Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia
2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-7288380
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)International Relations in Latin America
ResumoRobert Karl's new book is a significant achievement. This fine-grained political history demonstrates that Colombia's multiple chronologies of violence can only be understood by attending first to the regional. His final chapter is particularly compelling and will be required reading for anyone seeking to decipher the origins of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC).Across chronologically ordered chapters, his maps and clear descriptions of Gran Tolima's varied terrain anchor readers' growing sense of the entwining paths taken and not taken. At the heart of Forgotten Peace is Karl's contention that 1958–62 was a high point for national and regional attempts at peacemaking. He focuses on strategies that were wholly Colombian in their conception and rollout (in contrast to the internationally brokered peace deals with which later generations of Latin Americans became familiar). These included loans for ex-combatants, education funding, and infrastructure projects designed so that local people would receive wages. Folded in with such concrete initiatives were policy changes that anthropologists and sociologists in Bogotá hoped would improve indigenous people's lives, as well as government support for folklore festivals in Tolima and Huila. What's more, Karl is able to demonstrate that these were not pie-in-the-sky initiatives that emanated from Bogotá. He traces the push behind such initiatives back to small villages like Rioblanco, El Pato, and Ataco as well as to the regional capitals of Ibagué and Neiva. At the point in the narrative when “rehabilitation” becomes policy, readers encounter Pedro Antonio Marín (alias Manuel Marulanda Vélez and Tirofijo) declaring his support and managing a government-funded road crew. Karl also describes a Conservative appointee who intervenes to help Fermín Charry Rincón, notorious as a leader of the Marquetalia Communists, receive a formal pardon and a loan (pp. 86, 88, 91).Karl interweaves the rough-and-tumble of the frontiers that Bogotá's politicians and academics confronted in 1958–66 with a fair amount of national-level intellectual history. Karl's painstaking genealogy of academic writers' use of the phrase “La Violencia” is arcane in places, but his review of the writing, rewriting, and reception of La violencia en Colombia, by Germán Guzmán Campos, Orlando Fals Borda, and Eduardo Umaña Luna, is important. Less successful is his appropriation of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán's dichotomy between Colombia's “país político” and “país nacional,” to which Karl adds “país letrado” as a third term. Too often this seems a clunky typology that deadens Karl's otherwise-strong prose. Nevertheless, his tracing of the positions taken by military men, whom he treats as doing intellectual work even as they were embroiled in specific rural confrontations, is compelling. By the time readers arrive at the book's last chapter, which treats the military's move against Marquetalia in 1964, we have come to expect some level of insight into military commanders' engagement with rural actors, but what Karl was able to find and use to partially sketch military thinking about Riochiquito and El Pato seems not to have been matched in the case of Marquetalia, which is unfortunate although understandable.Karl's enthusiasm for his subject shines through. Indeed, he is perhaps too enthusiastic about the National Front and too enthusiastic about Alberto Lleras Camargo's role. Karl is not content to frame the book as a tightly argued, deeply researched study of the way regional and national actors engaged one another in an attempt to secure a peace that briefly seemed likely and then foundered, first because of splits in military and government circles in Colombia, and second because the immediate international context was being reshaped by a face-off between Washington and Havana. Rather, he presents the book as a counterweight to views of the 1960s as “an era of revolutionary violence,” and he sets his book against scholarly work that explores rural people's decision-making only by reference to “resistance” (p. 10). Given that Latin Americanists have been exploring the complexity of rural actors' historical engagements with national governments for some time now, and given that we do have work that approaches the 1960s from a wide range of perspectives, including that of reformists and the emergent middle classes, Karl missteps slightly. Moreover, Karl positions his project against the writings of Colombian historians, most notably Marco Palacios, who came of age during the National Front years and who are critical of the Liberal and Conservative parties for having made an exclusive pact with one another. It may well be that Forgotten Peace opens up new possibilities for young Colombians seeking to understand the long decades between 1945 and 1974. This reviewer is in no position to judge that question, given close association with Palacios. Yet it seems possible that Karl's work complements rather than contradicts writers critical of the National Front. Forgotten Peace introduces an important distinction between the front's optimistic initial years and the repressive politics that defined it by the mid-1960s.
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