uribe's colombia in historical perspective

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new left review 23 sep oct 2003 51

forrest hylton

AN E VIL HOUR

With lvaro Uribe Vlezs inauguration as Presidentof Colombia on 7 August 2002, the outlaws havebecome the establishment. Uribes father, Alberto UribeSierra, had been languishing in debt in the middle-class

Medelln neighbourhood of Laureles, in the mid-1970s, when a strangereversal of fortune catapulted him to wealth and influence as politicalbroker and real-estate intermediary for the narco-traffickers, boastingextensive cattle ranches in Antioquia and Crdoba. Uribe Sierra was

connected by marriage to the Ochoas, an elite family that joined theupwardly mobile contrabandistas arribistas to form the Medelln cartel;when Pablo Escobar launched his Medelln without slums campaignin 1982, Uribe Sierra organized a fundraising horse race to help out.Uribefils was removed from his post as mayor of Medelln for his con-spicuous attendance at a meeting of the regions drug cartel at Escobarshacienda, Npoles. When his father was murdered at his ranch in 1983,leaving behind debts of around $10 million, lvaro Uribe flew there

in Escobars helicopter. During his tenure as governor of Antioquia,between 1995 and 1997, Uribes Montesinosto borrow a phrase fromAlfredo Molanowas Pedro Juan Moreno Villa, alleged by a former usdea chief to be the countrys leading importer of potassium permanga-nate, the main chemical precursor in the manufacture of cocaine.1

This is Washingtons leading exponent of the war on drugs and terrorin the Western hemisphere. In April 2003 the us Congress awarded

Uribe an extra $104 million, on top of the $2 billion that has alreadybeen disbursed since 1999 under Plan Colombia. Whereas elsewherein Latin America the imf issues stern demands for fiscal surplus,

Uribes Colombia in Historical Perspective


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Colombias special needs are treated with indulgence and its militaryexpenditure thoughtfully excluded from the public-sector cutbacks theFund requires. For the well-known statistics of Colombias spiralling vio-lence also mark it out from all other Latin American countries. By the

mid-1990s, the homicide rate had soared to world-record heights: 72 per100,000 inhabitants, compared to 24.6 for Brazil, 20 for Mexico, 11.5 forPeru and 8 for the us. Homicide is the leading cause of death amongmen and the second leading cause among women.2 An average of twentypolitical killings were committed daily in 2001, up from fourteen per dayin 2000although it should be pointed out that most of these take placewithin five or six specific zones. Over half the worlds annual kidnap-pings occur inColombia. In 2001, 90 per cent of all trade-union activists

murdered were killed there. The country has the third highest numberof internal refugees in the world with over 2.9 million, out of a popula-tion of nearly 45 million, driven from their homes in the countryside; itis no exaggeration to say that it is rapidly becoming a place with nowhereto run and nowhere to hide.

Uribes inauguration ceremony was famously marked by nineteenmortar-bombs fired in his direction by farc guerrillas; symbolically,

these failed to do much damage to the Presidential Palace but killedtwenty-one people in the nearby slums. Again, in contrast to El Salvadoror Peru, the Colombian state has succeeded neither in neutralizing nordefeating its guerrilla insurgencies, intact since the 1960s. The farc, orFuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, with multiple bases anda stronghold in the southeast, has an estimated 16,00018,000 com-batants. The eln, or Ejrcito de Liberacin Nacional, mainly centred inthe oil regions of the northeast and the Caribbean export zones, has

between 5,000 and 7,000. Their longevity parallels the exclusion of pop-ular demands from the mainstream political system: whereas elsewheremass mobilizations have created new parties, forced changes in policyor overthrown governments, in Colombia neither urban populism norsocial democracy has ever been allowed to emerge as a national force.

1 See Joseph Contreras, with the collaboration of Fernando Garavito, El Seorde las Sombras: Biografa no autorizada de lvaro Uribe Vlez, Bogot 2000, pp.3543, 6572, 92, 167. Contreras is Newsweeks Latin American editor, and Garavito

a Colombian political columnist recently driven into exile by paramilitary deaththreats. For Molano, see Peor el remedio, El Espectador, 1 September 2002.2 Andrs Villaveces, Appendix: A Comparative Statistical Note on Homicide Ratesin Colombia, in Charles Bergquist et al., eds, Violence in Colombia, 19902000:Waging War and Negotiating Peace, Wilmington 2001, pp. 27580.


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Yet this is no dictatorship. With presidential elections held like clock-work every four years, Colombias constitutional democracy can boastthe longest running two-party system in Latin America; despite the factthat the two factions have often shed each others blood, the classic

political paradigmstructured, along Iberian lines, by an oligarchicdivision between Conservatives and Liberalspersists to this day. Thesystem was, of course, characteristic of the newly independent LatinAmerican states of the early nineteenth century where a ruling elite oflandowners, lawyers and merchants, manipulating a restricted suffragein which those who had the vote were clients rather than citizens, typi-cally split into two wings. Conservatives were devoted first and foremostto order, andlike their counterparts in Europereligion, in close alli-

ance with the Catholic Church. Liberals declared themselves in favourof progress, and were on the whole anti-clerical. Economically speak-ing, landed wealth tended to be more Conservative; commercial fortunesmore Liberal. This civilian division, in turn, would be punctuated orcross-cut by pronunciamientos and seizures of power by rival militarychieftains, in the namebut not always with the assentof one or otherof the opposing political parties.

Elsewhere, however, by the early twentieth century, this pattern hadstarted to give way to a modern urban politics, in which radical coali-tions or populist parties mobilized newly awakened masses with callsfor basic social change. Throughout the rest of the continent, acceler-ated urbanization and pressure from agrarian reforms led to a declinein the political weight of the landed fraction of the ruling class. InColombia alone, a ConservativeLiberal dyarchy has survived nearly ahundred years longer, remaining outwardly intact down to the twenty-

first centuryand this despite legislative elections governed by the rulesof proportional representation. The singularity of this phenomenon isnot confined to Latin America; in effect, no other party system in theworld can boast a continuity comparable to the Colombian. Perhapsthe simplest way of grasping the extraordinary character of the oligar-chy is to list the kinship ties of its modern presidents. Mariano OspinaRodrguez (185761) was the first self-declared Conservative President ofColombia, in the epoch of Palmerston; his son Pedro Nel Ospina held

the same office in that of Baldwin (192226); his grandson MarianoOspina Prez, in that of Attlee (194650). Alfonso Lpez Pumarejo, themost significant Liberal President of modern times, was a contempo-rary of Roosevelt (193438, and again 194245); his son Alfonso Lpez


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Michelsen, was President (197478) in the time of Ford and Carter.Alberto Lleras Camargo, another Liberal, was President in the days ofthe Alliance for Progress (195862); his cousin Carlos Lleras Restrepoduring the Vietnam War (196670). The Conservative Misael Pastrana

succeeded him (197074); twenty years later his son Andrs Pastranatook up the reins of power (19982002). If Presidential candidates, aswell as winners, were included, the list would be yet longer: lvaroGmez Hurtado, the Conservative partys standard-bearer in 1974 and1986, was the son of Laureano Gmez (195053), the most extreme ofall Conservative Presidents. How could this oligarchy, excluding all classrivals, defy a course of extinction for so long? What relation does it bearto the ineradicability of the relatively small guerrilla forcesand to the

consolidation of the murderous paramilitaries? No conclusive answershave been offered to these questions, but a key to the modern agony ofColombia must lie here.

The oligarchy

Originally, the division between Liberals and Conservatives had a rationalideological foundation in Colombian society. Liberals were lay-minded

members of the landed and merchant elite, hostile to what was perceivedas the clerical and militarist compromises of the last period of Bolvarscareer as Liberator. Conservatives, who initially had closer links to thecolonial aristocracy or officialdom, stood for centralized order and thesocial controls of religion. Ideas mattered in disputes between the two,starting with the Santander governments directive that Benthams trea-tises on civil and penal legislation be mandatory study in the Universityof Bogot, as early as 1825inconceivable in England itself even fifty

years later. Furious clerical reaction eventually led to the reintroductionof the Jesuits, who had been expelled from the colonies by the Spanishmonarchy in 1767, to run the secondary schools; and then their re-expulsion in 1850.3

But the clash was not just over questions of education; nor was it apurely intra-elite affair. The Liberal Revolution of 184953 involved ris-ings of peasants against Conservative hacendados in the Cauca Valley,

and mobilization of artisans stirred by the Parisian barricades of 18483 Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia. Fragmented Land, Divided Society,New York and Oxford 2002, pp. 115, 126, 142, 151, 204.


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and the writings of Proudhon and Louis Blanc.4 As in Europe, theLiberals abandoned their craftsmen supporters to the rigours of freetrade, and dissolved communally held indigenous lands. But by theirown lights, they remained committed to radical reforms. Slavery and

the death penalty were abolished, church and state separated, clericalquit-rents lifted, divorce legalized, the army reduced, and universal malesuffrage introduced; one province evenfor a surreal split secondgranted women the vote, a world-historical first.

It was this barrage of measures that forced a more intransigent andexplicit Conservatism into being, determined to roll back as manyof these changes as it could. The sequestration of Church lands by

Mosquera, and passage of a decentralizing constitution, led to the viciousConservative backlash known as the Regeneration under Rafael Nez;initiating, in 1880, five decades of extreme reaction. The constitutionof 1886 enshrined the power of the centre, giving the President theauthority to appoint provincial governors. The new concordat with theVatican ensured a tight link with the most authoritarian currents of theChurch, which dispatched successive waves of battle-hardened zealotsfrom other theatres of struggleEuropean or Latin Americanto fortify

the faith in Colombia. At the end of the century, the Regeneration regimescrushed Liberal resistance in the murderous War of a Thousand Days(18991903), leaving 100,000 dead, and jettisoned Panama to the us.

Topography of clientelism

Why does this pre-history of twentieth-century Colombia still matter somuch? Because it set the parameters for national politics down to the

threshold of the 1960sand, by perpetuating Liberal and Conservativeidentities, even now fixes public life in a peculiar rigor mortis. The rea-sons for such persistence clearly have much to do with topography:extreme geographical differentiation has always been an inescapable

4 For a pioneering treatment of the development of Afro-liberalism, indigenous con-servatism, and Antioquian settler conservatism in the Cauca after 1848, see JamesSanders, Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, Durham, NC forthcoming. Nancy Applebaums innovative Race,

Region, and Local History in Colombia, 18461948, Durham, NC 2003, goes beyondeconomistic debates on Antioquian settlers to examine the role of white suprem-acy in the cultural formation of a colonizing paisa identity along the coffee axis(el eje cafetero).


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factor of Colombian politics. The country is rent by three great mountainranges fanning up from the south, themselves split by the watercoursesof the Cauca and Magdalena. To the southeast, it opens out onto a vastexpanse of tropical lowlands, straddling the equator and crisscrossed by

innumerable rivers draining into the Orinoco and Amazon basins. To thenorth and west lie the Caribbean and Pacific coasts and the impenetra-ble jungle of the Panamanian Isthmus, while the countrys principal oilreserves lie in the easterly province of Arauca, fronting the Venezuelanborder. The majority of the population has always been concentrated inthe cooler and sub-tropical mountainous regions; Bogot, at 8,660 feetabove sea level, has an average temperature of 57F (14C). But the citiesthemselves were for centuries separated by tortuous roads and snow-

capped peaks; as they remain, for those who cannot afford air travel.

This is a configuration that has awarded traditional elites an exceptionallogistical advantage in imposing parochial clientelistic controls fromabove, while blocking nationwide mobilizations from below. But poortransport and geographical isolation have also had a critical shapingeffect on the ruling groups themselves. Centralized military control wasinherently more difficult in Colombia than in its neighbours: relative to

population, the army was always about a third of the size of that in Peruor Ecuador.5 Civilian partiesand the churchthus became much moreimportant as transmission belts of power than elsewhere. But they couldnot escape the logic of territorial fragmentation, either.

Although the country was divided between two great political loyalties,these showed no systematic regional pattern. A few zones did exhibita clear-cut predominance of one or other party early on: the Caribbean

littoral was Liberal, Antioquia was Conservative. But these were theexceptions. The rule was a much more intricate quilt of local rivalries atthe micro-level of small communities or townships, cheek by jowl withineach region. This had two consequences. Liberals and Conservativeswere from the start, and have remained, highly factional as nationwideorganizations. But what they lost in horizontal cohesion, they havegained in vertical grip on their followers, as the intense material andideological forces of their mutual contention were applied in intimate

grass-roots settings; the exceptional strength of Colombian clientelismno doubt owes much to the particular localization of these pressures.

5 James Payne, Patterns of Conflict in Colombia, New Haven 1968, pp. 1212.


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Another feature of the Colombian countryside both reinforced thisclientelism and gave it an unusual political twist. The country emergedfrom the wars of independence as one of the most disunited and eco-nomically depressed of the new Latin American nations, with miserable

communications, little foreign trade and very low fiscal capacity. It wasthe discovery, from the 1870s, that large parts of its highlands wereideal terrain for the cultivation of coffee that gave it a major exportstaple, generating substantial earnings and transforming the prospectsfor growth of the economy. Starting in Santander as an extension ofVenezuelan coffee farms, the crop spread westwards into Cundinamarcaand then into Tolima and Antioquia by the end of the century. Withinanother two decades, the country had become the worlds second biggest

producer after Brazil.

But the pattern of its coffee economy was distinctive. In Brazil, orfor that matter Guatemala, large plantations worked by indebted peas-ants or wage-labourers predominated. In Colombia such estates weremore modest and had less weight in the pattern of cultivation whilemedium or small holdings were much more numerous, if not to thesame extent as in Costa Rica. Compared with the great fazendas of So

Paulo or Paran, the social base of coffee agriculture in Antioquia orSantander, if still highly unequal, was, measured in terms of land owner-ship, more democratic. With important regional exceptions, such asCundinamarca and Tolima, production was controlled not by planters,who faced continuous labour shortages, but by peasant families work-ing on small- and medium-sized plots at mid-level altitudes of between1000 and 2000 metres. The commercialization of the crop, however,was always in the hands of a wealthy elite, which could advance credit to

small farmers, purchase their output and finance its export.

Small producers were thus often thrust into conflict with merchant-creditors and real-estate speculators over land titles and terms of sale fortheir crop. Profit margins depended on the maintenance of an oligarchicmonopoly, in the market as much as in party politics.6 Even on large

6 Mariano Arango, Los funerales de Antioquia la grande, Medelln 1990, andCaf e Industria 18501930, Bogot 1977; Michael F. Jimnez, Traveling Far inGrandfathers Car: The Life Cycle of Central Colombian Coffee Estates: The Caseof Viot, 190030, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 2 (1989), pp.185219; At the Banquet of Civilization: The Limits of Planter Hegemony in Early-Twentieth-Century Colombia, in William Roseberry et al., eds, Coffee, Society, and


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estates in Cundinamarca, landlord-merchants had to contend with frac-tious tenants who poached, smuggled, squatted, dealt in moonshine andrioted over tax hikes.7 But the general interconnexion between small-holdings below and powerful distributors above which distinguished

the structure of the coffee sector in Colombia tended to reproducetraditional ties of dependence in modernized forms, reinforcing thebonds of clientelism.

Into the twentieth centuryThe richest of all coffee regions was Antioquia, famous for its ultramon-tane allegiances. The long ascendancy of the Conservatives, in a period

where nearly everywhere else in Latin America they were in retreat oreclipse, had an economic foundation in the coffee export boom, whichcatapulted the merchant-industrialists of Medelln, the most Catholicand reactionary of Colombias cities, to national pre-eminence. Thecountry thus entered the world economy under the leadership of themost socially regressive elements of its elite, at a time when elsewherefree-market Liberals looking to secularize civic life had typically gainedthe upper hand. Just as organized labour was starting to make itself

felt in much of the rest of the continent, Conservative rule was givena new lease of life by the coffee boom. Production jumped from 1 mil-lion sacks in 1913 to 2 million in 1921 and 3 million in 1930. Duringthe same period, Wall Street opened generous lines of credit in whatbecame known among Colombians as the Dance of the Millionsrefreshing the elite but bringing no respite to struggling hill-farmers,tenants and sharecroppers.8 By this time, however, signs of a new popu-lar radicalism were stirring.

In 1914, a sharecropper named Quintn Lame was nominated SupremeLeader of the indigenous tribes of Colombia (though he did not speak

Power in Latin America, Baltimore 1995, pp. 26293, and Struggles on an InteriorShore, Durham, nc forthcoming. Following Catherine LeGrand, Frontier Expansionand Peasant Protest in Colombia 18501936, Albuquerque, nm 1986, p. 207, the termpeasant refers to small rural cultivators who rely on family labour to produce whatthey consume. Sharecroppers, service tenants, small proprietors, and frontier set-

tlers would, by this definition, all be called peasants.7 Jimnez, Struggles on an Interior Shore.8 Malcolm Deas, The Fiscal Problems of Nineteenth-Century Colombia,Journal ofLatin American Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (1982), pp. 287328; Vernon Lee Fluharty, Danceof the Millions: Military Rule and the Social Revolution in Colombia, Pittsburgh 1957.


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Nasa, the language of his people). Lame had fought on the Liberal sidein the War of a Thousand Days. Due to his organizing efforts, he wouldspend the next decade in and out of prison; but the movement heled, known as the Quintinada, gained ground through the tactic of col-

lective land occupations which swept through southern Colombia fromthe Cauca into Tolima. In the late 1920s and early 1930s peasants tookthe offensive throughout the coffee frontier. The political mood wasnow markedly different, as anarcho-syndicalist and socialist ideas finallybegan to make headway in the labour movement following the Mexicanand Russian Revolutions and the First World War. In 1926, the first politi-cal vehicle independent of Liberal and Conservative Party tutelage, theRevolutionary Socialist Party (psr), began to organize proletarian struggle

in the export enclaves of the Caribbean and along the coffee frontiers. Thepsrs second vice-president, Ral Eduardo Mahechaa tailor who, likeQuintn Lame, was a Liberal veteran of the War of a Thousand Dayshelped found the oil workers union, us0, and led a strike against TropicalOil (a Jersey Standard subsidiary) in the Magdalena Medio in 1926.The partys first vice-president, Mara Cano, daughter of an oligarchicmedia family from Medelln, toured the countryside from 192527. WithMahecha, she led the 4,000-strong banana workers strike against United

Fruit near Santa Marta in NovemberDecember 1928. In 1929, the psrsBolsheviks of Lbano rose up in a failed insurrection in southern Tolima;the first explicitly socialist rebellion in Colombia, it represented an alli-ance that radical artisans and provincial intellectuals had formed withtenants, sharecroppers and smallholders.

In the version of the 1928 banana workers strike immortalized byGabriel Garca Mrquez in A Hundred Years of Solitude, thousands were

massacred and loaded onto boxcars, and the memory of the repressionerased by official oblivion.9 In reality, the incident was thoroughly inves-tigated and publicized by a young lawyer trained in Italian positivistcriminology. As a deputy in the lower house of Congress, Jorge Elicer

9 Eduardo Posada Carb, Fiction as History: The bananeras and Gabriel GarcaMrquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude,Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 30,part 2 (1998), pp. 395414. Marco Palacios notes the lack of consensus over theexact number massacred: the North American consul put the figure at 1,000, the

strike leader Alberto Castrilln at 1,500, and the general in charge of the massacreat 47; see Entre la legitimidad y la violencia: Colombia 18751994, Bogot 1995, p 120.David Bushnell, citing Roberto Herrera Soto and Rafael Romero Castaeda, consid-ers the number of 60 to 75 definitive: The Making of Modern Colombia: a Nation inSpite of Itself, Berkeley 1993, p. 180.


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Gaitn used the massacre to launch his career as the first populist poli-tician within the Liberal Party.10 In his study of Gaitn, Herbert Braunlabelled him, accurately, as a petit-bourgeois reformer; but by givingofficial voice to popular demands and placing the social question at

the centre of national parliamentary debate, he earned the enmity ofthe dominant, oligarchic fraction of his own party as well as that ofthe Conservative far right.11 Gaitn broke from the Liberals in 1933 tofound the National Union of the Revolutionary Left, unir, and approvedthe founding of peasant leagues to compete with those sponsored bythe Liberal Partyand, crucially, with those of the Partido SocialistaDemocrtico, the local Communist Party.12

The psd had been founded in 1930 by leaders of the psr, two of whom,Jos Gonzalo Snchez and Dimas Luna, had led the Quintinada in theearly 1920s. With a strong indigenous influence, the psd gave top prior-ity to peasant struggles on the coffee frontiers, especially in Tolima andCundinamarca, where the largest plantations were owned by merchant-bankers from Bogot, as well as Germans and North Americans. Thepsd set up peasant leagues to capitalize on the wave of land occupa-tions that swept across the countryside from 1928; by the early 1930s

it had won considerable political legitimacy by forging a revolutionaryagrarianism focusing on the formation and protection of autonomoussmallholder communities.13 Gaitn accused the psd of skipping stagesof historical development: while communist peasant leagues aspired tousher in the socialist revolution, unirs were designed to remove thefeudal blocks on the development of capitalist agriculture. The country-side was hotly contested political terrain in the early 1930s andthiswas the Cominterns sectarian Third Periodthe psd viewed unir as its

principal political opponent, especially in Tolima and Cundinamarca.

10 See W. John Green, Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism and Popular Mobilization inColombia, Gainesville, FL 2003.11 Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitn: Public Life and Urban Violence inColombia, Madison 1986, pp. 89, 456, 545. Braun contends that Gaitanismohad little impact on organized labour, but Green has shown otherwise.12 Gonzalo Snchez, Las Ligas Campesinas en Colombia, in Ensayos de historiasocial y poltica del siglo xx , pp. 15268.13

Marc Chernick and Michael Jimnez, Popular Liberalism, Radical Democracy,and Marxism: Leftist Politics in Contemporary Colombia, 19741991, in BarryCarr and Steven Ellner, eds, The Latin American Left: From the Fall of Allende toPerestroika, Boulder 1993, p. 66.


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A New Deal?

Meanwhile, a decisive shift had occurred in elite politics. In 1929 coffeeprices plunged from thirty to seventeen cents a pound, threatening a dis-

aster for the export-based economy that was consummated in OctobersWall Street Crash. Simultaneously, the Conservatives split, as churchleaders openly backed rival candidates for the elections of 1930. Withthe economic basis of their hegemony gone, and their political cohe-sion broken, the door was left open for the Liberals to regain thePresidency after fifty years in the wilderness. Their candidate, OlayaHerrera, had been Ambassador in Washington under the Conservatives,with whom he enjoyed good relations, and his vote was less than that of

the Conservative rivals combined. There were no startling policy depar-tures. But four years later, when the Liberals won againunopposed:the Conservatives boycotted the electiontheir leader was the scion of arich banking family, Alfonso Lpez Pumarejo, billed by admirers as theRoosevelt of the Andes.

The Revolution on the March proclaimed by Lpez was a limited affair,more sweeping in itsrhetoric than its reforms.14 But taxation went up,

more was spent on schools and roads, and labour legislation was liberal-ized, which opened the gates to a growth in unionization. Most effortwas invested in revising the Constitution of 1886 to ensure separation ofchurch and state. This was enough to pull Gaitn back into the Liberalfold in 1935, and prompt the psd, in line with Popular Front policies,to throw its weight behind the Lpez regime, demobilizing its peasantleagues and renouncing its vanguard ambitions. With the support ofthe psd, which dominated the trade unions, Lpez created the Central

Workers Confederation (ctc) in 1936, with the aim of turning organizedlabour into a clientelist bloc under control of the Liberal Party.

After two years in office, Lpez called a halt to any further reforms.The most significant measure he had introduced was Law 200, passedin 1936, establishing effective occupancy of land as a legal basis fortenure. It has been argued that this partial victory of coffee workersitwas very partial: the landlords benefited far morein securing access

14 For a healthily sceptical view, see Richard Stoller, Alfonso Lpez Pumarejo andLiberal Radicalism in 1930s Colombia,Journal of Latin American Studies, 27 (1995),pp. 36797.


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to frontier lands in the 1930s led, ironically, to the isolation of moremilitant trade unions in other sectors, such as oil and transport: how-ever strong these grew, they were unable to affect this central area ofthe economy; hence the subsequent fragmentation of the labour move-

ment as a whole and, in consequence, the strengthening of the twotraditional parties. Whereas in other parts of Latin America a mobilizedpeasantry would play a key role in radical class alliances, once theColombian coffee growers had their family plotsso this hypothesisrunsworkers solidarity disappeared, and intra-class competition toavoid proletarianization, mediated by the clientelist practices of thetwo parties, took a bloody turn.15 Though this should be qualifiedthere were some Gaitanist and psd tenants and sharecroppers in Viot

(Cundinamarca) and Barrancabermeja (Santander), root-stock of thelater farc and elnthe Violencia of the post-war decades cannot beunderstood without recognizing the dependent incorporation of themajority of coffee-growers into the clientelist apparatus of each party.

The Liberal Republic lasted till 1946. During the second Lpez admin-istration of 194245, embroiled in corruption, those reformstheeight-hour day, social securitythat had not been a dead letter for organ-

ized labour were rolled back and the limited land programme reversedwith Law 100. By the early 1940s a consensus had emerged among theColombian elite that it was time for a return to liberal economic ortho-doxy. Social welfare and pro-labour policies would have no place in thenew order. Medelln, where the Unin de Trabajadores de Colombia wasset up by the Church in 1946, was to be the model for the nation. In 1944,the citys Conservative manufacturing elite formed andi, the nationalindustrialists organization, and in 1945 coffee merchants founded fede-

cafe. Though they had their differences over the next decade, these

15 This is the fundamental thesis of Charles Bergquist, The Labor Movement(193046) and the Violence, in Bergquist et al, eds, The Violence in Colombia:the Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective, Wilmington 1992, pp. 69, 195.While the Revolution on the March was certainly bourgeois, it was in no waydemocratic, privileging property holders over squatters, tenants, sharecroppers andsmallholders. Though the latter groups attempted to use the law in their favour,landlords had the upper hand and were able to expand their holdings through a

mixture of private and public violence. For a view of coffee and smallholding thatquestions Bergquists structural determinism, see W. John Green, Sibling Rivalryon the Left and Labour Struggles in Colombia during the 1940s, Latin AmericanResearch Review, vol. 35, no. 1 (2000); and Michael Jimnez, The Many Deaths ofthe Colombian Revolution, Columbia Papers on Latin America, no. 13, 1990.


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groups, joined by intermarriage, would subsequently dictate economicpolicy to successive governments behind the publics back.16

Between 1945 and 1950, demonstrations were smashed in Bogot and

Cali, strikes were outlawed, firings authorized, the ctcs legal standingwas called into question and the psd outlawed. In 1945 Alberto LlerasCamargo, who had taken over when Lpez Pumarejo quit before histime was up, smashed the communist-led river workers striketheirtrade union, fedenal, having been the most successful and militantin the ctc. In 1946, through the utc, business unionismsponsoredby employers, the Church and Washingtons own Cold War unionsbegan its rapid ascent. The decade of the 1940s was a brief moment

of democratic opening almost everywhere in Latin America, with pop-ulists swept into power. In Colombia, it saw an aggressive assaulton organized labour.

La Violencia

Only Gaitnthe leading labour lawyer of the day, who had occupied theposts of senator, city councillor, mayor of Bogot, Minister of Education

and of Labourcontested these developments through official chan-nels, winning a huge following among the Liberal electorate. Thoughthe psd leadership loathed him, Gaitn also had the support of manyParty militants and the solid backing of the working class, even inConservative Catholic strongholds like Medelln. When the Liberal estab-lishment locked him out of contention as the partys candidate for thePresidency in 1946, he ran on his own ticket. The result was to splitthe Liberal vote down the middle, and let the Conservative candidate,

Ospina Prez, through. Two years later, on 9 April 1948, amid escalat-ing rural violence and deepening repression of organized labour in thetowns, Gaitn was assassinated in broad daylight on a street in Bogot.News of his murder unleashed the largest urban riots in twentieth-century Colombian history, the so-called Bogotazoa storm that sweptthe provinces as well as the capital.

16 See Medfilo Medina, Violence and Economic Development: 194550 and

198588, in Bergquist et al, Violence in Colombia: Historical Perspective, pp. 1578;Daniel Pcaut, Guerra Contra la Sociedad, Bogot 2000, pp. 589; and EduardoSenz Rovner, La ofensiva empresarial: Industriales, polticos, y violencia en los aos 40en Colombia, Bogot 1992.


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The period known simply, though misleadingly, as La Violencia, is oftensaid to have begun with this drama. But that is to foreshorten it bynearly two decades. To understand its roots, it is necessary to go backto the origins of the Liberal Republic. When Conservative rule came to

an end in 1930, tensions long simmering in the countryside began toexplode. Memories of the partisan slaughter of the War of the ThousandDays, when Liberal and Conservative notables mobilized peasant mili-tias to kill each other in a struggle that cost the lives of one out ofevery twenty-five Colombians, were still vivid in many localities. Scarcelyhad Olaya Herrera taken office, when the fear that the Liberals mightnow wreak revenge triggered the first spontaneous outbreaks of violencefrom Conservative smallholders and landlords in Norte de Santander

and Boyac.17 Nor were these fears entirely irrational. Once the Liberalswere entrenched in power, they did resort to persistent intimidation andfraud. In retaliation, the Conservatives boycotted every presidential elec-tion down to 1946. Throughout the Liberal Republic, there was always amenacing background of killings in the municipios: political polarizationand paramilitary violence were spreading incrementally all through the1930s and 40s.

But if the logic of the defensive feud between embattled local com-munities, each with its recollections or fear of grievous injury, was inplace from the beginning, two national developments over-determinedthis underlying dynamic.18 The first was the shift in the electoralbalance between the two parties, once even a moderate degree ofurbanizationand in Colombia it was still quite moderatehad takenhold. The strength of Conservative loyalties had always depended onthe influence of the clergy, which was far stronger in small towns and

the countryside. Once the proportion of city-dwellers passed a certainthreshold, the Liberals started to command a permanent sociologicalmajority. This became clear in the 1946 presidential election itself,which they lost; the two Liberal candidates totalled over 60 per cent ofthe vote, a level that has been the norm for the Party ever since.

17 For a vivid account of these events and their background, see James Henderson,Modernization in Colombia. The Laureano Gmez Years, 18891965, Gainesville, fl2001, pp. 1839. This is now the best narrative history of the period in English. Its

main titleperhaps imposed by the publishercould scarcely be less apposite: theactual focus of the book lies in its subtitle, though it is both less and considerablymore than a biography proper.18 The notion of the defensive feud was developed in the classic study by Payne,Patterns of Conflict in Colombia, pp. 1617.


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On the Conservative side, loss of power increased the influence of themost extreme wing of the Party, under the charismatic leadership ofLaureano Gmez. Dubbed the creole Hitler by his foes, Gmez wasseen at the time, and has been since, as a fascist demagogue, driving

his party to fanatical extremes and plunging the country into civil war.In fact, in the in-grown world of the Colombian political elite, he hadbeen a good friend of both Lpez Pumarejo and his successor EduardoSantos, and benefited from the formers financial connexions. In themid-thirties, he had written blistering attacks on both Mussolinihe par-ticularly disliked the Duceand Hitler. But he was a Catholic integrist.Latin America of the 1930s and 40s was filled with movements and lead-ers, not all of them reactionary, impressed by the successes of German

or Italian fascism: Toro and Busch in Bolivia, Vargas in Brazil, Pern inArgentina. What was distinctive in Colombia was that the same kind ofattraction pulled Gmez and his party towards Franco, as a traditional-ist and religious version of counter-revolution, free of any of the populistconnotations that made the Italian or German regimes seem appealingelsewhere. The result was a rhetorical escalation, to Spanish Civil Warlevels, of historic enmities towards Liberalism, now represented as virtu-ally indistinguishable from Communism.

This was the combustible setting in which Gaitn was killed. The pop-ulism he had sketched on the left flank of Liberalism was a growingthreat to the countrys oligarchy, which he named as such. But viewedcomparatively, it was still relatively weak. The dispersal of the big-citypopulation into at least four regional centres, Bogot, Medelln, Cali andBarranquilla, none of which had over half a million inhabitants by 1940,deprived a potential Colombian populism of critical mass. He himself

noted in 1943 that less than 5 per cent of the countrys workforce wasunionized. So although the Bogotazo was an expression of popular rage, itdid not lead to any seizure of power. Rather than overwhelming a weaklyguarded Presidential Palace and ousting Ospina, the huge crowds werediverted into arson and looting, in which all classes eventually joined,allowing an easy restoration of order in the capital. But what could, at astretch, be regarded as a confused urban variant of the defensive feudinexorably reignited this now entrenched pattern across the countryside,

as Liberal notables, fearing Conservative revenge for the upheavalwhich duly materialized in a savage wave of local assassinations andpersecutionsmobilized their peasant followings to resist, hoping for an


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outcome different from the War of a Thousand Days. Blood flowed as ithad fifty years earlier, but this time for much longer.19

All together more than 200,000 people, mostly illiterate peasants, had

been killed by the time La Violencia was officially over. Strands of socialconflict were never absent from it, as tenants, sharecroppers and squat-ters on the coffee frontiers were drawn into successive waves of fightingon both sides. But La Violencia as a whole was a huge historical regres-sion, in which archaic partisan hostilities swamped not only the legacyof Gaitns short-lived populism, but also the chance of any independ-ent class politics beyond it. The havoc it wreaked was all the more futile,in that by 1948 there was little substantive disagreement left between

the Liberals, who had long dropped notions of social reform, and theConservatives, who were not free marketeers. The two elites were unitedin a common devotion to Cold War capitalism and anti-communismthat rendered even Gmezs brand of clerical fervour increasingly irrel-evant. Meanwhile, as the cities filled with displaced families fleeing theslaughter in the backlands, the mid-1940s onwards saw a decade ofunprecedented urban prosperity. Eerily, agricultural production jumped77 per cent in 1948 and 113 per cent in 1949. Provincial merchants, shop-

keepers, estate managers and political brokers grew rich on expropriatedland, coffee and livestock.20

Gmez himself, who became President in 1950 in an election boycottedby the Liberals, withdrew due to poor health soon afterwards; when he

19 The map of La Violencia coincides with that of the coffee frontiers, settled inthe late nineteenth century, and the zones of colonization in the early twentieth.Focused from 1945 to 1949 in Santander, Boyac, Caldas, Valle del Cauca, from1949 to 1953 the violence was concentrated in frontier regions: the eastern plains,the Magdalena Medio, Muzo in Boyac, Urrao in Antioquia; from 195458, with thespread of Conservative gunmen (los pjaros) under the dictatorship, it became mostintense in the Quindo; from the beginning of the National Front and governmentpersecution of banditry in Quindo and Tolima, and the independent republics inTolima and Cundinamarca, 195964. Similarly, a cartographic look at violence inthe countryside since the 1980s would overlap the frontier territories where exportcommoditiescoca, oil, emeralds, bananas, hardwoods, gold, coal, palm oilareproduced. See Mary Roldn, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia,

194653, Durham, nc 2002, which provides the best overview of the period.20 Carlos Miguel Ortiz Sarmiento, The Business of the Violence: The Quindo inthe 1950s and 1960s, in Bergquist et al., Violence in Colombia: Historical Perspective,pp. 12554; see also, Jess Antonio Bejarano, Democracia, conflicto y eficienciaeconmica, in Bejarano, ed., Construir la paz, Bogot 1990, pp. 14371.


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attempted to resume his duties in 1953, he was ousted by Colombiasonly military coup of modern times. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, headof the Army, seized power with the support of Gmezs factional oppo-nents within the Conservative Party, with which he had close family

and personal links. Once in power, he tried to mould organized labourinto a clientelist bloc loyal only to him, and has been painted as a Pern-like figure. But he had participated in the Conservative bloodletting as acommandereven the us embassy had complained that he saw a redbehind every coffee bushand as President proceeded to amass a for-tune in crooked cattle-ranching and real-estate deals.21 Under him, LaViolencia entered a new phase.

Highland struggles

When disorganized civil war had broken out after Gaitns death, thepsdalready outlawed by Ospinafocused on clandestine work in thecountryside, advocating armed self-defence. In 1949 its first groupsformed along the railway line in Santander, in the oil enclaves in Ariariand, most importantly, given the subsequent course of events, in Tolimaand Cundinamarca, where the psds and unirs peasant leagues had

been strong in the 1930s. At the end of the year, Liberal chieftainshad approached the party for help in setting up guerrillas in its strong-holds. By 1950, with official anti-communism operating at a genocidalpitch, left-liberal Gaitanistas formed a guerrilla front with psd fightersin southern Tolima. The force was led by the Loayza brothers, one ofwhose relatives, Pedro Antonio Marn, aka Manuel Marulanda or TiroFijo (Sure Shot), leads the farc today.22 But by the time Rojas Pinillalaunched his own counter-insurgency campaign, led by veterans of the

battalion that Gmez had sent to fight alonside the us in the KoreanWar, the LiberalCommunist alliance in southern Tolima had fractured.After five years of fighting, the most formidable Liberal guerrilla forceon the eastern plains, some 20,000-strong, turned over its arms inthe first of many failed amnesties.23 Under intensified military pres-sure, some of the Communist militias demobilized as well, while the

21 See Henderson, Modernization in Colombia, pp. 370, 366.22 Medfilo Medina, La resistencia campesina en el sur de Tolima, in GonzaloSnchez and Ricardo Pearanda, eds, Pasado y Presente de la Violencia en Colombia,Bogot 1986, pp. 23365.23 Gonzalo Snchez, Raices de la amnista en Colombia o las etapas de laguerra en Colombia, in Ensayos, pp. 21575; Alfredo Molano, Amnista y Violencia,Bogot 1978.


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remainder were driven out of their strongholds. In southern Tolima, amicro-war unfolded between the two groups as the Liberals, now prop-erly reintegrated into the central Party apparatus, succeeded in expellingthe Communists from much of the region.

To stamp out one of their last redoubts, Rojas Pinilla unleashed the Warof Villarica in 1955, targeting a highland municipality of northern Tolimathat was home to peasant unions and the Communists Democratic Frontfor National Liberation with a blitz of 5,000 troops, while us-donatedf-47s and b-26 bombers dropped napalm, as in Korea. Governmentforces occupied the area and an estimated 100,000 peasants were dis-placed. Half the Communist guerrillas fled to Sumapaz, across the

border in Cundinamarca, which remains under farc control today.Another column, with 100 armed men for 200 families, marched overthe central highlands into the southeastern lowlands to found the settle-ments of El Guayabero in western Meta and El Pato in northwesternCaquet, also currently run by the farc.Here men who had been trade-union or peasant leaders in the mountains became military commandersin the colonies of the new frontier.24

Yet despiteand in part because ofmuch heavier and more central-ized repression, rural violence was far from extinguished; it began totake new forms, with paid Conservative gunmen, thepjaros, murderingLiberalfamilies in the countryside, and secret police thugs committingbrutalities in the towns. When Rojas made clear his intention of stayingin power indefinitely, cracking down on opponents and simulating pop-ulist gestures for urban consumption, the oligarchy, which had alwaysprized civilian rule, closed ranks against him. By early 1957, not only

both political parties but the industrialists and the Church wanted himout; a business-organized shut-down toppled him. Two months later

24 On all this see, Eduardo Pizarro Leongmez, Las farc: De la autodefensa ala combinacin de todas las formas de lucha, Bogot 1991; Alfredo Molano, SelvaAdentro, Bogot 1987, pp. 3648; and Trochas y Fusiles, Bogot 1994, pp. 91103; forSumapaz, see Jos Jairo Gonzlez Arias and Elsy Marulanda, Historias de frontera:Colonizacin y guerras en el Sumapaz, Bogot 1990. Although somewhere between30 and 40 per cent of current farc combatants and officers are women, in the

1940s and 50s men dominated both the peasant leagues and the communist mili-tias, and they still control the Estado Mayor and the higher levels of leadership.For the pre-history, see Michael Jimnez, Gender, Class, and the Roots of PeasantResistance in Central Colombia, 19001930, in Forrest Colburn, ed., EverydayForms of Peasant Resistance, New York 1990, pp. 12150.


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Laureano Gmez, who had spent his exile in Francos Spain, and AlbertoLleras Camargo, who had flown there to negotiate with him, signed thePact of Sitges, formally committing Conservatives and Liberals to createa National Front that would share power equally between the two parties,

with alternating occupation of the Presidency and parity of represen-tation at all levels of government. Supported by business leaders, theChurch and party elites, the pact was scheduled to last until 1974; inpractice it endured, with minor modifications, until 1986. The Church,abandoning its exclusive affiliation with the Conservative Party, nowsought to unify the two formations.25

Political lockout

The National Front was to be the defining moment of modern Colombianhistory. The traditional two-party system had stunted and twisted theexpression of modern political oppositions, but could not altogetherrepress them. In the 1930s and 40s, Liberalism had developed an incipi-ent left-populist dynamic, and Conservatism a flamboyant defence ofprivate property and the altar. In their own way, each of these had got outof elite control, unleashing a sectarian conflict worse than the War of a

Thousand Days, which came to threaten the dyarchy itself. The NationalFront restored the two-party system, but now drained of any real ten-sion between its components. In Cold War conditions, the New Deal andthe Cruzada Nacionalista had become equally anachronistic referencepoints: anti-communism was now a sufficient unifying cement for both.The result was to shut the political expression of any radical demandsor frustrations out of the system, which became a pure machinery ofcommon elite interests, apportioning all government offices and posts

to Liberals and Conservatives in advance.

The National Front thus entrenched an exclusionary democracy thatpersists to this day, in which scarcely half the population even votes;Colombia has the lowest electoral participation rates of the continent.Radical popular movements were criminalized by state-of-siege legis-lation that equated protest with subversion. Quasi-official oppositionforces such as the Revolutionary Liberal Movement (mrl), led by Alfonso

25 In Colombia alone, liberation theology was opposed by the Church hierarchy enbloque (no dissident voices there), and those who chose to pursue its path ended up,by and large, dead, in exile, or, like the Spaniards Manuel Prez, Domingo Lan andJos Antonio Jimnez, swelling the meagre ranks of the eln.


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Lpez Michelsen, and the Alianza Nacional Popular (anapo), led byRojas Pinilla after his return from exile, had to run candidates on Liberalor Conservative slates. Banned from elections, the Communistsnowknown as the pcc rather than the psdfell into line behind the Liberal

Party, which came to constitute the spinal column of National Front pol-itics. If Colombia was spared the experience of the military dictatorshipsthat led assaults on labour and peasant radicalism elsewhere in LatinAmerica during the 1960s and 1970s, it was because the job had alreadybeen done. Though labour militancy increased in the mid-1960s inresponse to a rapidly deteriorating economic situation as coffee prices fell,the movement as a whole remained fragmented and weak. Thus, with theclosure of political space in the civilian arena, blocking the re-emergence

of any vibrant urban populism centred on the trade unions, only oneavenue for social protest was left. In the 1960s and 1970s the inevitablevehicle of choice for opposition forces became armed insurgency.

This option, of course, was rooted in the long pre-history of the peasantstruggles and land occupations along the coffee frontier, and their engulf-ing by the larger turbulence ofLa Violencia, which lingered, much of itas random killings and banditry, through the early years of the National

Front. But there were also still unsubdued enclaves of Communistresistance. In 1961 Gmezs son lvaro coined the term independentrepublics to refer to sixteen areas over which the central governmentdid not exercise territorial sovereignty. Under the Liberal presidencyof Lleras Camargoresponsible for crushing the 1945 river-workersstrike, and picked by Laureano Gmez as National Front candidatein 1958these red zones were surrounded by a military cordon thateffectively isolated them from the outside world. But once the Cuban

Revolution had put Washington into high gear, there was a new urgencyto eradicate them.

Birth of the farc

In May 1964 the Colombian Armed Forces launched OperationSovereignty to retake the municipality of Marquetalia, a smallCommunist stronghold in the extreme south of Tolima, on the border

of Cauca and Huila. Huey helicopters,t-33 combat planes, seven armybattalions, two specialized counterinsurgent companies and intelligence

groups (gil) were thrown in to wipe out the community and its nowlegendary leader Tiro Fijo. But here and in other coordinated military


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attacks, territory was captured, but not the enemy. Families, forced to flee once more, found their way either to the Cauca or into the tropicallowlands of Caquet and Meta; unable to settle in villages, the fightersformed a mobile guerrilla force. National Front counterinsurgency oper-

ations had only succeeded in unleashing a wave of armed migrationsfrom the central highlands to the southeastern jungle. With the open-ing salvos of Operation Sovereignty, comandantes from Marquetalia,Rio Chiquito and El Pato came together in El Bloque Sur to issue a newagrarian programme.26 This was the birth of the farc.

Two other guerrilla forces emerged in the same years. The eln is usu-ally characterized as a middle-class, university-based group that followed

Ches theory of thefoco to the letter. In fact it was no less rooted in thehistory of popular liberalism, communism and peasant-proletarian strug-gle than the farc. The patriarch of the Vzquez clan had participatedin the Gaitanista takeover of the countrys oil port, Barrancabermeja, in1948, and led Liberal militias during La Violencia; other early cadres werealso Liberal veterans. Vzquezs sons went to Cuba in 1962 to set up afocoand ended up defending the revolution against us invasion at Escambray.On their return they set up the first elnfoco in San Vicente de Chucur,

Santander. They could count on the support of key layers from the oilworkers union, uso, following the strike against the state petroleumcompany ecopetrol in 1963, as well as that of the elderly peasant squat-ters who had led the Bolshevik uprising in Lbano in 1929. In 1965 theeln accepted their most famous recruit, the priest and sociologist CamiloTorres Restrepo, whose death in combat in early 1966 provided liberationtheology with its first martyr.27

The Maoist Peoples Liberation Army (epl) guerrilla grouping, formedin 1967, grew out of the same background of agrarian struggle. Oneof its founders, Pedro Vzquez Rendn, had been the psds political

26 Following the lead of its squatting and smallholding constituency, the farc hasalways called, in practice if not in theory, for the radical reform of capitalism and thestate, never for their overthrow. The farc are of the market, not outside or againstit, and in this respect their distance from Sendero Luminoso, the only other LatinAmerican guerrilla group to rely so heavily on terror, could not be greater.

27 Torres, who studied with Peruvian Gustavo Gutirrez at the Louvain in Belgium,inspired Gutirrezs landmark text of 1967, Liberation Theology, as discussed inPenny Lernoux, Cry of the People, New York 1977, pp. 2931. For the eln, see FabiolaCalvo Ocampo, Manuel Prez: un cura espaol en la guerrilla colombiana, Madrid 1998,and Carlos Medina Gallego, eln: una historia en dos voces contadas, Bogot 1996.


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commissar in southern Tolima during La Violenciait was he who hadsuggested that Pedro Antonio Marn call himself Manuel Marulanda, inhonour of one of the leaders of the psr. The pc-ml (Communist Party-Marxist-Leninist) itself had emerged from the youth wing of the pcc in

1965, following the Sino-Soviet split. With the help of former Liberalguerrilla commander and mrl militant, Julio Guerra, the epl set up a

foco in a peripheral region of Antioquia with the goal of waging pro-longed popular war.28

Urban discontents

Nevertheless, the ideological courage and relative popular legitimacy

of the guerrilla groups of this period should not lead us to exaggeratetheir size. By the mid-1970s, the epl was practically non-existent; theeln was nearly eliminated in Anor in 1973, and the farc were stillconfined mainly to the lowland regions southeast of Bogot that theyhad helped colonize. In the cities, meanwhile, though secondary educa-tion expanded somewhat, unemployment rose sharply throughout the1960s. Protectionist industrial policies failed to generate jobs and theworking and lower-middle class saw hopes of social mobility dashed.

In 1969 anapo won majorities in municipal councils and departmentalassemblies. In 1970 Rojas Pinilla, running as a Conservative but onan anti-National Front platform, mobilized an anti-oligarchic discoursereminiscent of Gaitnssupplemented by a reactionary defence ofa Catholic tradition that was gradually losing ground to mass-mediainfluenceto win an estimated 39 per cent of the vote, mainly from thelower-middle and working class. The National Front resorted to thinly

disguised last-minute fraud to deny him victory and impose its candi-date, the Conservative Misael Pastrana. Once in office, he sponsoredpublic works and urban remodelling in an attempt to generate employ-ment and the appearance of reform.

Lpez Michelsen (197478), the corrupt son of Lpez Pumarejo, and aformer rebel against his Party, was technically the last president to serveunder the National Front. He courted the urban constituency that had

supported Rojas Pinilla, speaking of two Colombias: the first, connected28 For this group, see lvaro Villarraga and Nelson Plazas, Para reconstruir los sueos:una historia del epl, Bogot 1994; and Fabiola Calvo Ocampo, epl: una historiaarmada, Madrid 1987.


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to coffee and manufacturing, included Antioquia, the western Andeandepartments and the Caribbean port of Barranquilla; it received thebulk of government investment in infrastructure and government serv-ices. The other Colombia, said to cover 70 per cent of national territory,

was where blacks, Indians and frontier settlers livedthe southern andeastern plains and lowlands and the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Theseregions received little investment and had virtually no state presence,electricity, public services or even minimal infrastructure. But thoughcoffee prices temporarily reached new heights in the mid-1970s, inflat-ing state budgets, the near-collapse of traditional industries coupled withelite opposition ensured that Lpez Michelsens promises of reformremained a fantasy.

Simmering urban discontent took dramatic form in 1974 when anew group, m-19named after the day, 19 April, when the electionhad been stolen from Rojas Pinillaannounced its appearance by steal-ing Bolvars sword from the historical museum in central Bogot.Composed of middle-class Anapistas as well as young farc and pcc dis-sidents, m-19 had, from the outset, a keen sense of how best to exploitthe communications media to cultivate the same aura of romantic brav-

ado that had surrounded the urban guerrillas of the Southern Cone,some of whose veterans swelled the eme ranks. An explicitly national-popular movement with electoral ambitions, m-19s stated goal was notthe overthrow of capitalism or the Colombian state but the opening up ofthe existing political system. It generated widespread if diffuse supportamong the fragmented working and middle-class layers that had votedfor Rojas Pinilla and Lpez Michelsen.

The mid-70s saw a proliferation of civic protests over public services ledby the working class of the urban peripheries, mobilizing neighbour-hood associations and cooperatives. In 1977, the three major trade-unionconfederations staged aparo cvico, or civic strike, which was punishedwith brutal state repression. Thereafter, high unemployment, lowerwages, decreased social security and the rise of the informal sectorinwhich more than half the Colombian proletariat would be toiling by1985would contribute to the weakening of an already divided labour

movement.29

The crushing of the paro cvico set the stage for a wide-spread crackdown under the next Liberal president, Csar Turbay Ayala

29 Pierre Gilhodes, Movimientos sociales en los aos ochenta y noventa, in lvaroTirado Meja, ed., La Nueva Historia de Colombia, vol. viii, Bogot 1995, pp. 17190.


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(197882). Political activists of all stripes as well as hundreds, if notthousands, of innocent people were targeted as subversives by the army,the police, the intelligence services and a growing number of paramil-itary organizations. Many were tortured, imprisoned or disappeared.

Death squads like aaa (Anti-Communist Alliance) began to murderindiscriminately, on the Argentine model. Political violence grew muchmore intense than it had been during the previous decade.

The overall climate in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the urbantrade-union and civic movements smashed, was thus a propitious onefor guerrilla growth. There was as yet no obfuscatory discourse of armedactors of the Left and Right (as would be pioneered by Northern ana-

lysts of El Salvador in the 1980s). Politically, the guerrillas enjoyed somemeasure of prestige in the cities right up to the mid-1980s, where manymiddle-class dissidents accepted the legitimacy of their struggleandeven more so in the countryside, where such people were witness to,as well as victims of, human-rights violations. Besides, as middle-classJacobinism or popular liberalism, this was nothing new. The brutal reac-tion of the Turbay administration, coupled with hopes unleashed bythe Nicaraguan revolution, gave the guerrillas a new lease of life. They

argued that Colombia under Turbay was no different from the militaryjuntas of the Southern Cone, while the Sandinistas had shown thatarmed struggle was the only way to overthrow dictatorship.

Heat in the export enclaves

This latest phase of guerrilla growth, however, took place within arapidly changing political-economic environment. A process of restruc-

turing had begun within the oligarchy during the long stagnation ofthe 1960s and 1970s. Important fractions of capital had shifted theirinterests away from production toward speculation and the capture ofrents. New enclaves, dominated by foreign capital and the productionof a single commodity for export, multipliedthe petroleum regions ofArauca and Santander, the coal sector of the Guajira, bananas in Urab.The marijuana business, initially organized by Peace Corps veteransand quickly taken over by Colombian smugglers, flowered in the Cauca,

Csar, Guajira and Magdalena departments.30

Construction and bankingsoared. The Conservative base continued to shrink.

30 Daro Betancourt and Martha Luz Garca, Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos:Historia social de la mafia colombiana (19651992), Bogot 1994, p. 47.


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It was within this new context that the eln, reborn from the ashes ofits near-annihilation at Anor, began from the late 1970s to target theexport enclaves, surfacing in the petroleum regions of Arauca and Nortede Santander and, later, in the El Cerrejn coal-mining zone, with a

new vision of revolution modelled on Central America rather than Cuba.Building on its liberation-theology tradition, it strengthened ties to thepopular movements and began working closely with the more militantMarxist sectors of the oil workers union, uso, just as petroleum overtookcoffee as Colombias leading legitimate export. By the mid-1980s the elnwould be extorting petroleum rents from German multinationals con-tracted to construct the Cao-Limn pipeline in Arauca (with the covertaid of the Kohl government).

Meanwhile, m-19 initiated its first urban operations in 1978; the fol-lowing year its militants stole 4,000 machine guns from the armouryin Bogot and, in 1980, occupied the Dominican Embassy with the usenvoy insideoperations that were typically flash and risky, and didnot require a broad social base or mobilization.31 For its part, the epldropped Maoismwhich had led to numerous internal splitsin 1980,and made modest headway in the cattle country of Crdoba and the

banana zone of Urab, which it would dispute with the farc in the1980s and 1990s. The mostly Afro-Colombian workers there had organ-ized a union but, like the indigenous movement in the Cauca, cric,the bananeros faced high levels of state and paramilitary violence; bothwould later confront farc violence as well.32

For the farc, too, abandoned their defensive strategyand, eventually,their longstanding traditions of agrarian struggleto project themselves

throughout the national territory in face of this armed competition

31 On m-19, see Daro Villamizar, Aquel 19 ser, Bogot 1995; Laura Restrepo,Historia de un entusiasmo, Bogot 1999; and for its fate, Ricardo Pearanda andJavier Guerrero, De las armas a la poltica, Bogot 1999.32 Fernando Botero Herrera, Urab: Colonizacin, violencia, y crisis del Estado, Medelln1990; Clara Ins Garca, Urab: Regin, actores y conflicto, 19601990, Bogot 1996;William Ramrez Tobn, Urab: Los inciertos confines de una crisis, Bogot 1997.In the Cauca in the mid-1980s, farc and state/paramilitary violence led to the

formation of an indigenous guerrilla group, Quintn Lame, which laid down itsarms in 1991. After banana workers staged a 20,000-strong solidarity strike in1992, the farc massacred scores of them in 1993, claiming that the formerly epl-affiliated workers had become paramilitaries following peace in 1991. The farcwould commit several more massacres of banana workers in the mid-1990s.


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from the Left. By the early 1980s they had expanded from their basesin Caquet, Meta and Putumayo into the Urab banana enclave inthe northeast, the Middle Magdalena and the southeastern plainsGuaviare, Vichada and Vaups. This was the jump-off point from which,

feeding on taxes levied from the countrys thriving new cocaine industry,they would gradually morph into a military enterprise dedicated princi-pally to territorial expansion.

Narcotics enter the system

Fumigation of marijuana in the Cauca and the Sierra Nevada de SantaMarta and the extradition of leading traffickers to the us began, under

Turbays presidency, at the very moment that cocaine replaced marijuanaas Colombias most profitable export. In many respects, Turbays admin-istration marks the start of the current historical cycle. The Liberal Partywas given a new lease of life with the drug trade. Modernizing techno-crats in Bogot saw their limited power over the departments diminishas new political brokersmore corrupt, cynical and willing to work withthe cocaine mafia than were the traditional caciquescame to domi-nate regional and local political landscapes. Provincial clientelism was

revamped and the military and police assumed more prominent rolesas the upholders of public order. It was under the Turbay administra-tion, too, thatlvaro Uribe Vlez began his political career, granting pilotlicences to drug traffickers as head ofAerocivil. Pablo Escobar and otherleading traffickers began to make inroads into national politics at thesame time, mainly through the Liberal Party. Escobar himself became aLiberal deputy in Congress, aligned with Alberto Santofimio, one of themost corrupt of the old-style caciques.33

The question of drug money in politics was not even raised until the1982 elections. Escobar and the other traffickers moved freely: during

33 Escobar and associates such as his cousin, Gustavo Osito Gaviria, or el NegroGaleano, came from working-class neighbourhoods in Envigado and had gainedvaluable experience in the Urab tobacco wars of the early 1970s. The Medelln eliteinitially barred them from buying into industry, and refused them membership oftheir exclusive clubs. The Cali capos who came from middle-class and upper mid-

dle-class backgrounds were considerably more successful at discreetly integratingthemselves into the regional oligarchy, though Chepe Santacruz had to build his ownclub after being blackballed by the Club Colombia. When the two cartels were disman-tled in the mid-1990s, hundreds of smaller, more decentralized syndicates proliferatedand their influence in politics, especially the Liberal Party, continues unchecked.


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Uribes four-month tenure as mayor of Medelln in 1982, the city wasknown as the sanctuary. Cocaine processing and transportcentred, asthe coffee industry had been, on Medellnlinked the first Colombia ofthe central and western highlands to the second Colombia of the eastern

lowlands and Pacific and Atlantic coasts, through new cities (Florencia,Villavicencio, Leticia) as well as roads, airports and motorboats. For fron-tier settlers in Caquet, Putumayo, Guaviare, Vichada, Guaina, Vaups,Sucre, Crdoba, the Choc, Bolvar, the Santandersand, to a lesserextent, in Antioquia, Huila, Tolima, Cauca and Metacoca became theonly crop profitable enough to overcome the high transport costs thatresulted from the lack of infrastructure.34 Medelln began to recoversome of its fading industrial glory, becoming the major hub for the only

industry that Colombians owned and controlled; a process facilitatedby Antioqueo migration to Jackson Heights, Queens, which providedEscobar, the Ochoas, the Galeanos, Fidel Castao, Kiko Moncada andothers with ready-made distribution networks.

Secrets of survival

Without the rise of the coca economy from the late 1970s, the farc

would have had neither a geographically extensive network of semi-dependent clients on the open coca frontiers, nor a multi-billion dollarwar chest with which to expand their operations; and the ColombianArmy would be faced with the task of re-taking a southeastern region,albeit a large one, rather than over 40 per cent of a national territorydivided by three cordilleras and countless rivers.

Nevertheless, in attempting to answer the question why, decade after

decade, the state has failed to break the back of armed resistance, othercrucial factors come into play. Until the 1990s, genuine popular sym-pathy in the liberated zones gave the guerrillas important support.The farc was the armed force of a peasant colonizers movement, and

34 For the colonization of Guaviare and Vaups, see Molano, Selva Adentro; and ofVichada and Guaina, also by Molano, Aguas Arriba, Bogot 1990. The history of thecoca frontier is explored in William Ramrez Tobn, La guerrilla rural en Colombia:Una va hacia la colonizacin armada?, Estudios Rurales Latinoamericanos, vol. 4,

no. 2 (1981), pp. 199209; Fernando Cubides et al., Colonizacin, coca, y guerrillaBogot 1989; Alfredo Molano, Algunas consideraciones sobre colonizacin y vio-lencia, in Catherine LeGrand et al., eds, El agro y la cuestin social, Bogot 1994,pp. 2741; and for a summary of the debate, LeGrand, Colonizacin y violencia enColombia: Perspectivas y debate, in El agro.


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its ties to communities in the southeastern regions were solid. Thesewere sparsely populated territories that the Colombian government hadnever administeredno infrastructure or public services; not even partyclientelismbut which had undergone successive booms in quinine and

rubber. After the 1950s, they filled up with people fleeing partisan vio-lence in the highlands. From the 1960s until the 80s, the farc upheldthe banner of radical agrarianism: the only forceapart from the pcc, towhich they were organically linkedto call on the government to realizepromises of land reform, infrastructural development, credit cooperativesand technical assistance; indeed, the only oneat least in select frontierregionsto take up those tasks that the state had failed or refused to do.The farc were the local and regional administration in many parts of

the southeast; by any standard of living memory they were, even at theirworst, better than the national government or the traffickers.

Indeed, in some areas they have offered the only measure of protectionavailable to coca growers against the arbitrary brutality of the traffickers.Debt-driven mechanisms of labour control, their contracts enforcedthrough assassinationwhether these were inherited from the rubberboom in the southeast or transplanted from the highland emerald mines

of Boyaccast the farc as much-needed arbiters of the labour marketin frontier areas like Meta and Guaviare. Until quite recently, farc vio-lence unfolded according to predictable, if ruthless, rules that couldguarantee order and stability on the frontier, whereas narco-terror ledto chaos and unpredictability, particularly of coca-paste prices. Thefarc, in other words, have enabled the smooth functioning of the coca-paste market: without them the narcos might have destroyed each otherwith interminable mini-wars in the jungle. As well as maintaining a

reservoir of support in the frontier regions, the imposition of law andorder has allowed the farc to siphon off fabulous amounts of wealth fortheir war-machine by levying a tax known as el gramaje: though the fig-ures are by nature impossible to confirm, one expert has put the farcs1999 earnings at $900 million.35 If, lacking extensive transport and

35 See Bruce Bagley, Drug Trafficking, Political Violence, and us Policy in Colombiain the 1990s, available at www.mamacoca.org. While levying taxes on drug produc-tion (el gramaje) is a legitimate revolutionary tactic, in Colombia it forms part of a

pattern of extortion established during La Violencia, in which kidnapping, la vacuna(the vaccination) and el boleteo (the charging of war taxes via threatening letters)were employed as tactics to raise money, especially in Quindo and Risaralda, coffeeregions that had been home to bandit gangs, as well as the Vzquez family (eln)and Tiro Fijo (farc).


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distribution networks, the farc are in no position to compete with theauc in international markets, they can at least offer food, clothing, high-tech weapons, a cell phone and a monthly salary to impoverished ruralyouths who do not want to be government soldiers or paramilitaries.

Drug lords and death squads

The paramilitaries, with their ties to the repressive organs of the state,the Catholic Church and the two parties, have been able to profit fromthe cocaine business on a much grander scale than the farc: in aninterview in October 2000, Carlos Castao estimated (conservatively)that 70 per cent of auc monies came from the drug trade. They are

involved not only in coca-paste taxation and protection rackets but alsoin transport and distribution.36 They owe this lucrative role to theirorigin as death squads of the drug cartels. In the early 1980s, traffick-ers like Escobar, the Ochoas, Carlos Lehder and Gonzalo RodrguezGacha, enraged by guerrilla incursions on their activities, organizedmas, or Death to Kidnappers, to slaughter insurgents. This was thearmed precursor of todays Autodefensas Unidas de Colombiathe auc.Rodrguez, the most virulently anti-communist of the traffickers, had

worked as a lieutenant under Gilberto Molina in the Boyac emeraldmines, where each capo had a rudimentary military apparatus to enforcecontrol over labour and rivals; he served as a bridge between narco-par-amilitarism in the Middle Magdalena and the southeastern lowlands;between the first Colombia and the second.37

Carlos Castao, leader of the auc, describes a more internationalistformation in his 2001 autobiography, My Confession. As an eighteen-

year-old former army scout serving in the ranks of mas, he was sent

36 Jeremy Bigwood, Doing the uss Dirty Work: The Colombian Paramilitaries andIsrael, citing a 1998 dea Report: www.narconews.com.37 Another bridge was built by Pedro Juan Moreno Villa, who, as head of the cattle-mens association in Antioquia in 1983, defended mas in a public debate with LaraBonilla in Puerto Berro, a decade and a half before he facilitated the re-conquest ofUrab. On Rodrguez Gacha, see Jorge Enrique Velsquez, El Navegante, Cmo meinfiltr y enga al Cartel, Bogot 1992. Escobar, by contrast, considered himself aman of the Left, a foe of imperialism and the oligarchy, had ties to m-19 in the early1980s and to the eln in early 1990s; this created friction with business associatessuch as Fidel Castao, who eventually helped kill him: Alonso Salazar, La parbolade Pablo: Auge y cada de un gran capo de narcotrfico , Bogot 2002, pp. 857, 103,268.


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to train in Israel in 1983. Detailing how he ordered and participatedin massacres of civilians, Castao insists, I copied the concept of para-military forces from the Israelis.38 The lessons learnt in the West Bankand Gaza were applied in the Magdalena Medio region, which mas had

begun to fumigate of suspected communists and guerrilla sympathiz-ers in the early 1980s; Castao was at work there under the direction ofhis brother, Fidelwho would soon retire to devote himself more fullyto paramilitarismand Escobar.

As the violence initiated by Turbay began to spiral out of control,Conservative President Belisario Betancur (198286) made the firstattempt to negotiate a ceasefire. Once a follower of Laureano Gmez, but

by temperament in many ways a loner in the establishment, Betancurwas moved by the plight of the population, and wished to improve it.In 1982, as a first step, he declared an amnesty and freed several hun-dred guerrillas and political activists imprisoned under Turbay; namedsocial inequality as the culprit of the maladies spawned by the guerrillas;and insisted on executive, rather than legislative, supervision of cease-fire negotiationsalthough any proposed reforms would have had to gothrough Congress. Here, it seemed, was a window through which it was

possible to glimpse a de-militarization of socio-political life and a seriousdiscussion of problems such as violent dispossession in the countrysideand unemployment in the cities. For their part the farc, in a covert attackon the eln, which had not joined the ceasefire, denounced kidnappingand all forms of terrorism that threaten human dignity and liberty.39

Contradictions of peace

But Betancur never had the support of his generals or strong backingfrom any fraction of the ruling class, and he was dependent on Congressfor any structural change. He lacked either the power or the will to

38 Quoted in Bigwood, Doing the uss Dirty Work. Though the feud between narco-traffickers and the guerrillas is usually chalked up to m-19s kidnapping of a leadingtraffickers relative, Marta Nieves Ochoa, in 1980, which led to the formation ofmas,disputed profits from the cocaine business lay at the root of the dispute. Apparently,the farc had stolen merchandise from Rodrguez Gacha at one of his largest cocaine

laboratories, Tranquilandia, in Meta. See Salazar, La parabola, p. 111.39 Alfredo Molano, Frmulas, El Espectador, 15 September 2002. The most thoroughexamination of the peace process is Mark Chernick, Insurgency and Negotiations:Defining the Boundaries of the Political Regime in Colombia, Ph.D. Dissertation,Columbia University, 1991.


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insist on real social reform. The three insurgencies that entered intonegotiations with himfarc, epl and m-19could see this, and usedthe contradictions to strengthen their own position, calling attentionto rising army and paramilitary abuses and engaging in spectacular

military operations. By the time agreement had been reached, in late1984, the farc had doubled its number of fronts, from fourteen totwenty-eight. On their side, narco-paramilitariesaided by military andpolice officials, as well as Liberal and Conservative Party bosses in themunicipalitiesgeared up for future battles; as did one wing of theinternally divided farc. The spectacular rise of the cocaine industrydid not increase the disposition to compromise.40 Within the govern-ment, moreover, the figure in charge of managing contacts with m-19,

epl and farc, Jaime Castro Castro, was the political godfather of LiberalParty boss Pablo Emilio Guarn Vera, who was himself closely tied tonarco-violence, especially in Puerto Boyac, where one of the paramili-tary training camps, staffed by British and Israeli mercenaries on theirway to Central America, was named after him.

In 1985 m-19, hoping that a general strike in June would turn intourban insurrection, and complaining of army violations of the cease-

fire, pulled out of the truce themselves. In November their commandosstaged a spectacular seizure of the Palace of Justice in the centre ofBogot, capturing the Supreme Court within it, and requested negotia-tions. The Army responded by blasting the building in a tank assault thatended with the slaughter of all inside. Betancur was scarcely even con-sulted: the high command made it clear that if he demurred he wouldbe ousted. The massacre marked the beginning of the end ofm-19 as apolitical-military force.

Avoiding this kind of adventure in favour of a strategy of combiningall forms of struggle, the farc and pcc formed the Patriotic Union(up), as a civilian front designed to help consolidate a power basewithin the formal political system prior to laying down arms. In 1986,following six years of rising strike activity, a progressive trade union fed-eration, the cut, was bornanother sign of intensified popular protest.Though in regions of frontier colonization like Urab and the Choc,

peasant communities with a strong Afro-Colombian presence made the40 Sales of Colombian cocaine, marijuana, and heroin generated an estimated $46billion in revenues in 1999, of which Colombias share was $3.5 billion; a sumnearly equivalent to the $3.9 billion from petroleum, Colombias chief export: seeBagley, Drug Trafficking.


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up their vehicle for advancing radical democracy, the strategy carriedhigh risks for the farc and the pcc supporters.41 Given the hardeningof the narco-paramilitary right as a historic bloc in opposition to thepeace negotiations, an electoral politics so intimately tied to the nations

largest guerrilla insurgency was all too likely to result in widespreadextra-judicial execution of left politicians and militants, especially atlocal levels. Furthermore, a faction within the farc understood this andargued for increased militarization.42 In tragic confirmation of theirposition, by 1987 three hundred up militants, including presidentialcandidate Jaime Pardo Leal, had been assassinated by the Right, as wellas many key members of the cut leadership. More than three thousandup activists would be murdered by 1991.

As the ultra-rightwing onslaught gathered momentum in the late 1980s,students, professors and professionals like Dr Hector Abad Gmez wereassassinated, as were prostitutes, homosexuals, transvestites, thieves,petty drug dealers and users, in social cleansing operations thatbecame generalized in Medelln, Cali, Pereira, Bogot and Barranquilla.Tragically, the popular militias that sprang up in the peripheral neigh-bourhoods of Colombias major cities after 1985, dedicated to fighting

the corrosive effects of the drug trade on community life, also becameinvolved. Nevertheless, in 1987 and 1988, under the guns of the armedforces and their paramilitary allies, social movements staged massivemarches in the cities and the countryside, and moved closer to theguerrilla insurgencies, particularly the farc and the eln. The latterhad grown rapidly during the ceasefire period, and in 1987 foundedthe Simn Bolvar Guerrilla Coordination with the farc. Promises ofinsurgent unity proved illusory, however, as the atmosphere of sectarian

competition that had characterized the Left since the 1930s lingered.43

41 Here I disagree with Molano, who argues that it was a wise strategy. Though itis not easy to spell out a viable alternative, the farc might at least have applied thetight security measures the situation demanded, protecting their people and alliesin the up from needless risk. They might also have considered neighbourhood andworkplace organizing in the cities, rather than setting up militias among the dis-placed on the urban outskirts.42 This faction is currently dominant within the farcs Estado Mayor, and is bestrepresented by Jorge Briceo, aka el Mono Jojoy, the farcs military commander.43 Like nearly everything in Colombia, relations between the farc and the eln varyaccording to region. In some areas, such as southern Bolvar, the farc and the elncarry out joint attacks on paramilitary bases, while in parts of Antioquia, the farchas practically declared war on the eln.


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Meanwhile, as the ceasefire with the guerrillas was being concludedin late 1984, Escobar had Betancurs Minister of Justice Lara Bonillaassassinated. Lara Bonillas crime had been to resist the influenceof the cocaine mafia in Liberal Party politics and to expose the con-

nexions between military officials, cattle ranchers and narcotraffickersin the formation of mas.44 In the wake of the peace process, Escobarand the Medelln cartel, aligned with Liberal Party bosses in the prov-inces and factions of the military and police, increasingly determinedthe parameters of Colombian politics. Narco-investment in land, init-ially concentrated in the Magdalena Medio, became widespread. Tiesbetween the cocaine merchants, who had also invested heavily in financeand construction, and the newly formed self-defence forces became

tighter and more systematic.

Under pressure from Washington, the Barco government that tookover in 1986a Liberal landslide on a low votestarted to pursue theMedelln cartel. Escobar Inc. responded by ordering hits on leadingjudges, politicians and law-enforcement officials. More than 200 groupsof paramilitaries were declared illegal due to links wi

uribe's colombia in historical perspective

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