Toward a Theory of Political Violence: the Case of Rural Colombia

Abstract

IOLENCE has generally been associated with revolution, war, or organized crime. The present century has been remarkable for large-scale violence in these three categories. Much of recent mass violence has been a product of guerrilla or undeclared warfare, including struggles of liberation from colonial rule, and conflicts between different power groups. At the broadest base, one might say, a trifle pretentiously, that violence and terror are an erratic by-product of the vast social change toward equalitarianism in the world. Yet this article focuses on a unique process of violence: a variety of civil war, which, since 1948, has annihilated nearly 200,000 people in the backlands of Colombia. Before examining this phenomenon, we shall establish the theoretical context of terror and violence. Violence can be defined as a severely dysfunctional form of conflict, which in the case of Colombia has been a vendetta between the two political parties, an abortive revolutionary process, and a blind reaction to social frustration.' Violence is, among other things, a cultural artifact, and in the Colombian case, a traditional behavior pattern periodically becoming a cataclysm under certain social pressures. If we accept the Simmel theory2 that conflict is necessary for group integrity, cohesiveness, and the boundary maintenance of the group, the Colombian example pushes the case to the breaking point. The question may be raised as to what type of society is most likely to produce violence, or in what sociopolitical climate violence is a predictable outcome. According to Kornhauser, violence is associated with mass movements that are non-institutionalized.3 In our twentieth-century mass society, organized violence has occurred most dramatically under totalitarian governments where formalized and legitimatized channels are a prescribed part of the social system, or at least are available. Regarding transitional or developing nations, a different sociopolitical climate has generally been the case. In recent Colombia, the individual is alienated from the society he has known. In rural areas, the decline of localism and the emergence of a federated social order have posed a difficult problem for both the campesino (peasant) and the llanero (range cattleman), different as they are. Anomy results from conflicting norms; the relations of the little man to the land and to the proprietor are