Adding
outside violence to
inside violence will not solve
Colombia's problems
By
Jonathan
Power
May 17, 2002
MADRID - Before the latest carnage reported from
Colombia is shunted down into the archives and certainly
before the Bush administration decides it is going to re
direct its military aid to Colombia, now concentrated on
defeating drug trafficking, in the direction of fighting
leftist guerrillas, we should all take time out to
reconsider the last 100 years or more of Colombian
history. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia's Nobel
Prize winning novelist, has reminded us, Cicero wrote two
thousand years ago, "To be ignorant of what happened
before you were born is to remain forever a
child".
In Colombia's case the continuing political violence
has cut across all levels of society on and off all
through the last century and much of the century before.
(The common Colombian term La Violencia is usually used
for the particular intense period of civil war between
1946 and 1966, to distinguish it from the War of a
Thousand Days fought between 1899-1902.) Nearly all Latin
American societies have had their civil wars but nowhere
have they been so continuous and seemingly unending as in
Colombia. The historian R.W. Ramsey described the
phenomenon as the "western hemisphere's largest internal
war in the twentieth century". Politics have never been
tranquil or harmonious in Colombia.
At the same time Colombia has long prided itself on
its Athenian tradition of democracy, on its sophisticated
literary traditions, on its relatively free press and not
least its commitment to regular elections. Its military,
although an important element, do not rule behind dark
glasses. For nearly all its history the civilian
politicians have called the shots, as they do today.
Colombia's violence is rooted in the almost equal
contest of electoral politics, between Liberals and
Conservatives, whose original highly charged dividing
line between an oppressed peasantry and working class and
the Church-supported, landed aristocracy has become
dulled over time. For decades now what matters most is
what political tribe you are born into. As for the
Church, according to one study made in Aritama in remote
northern Colombia, the political polarization of
contemporary society is so complete that the two factions
even have their own saints: the Virgin, San Rafael and
San Antonio are said to be Conservatives associated with
the colour blue while the Sacred Heart of Jesus and San
Martin are liberals, and therefore "reds".
In the course of La Violencia brutal methods of
torture and assassination became commonplace in rural
Colombia. In the small towns and villages violence was
often perpetuated by people who had grown up alongside
their victims. The brutality has been literally handed
down from grandfather to father to son. For the last 38
years the leftist rebels have concentrated on fighting
the government but in recent months much of the rebels'
action has been in moving against the rightists'
paramilitaries. Last week's largest civilian massacre for
decades was a result of a clash between the country's two
biggest irregular armies- one leftist, living off income
from the coca trade and the other a paramilitary force
supported by landowners and elements of the army. The
free-lance armies have begun to eclipse the regular army
even though it is now heavily backed and supplied by the
U.S.
The endless cycle of violence has been a constant
preoccupation of Garcia Marquez - the violence of civil
war and economic exploitation in his One Hundred Years of
Solitude; the violence of partisan political hatreds in
No One Writes to the Colonel; the structural violence of
dictatorship in The Autumn of the Patriarch; and the
sexual violence of a repressive society in Chronicle of a
Death Foretold. In all of them he tries to plumb the
reasons for the violence and at the same time to steer
outsiders from their caricaturing of the South American
as "a man with a moustache, a guitar and a revolver". But
the bitter irony remains, the novels of La Violencia, as
Garcia Marquez himself once said, are "the only literary
explosion of a genuinely national character that we have
had in our history". Violence is deeply ingrained in the
Colombian personality and to root it out will be the work
of generations.
Yet despite the writings of this literary master and
despite the brave overage of events in Colombia by
reporters like Scott Wilson of the Washington Post who
brought us the news of last week's massacre in remote
Bellavista, we watch the juggernaught of the American
military machine rolling into Colombia with an
insouciance that is almost awesome, if it weren't so
foolish. If there were no chance of American intervention
working in relatively tiny but also violence-gripped
Haiti - where it has been tried twice in the last ninety
years, most recently by President Bill Clinton - there is
less than zero chance in Colombia. Adding outside
violence to inside violence will not solve Colombia's
problems. If there is a solution it will be the slow work
of political reform making Colombia's democracy more open
and more relevant to the poor; it will mean weaning
society off violence by enforcing the law on human rights
abuses; it will mean economic reform that gives the
peasantry their own land, legislated away from them in
the nineteenth century; and, for the outside world, it
will mean the liberalization of drugs so that the drug
barons and the illegal armies that hold Colombia to
ransom have the financial ground cut from under them. The
rest is simply illusion, perhaps fit only for a final
chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
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40th Anniversary of
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"Like
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