Violencia Pública En Colombia, 1958–2010

Abstract

This book recounts the history of the last half century in Colombia, focusing on the violent contention between the Colombian state, Marxist-inspired guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitary forces. Author Marco Palacios, a Colombian historian now based at the Colegio de México, is at pains to place his account against the background of US Cold War and terrorist concerns as well as the dynamics of the illegal drug trade, both of which color every aspect of the events he chronicles.Most of the information in the book is not new, drawn as it is from Colombia's major newspapers and news magazines as well as reading in an increasingly rich and sophisticated secondary literature on the period. Palacios is content, as he puts it, to “revise, correct, amplify, and restate” information and interpretations previously advanced in his own work and that of others (p. 20). In fact, his interpretations of the salient issues of the period — from the meanings of La Violencia (the civil commotion of the mid-twentieth century that pitted Liberals against Conservatives and resulted in 1958 in the power-sharing arrangement, the Frente Nacional, which marks the beginning of Palacios's study) to the ebb and flow of the different guerrilla groups' military strength over the decades and to the fate of efforts at negotiated peace between the armed contenders — follow mainstream understandings widely shared by specialists in the field of Colombian studies.Why then write and publish a book like this? Palacios himself seems somewhat at a loss to answer that question (pp. 20–21), but he concludes that his bird's-eye historical synthesis is meaningful. He is quick to point out that his interpretation is one of many possible ones and that it does not offer prescriptions for a future political settlement.Be that as it may, not all the information and analysis in the book is commonplace. There is an attempt to statistically analyze police records, for example, and although many of these labor-intensive exercises yield banal conclusions, such as the fact that most of the violence is “rural” (table 4.4, p. 175) or that it is largely perpetrated by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (figure 4.1, p. 179), there is important statistical information in the book, most notably a comparison of the degree of land concentration in 1964 and 2009 (appendix 2, p. 196). That data reveals a radical transformation of land tenure in the last half century, an agrarian counterreform of unprecedented proportions. Tens of thousands of small and medium-sized farmers, displaced by the violent contention between government forces, guerrilla groups, and paramilitary forces in rural areas, have been dispossessed by large landowners, many of them bankrolled by drug money.Palacios rightly emphasizes the growing influence of large landowners (latifundistas) in Colombian politics and society, but he curiously ignores the ideological and political legacies of the remarkable diffusion of property ownership, especially in the all-important coffee zones, during the middle decades of the twentieth century. That largely market-induced agrarian reform, I have argued elsewhere, sets Colombian history off from that of its Andean neighbors and of Latin American nations generally, and it helps to explain many of the exceptional features of Colombian history during the last half century. These include the remarkable staying power of Colombia's traditional, clientelistic two-party political system and the poor showing of third parties of both the Left and the Right; the weakness of labor and the Left, and the paradox of the longevity of an armed Left unable to win widespread political and ideological support and consequently relying on kidnapping, extortion, and drug trafficking to support itself; and the degree of Colombian acquiescence to neoliberal economic reform and the appeal of right-wing, US-allied governments like that of Álvaro Uribe's eight-year presidency, which ends the period covered by Palacios's book.A useful feature of Palacios's book is its bibliography of secondary works. But even here there are glaring omissions. These include the classic collection on La Violencia edited by Gonzalo Sánchez and Ricardo Peñaranda and the compelling critique by ex-Communist Alvaro Delgado of the Colombian Communist Party's strategy of pursuing, simultaneously, electoral and armed strategies of achieving power, a policy that proved disastrous for the peaceful Colombian Left and for labor leaders in particular.On page 79 (footnote 12), the author announces that he is at work on a study dealing with the first decade of Colombia's second most important guerrilla group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional. Hopefully, that monograph will do more than the present survey to advance our understanding of violence in Colombia.