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“La Violencia” Colombia

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“La Violencia” Colombia Conflict 93 LA VIOLENCIA In a country of regions, a nation that geographically defies unification, La Vio- lencia was a phenomenon that clearly demonstrated the weakness of the Co- lombian state. The Colombian government, for all intents and purposes, was confined to the Plaza de Bolívar, the main square in Bogotá, and other main plazas at regional capital cities. People in the countryside had no incentive to 94 Chapter Five obey arbitrary laws, radiating out from a distant capital and written by politi- cians who never understood rural life in Colombia. When the Liberal Party decided not to run a candidate in the 1950 election, politics became something other than electoral contests and governance: for Liberals who held no stake in the official political apparatus, violence seemed to be the only means for political participation. Thus vengeance killings, cattle theft, and long-standing familial and territorial disputes came to define reality for vast segments of Andean, rural Colombia, and the distant Colombian government was both unwilling and unable to stop any of this. Perhaps as many as 80 percent of the victims of the violence, roughly a quarter of a million people killed during a fourteen-year period (1946–1960), were young, male, and poor. The violence demonstrated a severe disconnect between urban and rural Colombians and between the wealthy and the poor, highlighting the dangers of demonization of political adversaries. Myopic, anemic leadership at Bogotá made people in the rural areas realize that the government could not respond and would not respond, so poor people took political matters into their own hands in the manner that was most functional to them. They destroyed their enemies, their neighbors, through visceral, brutal violence, and it took years for the nation’s decision makers to take note and to develop a plan of action to stop or at least diminish the violence. That plan—a creative, collaborative effort called the National Front—was organized by elites in the capital city and offered some political breathing room for both parties. The National Front was the political agreement whereby the two traditional political parties, Conservatives and Liberals, would rotate in and out of the presidency every four years through competitive elections, though the competition would be interparty. This ar- rangement grew out of Colombia’s unique nineteenth- and twentieth-century political history—discussed earlier—whereby one party would rule to the complete exclusion of the other party, offering little more to the party out of power than a challenge to mobilize for violence. There is little doubt that the National Front succeeded in dampening down rural violence, but hostility, anger, and revenge killings in the countryside did not end overnight because of an elite political agreement at Bogotá. Gradually, as in other Colombian conflicts, the violence grew counterproductive, as a developmentalist model took hold and work began (with millions of dollars in funding from the United States) to rebuild the battered nation. Another often-overlooked factor that contributed to a Colombian quasi- consensus against the violence was a book, published in two volumes in 1962. Three Colombians, the jurist Eduardo Umaña Luna of the National University at Bogotá, a prelate, Monsignor Germán Guzmán Campos, and a young intellectual, a sociologist who earned a doctorate at the University of Florida, Orlando Fals Borda, authored La violencia en Colombia: Estudio de Conflict 95 un Proceso social.7 The book painted a clear, unsentimental account of the years of violence, based largely on fieldwork, interviews, and graphic pho- tographs. The published work shocked the literati in Bogotá and throughout the cities; people in Colombia knew that violence occurred in rural areas of the nation, but the wealthy and well connected—most of whom could protect themselves from such phenomena—read this dispassionate report as one that seemed to come from a distant land. The book clashed with their concept of modernity and national development. La violencia en Colombia was pub- lished, it should be noted, just months after U.S. president John F. Kennedy visited Colombia as a way to show solidarity with the nation’s political and economic elite. Kennedy allocated millions of dollars to Colombia—a nation he viewed as a model of democracy and gradualist development—for his sig- nature development program in Latin America, the Alliance for Progress. He also, ironically, promoted the U.S. Peace Corps while in Colombia. Colombia would serve as the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to welcome the arrival of sixty-one Peace Corps volunteers in the fall of 1961. The first paragraph of La violencia en Colombia expresses the lack of clar- ity that certainly existed in the early 1960s and, to a certain degree, charac- terizes contemporary Colombia. The authors wrote, “Much has been written about the violence, but there is really no agreement as to what it means.”8 The book established “violence” as a legitimate area of academic research—the researchers were referred to as violontologos or (roughly translated) “those who study the violence.” For many years, during the 1960s up until quite recently, political and social violence seemed to be the major concern and focus of the academic community, especially scholars living outside Colom- bia, including American Robert Dix, American-born Paul Oquist, and French sociologist Daniel Pécaut, to name a few. The creative solution to “the violence”—the emergence of the National Front—led to a new and unforeseen substructure of violence in the form of leftist guerilla insurgencies throughout the country. Colombians who wanted nothing to do with traditional Conservative or Liberal Party platforms were dismayed by the narrowness of the elite bipartisan agreement. How would the politically unaligned or disenchanted engage politically after the 1958 imple- mentation of the National Front? Part of the answer came in the form of a revolution on the not-so-distant island of Cuba, months after implementation of the National Front. The Cuban Revolution of January 1959 provided enor- mous energy for the disenchanted, those who questioned traditional politics, political alignments, and economics in the Americas. The accommodating nature of the National Front represented, by January 1959, an opportunity for organization outside of the traditional party alliance in Colombia and gave birth, in effect, to the modern leftist armed insurgencies in Colombia, one of which—the ELN—is still operational in the country, though certainly their objectives and philosophy have mutated during their difficult, fifty-five-year existence. Conflict 103 Conflict has been endemic in Colombia since the earliest days of the re- public’s founding. It has resulted from geographic factors which, in isolating large segments of the country, created strong regional identities and culture. Political factors paired with the historical weakness of the central govern- ment and the immense power of the Church and oligarchy contributed to tension in the nineteenth century that would spill over into armed conflict at various periods in Colombia’s history. Outside meddling by the United States in the early twentieth century and disagreements with neighbor- ing countries generated conflict, but most of the conflict in Colombia has been produced internally; vacillating leadership, inadequate prosecutorial customs, a tepid press, distant, diffident political officials, and outright fear have allowed murderers to kill with impunity in contemporary Colombia. But conflict does not define the Colombian nation or its people. The resil- ience of the Colombian nation, a nation that has endured so much conflict, is evidenced in a difficult-to-quantify “Colombian style,” which is informal, warm, accepting, and refreshingly suspicious of those who take too much for granted. Colombians have learned to live with great ambiguity and un- certainty. Conflict is part of everyday life, but so too is warmth, generosity, and a spirit of collaboration. Most Colombians try to transcend the daily po- litical and social conflict by spending as much time as possible with family, friends, and visitors—a style of endurance influenced by Colombia’s unique historical and cultural development. NOTES 1. We use the English spelling “guerilla” as opposed to the Spanish guerrilla (liter- ally, “little war”). Also, we interchange guerilla (as a movement) with “insurgency.” 2. Gran Colombia is a nickname for the time period when Colombia comprised Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama, 1821–1830. 3. David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 118 4. See chapter 7 of Bushnell, “The New Age of Peace and Coffee (1904– 1930).” 5. Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 107. 6. Tragedy characterized the demise of several Latin American populists; Getúlio Vargas committed suicide in his bedroom in the Presidential Palace in 1954, and the much beloved Eva Perón died of cancer at thirty-three years of age in 1952. 7. Germán Guzmán, Orlando Fals Borda, and Eduardo Umaña Luna, La violencia en Colombia: Estudio de un Proceso Social (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1962). 8. Ibid., 23. 9. Palacios, 213. 10. Alma Guillermoprieto, Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America (New York: Vintage, 2001), 31..
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