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Forgotten peace: reform, violence, and the making of contemporary Colombia

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ia/iiy006

1468-2346

Tom Long,

Conflict, Peace, and Violence in Colombia

On 9 April 1948, Colombian Liberal Party politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was murdered on the streets of Bogotá. The killing ignited urban riots and spurred a new round of partisan violence across the countryside. The following decade, so central to the national narrative that it became known simply as La Violencia (the violence), saw perhaps 200,000 people killed and tens of thousands displaced. Violence provoked a coup and several years of military rule—an aberration for Colombia. Historian Robert A. Karl's exceptional new book, Forgotten peace, recounts efforts to end the pattern of violence. As Karl notes, Colombia's history is marked by an unusual combination: relative democracy and staggering levels of internal violence. That pairing continues to this day, alongside efforts to create peace, making his book strikingly current. While spectacular in its scale and intensity, La Violencia continued old practices of settling political scores. The Colombian Conservative Party ended a period of Liberal rule in 1946 and used its ascendancy to solidify local political control and seize land through forced displacements. This merged violence, politics and economic motives—all indicating that peace would require more than halting the killing. In 1957, political leaders forged a power-sharing agreement called the National Front to ease the transition back to civil rule. The pact's originator was Alberto Lleras Camargo, a former Liberal provisional president and the first secretary-general of the Organization of American States. The statesman embodied the optimistic ethos of the early years of the National Front, which saw real progress, with a reduction in the violence and the gradual return of the displaced. Some combatant groups disbanded and the national state engaged the countryside with resources to support peace and meet longstanding demands for land, loans and roads. In short, there was a substantial effort to create local peace pacts, a so-called ‘paz criolla’ (creole peace) as the 1950s ended.