1997, out of a total of 131,000 soldiers, only

22,000, or 20 per cent, were combat-ready.

US

assistance hit a

low from

1991-96, during which time most of the anti-drug "aid" went to the police rather than the military, rights organizations in the

With

which had come under

USA

fire

from human

and Europe.

the military crippled by

its

own

brutality

and incompetence,

insurgencies policed communities, provided public services

and

regula-

tory oversight, determined budget allocations, influenced electoral par-

HOUR

EVIL

COLOMBIA

IN

9I

ticipation, restricted or permitted geographic mobility,

trated disputes

among

importandy, the ers,

FARC

and the

ELN

collected taxes

from

arbi-

Most

narcotraffick-

women, and

small businessmen and

ranchers,

cattle

and even

neighbors, friends, and family members.

large

and

medium-sized landowners. Along with kidnapping, tax collection was perhaps the most widely resented of guerrilla

tactics.

While the

AUG

charged taxes, most investors, property and business owners preferred to

pay high

rates

of protection rent to fervent defenders of "private

property" and "free enterprise."

The same was

petroleum

tions, particularly in the

sector, that

true for foreign corpora-

had

to

pay high rents and

were often subject to peasant movement-insurgent demands for

social

investment in health care, education, and infrastructure. In Casanare and Arauca, for example, the insurgencies forced British Petroleum to invest in schools, vocational training,

and

local

development

projects.

Petroleum companies and other multinational corporations preferred to invest in lobbying the

Colombia

US

government

for increased military aid to

rather than continue Rinding the insurgencies. Occidental

B.P.-Amaco, the two

largest players in the

up with other energy

firms, including

Colombian

oil

and

market, teamed

Enron, to form the US-Colombia

business partnership in Washington. Their financial support for the military rights

and

paramilitaries

was documented. Given that private property

much of Colombia, it was not surprising that paid protection money to paramilitaries as a

were contested in

foreign

corporations

"capitalist insurance

poHcy."^^

Ill

Though

guerrilla

Counter-Advance

expansion in the 1990s was exceptional, paramilitary

advance was even more impressive. As

and the

threat they

we have

seen, guerrilla exactions,

posed to the property and security of elites, explained

part of the paramilitary reaction,

which began

as a political response to

Betancur's peace process in 1982-83, grew in the fight to prevent the

democratization of political decentralization under Barco in 1987-88, and contracted after guerrilla demobilization and the Constituent Assembly

under Gaviria in 1 99 1—92. pace than

it

opposed to little

It

surged again under Samper, though at a lesser

had under Barco. Since insurgencies made few territorial

and

military

political

- advances under Samper,

impulse to prioritize expansion and

political integration.

there

-

as

was

FORREST HYLTON

92

When

Fidel Castaiio disappeared in 1994, Carlos Castafio took over

the family business, founding the

ACCU (Peasant Self-Defense Forces of

Cordoba and Uraba)

During Alvaro Uribe Velez's term

that year.

governor of Antioquia, from 1995 to 1997, the strategic corridor to the

Caribbean from the

ACCU

FARC, cementing

alliances

ACCU

with the military and other regional paramilitary blocs under leadership.^^

Flush with victory in Uraba,

predicted there

AUC

as

took Uraba's

chief Carlos Castaiio

would be many, many massacres on

model of

the

Mapiripan, Meta.^^ Lxjcated in the heart of the

FARC

coca economy, near the border of literally a case fifty

of deaths foretold.

territory, at the crossroads

Meta and

On

12 July 1997, two charter

paramilitary "soldiers" were flown from

located in San Jose de Guaviare.

The

airport

of the

Guaviare, Mapiripan was

Uraba

flights

of

into the airport

was under military

next to the counter-narcotics base of the Joaquin Paris Banalion

control,



at that

time the only base in Colombia from which US-led fijmigation operations

were being conducted. With the sergeant in charge of airport

security

and an army

intelligence official present, paramilitaries

unloaded

guns, uniforms, and communications equipment, which soldiers then

To

helped load onto trucks that would take them to boats.

Mapiripan from San Jose by

river,

get to

they passed by the checkpoint of the

Colombian Army's Special Training School island just downstream from San Jose.

at

Barracon, located on an

US 7th Special Forces Group were helping Colombian counterparts from the 2nd Mobile Brigade

Trainers from the instruct their

military planning.

recruited troops,

The

paramilitary presence, reinforced with

1

80

to in

locally

went "undetected" because Barracon's Commander,

Colonel Lino Sanchez, a School of the Americas graduate, had assisted in planning the massacre.

embarked on list

five

Upon

arriving in

of "guerrilla supporters" to the town's slaughterhouse. There, amidst

screams and

cries

for help

heard throughout the town, they were

disemboweled so that they would not the

Mapiripan, paramilitaries

days of torture and murder, taking victims from their

river.

Judge Leonardo Ivan Cortes,

float after

who

being

later fled the

dumped

in

country under

letters and made phone calls to the military. Colonel Hernan Orozco claimed he had no troops available, but promised to send word to his superior, General Uscategui, who was in charge of the VII Brigade in Meta and Guaviare, headquartered in Villavicencio. As

death threats, wrote

HOUR

EVIL usual, neither the police

COLOMBIA

IN

nor the military arrived until

93

after the

bloodshed

had abated.^^^

Che

Ironically echoing

Guevara's

prophecy came

call for

"many Vietnams,"

Carlos

mushroomed from 286 in 1997 to 403 in 1999, mainly in areas of land concentration and class differentiation."^ ^ After the push into Meta and Castafio's dark

Guaviare in 1997, the

true, as paramilitary massacres

AUC moved into Northern Santander, Santander, The

southern Sucre, and the part of Uraba in the Choco.

curve of

paramilitary growth overlapped closely with that of hectares devoted to

coca cultivation, for under the direction of Carlos Castaiio and Salvatore

Mancuso, the

AUC

vastly

expanded

control over the process of

its

cocaine production, transport, and distribution. sacres

-

most, though not

tandem with or mid- to

all,

committed by

clearing a path for the military

working

— quadrupled during

in

the

1990s.^^^

late

Developments

in

Uraba

illustrate

how

agro-industrial development,

extensive cattle ranching, cocaine production,

hand with

in

The number of mas-

paramilitaries

and transport went hand

a paramilitary project of regional territorial conquest,

which reinforced patterns of

racial

domination and

class exploitation

derived from colonialism. As governor of Antioquia, Uribe had set

about legalizing and regulating anti-guerrilla Rural Vigilance Cooperatives.

The

militias

-

Convivirs, or

brainchild of Rafael Pardo, Gaviria's

minister of defense, Convivirs were structurally similar to the Peruvian

rondos campesinas, or the Guatemalan Civil Defense Patrols of the

1980s.

They were modeled

grouped 950

cattle

gically sophisticated

Camacho's

AAA

after

a

program

communications network. Linked

the Convivirs vociferously.

the

armed

forces

1

that

had

to

both General

1997,

civilian

and supported

collaboration with

was compulsory. The Magdalena Medio Valley

referent.

some 200,000

counted for

until

For Bedoya,

During the two years Uribe served displaced

Cordoba

and MAS, General Harold Bedoya headed the

Colombian Armed Forces from 1994

was Bedoya's

in

ranches into a network connected by a technolo-

as

governor of Antioquia, Convivirs

peasants, mainly

from Uraba. Antioquia

8 per cent of displaced people nationwide,

ac-

more than any

other department, and the Conservative Antioquian senator, Fabio

Valencia Cossio, accused Uribe of "sponsoring paramilitaries" that

had helped contribute

to an almost

400 per cent

increase in the homicide

FORREST HYLTON

94 rate.^^^

In neighboring Cordoba, where paramiUtary chieftain Salvatore

Mancuso

ran a Convivir unit, Convivirs displaced 10 per cent of the

population in 1995 alone.

Under state-of-siege

and with President Samper's approval,

provisions,

Uribe created "Zones of Public Order," under the Rito Alejo del Rio

XVII Brigade

— another MAS

in 1996. General

veteran,

command

of General

and Bedoya protege — and the

Bedoya declared

that those

who opposed

the zones "defend the interests of narco-trafFickers or subversives."

According to Colonel Carlos Velasquez,

move was

del Rio's first

to

who

served under him. General

remove troops from

areas

where they were

protecting civilians from paramilitary incursions."^^^ In the four munici-

banana

palities in the

axis,

the homicide rate was

opposed to 60 per 100,000 nationwide 100,000). Although the total

his term: in

500 per 100,000,

USA,

number of homicides

zone was high before Uribe took over worse during

(in the

1995,

it

in Uraba's

banana

governor (400 in 1994),

as

as

was 8 per got

it

doubled to 800; in 1996, 1,200; and

it

in 1997, 700. In 1998, the year after Uribe's departure, 300."'^

it

dipped to

In the 1950s and 1960s, General Ruiz had been emphatic about the

importance of

social investment,

but in the neoliberal

was dropped from the counterinsurgent equation. In Security Doctrine,

when

Plan

over South America in the

Condor

cast

its

with National

long and bloody shadow

Camacho

General

1970s,

era, that variable

line

created and

promoted paramilitary groups under Turbay. The goal had been

to

reduce the level of human rights violations attributable to the Colombian police

and armed

forces,

while wiping out "the subversion." Paramilitary

presence spread incrementally under Turbay, Betancur, Barco, and Gaviria, but given the regional fragmentation of power, counterinsur-

gents were unable to ftinction as a unified force until the mid-1990s. Thereafter, they

became more

effective in generating

redistributing wealth, political power,

employment while

and property toward the

light-

skinned top of the social pyramid.

The

regional state

regulate" politics

was prepared to look

anti-guerrilla

militias,

ftirther

from organized crime. Agencies of

mitted upwards of 75 per cent of late

human

1980s, but by the late 1990s the

the same percentage, while the

for

"legalize

state repression

rights violations

AUG was

army and

ways to

and

eroding the line separating

police

had com-

through the

responsible for roughly

committed a mere 5 per

EVIL

HOUR From

cent of total violations.

COLOMBIA

IN

997

1

to

95

2000, paramilitary numbers

doubled.

how

This was

privatized, subcontracted counterinsurgency

was sup-

posed to work. Amnesty International, America's Watch, and other

human

groups signaled close connections between Convivirs and

rights

paramilitaries.

The

organic unity between the two was manifest: at the

end of 1999, when the Constitutional Court banned the Convivirs

numerous massacres of unarmed passed into the ranks of the

civilians,

for

their foot soldiers simply

AUC.

Victims were anything but passive. Backed by groups, like the Peace Brigades International,

US human

rights

Colombia Support Net-

work, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a "peace community"

movement gathered steam

in

Uraba

in

the mid-1990s."^^

violence against civilians reached shocking levels, even by

which were then among the highest

standards,

ACCU displaced some seat

Political

Colombian

in the world. After the

15,000 people from the area around the country

of Apartado, with the help of the Catholic Diocese and Colombian

NGOs,

peasants who reftised to be dispossessed founded the Community of San Jose de Apartado (pop. 1,200) in March 1997.

Peace

communities

zones

like

San Jose were established

as multi-ethnic neutral

Peace

outside the larger war system. Setbacks, particularly the assassination of leaders, massacres,

from working to

and economic blockades, did not stop communities

live in peace,

without having to pay tribute to military

won

international recognition for her efforts to

authority. Gloria Cuartas

mayor of Apartado, and she accused

protect the civilian population as

government

soldiers

Agusto Rivera, of "Peace

in front

Week"

of her and 100 children, during the inauguration

August 1996. At

in

ACCU to decapitate a child, Cesar

of permitting the

a

Uribe's secretary of government, Juan

of being a

FARC

defamation.^

meeting of departmental

officials,

Moreno, publicly accused Cuartas

spokeswoman, while General

del Rio sued her for

^^

In the face of massive repression from the paramilitary right and insurgent Left, peace communities like San Jose de Apartado fought for a different vision

of sovereignty,

as

peace and self-determination, and for

collective social rights as well as individual political

by the

late

and

civil rights.

But

twentieth century, organized right-wing repression, and the

military hypertrophy of the

armed

Left, led to the relative

fragmentation of Colombia's radical-popular movements.

weakness and

FORREST HYLTON

96

and delegation of repression — key features of 1990s — weakened and delegitimized the central government

Political decentralization

the

authority

it

was supposed to support.

decentralization

meant

popularly elected for the

A pet project of the World

that both state governors first

time since

1

Bank,

and mayors were

886, but this only exacerbated

the lack of central government authority and spurred the retrenchment

of regionally based narco-landlord power in the Liberal Party.

Using

terror tactics pioneered in the

1950s, this bloc successfully

insulated electoral politics fi-om the broad Left challenge. This helped

insurgencies accelerate the trend toward territorial expansion in the

first

half of the 1990s, while previously disparate regional paramilitary groups

united in a national umbrella organization in the second half

sponsored chemical warfare southeast with Monsanto's turned, and

US

-

US-

the spraying of insurgent-held areas in the

Round-Up

Ultra (glyphosate)

government pressure on nearly

increased alongside Rinding for the "war

Colombian governments turned

all

- had

re-

aspects of policy

on drugs." The

US and

a blind eye to the increasing reach of

the paramilitaries, focusing instead

on eliminating

strengthening the Colombian military and poHce.

Left insurgencies

by

8

1998-2002

Involution,

War

is

paid for in land

.

.

.

Our

history

one of incessant

is

displacement.

Alfredo Molano, Los Desterrados (2002)

Since the late 1990s, the widening of the counterinsurgency war in the jungles

and

plains of the south

and southeast has formed the

of

axis

public policy, as military and paramilitary expansion accompanied peace negotiations with the

FARC.

In 1998, the creation of a Switzerland-sized

"demilitarized zone" in the south, officially governed largest insurgency, raised hackles in

Colombian

by the country's

regions, as well as in

W.

Washington. Under Presidents Clinton and George

Bush, the

and Colombian governments implemented Plan Colombia, a $4

billion "aid" package,

police

and

military.

narcotics production

80 per cent of it earmarked

The

stated goal of Plan

by half

in six years,

and

for the

Colombian

Colombia was to

US

five-year,

to cut

conquer the 40 per

cent of national territory held by insurgents.

I

Electoral Pacts, Elusive Peace

Pacts for peace with the insurgencies determined the elections, as did pacts

outcome of the 1998

with paramilitary counterinsurgents in 2002.

Divergent campaign strategies and political programs shared the goal of strengthening central

common

government authority, but highlighted the

salience of new forms of armed clientelism instead.

The

shift in policy



from peace with the insurgency to peace with the paramilitaries - led to the

end of the bipartisan monopoly on with deepening

US

political representation,

government involvement

in

and coincided

Colombia's

civil

war.

FORREST HYLTON

98

In spite of their exclusion from formal politics, Left insurgencies and the right-wing counterinsurgency helped determine electoral outcomes

and regional

at the national as well as local

levels

- mayors,

the city

councilors, municipal officials, departmental governors, departmental

and congressional

and

representatives,

When

senators.

Conservative

Andres Pastrana was elected president (1998-2002), many agreed that

FARC

the promise of peace negotiations with the

but

victory,

it

had netted him

was quickly forgotten that Liberal Horacio Serpa

also

campaigned on a "peace" platform. Serpa promised to negotiate with the

Going

ELN

the political character of the guerrillas, as did the Left: rebels

FARC.

rather than the

against the counterinsurgent grain, both candidates recognized

"They are not simply

more

perceptive critics

on

bandits, terrorists, or narco-guerrillas, but

with ideology, resources, and specific objectives against the

was a non-negotiable

existing order.""^^^ Agrarian reform, for example,

demand. So was the reorientation of the economy, away from the neoliberal export model, toward a nationally oriented developmentalism,

more or was

less

modeled on Sweden. The

state

was an enemy with which

possible, at least in theory, to negotiate.

But

insofar as the

it

FARC

considered invalid the distinction between paramilitaries and the Co-

lombian

military, paramilitary

The FARC's

incompatible. militaristic

expansion and peace negotiations were

ideology

Marxism mixed with

authoritarian social

would be

best described as ossified,

progressive Creole liberalism.

democracy proper

It

was the

to a tributary statelet based in the

countryside and small towns.

Unlike Pastrana and the

FARC,

Serpa and the

broaden the discussion about war, peace, and "civil society," a concept in which the

ELN

had promised

to

social change, to include

FARC did not believe, since they had

a Manichean, "friend-enemy" understanding of politics that did not admit the possibility of autonomy. "^^^ Perhaps unrealistically, agribusinessmen

and

cattle ranchers, as well as peasants, trade unionists, students,

com-

munity organizations, the unemployed and middle-class professionals, were to bring forward demands and proposals. The ELN asked that several municipalities in the

recognized as

Magdalena Medio be "demilitarized"

(officially

ELN territory), in order to conduct negotiations away from

the batdefield.

The agreement,

was designed to lead

forged in Mainz, Germany, in July 1998,

to debate

regional development in the

and discussion about investment and

Middle Magdalena

Valley.

EVIL

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

99

ELN was sabotaged by the would have favored medium and small peasant producers,

Predictably, the peace process with the

AUG.

It

demonstrating the possibility of regional agreements for social incorporation

- supported by

political and community" -

the "international

that included investment in health, education,

and

infrastructure. It

represented an opportunity to implement a small-scale agrarian reform that dealt not only with land distribution tribution,

and

transport,

progressive change

the

AUG,

and

titles,

and might have proved

was possible

at the local

but to

credit, dis-

skeptics

and regional

in a repeat of the experience of Puerto

levels.

that

But

Boyaca under Betancur,

mobilized clients in opposition, and blocked transport routes through the country's

Since Serpa

chief arteries.

the

lost,

proposal was

dropped, and Pastrana favored the "fragmented peace" that prevailed

under Gaviria, negotiating

directly with the

FARG. This was

a prolon-

gation of war and neoUberal technocratic rule.

Yet Pastrana withdrew the armed forces from a demilitarized zone of

some 16,200 1998,

as a

Gaguan region of Gaqueta

hectares in the

preliminary concession to the

their sovereignty over the region,

FARG.

which was

logical given that the

was the only group ever to have administered the 1999, Pastrana and the

FARG

territory.

and socioeconomic

power, or the

will, to deliver

measures demanded by the

restructuring.

human

IMF

neoliberal austerity

— one came

in early

2000, when

officials

went on

promised, 50) of their

police

own -

end of

rights, natural

and Golombian government

363 captured

FARG

in exchange for a $1.9 billion loan.

tour" of European capitals; another in June 2001, released

the

But Pastrana lacked the

on reforms — other than

Despite occasional high points representatives

By

approved a twelve-point program for

negotiation, including issues of agrarian reform, resources,

November

in

In effect, he recognized

and

soldiers in

when

the

FARG

exchange for 11 (not,

the peace process was stillborn.

withdrew from preliminary negotiations

FARG

a "learning

in late

as

The FARG

1999 and 2000, due

to

the government's unwillingness or inability to rein in the military and the

mushrooming paramilitary forces. They then used the demilitarized zone to hold a pool of kidnap victims numbering several thousand, and prepare for future battles.

On

20 February 2002, under intense pressure from the

politically

the

military, the

ascendant reactionary bloc, and the media, Pastrana ordered

Golombian armed

forces to retake the

FARG's

demilitarized zone.

1

lOO

FORREST HYLTON

He

did so with international backing, and the attacks of September

helped to delegitimize the tactics

and

their

FARC

at

home and

misunderstanding of the role of public relations in

contemporary politics, they

lost

what

little

chance for

political legitimacy

the peace process had offered. In spite of Pastrana's unpopularity

he

left

office,

much

The

trafficking, extortion, terrorism.

FARC, were

when

of the urban and small-town population was

convinced that the country's problem was "insecurity"

drug

1

abroad. Because of their

-

kidnapping,

insurgencies, especially the

generally held responsible.

accomplishing what no other FARC's legendary septuagenarian leader, had become the only politician more unpopular than Pastrana himself Thus, by raising kidnapping, extortion, and selective assassination to new, atrocious proportions, in 2001-2, the FARC - and, to a much lesser extent, the ELN - helped the rise of a "strong-hand" ruler like Pastrana set the stage for Uribe,

president had: Tirofijo, the

Uribe. Between 1997 and 2001, the

FARC

kidnapped 3,343

civilians

and the ELN, 3,412. Kidnapping was the most important source of

ELN, and the second-most important for the FARC. represented for many by the cylinder bombing of a church in Bojaya, Antioquia, in April 2002 - which incinerated 119 Afro-Colombian men, women, and children - made them far more financing for the

The FARC's

tactics,

disreputable than they

The only group of with the

FARC

had ever been

before.

the ruling class that supported the peace process

was the

''cacaos,''

a group of financial-industrial-media

conglomerates, which, though economically dominant in the 1990s, was

unable to lead the ruling

class as a

whole. Economic preeminence did not

translate into increased political clout, for the peace process generated

vehement repudiation from the Liberal Party and groups opposed

to

peace negotiations under Betancur. Landlords, whose class composition

changed before,

as narcotrafficking speculators swelled their ranks,

regional politics. elites fiised

military

behaved

as

using violence to concentrate land and dominate local and

Working with

the Liberal Party, traditional landed

parvenu drug merchants, agribusiness enterprises, and the

and

police.

Politically, this reactionary

bloc was

much

stronger than the cacaosP"^

Thus the FARC can hardly be blamed for skepticism, even cynicism. Colombian history taught them that "negotiation" meant preparation for war,

and

that

"amnesty" was a synonym for extrajudicial execution.

HOUR

EVIL Throughout

COLOMBIA

IN

Pastrana's presidency, the

AUG,

and

agro-exporters, factions of the military

allied

lOI

with catde ranchers,

police, business

Church and base of the FARC and the

groups, influential sectors of the Catholic

massacred the social ^

numbers.

In

many ways

it

was a

repeat,

and

industrial

the Liberal Party,

ELN

record

in

major key, of the

in a

war orchestrated during the peace process with Betancur, yet by now the

US

government's involvement was

much

greater, as

was the reach of the

paramilitaries.

Plan Colombia

II

With popular

and center-Left

protest, mobilization,

electoral victories

spreading in the Andes after 2000, Colombia became an increasingly geostrategic ally for the

W.

George

Bush, the

US government. Under Presidents Clinton and US and Colombian governments implemented

Plan Colombia, ostensibly designed to combat the explosion of narcotics

production

-

despite the demise of the Call cartel in 1996, in the late

1990s, "the business" {el negocio) was better organized than ever. After the downfall of the country's

and

political decentralization

the narcotics industry.

two major

cartels,

By 1999,

sales

of Colombian cocaine, marijuana,

and heroin generated an estimated $46 Colombia's share was $3.5 billion

delegation of repression

was accompanied by the decentralization of

billion, a

billion in revenues,

sum

from petroleum, Colombia's chief export. This was due

alliances

formed between

traffickers

of which

nearly equivalent to the $3.9

and the

AUG

-

in part to

or, less often, the

FARC - that were difficult for uncorrupted officials to dismantle. The FARC earned an estimated $900 million in 1999, and in 2000, total

coca production was up to 136,200 hectares, 70 per cent of it in the

FARC

heartlands of Guaviare, Caqueta,

and Putumayo.

Retired

General Barry McCaffi-ey, President Clinton's "drug czar" and former

head of US Southern

Command,

urged

on "narco-terrorism" - the idea being

US legislators to embrace the war that since the FARC functioned

like a cartel, to fight the "narco-terrorist"

FARC was to fight the "war on satellite

commu-

were to be used only to

fight the

In theory, helicopters, tanks, planes, radar,

drugs." nications,

and

state-of-the-art training

"war on drugs," but in practice they would be used to

and

its

war economy. This was

in keeping with

RAND report which urged the defeat,

as

strike at the

FARC

recommendations from a

opposed to mere containment,

FORREST HYLTON

I02

of insurgencies, citing the examples of Peruvian rondos campesinas and

Guatemalan guardias

support of a more straightforward

in

civiles

RAND

Another

military-paramilitary counterinsurgent strategy.^^

re-

port mentioned the example of El Salvador in the 1980s as a model for

what

US

terror,"

Colombia should look like. on drugs" was folded into the "war on drugs and

policy toward

Though

the "war

beginning in 2002, in Colombia, too, there was a story about

After Venezuela and Mexico,

Colombia

of Latin American

- accounting for some — even though most of the country's

oil

the third largest source

is

the United States

oil for

3 per cent of US consumption

resources have remained uncharted so far

domestic consumption more

oil

Ecuador the Venezuela-Orinoco

.

.

We

might add

imports for

belt

and

shares with Venezuela

which

is

widely suspected of

having perhaps the largest pool of hydrocarbons in the world.

The

future of US-Venezuelan relations, hence of Venezuelan oil for

consumption,

is

uncertain.

present and future,

plies,

stake, then,

be located in

territory

— and foci

aid far

beyond what any

of the new, or - in the case of the

West Bank and

territories in the

- thought to Hugo Chavez's

oil reserves

the containment of

Colombia received

Bolivarian revolution.

US

sup-

proportionately.

was control of Colombia's future

FARC

government outside the main occupied

The importance of Colombian

rises

its

from Latin America than from

Colombia

the Middle East; and that

.

US

contrary to popular perceptions, the

that,

At

oil:

East Jerusalem

-

the old,

colonial wars.

Plan Colombia called for a "push into the south," meaning Putumayo

and Caqueta, coca-growing

would

areas

under

FARC

control; "anti-drug aid"

John Kerry argued from between counternarcotics and

therefore be used for counterinsurgency.

the Senate floor that although "the line

counterinsurgency

"cannot

let this

is

stop

Colombia," the

US

government

not

at all clear in

.

extension of aid."^^^ "Aid" to the Colombian

.

.

Armed

Forces and police had doubled each year from late 1997 to 2000, and although Plan Colombia had been discussed as early as mid- 1998, it

did not become a priority for the Republican-led 1999. it

The FARC's Bloque

killed three

US Congress until mid-

Oriental caused an international outcry when

North American indigenous

rights activists

working with

HOUR

EVIL

COLOMBIA

IN

IO3

U'wa indigenous people to keep Occidental out of U'wa territory.^^^ after, the Colombian minister of defense, no friend of the U'wa, resigned in protest against ongoing peace negotiations with the FARC. the

Soon

In August, General McCaffrey visited Bogota with Undersecretary of State

Thomas

Pickering, urging Pastrana to craft a proposal designed to

strengthen the Colombian

Armed

and stop economic hemorrhaging

months

2000

it

later.

had begun

had been signed into law —

in

late

in

Washington

human

Plan Colombia was set to go into

Putumayo, with

was to

materialized in

for

effect,

it

nod

and

Colombian

in the

and

US

As

which duly

form a 1,000-man counter-

was designed to secure the coca

pilots

police.

AUC announced their arrival

and massacres. Their mission,

"political cleansings"

December 2000

Leahy

military-

to the disbursement

to the military

the

to

clear a path for rapid military advance,

narcotics battalion. This

enough

a tacit

and opening the door

of $L3 billion in "aid," 80 per cent of

in

two

rather than Bogota.

rights provisions (the

August 2000, giving

paramilitary collaboration,

evidently,

in 1998. Less than

Plan Colombia was circulating in English, and by July

President Clinton breezily waived

Amendment)

"war on drugs,"

Forces, deepen the

that

fields

long

mercenaries to fumigate them.

year, the AUC had become the lords of cocaine in PutuUnder Plan Colombia, they then moved into the neighboring departments of Narifio and Caqueta, which soon became two of the

Within a mayo.

country's most conflictive and coca-ridden departments.

Plan Colombia succeeded in professionalizing the Colombian

Armed

Forces and police, and fumigating large swaths of the countryside, but

did not weaken the insurgencies or dent the narcotics business. strengthening the

AUC's

principal allies in the military

and

Colombia strengthened the

paramilitaries. It did

areas, especially in the north,

where the AUC supervised coca

secured

airstrips,

and provided security

not target the

many

cultivation,

for transportation. In a public

interview in 2000, Carlos Castaiio estimated that

AUC's

And by

police, Plan

70 per cent of the

revenues came from the narcotics business. Pastrana's Ambassa-

dor to Washington, Luis Alberto Moreno, put the figure Plan Colombia did not put a stop to this pattern;

at

75 per

if anything, it

cent.

deepened

it.

Often working or coordinating with the Colombian militaries increased massacres, expropriation,

1998

until they entered into negotiations in

military, para-

and displacement, from

2002,

at

which point they

FORREST HYLTON

I04

Stopped headline-grabbing violence, without renouncing terror tactic

of choice, or narcotics trafficking and expropriation

The

power.

increase

in

guerrilla

as their

as sources

kidnappings paralleled the

rise

of of

paramilitary massacres, but the latter affected mainly peasant smallholders, frontier settlers, rural laborers,

and Afro-Colombian and

in-

digenous communities, while the former was aimed chiefly at the middle class

and propertied.

Family Ties

Ill

In taking aim at kidnapping, the

AUG and

Uribe Velez, played on the

of urban and rural property owners.

fears

its

preferred candidate, Alvaro

these groups, they offered an illusory "security" to

unemployed youth

in the city

from insurgent

and country, they provided jobs

in the

flourishing private security business. Like Castafio's, Uribe's father

been murdered by the FARC. Ghosts from

To

threats;

had

la Violencia reappeared: the

overcoming of personal trauma and the restoration of family honor through counterinsurgent warfare were distinguishing features of Uribe

and

Castafio's

political

These personal

personae.

mobilized to powerfiil rhetorical effect

histories

- most middle- and

were

ruling-class

people identified with this kind of suffering, as did the families of soldiers,

policemen, and suspected or actual paramilitaries.

Support for Uribe and a "peace process" with the

AUC was therefore

widespread, and Uribe was elected on a simple, clear-cut program: there

would be no more attempts

The solution to the The most important lobbies behind Liberal Party, the military high command,

to treat with subversion.

insurgencies was to eliminate them. this reverse

course were the

multinational banana companies, palm

oil

processors, flower magnates,

narco-barons, and cattle ranchers. Even as they funded the partially privatized counterinsurgency, they called for increased state-led violence

against the insurgencies, broadly defined to include

progressive social change. "^^

anyone working

for

Their candidate in the 2002 election was

Alvaro Uribe: he was, in the words of Carlos Castaiio, "the

man closest to

our philosophy."

The role

of

civilian

stemmed from

core of that philosophy civilians in the conflict. is

a relative term.

like civilians,

Two

a particular view of the

As Castano put

it,

"In war, unarmed

thirds of the guerrillas are "^^^

and collaborate with the

guerrillas.

unarmed, act

At the heart of

HOUR

EVIL

IN

COLOMBIA

IO5

Uribe's "democratic security" policies was the notion that the state

needed

citizens to collaborate

democratic societies there

There

no

is

is

with the armed

no

forces.

between police and

distinction

Uribe has

said,

Compare

citizens."

"In

of crime.

citizen neutrality in the face

diis

statement to General Bedoya's: "Concerning the criminals, no one can

be neutral

you

.

.

Neutrality

.

are against them."^^

Much like

September 2001.

1 1

Uribe's

is

You are with the terrorists or we note, was articulated before

not possible.

is

Bedoya's view, the

Bush administration

in

Washington,

a semi-authoritarian form of parliamentary government that

does not respect individual rights or international law.

This represented an extension of the cold war. In building a nation-

wide network of

spies,

Uribe followed ideas

articulated

and practiced by General Ruiz

in

from the 1970s through the 1990s, Generals Yanine,

1960s;

the

"peasant soldiers," and "forest guard" families,

first

Camacho, Bedoya, and

del Rio encarnated aspects of this philosophy.

General Yanine and Pablo Guarin

first

put

Magdalena Medio

in the early 1980s. It

eastern Antioquia

and southern Cordoba

into practice in the

it

developed in

Castano, and Carlos Castafio and General del Rio perfected

when Uribe was governor of Antioquia. with the armed

Civilians

it

1

in

Uraba

needed to collaborate

forces, especially in intelligence gathering

Uribe's objective of recruiting

north-

fiirther in

1987-90, under Fidel

-

or

else.

million paid informers was rapidly

more than planned had signed up by August 2004. army of 20,000 "peasant soldiers" {soUados campesinos) relied on kinship and friendship networks for intelligence, which meant that for surpassed: 1,500,000

Uribe's

every peasant soldier, there were perhaps four unpaid informers.

same was true of the 36,500 coast, these

Uribe's 1 1

were dominated by the

first

August -

with

"forest guard" families;

a

steps as president

mere four days

AUG).

AUG.

aft:er

his inauguration

ceremony was met

"negotiations" with the

1997, which stipulated that

782, which removed the stipulation.

aircraft

war

and

guidance

effort,

US

- of

ACCU

(the

do so, he repealed Law 418 of the government could not sign accords or

In order to

dialogue with a group lacking political status, and replaced

fiind the

The

along the Adantic

were to declare a State of Emergency on

FARC mortar fire — and open

leading bloc of the

all

Uribe

supplementing Plan Colombia.

surveillance

it

with

Law

also levied a special tax to

US

troops,

US

technology operated in support - or

the "bandit-extermination" campaigns under

way

in

FORREST HYLTON

I06

petroleum-rich Arauca, Sucre/Bolivar, and the coca-growing regions of

and southeast.

the south

The Justice and Peace Law passed

in

June 2005 gave near-impunity to

demobilized paramilitaries (see Chapter

9,

below), but raised unan-

swered questions about Uribe's family history. Congressman Gustavo Petro, a former

M-19

who denounced

politicians

was one of a number of opposition

militant,

Uribe's close

These

allegations surfaced as the

in the

2006

ties to

AUC prepared

narco-paramilitarism.

to enter formal politics

and armies

election cycle, with assets

intact.

When

Petro

pointed out that one of Uribe's brothers and two second cousins had

much

from the new

to gain

allegations,

legislation, the

mentioning Uribe's father

and Pablo Escobar. the president

in

Miami Herald echoed

the

connection with the Ochoas

- one of which, "La Carolina," brother in question — and paramilitary

Specific properties

co-owned with the

groups ("The Twelve Apostles," "The R's") were

named

in connection

with the allegations.

While

circumstantial,

the

evidence

is

suggestive.

Uribe's

father,

Alberto Uribe Sierra, had been languishing in debt in the middle-class

Medellin neighborhood of Laureles, in the mid-1970s,

when

reversal

of fortune catapulted him to wealth and influence

broker,

real-estate

intermediary,

and "recognized

a strange

as political

He

trafficker."

boasted extensive cattle ranches in the savannas of northern Antioquia

and southern Cordoba, and was part of a group of Antioquian narco-

who bought EPL were active.

speculators

the

land on the cheap in areas where the

FARC and

Uribe Sierra was connected by marriage to the Ochoas, a ruling

Antioquian family that joined the upwardly mobile mafiosos to form the Medellin

cartel

(and

MAS); when Pablo Escobar launched

his

"Medellin

without Slums" campaign in 1982, Uribe Sierra organized a fund-raising horse race to help out. Uribe ^A was

of Medellin in 1982, Belisario Betancur's

as a favor to

campaign.

first

appointed to his post

as

mayor

Uribe Sierra for having helped finance

He was

quickly removed by the then-

governor of Antioquia.

During Uribe's sanctuary."

It

brief tenure, traffickers referred to Medellin as "the

has been suggested that his removal

came

conspicuous attendance at a meeting of the region's drug Escobar's hacienda, located in the Magdalena Medio. Sierra

was murdered

at his

after cartel

When

his at

Uribe

ranch in 1983, young Alvaro flew there in

EVIL

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

lOJ

Escobar's helicopter. President Betancur and important

members of the

regional elite attended Uribe Sierra's funeral, demonstrating their will-

ingness to overlook dubious business ventures from v^hich they benefited.

One

of President Uribe's ranches in Cordoba bordered one that

belonged to Salvatore Mancuso, the paramilitary "entrepreneur of coercion,"

who had

served as a Convivir

and became one of the leading

know him

only

only as horse

figures

rancher

as a fellow cattle

traders."^ ^

commander

of the

-

AUC.

just as

Cordoba,

he knew the Ochoas

As governor of Antioquia, Uribe's "Montesi-

nos," to borrow a term from Molano, was Secretary of

Pedro Juan Moreno

in

Uribe affected to

Villa.

He was

alleged,

Government

US DEA chief,

by a former

to

be the country's leading importer of potassium permanganate, the main chemical precursor in the manufacture of cocaine, between 1994 and

1998 - a period that overlapped with Uribe's term.^ one of Uribe's campaign advisors

in

Juan Moreno was

^

2002. General del Rio, the "pacifier"

of Uraba, was dismissed by Pastrana for links to the paramilitaries, and celebrated an act of protest {acto de desagravio) in response.

organized in

May

The

1999 by Juan Moreno and General Bedoya's

movement, Fuerza Colombia, served presidential campaign. Like ^ advisor.^

as a

event,

political

launching pad for Uribe's

Moreno, General

del Rio

was a campaign

Based on his choice of friends, neighbors, advisors, and ministers, Antonio Caballero, arguably Colombia's leading humorist - following the political distinction

murder

- noted

in

1999 of the person who had previously held that

that Uribe appeared fond of

Whatever the nature of

his

relationship

to

bad company.

narco-paramilitarism in

Cordoba and Antioquia, the indignation with which the Clinton administration and the US media treated Samper, contaminated by mere

receipt of campaign finance

from the drug

lords,

seems comical in

retrospect.

Although he extradited more lombian

traffickers

history, Uribe's links to the

peculiar forms of terrorism,

than any president in Co-

inmost nexus of narcotics, and

would appear

to be far

its

more intimate than

Samper's; not one extradited trafficker was a ranking paramilitary. Initially,

however, Uribe was warmly embraced by the

US

government,

Semana declared

as well as the

Colombian oligarchy and middle

him "Man of

the Year" in 2002. This was because, in the eyes of the

class.

FORREST HYLTON

I08

majority of Colombians and

US

policy-makers, he did not represent

narcotics, paramilitarism, or clientelist politics as usual.

was that of a true believer state

in

counterinsurgency

as a

His public image

means of extending

power.

As

at

previous conjunctures, in the late 1990s the reform-minded

fraction of the ruling class did not represent the ruling class as a whole,

much allies,

less

the nation. In their war against the state and

insurgencies stepped

its

paramilitary

up campaigns of kidnapping, extortion,

bombings, and even massacres, which brought the war closer to the everyday

lives

generations.

of city and town dwellers of all

Fanned by media

hysteria,

classes, races, genders,

and

these tactics helped lead a

majority of voters to opt, in a quixotic quest for "security," for right-

wing authoritarianism gency.

in line with cold

war

principles of counterinsur-

The Edge of

President Uribe has

the Precipice,

made Colombian

society

2002-5

one that

toward a mafia

is

we

the culture of paramilitarism ... In Colombia,

professing

are

headed

DAS

(2006)

state.

Ramiro Bejarano, former head of

Plan Colombia failed in terms of drug eradication, but succeeded in

Armed

modernizing the Colombian especially helicopters,

and

consolidated political,

and

social,

territorial

formerly held by the insurgencies. exclusively. Plan

Forces,

which lacked hardware,

specially trained fighting units; paramilitaries

Colombia helped

criminal enterprise and turn

it

By

influence

targeting

FARC

in

territories

areas almost

paramilitaries vertically integrate their

into a political instrument."^

Debate on

the Justice and Peace Law, regulating paramilitary participation in official

and

politics

memory and

civil

society,

to frame the fate of a trafficking,

was structured around the opposition of

justice versus peace

and

forgetting. It

group that had admittedly

and expropriation

in

its

relied

was an odd way

on massacres, drug

push to eradicate the insurgencies.

The need to forget and pardon without truth or justice was related to the AUC's drive to enter formal politics, of course, but also to systematic Colombian

and armed forces documented in reports by Amnesty International, and the US State Department.^ The ELN, pushed to breaking point, had begun preliminary talks on negotiations with Uribe's government. The FARC has been excluded and - facing 18,000 mobilized troops - subject to the ties

to the

Human

largest

police

Rights Watch,

US-backed

military offensive in history,

under Plan

Patriota,

while those fighting alongside or in lieu of the state were politically incorporated.

FORREST HYLTON

no

A New

I

Feudalism

In 2003-5, the armed Right's electoral power endangered the bipartisan

monopoly

for the first time since

1848. In seeking re-election and

creating a legal architecture for legitimate paramilitary participation in state

and

state"

linking

it

- now

fiised

under the concept of the "communitarian

split his party,

strengthening the central government by

society

- Uribe

to dispersed regional

marked the end of the

power

centers.

not plan to negotiate with guerrillas without military defeat.

No

elites,

and

election of Uribe

1982, since Uribe did

first

inflicting decisive

Gomez had

president since Laureano

closely with opinions that held

regional

The

historical cycle initiated in

identified so

sway among the military high command,

their allies in

government.

The

reactionary coalition,

born during Betancur's peace process, hardened against Barco's muni-

and

cipal reforms

Gaviria's departmental reforms, and, through para-

militarism, landed elites

and

regional-local

central

government reforms and peace

in the

Casa de Narifio.

governments blocked both

initiatives.

Now they had an

ally

After Uribe's assumption of the presidency, the paramilitaries tight-

and

politics.^ ^

At the top, there were numerous commanders who became paramilitaries to bury the record of what they had done as traffickers. These men were known mainly for ened

their grip over patronage

their reputations in the mafia underworld: Francisco Javier Zuluaga, Jose

Vicente Castano (Carlos and Fidel's brother), Hernan and Jesiis Giraldo,

Rodrigo Tovar Puro,

"Don

Berna."

^

a.k.a.

Once

"Jorge 40," Diego Fernando Murillo, a.k.a.

negotiations began,

all

except Castaiio appeared

as

comandantes paramilitares. They were given a nickname

that played

on

their

- and were

said to be trying to get their paraportes (a play

in

uniform

opportunism - "the parachutists"

pasaporte) to avoid extradition to the

Cordoba -

- was

USA.^

the bastion of the Castano brothers

of the

on the word

^

and Salvatore Mancuso

the birthplace of "Colombia Viva," a political

to rally support for the incorporation

{los paracaidistas)

movement designed

AUG into state institutions.

Santa Fe de Ralito, located in the southern part of the department, was

chosen by the

AUG as the place to negotiate with government. Colombia AUG

Viva elected two congresspersons from Cordoba in 2002. The exercised oversight of the University of Cordoba,

managing the only

hospital in the southern part of the department. In their municipalities of

EVIL Tierralta

HOUR

COLOMBIA

IN

and Valencia, considered the

mayors elected

political capitals

III

of the

AUG,

both

2003 were from Colombia Viva. Other candidates paramilitary threats. Along with two others, on 1 April

in

withdrew, citing

2005, Departmental Congressman Orlando Benitez Palencia was sinated by paramilitaries from

Don

assas-

Berna's Heroes of Tolova Bloc in

Valencia. Benitez failed to heed warnings not to run for

mayor

there."^^^

For Enrique Santos Calderon, editor of El Tiempo, narcotrafFickers,

and

paramilitaries,

Atlantic coast.

^

political

bosses

{gamonales)

The department of Magdalena,

had fused along the controlled by

Hernan

Giraldo and Rodrigo Tovar, provided one of the best examples.

AUC's

candidate for governor, Trino

Luna Correa, won

in

2003

The after

running unopposed. Other candidates resigned, citing paramilitary threats for

and harassment, and more voters

Luna.

AUC

The

representatives.

blank ballots than voted

cast

secured victory for three senators as well as three

When

Concordia, in spite of

Efrain Escalante insisted

on running

AUC threats, he was assassinated.

capital city, Santa Marta, paramilitaries quickly

for

mayor of

In Magdalena's

amassed a fortune by

charging taxes on the trucks bringing goods to container ships that dock in the port's

deep harbor. Everyone from

paid them taxes.^

^

Through

Dibulla,

located at the foot of the Sierra

street

vendors to store owners

Mingueo, and Palomino, towns

Nevada de Santa Marta across the moved drugs and guns un-

departmental border in La Guajira, they molested, despite considerable

army and

police presence

on

the roads.

In Magdalena and La Guajira, paramilitaries working for Giraldo and "Jorge 40" controlled intelligence, gambUng, prostitution, private security, protection rackets, contraband,

money

laundering, and most of

the cocaine business. In Cesar, the cattle-ranching department where

"Jorge 40" had once served as finance secretary, the picture was similar.

As

in

Magdalena, the governor ran unopposed in 2003,

candidates resigned in the face of

after other

AUC threats. As in Magdalena, he won,

number of blank votes outnumbered votes for him. In La which borders Venezuela - and, along with Cesar and Magda-

although the Guajira, lena,

forms part of the north coast region defined by the Sierra Nevada de

Santa Marta

-

the

mayor and ten

city council

members were

arrested in

September 2004. They had allegedly fijnneled health care block grants to paramilitaries run by "Jorge 40" and Jesus Riohacha, the

capital, in

Giraldo (Hernan's brother, also wanted for extradition to the trafficking charges).

"^^^

USA

on

FORREST HYLTON

nZ

Antioquia provided another example of flagrant paramilitary control,

and while

a minority questioned

in private,

it

few dared to do so

Nutibara (BCN) in November 2003, Diego Fernando Murillo,

"Don Berna"

"Adolfo Paz" in the

in the underworld, a.k.a.

continued to rule over the

Born

in

Despite the ostensible demobilization of the Bloque Cacique

public.

city to a degree

a.k.a.

AUG,

Escobar had only dreamed of

in Tulua, Valle, the center oi pdjaro operations in the 1950s, after

leaving the

EPL, Murillo was

He

Escobar's organization. fare to

become

who worked

a sicario

his

way

to the top of

survived various rounds of internecine war-

By 2005, he

the undisputed mafia boss of Medellin."^^

conmianded Bloques Heroes de Granada, Galima, Libertadores Pacifico,

and Heroes de Tolova from

del Sur,

his seat at the negotiating table in

Santa Fe de Ralito, until he "gave himself up" in

late

May

2005.

He

agreed to be held under government supervision on a ranch in Gordoba, near the seat of negotiations, in exchange for political benefits under the

He was later taken to a maximum US government pressure afi:er assassinating

pending Justice and Peace Law. security prison in response to

the departmental congressmen from Gordoba, but was then returned to a local prison just

south of MedeUin, in his

on with business

In 2004, while his private

Don

services,

own

territory,

where he carried

as usual.

Berna's

army worked

candidates

to take over cable television

won 30

posts

heads of local

as

neighborhood advisory boards {Juntas de Accidn Comunat) in Medellin,

and dominated construction, and

retail.

Through

real estate, finance, transport, wholesale,

the infamous

"Envigado Office,"

Don Bema

supervised extortion, intelligence gathering, surveillance, contract killing,

recruitment and training of assassins, auto theft, bank robbery, gambling

and prostitution, drug sales, money laundering, and private security. Through his NGO, "Gorporacion Democracia," Don Berna had begun to select candidates for the legislative elections

Even

in Bogota,

similar processes

markets {sanandresitos)

works of

unofficial

Paramilitaries

were under way. Paramilitaries

main wholesale food market,

controlled the

,

profiting

from

of March 2006.^^

as well as the duty-free

local peasant production, net-

informants, pirated

GDs, and

ceil

phone

calls.

were estimated to make 400 million pesos (more than

$160,000) per month from extortion in the sanandresitos alone. They also controlled

many

of the

capital's prostitution rings,

and engaged

widespread kidnapping and contraa killing - the very

in

tactics against

HOUR

EVIL which they were supposed

They were

holdings.

IN

COLOMBIA -

to be fighting

II3

in order to

expand

and mo-

dealerships, gas stations, construction, gambling, contraband, tels.

like

According to an

official report,

Ciudad Bolivar

One

economies.

their

involved in white slavery, and invested in stores, car

they dominated entire slum

the south,

in

districts,

using gangs to take over local

of the authors of said report warned that Bogota

was becoming similar to

Don

Berna's Medellin."^^^

who participated in a comon paramilitarism spoke of the "Don Bernizawhereby poor youth from the northern slum districts -

In Bucaramanga, Santander, a delegate parative research project

tion" of the city,

Comunas

and 2

1

(fifty-three

neighborhoods) - were being recruited to

work in illegal economies dominated by the paramilitary mafia. Bucaramanga Metropolitan Area (AMB) was shared out between Ivan Duque, "Ernesto Baez," leader of the Central Bolivar Bloc (BCB), and "Jorge 40," chief of the Northern Bloc (NB). Stores of

and Bucarica taxes,

in

Comunas

1

types in La

all

while mechanics and shoemakers in

Comuna

street

in

3 paid the same. Car

washes charged bus drivers 2,000 pesos per day - 8,000

wanted

Cumbe

and 2 paid 6,000 pesos per day ($2.50) if

the driver

security against stick-ups. Taxi drivers paid 3,000 pesos,

and

vendors 500 pesos, for the use of public space. Curfew went into

women

effect after

9 p.m., and young

miniskirts,

or revealing cleavage.

women, and

prostitutes

were prohibited from wearing

Drug

Over

drug and prostitution

rings.

criminals,

unemployed youth

time, the paramilitary drug mafia organized

army of labor. This was

beyond anything Marx imagined when he described the lumpenproletariat in mid-nineteenth-century France.

from Antioquia, the coffee

had colonized much of the Atlantic frontier

in

the

into

^

into a disciplined, mobile counterinsurgent

dwellers, especially

adulterous

like paramilitaries nation-

young women and men

wide, in Bucaramanga they recruited lucrative

users,

were "cleansed." Yet,

coast.

The

axis,

role

far

of the

Unemployed slum

and the Santanders,

colonization of the coffee

nineteenth century led to the foundation of

new

municipalities under Liberal or Conservative party patronage; while

the second

wave of colonization, from slums or small towns

in the

interior to other small

towns or slums, mainly those of the national

periphery, favored the

AUC. While

the

FARC

had abandoned "the

combination of all forms of struggle," their opponents employed effectively

than ever.^^^ They scored their

first

it

more

key victory in the

FORREST HYLTON

114

congressional elections of

and 35 per cent of

March 2002,

in

which they won between 30

seats.

A new generation of soldiers had replaced the battle-hardened veterans created in the

mold of the Castahos and Mancuso, however. They did

not wear uniforms or

live in

moved anonymously

remote mountainous or lowland regions, but

in cities

administration, occupation,

and towns, performing the

like the

At the bottom, many of the new

recruits

pdjaros than Castaiio's troops.

were unarmed, and, unlike the Convivirs, did not sport radios

on the

daily tasks of

and accumulation. They were more

telltale

two-way

hip. In Valledupar, Santa Marta, Cartagena, the cities

of the

north coast; Bucaramanga and Barrancabermeja in the Santanders; Villavicencio

and Bogota axis,

and Puerto Asis

in the

Andean

in the southern jungles; Medellin, Call,

they could be seen selling

selling

CDs

and

and Manizales

heartlands; Pereira cell

phone

in the coffee

operating fruit stands,

calls,

running auto repair shops,

sunglasses, driving taxis,

guarding pubHc buildings and private businesses, "collecting {cobrando facturas), monitoring

movements

bills"

and out of neighbor-

in

hoods, protecting politicians and businessmen, riding around on motorcycles

running "errands," or

"Judicial Bulletproofing"

II

In late June 2005, the Colombian Congress

by

paramilitaries, according to

- 35

Mancuso and

approved the Justice and Peace Law, and in spite

and

sitting in restaurants, bars, bakeries,

eavesdropping on people's conversations.

cafes,

late

of domestic and international controversy.

Rights Watch-Americas

Watch warned

per cent of it controlled

Jose Vicente Castano

July Uribe signed

The

it,

in

director of Human

would "launder the criminal records of top paramilitary commanders - including some of the country's most powerful drug lords - while allowing them to keep their wealth and maintain their control over much of the country.""^ ^ A that the law

senior "violentologist" predicted a scenario of Italianization that

would

"produce an order based on crime and cruelty" in which "terror and the superconcentration of wealth" would be distinguishing features.^

^

Just as the discourse of "anti-terrorism" denied guerrilla insurgencies

the possibility of achieving political recognition as anti-state actors,

under

article

72 of the Justice and Peace Law, the

status as "subversives"

and

"rebels.

"^^^

AUC secured political

This would allow top comman-

HOUR

EVIL

IN

COLOMBIA

II5

ders to avoid lengthy prison terms and/or extradition. Sentences

carry a

maximum

of six and a half years.

A

would

team of twenty prosecutors

would be given a maximum of sixty days to investigate crimes. There would be no unraveling of command structures, logistics, transport routes,

finances,

investments, political alliances, or other aspects of

would reveal kinship with official power. Former Uribe supporter, Senator Rafael Pardo - who, as minister of defense under Gaviria, came up with the idea of Convivirs — helped

paramilitarism that

author a military,

that

bill

would have required

and political

some form of

reparations for the victims of paramilitary crimes against

He

humanity.

contended that the "Justice and Peace"

"a farce of justice," and warned that

ment of

a

investigation into the financial,

structures of paramilitary organizations, along with

political

it

legislation

could "lead to the

made

legal establish-

model based on organized crime."

Former

president Gaviria, aiming to save the Liberal Party from collapsing

under the pressure of uribismo, echoed Pardo. "Mafias have taken over various departments," he insisted, "not only in terms of drugs, but in

terms of administration

with these situations."

Law would

.

One

sees the president very comfortable

The two

agreed that Uribe's Justice and Peace

.

.

grant impunity to the leaders of organized crime, facilitating

mafia penetration of the state in the regions,

and

cities,

municipios.

Since the Bush administration would not finance but a fi-action of the

-

improvised, legally dubious demobilization process

Ambassador

Europe and the

rest

of the

$170 million — Uribe initially looked to world. US Ambassador William Wood

declared Mancuso's appearance before the

2004 "absurd," and

US

disarmament.^

government

compared

traffickers,

set aside

were not

in July

political actors,

murderers, and thieves." Yet in

$20 million

for their ostensible

^

Reflecting the relative as

Colombian Congress

insisted that paramilitaries

but rather "criminals, drug

2006, the

the costs of which

Wood estimated at

to the

power of human

USA, when they met

rights organizations in the

in Cartagena in February

EU

2005,

European governments and multinational lending agencies required that paramilitary crimes against ftinds

humanity be punished. Disbursement of

hinged on the passage of

incarceration,

legislation that

mandated

and some form of reparations. Following the

roundly rejected Uribe's Justice and Peace ing to international standards.^

Law

as

investigation,

UN,

the

EU

unacceptable accord-

Support for "democratic security"

FORREST HYLTON

Il6

and peace with the paramiUtaries (however

policies

nevertheless a startling retreat

with the

from the support

In a to the

show of how far EU

was

of EU diplomacy from the

FARC and the ELN - the lynchpin

1980s through the early Pastrana

qualified)

for a negotiated peace

years.

foreign policy

Anglo-American occupation of

had

shifted right after acceding

Iraq,

in April

2005 German

Defense Minister Hans Georg Wagner expressed enthusiasm for "demo-

The

cratic security."

contrast between the treatment afforded the

AUG versus the FARC was remarkable. The FARC had never agreed to a under Pastrana, so they did not discredit themselves by

cease-fire

violating

it,

AUG did on

as the

FARC

a daily basis.

form of the Plan

for takeover in the

territory

was

slated

Patriota.

Plan Patriota helped turn the Colombian conflict into a source of

ongoing regional diplomatic tension. Though chiefly

US advisors and 600

mercenaries,

and

relied

Initiated in late

2003, to drive the

it

$700 million plan was was supervised by 800

on the

military intelligence support, as well as over year.

this

funded by the Colombian government,

USA for logistics and

$100 million

FARC

in "aid" per

out of a 116-mile

heartland of Caqueta, Meta, Guaviare, and Vaupes, and extradite leaders to the

USA, Plan

Patriota

and spread the war

(plus extradition),

FARC

was Operacion Marquetalia writ to

large

Venezuela and Ecuador. Some

20,000 Ecuadorian troops massed along the Colombian border in April 2006, while in Venezuela, more than 100 Colombians served prison time for plotting to paramilitaries

kill

Hugo Chavez

DAS -

and

in coordination with

Colombian

the intelligence service answerable only to

President Uribe. Paramilitaries

-

were permitted to hold on to the country's best lands

close to half of all cultivable land, according to the Comptroller

General's Office

- along with

the most profitable networks of narcotics

production, transport, and distribution, not to mention legal front businesses.

The "demobilization"

accelerated in late 2004, militaries

and

process began in

left

Commanders

demobilized by March 2005.

rather than go to

fatherland," they

jail

AUG,

para-

declared that

in "defense

of the

again. Extradition to the

USA

ditto reparations for the families of victims. In

April 2005, with negotiations

spokesman of the

committed

for "excesses"

would take up arms

was out of the question;

November 2003,

more than 30,000 former

on the verge of unraveling, the

Ivan Duque,

a.k.a.

political

"Ernesto Baez," threatened

EVIL

HOUR

IN

to "return to the mountains," but

COLOMBIA

II7

once Uribe signed the Justice and

Peace Law, Baez called for the formation of a poHtical movement, and described the

permanent way, the poUtical

and regional power

"We

formation process with candor:

parastate

penetrated, in a

structures

.

.

.

have

process, building local

Our goal is to outlive the war and movement that will offer voters

transform ourselves into a democratic

an alternative."

Mancuso announced

Salvatore

and praised Uribe's law since actors"

- an

objective

as

AUC's

that since the absence of the

of paramilitary

demanding

politics,

AUC's

its

family

in

^

to official

He

predicted the

already strong position in Congress in legislative

March 2006;

2002.

ties

that paramilitaries be given "judicial

his prediction

came

true, as citizens in

two of Colombia's thirty-two departments voted further

had

Jose Vicente

'

atrocities.

bulletproofing" against extradition and prison terms.

AUC would improve elections in

as "political

troops were victims, and therefore as deserving

victims

Castafio echoed him, emphasizing the

Colombian

a career in politics,

AUG

zones had obligated paramilitaries to take up arms in

"self-defense," the

of reparations

make

stated at the proto-national paramilitary

Mancuso contended

conference in 1994. state in guerrilla

first

intentions to

for recognizing the

twenty-

right than they

Discussing plans to run for office once "judicial

Mancuso suggested that many former AUC commanders would follow his lead. The results of the legislative elections of March 2006 suggested that, obstacles" were cleared,

wary of ment.

extradition, paramilitaries took their cues

On the one hand,

commanders

in

Columbia, with the face of for

all

US

govern-

FARC

a federal grand jury indictment in the District of

US

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

"strikes at the very heart

of the

FARC

flooded our communities with cocaine."

stating,

in

FARC

was responsible

He added

that the indict-

evidence to the contrary, that the

most of Colombia's cocaine production.

ment

from the

extradition warrants were issued for fifty

narcotics operation that has

The

expulsion of a handful

of openly paramilitary candidates from the most prominent of pro-Uribe parties,

on

traditional

the other hand, led to greater paramilitary

machine

paramilitary

politicians.

suppon

for

This camouflaged, but did not diminish,

dominance of politics

in the regions. Jorge 40, lord of the

north coast, waited until political alignments were in place, demobilizing just before the elections in

March 2006. Maintaining

a

low

political

FORREST HYLTON

Il8

Jorge 40 obtained the most favorable electoral results of any

profile,

'^

paramilitary chieftain.

Scorched Earth in the Cattle Republic

III

were estimated to have expropriated some 5 million

Paramilitaries

hectares between history.

1997 and 2003 - the

One Colombian

fraction of

its

largest

land grab in Colombian

analyst asserted that the

another dubbed the

reform carried out by "self-defense" forces, themselves, favored

companies and

power of the landed

made Colombia uniquely atavistic, while country a "cattle republic." The agrarian counter-

ruling class

palm and banana

cattle ranchers.

as

paramilitaries

called

plantations, as well as logging

The numbers

are telling: in 1987,

35

million hectares were devoted to cattle ranching, and in 2001, 41.7 million. In 1984, ranches larger than

cent of the land; in

1

500

hectares occupied 32.7 per

996, 44.6 per cent; in 200 1 61 .2 per cent. ,

By 2004,

0.4 per cent of landowners possessed 61 per cent of all titled land, while rural poverty

Of

was up from 82.6 per cent

course, figures cannot

whom,

in

2001

to

85 per cent in 2003.

the stories of the displaced, most of

in addition to trauma, experience discrimination

persecution in course,

return

tell

it

new

"^^^

and

political

Barring a major political reversal, of

was unlikely that more than a handful of the displaced would

home, and

returned to them.

any kind.

locations.

less likely that their

Only one

And though much

land (mostly untitled) would be

in three received

has been

government

made of the

1

assistance of

5 million hectares

of tropical rain forest destroyed and planted with coca, somewhere

between 75 and 100 million hectares of jungle had been cleared to

make way "seigneurial

naming and

for

catde.

The Comptroller

power of an anti-democratic

General's

Office spoke of

stripe" in the countryside,

narco-paramilitaries as wielders of "real

power"

in the regions

municipalities.

Along with increasing land concentration, expropriation, and dispossession, aerial fumigation

under Plan Colombia has been an enormously

cosdy and destructive endeavor, causing widespread respiratory and skin infections in the civilian population, especially children killing licit as well as iUicit crops,

Nevertheless, from

2002

to 2004,

and poisoning

and the

rivers

and

elderly, soils.

Washington and Bogota claimed

unprecedented success in their campaign against coca; in December

HOUR

EVIL

IN

COLOMBIA

UN study alleged that planting had been cut by 30 per cent, to

2002, a

252,000

acres.^^^

During 2003, over 35,000

acres

were destroyed every month -

according to legislation approved by the

2003, even

US

Congress in early December

National Parks, which contain 70 per cent of

forests in

Colombia's water and 10 million hectares of

became

II9

officially

protected forest,

game. In 2005, fumigation and/or manual eradication were

fair

undertaken in Parque Tayrona in Magdalena, La Macarena in Caqueta,

and Catatumbo

Northern Santander,

in

was dedicated

surface area

which

in

"Towns

In the far south, in Putumayo,

less

than

1

per cent of

^

to coca cultivation/

dedicated to the harvest and

production of cocaine have been abandoned hke ghost towns in the old

American West,

their stores

empty, their people vanished."

Round-Up

highly concentrated doses of Monsanto's

Using

Ultra mixed with

Cosmo-Flux, a chemical compound formerly supplied by ICI that made glyphosate stick to whatever

Colombia

part of Plan

Colombian rivers,

pilots

and

legal

Colombia.

In

and

US

crops,

many

it

touched, such fumigation was an integral

after

2000. Spraying

this

mercenaries destroyed

toxic

compound,

fish, wildlife, livestock,

well as coca fields throughout southern

as

cases,

coca

have simply replanted further

settlers

out on the frontier.

Chemical warfare needs

to get setders

helping

.

.

.

viewed a part of the broader counter-

to be

insurgent strategy. "Fumigation

is

mode

a

and peasants out of

the subversion ...

military terror: to drain the water

reached record

levels,

.

.

whose hidden

objective

same function

It serves

the

from the

sea."^^^

Even

as

is

them from as para-

fumigation

with nearly 136,000 hectares sprayed, 114,000

hectares remained in 2004.

There was no "improvement,"

production remained close to 1999 less,

.

their regions to prevent

levels



as

as net

coca

opposed to 50 per cent

according to the stated goals of Plan Colombia's authors. Prices of

cocaine and heroin

on US

streets

continued to decrease slighdy, while for

every 32 hectares of coca fumigated, one was eradicated. Including the

number of hectares fumigated, coca production in Colombia was greater 2005 than in 2003, and remained just below the record set in 2002. By 2006, it was clear that whether or not the reductions in 2002-3 were

in

a

mirage,

coca cultivation had hit record

levels

again,

as

farmers

replanted, relocated, or both. Aerial fumigation of over 2,500 square

miles of

Colombian

territory,

much of

it

jungle and rain forest, at a

I20

FORREST HYLTON

narrow economic cost of

at least

only in reducing coca production

Of course,

locally, often temporarily.

in the absence of any crop-substitution program, insurgent

and counterinsurgent even the

$160,000 per square mile, succeeded

RAND

terror

on the coca

frontiers

can only increase,

Corporation studies recognized.

It

as

has also created

diplomatic problems with neighboring governments in Quito and Caracas,

which contended

that plans

Colombia and

to increasing violations of their sovereignty.

make

the Bush-Uribe regime blink.

But

this

Patriota

had led

was not a cost

to

10

War

During the

as Peace,

Colombian people have produced

the

last five years,

2005-6

the single greatest success story in Latin America.

R- Nicholas Burns,

of State for

I

The

US

Undersecretary

Political Affairs

Unifying Theory and Practice

executive branch in

Washington hailed Uribe's "democratic

which focused on integrating civihans into the

ity" policies,

(2006)

secur-

repressive

branches of the state in order to defeat insurgencies and extend central

government authority,

as a

model

for counterinsurgency.

While they

have not succeeded against entrenched guerrilla insurgencies, democratic security politics have allowed paramilitary forces to extend their control

of

political,

economic, and

relations

Any and

between

civilians

They have

regions.

also

and violated Geneva Protocols regulating

and combatants.

armed

interpretation of the

conflict carries specific legal, political,

Using arguments put forth in a book written

military ramifications.

by an

new

social life to

reinforced internal colonialism

advisor, in late January

2005, President Uribe announced to his

diplomatic corps that neither war nor armed conflia existed in Colombia.^^^

That, of course, would imply politically recognized warring parties. Instead,

an embattled

state

and

civil

society

was fighting (and, with the help of an

"intemational community" led by the ism." Public debate in political significance

of language

is

could be redefined as "terrorism," negotiated

- that

is,

USA, would soon

defeat) "terror-

Colombia fi-equendy hinges on semantics, and the

political

-

not

it

lost

on anyone.

would mean

solution to

armed

the

If the

problem

end of pressure

conflict

with the

for a

FARC.

FORREST HYLTON

122

Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, acceptance of new

In the age of

nomenclature would

have allowed Uribe to ignore Protocol

also

the Geneva Conventions, which

II

of

obliges governments as well as insur-

gents to distinguish between civilians and combatants. Meanwhile, Uribe

advanced in preliminary

Havana,

in

under Gaviria. After General, as

talks

on peace negotiations with the

keeping with the model of fragmented peace 1 1

first

September 200 1 before becoming ,

ELN

in

established

US Attorney

White House Special Counsel, Alberto Gonzales called

rV of the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "archaic," while in June 2005, President Bush called an Amnesty International report on torture and human rights abuse in Guantanamo "absurd." Uribe may have been hoping to capitalize on new imperial doctrines regarding antiProtocol

terrorism,

Though

human

rights,

and international

beyond the scope of

largely

law. this

book, the relationship

between cold war anti-communism and post-cold war anti-terrorism

worthy of brief consideration. As cold war counterinsurgents under

is

Ronald Reagan,

and Afghanistan were

armed

insurgencies.

communism was

new

W.

Bush's "global war on

rubrics. Colonial

similar to those in

Salvador, insofar as planners to fight

George

leaders of President

terrorism" fought old battles under

and commanders targeted

The

wars in Iraq

Vietnam, Guatemala, and El civilians as a

way

counterinsurgent core of cold war anti-

retained in the "global

war on terrorism," making

Uribe and the Colombian generals contemporary rather than anachro•



290

nistic.

II

"The Changing Same:" Uraba

Counterinsurgent theory holds that in guerrilla warfare, the distinction

between

civilians

and combatants breaks down. In

lombian military had no regard

for

Conventions, for they did not face

viewed

civilian oversight as

human

CoGeneva

practice, the

rights

or the

civilian courts until

1991.

They

an obstacle to waging the counterinsurgent

war against Colombian people, and Uribe's positions were

in line with

the military's. Well after the disintegration of the Soviet

Union and

Eastern bloc, Uribe, like the political

Colombian high command, retained

a

philosophy rooted in the cold war, but recycled under the rubric

of "anti-terrorism."

A prominent sociologist

noted that the generals' "hypothesis of war"

EVIL

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

I23

As if to illustrate the consequences of 21—22 February 2005, near the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, four community members - including Luis Eduardo Guerra, one of the community's leaders and founders - three children, aged two, six, and eleven, and one adolescent, aged seventeen, was "impervious to change." this

approach, on

were murdered. Some were slaughtered with machetes and

dismembered. "^^^ According to

their bodies

refused to testify

army soldiers were

before state authorities for fear of reprisal,

The army provided

who

local residents,

responsible.

confusing, contradictory statements about

its

actions

during the massacre. Leaders like Luis Eduardo Guerra had traveled to the to explain their situation

and

international pressure, an

OAS

decision

mandated

efforts to ameliorate

Inter-American

members of San

that

USA and Europe

it.

Human

As a

result

of

Rights Court

Jose receive security guarantees

from the Colombian government. The February massacre, however, brought the

total

number of community members assassinated to 1 52 FARC), which demonstrated the limits of

(19 of them at the hands of the international neutrality,

As

solidarity.

with strong

ties

practitioners

however, residents of San Jose continued to

produce in peace, they needed

all

armed

of militant, non-violent

human

to international

rights organizations,

insist that in

order to live and

forces, including

government

troops and police, out of their community.

They threatened setting

up

target for

up and move

to pick

a police station in the town,

FARC

incursions.

if

the government insisted

on

which would have made them a

But former minister of defense, Jorge

Alberto Uribe, said there could be no peace without the protection

of the police and armed forces. President Uribe went further: "There are

good people

in the

community, but some of

defenders have been signaled by people auxiliaries."

Given

and mobilization were

leftist

insurgencies,

identified

there

forms of

as

and

FARC

social protest

secret.

This led to the conclusion that first

all

leaders, patrons, live

suspect, even criminal, because insurgents were

thought to direct them in

not

its

who

and then

if civilian

supporters of guerrillas were

either co-opted or targeted, the state

US-trained and -funded troops could not win their war.

By

and

2005, a police station had been installed in San Jose, and most of remaining 400 inhabitants had

left

to

its

early April its

found a new municipality. La

Holandita, without a school, medical services, electricity, running water.

FORREST HYLTON

124

or sewerage. There was a single bathroom for the entire community. In

May, only

five families

were there in

larger

remained in the original settlement, but police

numbers.^^

In line with an economic development model driven by export agribusiness in

and financed by foreign

San Jose were

likely to

capital,

former community lands

be targeted for African palm plantation

development. Since palm plantations required deforestation and heavy irrigation,

they represented a danger to rivers and

community. ^^ In

personal credit for the Castaiio

new

had

forests, as well as the

took

his first public interview, Jose Vicente Castafio rise

of the African palm and agribusiness in Uraba.

invested, convinced others to invest,

and gone

in search

of

regions for investment.

Known as the AUC's behind-the-scenes strategist,

Castaiio, a.k.a. "the

Professor," offered a rudimentary theory of state formation.

The

AUC

secured regions for investment, and the Colombian state followed investors:

"We've got

to take rich people to invest in regions

over

all

Thus

the country, and that's one of our missions as comandantes''

the

expropriation

-

represented a threat to the survival of Afro-Colombians

and mestizos

in

San

African palm

to be implanted, like state sovereignty, via terror

and

Jose, as well as indigenous reserves along the lower

Atrato, Cacarica, Curvarado, Jiguamiando,

and

Salaqi rivers.

"The

we have been subject by the armed forces, which have nakedly acted with paramilitarism," the Peace Community of San Jose observed, "is not our invention nor is it a question of statistics. Our extermination to which

victims have faces, histories, and families.

III

""^^^

"Return to the Source:" Cauca

Cauca's indigenous groups are currently at the forefront of radical-

popular movements in Colombia. Cauca's history (60,000) security"

USA. in

policies

In

in

They

led the largest mass

march

in

September 2004, against "democratic

and the proposed

free

March 2005, they organized

which 70 per cent of the population

voting against free trade with the

trade agreement with the

a referendum

on

participated, with

USA,

A former

in

free trade

98 per cent

a process international

mayor of Caldono, Vicente Otero, was one of the key organizers of the campaign, and on 21 May, DAS agents searched his house and arrested twenty townsmen and

observers considered transparent.

HOUR

EVIL

same

125

war zone of Toribio, Jambalo, and Tocueyo, was

area as the

then destroyed by

COLOMBIA

issued for another 200.^°^ Caldono, located in

women. Warrants were the

IN

FARC

cylinder

bombs on 3-5

July.

Northern Cauca, where insurgencies had been encrusted twenty

years,

became a

for over

strategic rearguard because Plan Patriota targeted

the other side of the cordillera in Caqueta and Meta.

Colombian

generals

argued that the macizo region - where the eastern and central Cordilleras part ways

- had become

a second

FARC

negotiations between the

"Caguan," a reference to the

and Pastrana

in

school was therefore turned into a barracks, while

site

of

Caqueta. Caldono's

its

sports field

became

a heliport. According to the mayor's office, 2,400 were displaced, over

them women and

half of

When

visiting

doleezza Rice

that

US

Secretary of State

Con-

not have been aware of the importance of her

As she

for the counterinsurgent cause.

FARC had overrun

took Toribio only

^

Bogota in April 2005,

may

unwavering support the

children.^

arrived,

Nasa town of Tacueyo.^^^ The armed forces nine days of sustained combat with the FARC

the

afi:er

began on April 14 and spread along a fourteen-mile stretch of the

northern Andes.

Rice uncritically repeated Uribe's specious claim to

have achieved control over

all

of Colombia's municipalities — ignorant,

apparendy, of events in northern Cauca and the shake-up within the

high

command. Talk of was uninformed

conflict

armed

a "definitive solution" to Colombia's

at best,

ominous

at worst.

Following Rice's lead,

Uribe promised to undertake "definitive action" to "defeat

terrorists" in

northern Cauca.

Though

Rice declared, "Concrete improvements in security and rule

of law are fostering a culture of law^lness in Colombia and a sense of security for

its

citizens," headlines flady contradicted her.

implementing the

FARC

and the

of law was caught in the

rule

military.

members were forced to

The

had been caught

most convincing demonstration

militarily capable

security

The

in

had not been

attacks

command,

between the

whose

four of

resign after disagreeing about the effectiveness of

joint task force operations,

the

military high

The only party

crossfire

2005

as

it

was

flat-footed.

to date that the in

This was by

FARC

was

far as

1995, and that democratic

effective in defeating the insurgencies.^^

on Toribio,

like the attacks

on San Jose, struck

of the radical-popular movement in Colombia.

Where

the

at the heart

FARC

could

not be blamed for San Jose, Toribio was yet another illustration of their

FORREST HYLTON

126

Cauca and

colonial criollo attitudes toward indigenous people in where.^^''

by

The

gas cylinder

women

else-

death of a nine-year-old boy and the destruction wrought

bombs were shown around

the world.

Nasa men and

mobilized their "indigenous guards," which totaled some 7,000,

armed with wooden canes connoting leadership status, hiked to FARC's mountaintop position to tell them not to launch bombs on

and,

the

the

town.

Here were democratic

munity rule

security policies, based

on

non-liberal

traditions of non-violent conflict resolution, that

of law, government protection of constitutional

political participation,

com-

promoted the

rights,

democratic

and popular sovereignty. As he had

after the

massacre in San Jose, however, Uribe insinuated links between the

communities and the FARC. By

late

May

2005, there were

arrest

warrants for 200 Nasa, accused of guerrilla ties.^^^ As they had with the

FARC

(and, previously, the

AUC), community

leaders reiterated to

President Uribe and the military the need to rid their territories of parties in the

all

war system.

Discussing military-police presence and dismissing alleged links to the insurgency in one of Uribe's "communitarian councils," a group led by

Nasa Congressman Daniel Pinacue walked out president's

in protest against the

incomprehension of Nasa modes of conflict resolution. The

Colombian National Indigenous Organization (ONIC)

the

labeled

"communitarian council" a "media spectacle," explaining that the representatives of "distinct instances of the government, orchestrated

by the president, dialogue among themselves, impose

their position, their

biased reports, their policies and interests, and impede questioning or criticism."

Clearly, Uribe

and indigenous people had incompatible

visions of authority, democracy, security,

As in San Jose, the police arrived would not permit neutrality of citizens

and popular sovereignty.

in Toribio to stay.^^^ in the

war

it

The

had promised

state

to win,

and demanded collaboration against the FARC. Those who went along would be rewarded, while those who did not would be suspect. Community leader Ezekiel Vitonas, who traveled to New York City to address the

UN

in

May

2005,

criticized Uribe: "Identity, unity, territory,

and

culture are the four pillars contemplated in the constitution, but self-

determination of indigenous peoples that "self-determination"

is

not upheld." Vitonas specified

meant developing a way of life and subsistence,

based on tradition, and defending

it

in the face of threats.^^^

EVIL

HOUR

IN

COLOMBIA

l^J

Indigenous rights and self-determination did merit mention in the Senate foreign aid list

of

priorities in

US

2006, but were not high on President Bush's

bill for

Colombia. Echoing the

justification for

US

foreign

policy in El Salvador in the early 1980s, Secretary Rice repeated that,

while

much improvement remained

eradication,

and so

forth,

Bush administration's

to be done on human rights, coca Colombia was "on the road." This fit with the

vision of Iraq, fashioned in part

counterinsurgent campaigns in Central America, for

was used

as

by veterans from

whom

El Salvador

an example of imperial success. In January 2006, Secretary

Rice and President Bush mentioned Colombia as a template for counterinsurgent democracy. Each spoke independendy of the need for the putative Iraqi

government

to "clear" Iraqi territories

of insurgencies and

"hold" them against insurgent threat. This was the language used to explain the goals of Plan Patriota.

December 2005, imperial success

President

On

the MacNeal/Lehrer

Bush used Colombia

on what he

called the "heart

employed the language of "clear and hold"

as

NewsHourm

an example of

and soul"

front,

and

in his "National Strategy for

Victory in Iraq" in January 2006.^^^ Apparently, nothing succeeds quite like success.

Conclusion: Amnesia by Decree

We

just

want

to forget the past.

Manuel Mariano, demobilized

paramilitary (2006)

Until the end of the nineteenth century, frequent but small-scale

wars

made Colombia

Violencia of the 1940s

people dead

-

its

civil

representative within Latin America, but since la

and 1950s - a

historical course has

conflict that left at least

200,000

been more violent than those of its

neighbors. In spite of diverse trajectories, social democratic electoral politics,

supported by radical-popular organizations, characterize the

current scene in South America. In Colombia, in contrast, militarily

strong Left insurgencies, imperially supported police and armed forces,

and a semi-autonomous, increasingly powerftil

coalition of private right-

wing narco-armies weakened the radical-popular movement. Patterns of counterinsurgent terror against civilians established in

rubric after 11 September 2001. struggles for peace

and

the lingua franca of

The

first

Not

justice, terror

Colombian

backed Rafael

in

politics

Cauca was

Niiiiez's bid for

were

anti-terrorist

for the first time, in response to

and

official

and

amnesia have become

society.

historic defeat for radical-popular forces

Although the contest

regional, Liberal

dominance, so

its

came

in

1879.

"Independents"

political implications

were national. In the "Age of Capital" (1848-76), politics

la Violencia

and repackaged under the

reinforced during the cold war,

official

Colombian

had been marked by continuous popular mobilization,

subordinate groups defined

new

ideas of citizenship

and popular

as

sover-

eignty in discourse and practice. In Cauca, ex-slaves, free persons of color, indigenous

communities, and frontier

settlers

participated in a vigorous republican political culture, in

from Antioquia

which

equality.

FORREST HYLTON

I30

fraternity,

and

place in the

liberty

new

were ideas to be fought

republic, challenging racial

modes of

tion, colonial

and the

exploitation,

They

for.

struggled for a

and bureaucratic dominaspatial configuration

of

The state was called on to help them in their efforts, and they demanded that it adjudicate local and regional conflicts with landed oligarchs. The potential for a political opening to radical-popular claimsterritory.

making provoked tremendous unite

them -

in spite

fear in

Cauca's regional

of pronounced

elite; it

political differences

helped to

— around an

authoritarian Hispanophile Conservatism that took over the country for

half a century.

Following the outbreak of the

First

World War, however, with

coffee

production continuing to surpass previous records, indigenous and peasant resistance and rebellion challenged the bipartisan monopoly of politics

through direct action,

local

revolutionary socialist

experiments in self-government, and

They

parties.

through land takeovers, based on the slogan, "land belongs to the

tiller."

Backed by the newly formed Communist Party and trade unionists export enclaves (bananas, tration to enact a

oil,

new

challenged landlord dominion

in the

gold), they pressured the Liberal adminis-

program of social and economic reforms

to redistribute

land and wealth, regulate relations between organized labor and capital,

and adjudicate

conflict

between

and

rulers

ruled.

Law 200

of 1936,

designed to give land tides to occupants, was neither bourgeois, in that it

did not eliminate the challenge to private property rights, nor demo-

cratic, in that it

did not

make landownership more widespread among the

peasantry, except along the coffee axis,

where a smallholding peasantry

gained title to land, and access to middle-class brokers through the poHtical parties

To

and the

coffee growers' association.

Colombian uniqueness, I have emphasized how experiences of the cold war overlapped, as in a montage, with Creole patterns of explain

oligarchic rule anchored in ultramontane Catholicism,

dominance, and coffee exports

economy and

subalterns into Liberals

sought to undo

after the 1880s,

which

society through reactionary politics.

fifty

years

of Conservative

sectarianism spread with a vengeance in the 1930s total

war

stimulated by,

the

forms of

ideologues,

of the

who

political

Conservative

partially integrated

rule,

and 1940s, spawning

that targeted civilians. This stimulated, rise

of middle-class

politicians,

aggressively staked out positions

spectrum

as a

means of

As

partisan

and was

journalists,

and

on the extreme ends

livelihood.

EVIL

HOUR

War, "forced

later call, in the

draft urbanization"

I3I

World War Colombia was

Agrarian policy in post-Second

what Samuel Huntington would

COLOMBIA

IN

-

similar to

context of the Vietnam

driving the peasantry into the cities

through counterinsurgent warfare in the countryside.^^ After the 1950s,

was finally suspended, as wounds the two parties on one another were sutured by anti-communist counter-

intra-elite sectarianism

had

inflicted

insurgency.

Once

civilian elites

US

renounced military resolution of partisan

became the preserve of military

conflict, public order

officials.

Like the

School of the Americas, where roughly one-third more Colombian

officers studied

than their closest competitors from El Salvador, Korea

served as a classroom for

men who

occupied leading positions

later

US

within the Colombian military during

imperial wars in Vietnam,

Central America, and the Balkans.

Colombia's counterinsurgent terror

state

was

by

built

civilian politi-

who delegated repression to the military, rather than military diaators who destroyed their societies in order to save them, as happened cians

in Central

America and the Southern Cone. Permanent

civil

war and

durable parliamentary democracy, rather than military dictatorship,

made Colombia stand

out, yet throughout the National Front, the

use of state-of-siege legislation was the rule, not the exception.

end of the cold war, the

decreased as the paramilitary function increased.

Colombian during and

military

and

after the cold war,

the First

investment

-

in,

The

trajectory of the

ran state administrations

political terror.

and government reach

the mid- 1940s

over,

-

elites,

to an extent not seen since the in the 1860s, mobilization

was

in

infinitely bloodier,

cated, than the

first.

undermining

racial

and

and

class

privileges

domination

But since the mid-twentieth century was

Europe and

Asia, the second

wave of reaction

though hardly more technologically

Perversely, right-wing state

in

capital

second half of the nineteenth century. As

and

helped stimulate armed mobilization on the Left in the

by creating migration

US

accompanied by moderate reform from above

large-scale repression.

moment of total war

as

South America was extended

radical-popular mobilization challenged property rights

met with

the

forms one side of the story of Colombia's

World War through

of regionally based Creole

a

who

civilian elites,

endemic warfare and widespread

From

With

direct role of the military in counterinsurgency

two direaions:

Colombia's rapidly growing

cities,

first,

to the

and second,

1

sophisti-

parastate terror

960s and

1

970s,

urban frontiers of

to the agrarian frontier,

FORREST HYLTON

132

of the south and the plains of the

especially in the jungles

spaces, state power, even in

Such

proved to be

areas

military-paramilitary

its

fertile terrain for

east.

In those

was too weak to govern.

repressive aspect,

the growth of insurgencies until

counterinsurgency

operations

accelerated

after

2000, under US-financed Plan Colombia.

Thanks

to a shift in the productive base, toward extractive enclaves

and extensive ranching and

agribusiness, in the

1980s and 1990s, Left

insurgencies gained in military projection, territorial reach,

power, and

lost in national political advantage,

terror tactics that

had

traditionally

making

and

local

increasing use of

been employed against them by

opponents. There have been guerrilla insurgencies in Colombia since 1948, but their Golden Age lasted from 1978 to 1998. Colombian

grew

guerrillas

fastest

when

image became irremediably

their public

tarnished.

With

institutional support

of

many

kinds, counterinsurgent oppo-

nents thus spread with startling velocity and increasing social acceptance

between 1997 and 2005, relying on

and violent expropriation of centration of land, wealth,

and

This fostered a wholesale recon-

political

death agony of the National Front, to

privatized, decentralized repression,

territory.

when

power. During the protracted central

governments attempted

implement reforms or negotiate peace with insurgents

in

1983-84,

1991-92, and 1998-99, regional-local governments and

1987-88,

latifundistasy old

and new — joined

hip with paramilitaries

at the

— used

concentrated terror against individuals and communities perceived as subversive.

Since they were considered the

socialism

became

"unarmed wing of the subversion,"

seeking to realize the promise

activists

-

to

targets for systematic military

campaigns



revolutionary democratic

which Salvador Allende committed

after the late

1970s.

A

his life in Chile,

and paramilitary

decade

later,

assassination

with the

UP

largely

exterminated and Left candidates assassinated, neither the insurgencies

nor the counterinsurgency considered the distinction between combatants

and

civilians valid.

Under

war economy in the 1990s, on urban and rural frontiers,

a neoliberal

anarchic, atomistic individualism prevailed

with organized crime channeling antisocial energy into

capitalist value

through violence, intimidation, and physical liquidation of the electoral Left.^'5

Cocaine mafias

inftised fresh

blood into older landed

elites in

the

HOUR

EVIL

countryside, effectively putting

COLOMBIA

133

them and the two

traditional parties on and municipios. Multinational corpora-

life-support systems in regions tions

IN

found that narco-paramilitary "security" offered the only guarantee

for private property

and command of labor. Along with the

prices in 1989, the paramilitary-drug mafia nexus

of the coffee republic built

coffin

collapse of

the

last nail in

in the late nineteenth century, as

became the country's most powerful

traffickers

put the

new

latifundistas. In the

order they have installed in regions around the country, "the land

belongs to the expropriator."

After China, Colombia's

^

perhaps

is

the largest agrarian counter-reform in the world; unlike China, though, in

Colombia, counter-reform was not preceded by land reform.

Modes of torture, pioneered in

la

killing,

massacre, and dispossession, similar to those

Violencia,

were revived through new organizational

vehicles in late twentieth-century

Colombia. Early twenty-first-century

dynamics were new, due mainly to the hurricane-like impact of the narcotics trade, paramilitary political-territorial advance,

US

and increased

mihtary intervention, but the presence of the past, especially

Violencia,

was palpable.^ ^^ "Without having

had only written the introduction to the explains. "In

present

-

no other

analysis

it,

if

you

In peripheral regions where export

much

so

like,

we found

that

la

we

of the present," Sanchez

of study has the past had so

field

or the present,

realized

force

much

on

force in the

the past."

commodity production and natural

resource extraction predominated, Afro-Colombians, indigenous people,

and

frontier settlers lived

under

limitless terror

again at the end of the twentieth century. those living in the coffee axis, where

^^^

many

tactics

The

rise to

and

a historical sense of tragic circularity

were pioneered

in the

spread of contract killing, kidnapping, and extortion gave

for a better future

pessimism

la Violencia

Eventually, this was true for

1950s.

hope

- during

existed.

This

is

was hard the

and

to sustain,

vacuum

into

repetition.

For many,

and grounds

for

deep

which Alvaro Uribe stepped.

Right-wing repression and overgrown armed resistance explained the relative

weakness and fragmentation of Colombia's radical-popular

movements. Looking back,

it is

clear that

center tilted toward redistribution

-

whenever Colombia's

- of wealth,

or peace negotiations with insurgents,

it

political

resources, political

power

shifted right. Political

power

remained tied to landed wealth and control of territory. The enterprises of paramilitarized narcotics capos became more inclusive, better organized,

and

tightly linked to official politics after the

mid-1990s. The

FORREST HYLTON

134

no longer depended on

narcotics business

and

centralized cartels,

united town and country far more than any other industry.

No

it

fraction

of the Colombian oligarchy had brought other groups together around a

hegemony

project for

at

the national

level.

other factions in strengthening the nation

command

of labor. As a

paramilitaries

-

result, in

None

state,

led or directed

property rights, and

the early twenty-first century, narco-

the private defenders of the state and private property

increasingly set the boundaries of local, regional,

-

and even national

elections.

The

dispersed

power

fi-om a

weak

political center attested to the

parcellization of sovereignty. Yet if past precedent

were anything to go

by, emulation of Venezuelan counterinsurgency success in Falcon in the

Ayacucho and the Upper Huallaga Valley in

early 1960s, or Fujimori's in

the 1990s,

would

require a capacity to mobilize a peasant constituency,

both hostile to the

guerrillas

and southeastern Colombia. the

and amenable

to anti-communist chente-

This has never existed in the jungles and tropical plains of southern

lism.

Colombian Army,

It

remains to be seen whether the

either preceded or followed

occupation, will create one. Scorching the earth firom the

economic

life

impossible in rebel zones,

is

of

air,

to render

a tactic with antecedents in the

early cold war. It evokes the terrible slogan coined

epigraph to Chapter 7: "If

arrival

by paramilitary

by Zuleta

we cannot and do not want

to

in the

modify the

circumstances that determine these manifestations of misery, marginalization

and

despair, then let us eliminate the victims." Nevertheless, a

had not altered the first condition of the and radical-popular mobilization - an exclusionary political

strategy along these lines

insurgencies

may have armor-plated it fiirther. Though Colombia is today exceptional within

order. It

to

its

ongoing

civil

war, in the world at large

sentative than, say, Bolivia,

sharp limits

on

may

be more repre-

where national-popular mobilization has

state violence,

carbon resources,

Latin America, thanks

it

and led

set

to the nationalization of hydro-

as well as a shift: in political representation

the ruling minority of criollos and mestizos.

I

away

fi^om

have focused on explaining

the exceptional character of Colombia's political violence since the

1940s, but the final chapter suggests that under presidents Bush and Uribe,

Colombia may have become a model

for "successfiil" counter-

insurgency and "low-intensity" democracies worldwide.

With

the blessing of Washington and international financial institu-

HOUR

EVIL tions, in the

IN

COLOMBIA

I35

1990s wealth and power were concentrated to an

extra-

ordinary degree by exclusionary parliamentary democratic systems, characterized by regular elections,

and

economic policies. would be examples from the

neoliberal

El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala

American region where skyrocketing crime,

Latin

shadowy

impunity, and murders followed "successful" counterinsur-

mafia-political

FMLN

gency, except that the

^

electoral party.

the

FSLN

successfully endured,

many "emerging market

Like

North Adantic, they

high

and the

almost unrecognizable form, the transition from army to

in

albeit

levels

feature

endemic

class

and

democracies" outside ethnic-racial conflict,

of violence and impunity, and a potent fusion of politics with

organized crime. Iraq and Afghanistan would be other examples of

where insurgencies, neoliberal economic

societies

cratic"

elections

and "demo-

policies,

take place in the midst of growing impunity for

organized crime, except that both are under

US

occupation, and are

therefore exceptional.

As

part of liberal nation state formation, other "low-intensity

racies" in Latin

ing

periods

Colombian life

-

America established

of

US

official

government-sponsored

case, incorporation

the fiision of politics

democ-

Truth Commissions followIn

terror.

state

the

of paramilitaries into elections and public

and organized crime -

is

premised on

officially

enforced amnesia with precedents in the cold war. Through the Justice

and Peace Law, Alvaro Uribe has allowed parastate criminals of oblivion, and to prosper

their crimes in a haze

after the fashion

to

bury

of those

amnestied by Rojas Pinilla in the 1950s.

There First,

are at least three significant differences

lacking patronage

ties to either party,

between then and now.

Left insurgencies have litde

chance of partaking of the amnesty; under Uribe, the

be targeted for elimination of paramilitary blocs

is

as "terrorists."

far stronger in relation to the

central

government than

it

capital

accumulation and

its

had been

fifty

autonomy from

bipartisan system

is

at least, will

two

parties

it

a considerable

the state that created

it.

collapsing under the impact of uribismo.

future, the Liberal-Conservative diarchy

is

and

Whatever

society.

Bringing an analysis of the past to bear on the present,

memory and

Third, the

unlikely to survive intact

the proposed paramilitary integration into state

public debates about

and the

years before. Its strategy of

evolution as a parastate give

degree of relative

its

FARC,

Second, the regional coalition

justice in light

I

have situated

of what came before.

FORREST HYLTON

136

Colonial

modes of

political

domination, economic exploitation, and

racial/ethnic discrimination did not

but entered a

moment it,

is

new stage from which

surely

end with the Wars of Independence, they have yet to emerge.

one of Colombia's darkest, but

if

the past

The is

current

any guide,

too, shall pass.

Radical-popular

movements have proven

to be nothing if not resilient,

recreating themselves in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, despite successive waves of state, parastate,

and even insurgent

struggled to hold the state accountable to

its

citizens,

the rule of law according to constitutional rights. offered a different

model of authority — rooted

forms of democracy - than the

terror.

and

They have

to strengthen

They have

therefore

in non-liberal, collective

state or the insurgencies,

of the parastate. Compared to the Nasa in Cauca, the Peace

not to speak

Community

of San Jose, or Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities in the

Choco, the

FARC

militarist visions

and the counterinsurgency have impoverished,

of democracy, security, autonomy, and sovereignty.

Surveying the Colombian past,

we might draw hope from

time and again, radical-popular movements have arisen to

the fact that,

demand

determination in a more peaceful, equitable, and just polity.

self-

Notes

Introduction: 1

For

statistics

on the Clioco,

Remembering Colombia see

Grace Livingstone, Inside Colombia: Drugs,

War (New Brunswick, NJ 2004), p. 75. For the history of of natural resources in the Choco in the 1970s and 1980s, see

Democracy, and the extraction Peter

Wade,

Blackness

and Race

Mixture. The Dynamics of Racial Identity

MD

1993), pp. 131-48. For racial categories such as mestizo and black, see ibid., pp. 8-28. note on statistics: I assume that they are (Baltimore,

A

part of political contests to define truth, rather than neutral numerical abstractions,

and use them

less for

the sake of precision than for purposes of

illustration.

2 For figures on

US

military

and

police aid to Colombia, see

Adam

Isaacson,

"Number Three No More," 19 April 2005: www.ciponline.org. 3 "No en nuestros territorios," 15 November 2005: www.codhes.co; English translations, see

Adam Isaacson,

"

'Not in our

territories,'

say

for

Choco

leaders," www.ciponline.org.

4 Jon Wiener, "Mike Davis talks about the 'Heroes of Hell'," Radical History Review 85 (2003), pp. 227-37. 5 Antonio Caballero, "Infiltrados o reinsertados?" Semana, 30 April 2006. 6 For the concept of enclave economies, see Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faleno, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley, CA 1979 [19711), p. xix: "In enclave economies, foreign invested capital originates in the exterior,

and transforms

is

incorporated into local productive processes,

parts of itself into

goods that bananas,

realize again the life

etc.) are

taxes. Its value is increased by which transform nature and produce

wages and

the exploitation of local labor forces,

of

this capital

when

staples (oil, copper,

sold in the external market^ Italics in original. For critical

LeGrand, "Living in Macondo: Economy and Company Banana Enclave in Colombia," in Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds. Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the History of US-Latin American Relations (Durham, NC 1998), pp. 334-7.

discussion, see Catherine

Culture in a United Fruit

C

2 1

FORREST HYLTON

138

7 Ivan Orozco Abad, "La democracia y el tratamiento del enemigo interior," Andlisis Politico 6 (Enero-Abril 1989), pp. 54-79. 8 Figures taken from Human Rights Watch, "Colombia: Resumen de pais," January 2006: www.hrw.org. On displacement, see Nora Segura Escobar, "Colombia: Guerra y desplazamiento forzoso," Andlisis Politico 43 (MayoAgosto 2001), pp. 85-106. On gender and displacement, see Donny Meenens, "Victims and Survivors of War in Colombia: Three Views of

Gender Relations," in Charles Bergquist et al., eds. Violence in Colombia, 1990-2000: Waging War and Negotiating Peace (Wilmington, DE 2001), pp. 151-70; for bibliography, see Flor Alba Romero, "Poblacion desplazada por la violencia en Colombia y otros paises," Andlisis Politico 34 (MayoAgosto 1998), pp. 126-43. issues of justice, reparations, and reconciliation, see Ivan Orozco Abad,

9 For

"La posguerra colombiana,"

46 (Mayo-Agosto 2002),

Andlisis Politico

pp. 78-99.

10

Human

1

As elsewhere

Rights Watch, "Colombia: in Latin

self-identification

America,

shifts

Resumen de

pais."

racial categories in

Colombia

are fluid,

and

according to political processes and outcomes.

According to the Colombian government's

human

rights

observatory,

roughly one in four Colombians was of African descent, while according to the former governor of the Choco, Luis Gilberto Murillo, the true figure was between 36 and 40 per cent. Some 80 to 85 indigenous peoples represented an estimated 800,000 to 1 million people, perhaps 2 per cent of a national population of 44 million, according to the National Organization of Indigenous Colombians and the High Commission for Human Rights. See Luis Gilberto Murillo, "El Choco: The African Heart of Colombia," Colombia Update: Colombia Human Rights Network (Win-

UN

ter/Spring 2001), pp. 12-13. 1

For the concept of internal colonialism in Colombia and Latin America, see Blackness and Race Mixture, pp. 147-8; idem. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London 1997), pp. GA-7. Schematically speaking, social formations structured by internal colonialism reproduce, often in new

Wade,

forms, relations of violence, domination, and exploitation derived from

- where wealth any other region in the world - is almost exclusively Creole (of Spanish descent), while thin middle sectors generally adhere to the Creole ideal whatever their hue. The majority of rural and urban laborers are dark-skinned descendants of Africans, indigenous groups, and people of mixed European-African-Native Amercolonialism. In Latin America, the small minority at the top

and

political

power

more concentrated than

are

in

ican descent (mestizos).

13 See Willian F. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Choco',

OK

1680-1810 (Norman, 1976). 14 See Roland Marchal and Christine Messiant, "Las guerras

civiles

en

la era

de

nuevos conflictos y nuevos paradigmas," in Andlisis Poli'tico 50 (Enero-Abril 2004), pp. 20-34. For a look at Colombia compared to

la globalizacion:

5

HOUR

EVIL

COLOMBIA

IN

I39

Lebanon, and Angola, see Nazih Richani, Systems of Violence: The Economy of War and Peace in Colombia (Albany, NY 2002), pp. 157-71. A significant number of major historical and social scientific works are not Italy,

Political

1

cited below.

I

make no claim

essentially interpretive, specialists interested in

I

reading

my

to comprehensiveness; since

only works of which

cite

more should consult

I

have

made

task

use.

is

Non-

the bibliographic essays

David Bushnell, The Making of Modem Colombia: A Nation in Spite of //j(f^( Berkeley, CA 1993); Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Divided Land Fragmented Society (Oxford 2001); and Ricardo Penaranda, "The War on Paper: A Balance Sheet on Works Published in the 1990s,"

in

in

Bergquist

Charles

et

Violence

eds,

al.,

in

1990-2000,

Colombia:

pp. 179-94.

16 Gonzalo Sanchez, "Guerra prolongada y negociaciones inciertas en Colombia," in Sanchez and Eric Lair, comps, Violencias y estrategias colectivas en la region andina (Bogota 2004), p. 19. 17 The characterization of the conflict is the subject of ongoing debate. three scholars of civil

Colombian

en Colombia?" Andlisis

rural

life:

William Ramirez Tobon,

I

follow

,;Guerra

AG (Mayo-Agosto 2002), pp. 151-63;

Politico

Dario Fajardo, "La internacionalizacion de Alvarez, comp.. El Plan Colombia

'

y

la

guerra," in Jairo Estrada

la intensifcacidn

de

la guerra: Aspectos

globales y locales (Bogota 2002), p. 71; Alfredo

Espectador, 8

May

2005. See

intensidad," El Tiempo, 23

also,

May

Molano, "^Neutralidad?" El Alfredo Rangel, "Guerra civil de baja

2004.

18 Fernand Braudel, "History and the Social Sciences" (1958), in Sarah Matthews (Chicago 1980),

trans.

cional:

La

historia

y

la

p.

On

History,

37; idem, "La historia opera-

investigacion del presente" (1971), Contrahistorias 2

(Mexico, DF), Marzo-Agosto 2004, pp.

29^0; Marc

Bloch, The Histor-

(New York

1953), pp. 43-7; and E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York 1961), pp. 28-9, 35, 69. In Colombia, Dario Betancourt and Marta Luz Garcia's work stressed this connection. See Daniel Pecaut, "Los ians' Craft

aportes de Dario

Betancoun Echeverry,"

y la politica (Bogota 2004), kidnapped and "disappeared" in 1999. intelectuales

in

Gonzalo Sanchez et al., Los 107-19. Betancoun was

pp.

19 Alison Brysk, "Recovering from State Terror:

America," Latin American Research Review 38: Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression

MN 20

and

The Morning

After in Latin

1

(February 2003), p. 239;

the Labors

of Memory (Miimeapolis,

2003), pp. 46-9.

I refer

to vulgar interpretations that posit a timeless,

tion for violence.

While these

unchanging predilecpohcy-making

interpretations prevail in

more historicized visions, like Alvaro Tirado Mejia's, stress the development of authoritarian educational institutions, political culture, and regulation of private life under the Regeneration and through la Violencia (1880-1964). These, of course, are worthy of serious consideration. See Fabio Lopez de la Roche, "Cultura politica de las ciases dirigentes en

circles,

FORREST HYLTON

I40

Colombia: Permanencias y rupturas," in Lopez de la Roche, comp., Ensayos sobre cultura politica colombiana (Bogota 1990), pp. 119-20, n. 32. 21 James E. Sanders, Contentions Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in

NC

2004), p. 197. Mary Roldan, Blood and Fire: La Violencia inAntioquia, 1946-53 (Durham, 2002), p.

Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham,

NC

14. See also,

Malcolm Deas, "Alg^nos

interrogantes sobre la relacion entre

and Ricardo Paiiaranda, comps, Posada ypresentede la Violencia en Colombia {^0^0x2. 1986), pp. 41-6; and David Bushneil, "Politics and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Colomguerras civiles y violencia," in Gonzalo Sanchez

bia," in Charles Bergquist et

al.,

The Violence

eds.

in Colombia:

temporary Crisis in Historical Perspective {^'Amm^on,

DE

The Con-

1992), pp.

1

1-30.

Dependency and Development, pp. 96-9; Tulio Halperin Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America (Durham,

22 Cardoso and

Faletto,

NC 1992 [1967]), p. 282, 383. 23 See Daniel Pecaut, Ordeny violencia: Colombia, 1930-53, vol. I (Bogota 1 987), p. 1 8; Bushneil, The Making ofModem Colombia, p. 284; Marco Palacios, Entre la le^timidady la violencia: Cobmbia, 1875-1994 {^o^oxa 1995), p. 237. 24 In addition to The Prison Notebooks (New York 1971 [1929-35]), my understanding of ruling-class hegemony and territorial fragmentation has been influenced by Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question (West Lafayette, IN 1995), translated and introduced by Pasquale Verdicchio, 25 Following Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, i