The Dispossessed. Aviva Chomsky
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move from the countryside to the city introduces them to a different set of challenges than those they faced in their villages. There are the politicians and priests who demand payoffs for their help in finding housing, food, and job assistance for the displaced. There is the danger of street crime—from petty theft to murderous drug turf battles. Consumer goods are more available in the city, but food is less plentiful and more expensive. And the displaced face racism and discrimination. Osiris, of Afro-Colombian descent, recounts an incident in which a man, firing shots at her family’s home in the middle of the night, taunts them: “Come out of there, you displaced sons-of-bitches, fucking guerrillas! Come out and die!” Osiris puts on a brave face: “It turned out to be one of the neighbors who’d had too much to drink and decided to make fun of us for being displaced. It was a joke. But jokes have their poison and drunks say what they really feel. Things here are difficult” (p. 170).
The question of violence and displacement
“The roots of Colombia’s crisis lie in its historically weak state, a divided ruling class, and a closed two-party political system that has blocked any participation or voice from the mass of the population,”18 write Tristin Adie and Paul D’Amato, summarizing the main reasons for the violent nature of Colombian society. For the first century and a half of Colombia’s existence as an independent state, the elite-based Liberal and Conservative Parties, whose influence reached from Bogotá to every rural town, rotated in and out of government with a regularity lampooned in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Periodic party competition led to armed conflict, with militias of Liberals and Conservatives squaring off in rural areas. Throughout most of this time, the mass of the population remained excluded from the political spoils, or, in the case of some peasants, remained tied to the Liberals or Conservatives.
This began to change in the 1930s, when, during the Great Depression, labor and peasant organizing put pressure on the political system. The Liberal governments of the 1930s enacted measures providing for social security and workers’ rights akin to U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or the state-led reforms of Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas. As in the United States, this period of reform was short-lived. The Second World War and the subsequent Cold War put a damper on popular aspirations, giving the Colombian Right an opening to roll back the 1930s reforms. President Alfonso López Pumarejo, who had played the FDR role in the 1930s, returned to power in the war years only to lead a retrenchment in the reforms he had championed. This ignited a populist movement inside (and outside) the Liberal Party, in which the Left, workers, and peasant organizations rallied behind the charismatic politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Gaitán came in third in the presidential elections of 1946, not far behind the official Liberal candidate. He looked to be in a strong position to win the 1950 election. However, on April 9, 1948, an assassin cut down Gaitán on a Bogotá street. The assassination ignited the Bogotazo, weeks of mass rioting in the capital and beyond, as Gaitán supporters accused the Conservatives or official Liberals of murdering their leader. After a brief respite, the violence reignited, this time engulfing the country in a cycle, which has since been called La Violencia, lasting through 1958. Eduardo Galeano describes La Violencia:
The violence began with a confrontation between Liberal and Conservative Parties, but the dynamic of class hostilities steadily sharpened its class struggle character.… When [Gaitán] was shot dead, the hurri cane was unleashed. First the spontaneous Bogotazo—an uncontrollable human tide in the streets of the capital; then the violence spread to the countryside, where bands organized by the Conservatives had for some time been sowing terror. The bitter taste of hatred, long in the peasants’ mouths, provoked an explosion; the government sent police and soldiers to cut off testicles, slash pregnant women’s bellies, and throw babies into the air to catch on bayonet points.… Liberal Party sages shut themselves in their homes, never abandoning their good manners and the gentlemanly tone of their manifestoes.… It was a war of incredible cruelty and it became worse as it went on, feeding the lust for vengeance.19
La Violencia took the lives of as many as 300,000 Colombians. It came to an end only when the Liberals and Conservatives agreed to a National Front pact in 1958. In the pact, the two parties agreed to trade the presidency every four years and to divide up the spoils of government between them. This arrangement held until 1974. As Jenny Pearce has explained,
The state was … literally carved up by the traditional parties. In addition to alternating the presidency between them for 16 years, all legislative bodies and public corporations … cabinet offices, judicial posts and posts at all levels of public administration were to be distributed by agreement between the two parties.
No expression of social conflict was permitted outside the control of the two traditional parties.20
While the National Front governments quelled the interparty conflicts, they did not end the peasant insurgencies sparked during La Violencia. In the 1950s, Conservative governments—with backing from the United States—launched major military operations against peasants who wanted to protect and extend the land reforms of the 1930s. These military operations stimulated the organization of peasant self-defense forces into guerrilla armies in which Colombia’s small Communist Party played a role. Focused on the nearly uninhabited departments (a subnational unit of government similar to a state government in the United States) of Meta and Caquetá, these peasant armies set up “independent republics” intended to allow peasants to work the land free of interference from the central government. But the central government and great landlords had no intention of ceding their authority to the independent republics. Instead they defined the peasant leaders as “communists and bandits” and set about re conquering the land from them. As Molano wrote in an important 1992 study of this process, “The only possible out come was war. One by one the republics fell to the army, and once they were under government control the land became concentrated in the hands of the large landowners.”21
Government and landlord assaults provoked a counter-mobilization among the peasants and others who found themselves locked out of the country’s closed political system. “Seeing that it would be impossible to break through the rigid political and agrarian structures using legal means, the opposition declared an armed rebellion. During the same period other guerrilla forces, the National Liberation Army (ELN) in 1964 and the People’s Liberation Army (EPL) in 1967, were created, and the big landowners dominated the country’s economy.”22 In 1966, several guerrilla forces tied to the Communist Party fused into the FARC. Through many political, ideological, and military twists and turns, the FARC and the ELN have established themselves today as the most durable guerrilla forces in Colombia. However, they have not been the only guerrilla challengers to the Colombian government. In the 1970s and 1980s, the urban-based guerrillas, the M-19, rose in prominence. But the M-19’s seizure of the Palace of Justice in 1985—which resulted in the immolation of the Supreme Court and the deaths of many judges, lawyers, and ordinary citizens—provoked a backlash against it. Even though the Colombian military leveled the Palace of Justice in its assault on M-19 guerrillas, the government seized the initiative to deliver a crushing blow to the M-19. A 1989 government amnesty to M-19 members brought former guerrillas into the electoral arena and propelled one M-19 leader, Antonio Navarro Wolf, into a position with the Colombian government in the 1990s.
However, Wolf’s transition from guerrilla to mainstream politician was the exception. The majority of M-19 members, as well as thousands of guerrillas from the FARC and other formations, took seriously the government’s 1984 invitation to lay down their arms and to compete in the electoral arena. They formed Unión Patriótica (UP), a left-of-center electoral front, in 1985 to compete in the 1986 presidential and newly approved local government elections.23 Looking forward to the 1986 elections, FARC leader Manuel Marulanda, known by his nom de guerre Tirofijo (“Sureshot”), spoke of his desire to return to political life as a local town counselor. But the government and the armed Right reneged on their promises. The false dawn of the 1986 elections “proved to be a great deception; the UP was literally annihilated as many of its leaders and hundreds of its candidates for office were murdered.”24 In fact, human rights workers have documented more than 3,000 murders of UP activists. With the UP experiment a shambles, the guerrillas returned to the hills and took up arms again.
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