The People's War
Pearce, Jenny
ON AUGUST 18, 1989, LUIS CARLOS GALAN, front-runner for the Liberal Party presidential nomination and likely winner in elections due in May, was shot dead while addressing a crowd in...
...drug policy seems bound to lead this country to weigh in on the dirty side of Colombia's dirty war...
...The anti-Turbay backlash certainly contributed to the victory in that election of Conservative candidate Belisario Betancur...
...Noticiero Crypton" by Diana Turbay Quintero, daughter of ex-President Turbay Ayala...
...who are denied the means to a livelihood...
...Making use of the It is possible...
...He faced strong opposition from within his own party: and, while a few selected Liberals participated in his government, the rest opposed him from their congressional majority and blocked any significant reform...
...The Popular Liberation Army (EPL), formally founded in 1967, is the armed wing of the Chinese-line MarxistLeninist Communist Party (PCC-ML...
...The area is rich in farmland and pasture, oil, gas and coal...
...After the forum, military operations in the neighboring villages intensified...
...We are at war, that is forgotten...
...The army has more than ten uniforms...
...COLOMBIA ELN, on the other hand, clearly sought to seize power.19 The group won support and made large sums of money by kidnapping oil executives and forcing their companies to invest in health, education, water and sewerage in the areas in which it operates...
...The political order forged then remains the basis of the Colombian system to this day...
...For the first time, the national press began to debate the energy issue, the role of the multinationals and the nature of the contracts signed with them...
...But today you can't shoot before you're shot at...
...Noticiero TV Hoy" by Andr6s Pastrana, son of exPresident Misael Pastrana Borrero...
...These included a number of independent workers' collectives, some factory-based groups, the Movement for Bread and Liberty (MPL), the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (PST)-part of which later withdrew-and the Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR...
...Are we at war, General...
...It is not insurgency, it is subversion....Insurgency corresponds to political, economic and social problems...
...And unlike most of its neighbors, Colombia paid its debts and sustained steady growth even through the regional depression of the 1980s...
...University professor Eduardo Diaz Uribe described the role: "From the installation of electricity, the construction of a bridge, a school or of a health post, to the most everyday things such as medical attention, a job, agricultural credit etc...[all] are considered the product of his action or of his benevolence, they are his works.'Look at this health center...
...Turbay expanded both the army's power to arrest and the kinds of crimes tried by military court...
...Despite a growing awareness during the 1970s that "something was wrong," the political class was slow to recognize the need for reform...
...By 1978, the figure was 27 per 100,000...
...Not concerned with the seizure of state power, these movements attempt to build alternatives from below, independent not only of the traditional parties, but also of the orthodoxies of the Marxist Left and the various strategies of armed struggle...
...The second attempt was the Frente Popular (FP), which the PCC-ML set up in an effort to widen its political influence...
...That Sunday evening, the mayor and town councilors went to the battalion commander to ask for an explanation...
...Most important was the Uni6n Patri6tica (UP), a coalition of the Communist Party and several small left parties, founded in 1985 by the FARC guerrillas as a result of peace accords signed with Betancur...
...The organization grew rapidly, mainly because many people on the Left distrusted Betancur's peace plan and feared that raising false expectations would damage the movement as a whole...
...One grenade exploded in a house, killing a four-year-old boy instantly and wounding his grandmother and mother...
...Peasants invaded lands and labor organized in factories and on plantations...
...They were weakest, however, in the urban areas, particularly the large cities...
...I am not speaking of arbitrariness nor of despotism, but rather of the institutional framework adequate for a war situation...
...T HE RESURGENCE OF GUERRILLA MOVEments coincided with a deepening crisis in the traditional political parties...
...It was taken away at the very moment when military justice was deprived of its function of judging public order crimes...at the moment army commanders began to face charges, when their hands were tied...
...He paid less attention to political reforms at home and had no substantial economic and social program with which to back up his peace initiatives...
...The private and violent settling of accounts for political purposes is not new in Colombia...
...B Y 1986, COLOMBIA'S POPULAR MOVEMENTS had reached a new stage, qualitatively and quantitatively...
...In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, a student leader, Antonio Larrota, organized the Workers, Students and Peasants Movement (MOEC...
...t . Other new guerrilla movements appeared in the 1970s and 1980s: Workers Self-Defense (ADO), the indigenous group Quintin Lame in Cauca, MIR-Patria Libre and the Workers' Revolutionary Party (PRT...
...The FARC hastily returned to armed struggle...
...Each guerrilla organization has its political movement, broad in some cases, narrow in others...
...The peasant movement, led by the National Peasant Association (ANUC), was at the forefront of people's struggles in the first half of the 1970s...
...Other peasants, drawn by rumors of riches, headed for the goldproducing areas of northeast Antioquia and the emerald mines of eastern Boyacd, each of which became notorious centers of violent conflict...
...The major dailies, El Tiempo and El Espectador, belong to different factions of the Liberal party...
...Horacio Serpa Uribe...
...Or, as the FARC and M-19 argued from their different perspectives, win reforms and the right to participate in the electoral process...
...Lacking a consensus for either reform or repression, the state has abandoned the fight to local elites-including cattle ranchers, businessmen and regional political bosses, in alliance with army officers and drug traffickers-who have opted for "private justice" as their best bet to maintain the status quo...
...5. 1973 figures come from a Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadistica (DANE) study quoted in Alvaro Avila Bernal, Corrupcidn y expoliacidn en Am&rica Latina (BogotA: Grijalbo, 1987), p. 150...
...By the mid-1980s these movements were challenging the hegemony of the traditional parties...
...Between 1979 and 1981, President Julio C6sar Turbay Ayala sponsored repressive legislation to restrict popular mobilization...
...It must be defeated...
...In reality, Colombia lives under an anachronistic political order which defends an extreme concentration of wealth and power...
...Colombian journalist Antonio Caballero calls this the "commercial war," waged by the cartel to protect its business interests.' There is another war, with a great many more victims -in this case mostly from the lower echelons of Colombian society: the "political war" or the "dirty war...
...Neither of the traditional parties would accept a governmentopposition formula, which would relegate its influence to Congress...
...According to Hernando G6mez Buendia, director of the Institute of Liberal Studies, between 1979 and 1989, seven magistrates, 41 judges and over 200 investigators and auxiliaries were killed by the drug mafia...
...By 1987 they were operating in 339 of the country's 1,009 municipalities, a considerable geographical area, covering all the departments except Guajira, Choc6, Narifio and the comisarias of Amazonas and Vaup6s...
...M-19, a radical, nationalist and palpably Colombian phenomenon, attracted a broader base of sympathy and support than any previous group, particularly from urban middle-class youth...
...Abstentions were high even before the National Front, and the Front's first presidential election attracted nearly 58% of the registered electorate...
...Antagonism to Turbay's sleazy practices and repressive policies eventually split the Liberals...
...The army lost the protection of the state....The basic problem is that the army is not being used as a military force...
...Gonzalo SAnchez et al, Colombia: Violencia y Democracia (Bogotd: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colciencias, 1988...
...It remained closed, unable to offer channels for demands to be heard or reforms that might meet the aspirations of the country's poor majority...
...Fierce debates over how to bring about political reform have been a common feature of Colombian politics since 1973, VOLUME xxiii, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990)17 VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990) 17Colombia but few reforms have ever made the statute book...
...The 1970 election, with ANAPO in the ascendent, brought a much larger turnout (52.5%) than the 40.1% in 1966...
...two other left-wing groups, A Luchar and the Frente Popular have lost 100 and 50 activists respectively...
...Colombia's shift to a predominantly urban society brought with it a new form of clientelism (the trading of favors in return for political loyalty) which fed on the deprivation, unemployment and powerlessness of the urban poor...
...and the leader of the Left opposition movement, Uni6n Patri6tica (Jaime Pardo Leal...
...Fabio Visquez and a small group of mostly student activists, strongly influenced by Cuba and MOEC, set up the Army of National Liberation (ELN) in 1964, after receiving basic military training in Havana...
...The same political families, fathers and sons, who had dominated the country's political history remained in power...
...The minister of mines did resign, and the ELN stopped blowing up the pipeline...
...San Vicente is the third most important municipality in the department of Santander, with 85,000 inhabitants, of which 45,000 live in the urban area...
...The world's press often describes Colombia as the most democratic country in Latin America, due to its regular elections and stable two-party system...
...1988...
...El Siglo (Conservative) is controlled by the infamous political family of Alvaro G6mez Hurtado...
...A few years later Tulio Bayer, of MOEC, and Rosendo Colmenares, a veteran of the Liberal guerrilla experience of the 1950s, were killed leading a similar attempt in Vichada in the eastern plains...
...These movements view the fundamental contraFARC guerrillas: The only organized force with a vision already accept defeat and who want to win their [the guerrillas'] favor or that of political groups in certain regions for electoral interests or for protection...
...During these years, economic developments in the countryside, particularly in regions of colonization or expanding commercial agriculture, encouraged peasants to turn to an option-guerrilla warfare-that offered defense against landowners, and a political project in which they figured as actors and subjects...
...One Liberal politician claimed that opposition movements or party factions could survive only four to five years without access to state resources and bureaucratic posts...
...The traditional elite seemed unlikely to allow more than a minimal participation of opposition forces...
...Rojas won 38.7% of the vote on April 19 of that year (to Pastrana's 40.3%) but is widely believed to have been deprived of victory by fraud...
...The Guerras put it there'....'The light in this district was given by Martinez Simahin'....'The sewerage system was put in by Dajer...
...DANE figures reported in Latin American Newsletters Andean Report, July 27, 1989...
...Peasant and labor organizers and suspected guerrillas were arrested...
...This prompted the movements to seek national coordination and to create expressly political vehicles for challenging the hermetic political and social order...
...Or, as the EPL insisted, find political openings by uniting all forces against "fascism...
...and -"Telenoticiero de Mediodia" by Maria de Rosario de Ortiz Santos, from the Santos family of El Tiempo and exPresident Eduardo Santos...
...Politicians find it easier to use the party machines than to challenge them...
...In 1980 Sen...
...The assassination took place in front of television cameras and in spite of the presence of Galin's 22 bodyguards...
...Their rural forces handed over their weapons in return for guarantees that they could safely participate in electoral politics...
...What do you call an energetic state...
...A very serious power vacuum...
...FFORTS TO BUILD AN EFFECTIVE INDEPENDent grassroots movement in the 1970s faced many difficulties...
...And how do you defeat the guerrillas militarily...
...A Luchar's combative politics (the name means "to struggle") won it influence in the peasant and, to a lesser extent, the workers movement...
...By 1986, the urban cells of M-19, the only group to mount significant urban operations, had been all but wiped out...
...The People's War 1. El Espectador (BogotA), Oct...
...We are acting, thinking, conceiving...not a real country, but one of paper," he said last year...
...People were taking their opposition into the streets for want of any other political channel...
...The confusion of these two is dangerous...
...An energetic state would make the dirty war unnecessary...
...Abstentions in the big cities were notorious...
...Other reforms dealt with some overt abuses of the bipartisan system, for instance one member from a third party was to be allowed to join three members of the traditional parties on a new National Electoral Council...
...A simple interrogation carried out by a military authority has no legal validity...
...Should they, as the ELN wished, deepen the revolutionary process through a prolonged popular war...
...Incredibly, all the major television news programs are run by the children of former presidents: -"Noticiero de la 7" by Felipe L6pez Caballero, son of L6pez Michelsen, grandson of ex-President L6pez Pumarejo...
...Social and economic reality, however, has changed profoundly...
...On January 17, 1988, Father Jaime Restrepo L6pez, parish priest of San Jos6 del Nus in the department of Antioquia, was shot dead as he prepared to say mass...
...Though it faced a growing social catastrophe in the burgeoning cities, local government actually did less and less...
...These events bear all the characteristics of political crimes, committed to punish those belonging to certain parties or adhering to certain ideologies, or to intimidate entire communities, to maintain a certain economic status quo or to prevent the rise of certain forms of popular expression...
...It has cost the government millions in lost revenues and, between early 1988 and mid-1989 alone, nearly $400 million in damage to pipelines...
...In March 1988 he gave his first interview to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza of El Tiempo, from which this is drawn...
...Don't you think that the political groups are one thing and the guerrillas another...
...Economia Colombiana (Bogoti), Oct/Nov 1989...
...3. It is often noted that Colombia has a relatively large middle class, but official income distribution figures show that the middle 30% receives only 28% of total income...
...7. El Tiempo (BogotA), Aug...
...If there is will on the part of the government, will from the parties, will from the court and the judiciary, will from parliament, the armed forces will have the will to fight and win....They don't have it now for lack of support...
...4 Three decades later that class is unleashing a wave of right-wing terror against people who demand their rights...
...According to the president of the municipal council, Adolfo Mufioz, peasants talked of nearly 40 dead and many wounded who could not be brought to the towns because the army stopped them...
...others fled the region...
...ON AUGUST 18, 1989, LUIS CARLOS GALAN, front-runner for the Liberal Party presidential nomination and likely winner in elections due in May, was shot dead while addressing a crowd in Soacha, on the outskirts of Bogota...
...Only a few regional politicians showed up...
...It accepts dialogue for purely tactical reasons, to strengthen itself, but it never abandons its objectives....Here, there are politicians who say that we must enter into dialogue with the guerrillas...
...They had failed to win broad support and were hard put to battle the large and wellequipped Colombian army...
...It is caused by private initiatives, due to the absence and weakness of the state and also to the pain caused by the subversive groups...
...The UP saw it as broadly based and encompassing both the Left and other progressive forces...
...they are stealing the oil...
...The guerrillas had to decide how to use their armed strength...
...In the towns and cities, where there were only 500,000 manufacturing jobs in 1985, illegal activities flourished and the informal sector grew to provide over half of all employment.' Unlike the economy, the political order based on oligarchic power and family patrimonies failed to modernize...
...A state which gives us the instruments to act...
...He spoke of reform, and was viewed as making a serious effort to deal with the violence-notjust political violence, but also criminal violence, which had reached epidemic proportions in the cities by the early 1980s...
...But the new movements were primarily children of their times...
...The 1958 National Front pact, by which the two parties agreed to govern in coalition and alternate in the presidency for the next 16 years, ended La Violencia by offering guarantees of patronage and power to both parties...
...Just as they created two Vietnams, two Koreas, there could be a Colombia divided into two...
...A sample of private-sector, government and party leaders in 1977 and 1978 showed that twothirds were unequivocal on this issue...
...In some places militant labor suffers most...
...2 Among the victims was Daniel Espitia, the national treasurer of the peasant movement (ANUC), who was shot dead by paid assassins on August 9 of last year...
...With their heads shaved and their faces painted black, the soldiers began to come out of the Luciano D'Luyer barracks in San Vicente de Chucurf at 6 p.m...
...1, 1989...
...Among the guerrillas' demands have been the resignation of the minister responsible for oil and of the president of ECOPETROL, the nationalization of the Carlo Lim6n oil field, an end to contracts with foreign companies and a nationwide forum to discuss oil policy...
...Elitism and sectarianism characterized the Left, replicating much of the paternalism of traditional patronage politics...
...It is not, as it should be, a force of repression...
...When those problems disappear, so does insurgency...
...It avoided the sudden swings from radical populist to radical monetarist policies which have characterized many Latin American economies...
...After abandoning state sponsorship, it grew into the most militant popular organization in the country's history, only to face gradual defeat, division and demoralization after 1974...
...From the ashes of the old EPL and ELN, movements emerged which threw off their Chinese or Cuban ideological straitjackets and sought to root themselves more firmly in Colombian reality...
...Which makes it possible to take special measures, to restrict freedom at a given moment...
...Only the FARC, with its very particular origins and character, survived the 1970s with most of its original objectives intact...
...6 Eleven trade unionists at the Nare Cement works in the Magdalena Medio region were killed, including the union's president, vice-president and treasurer...
...They announced the imminent "cleansing" of San Vicente of the guerrillas and their collaborators, and were signed by the paramilitary command, "Colonel Rogelio Correa Campos...
...Perhaps more significant were the newer "civic" movements, which brought people together on the basis of interests shared by a local community, sector or region-such as the lack of water, sewers or other municipal services-rather than the traditional class-based trade unionism...
...The Left made two attempts to work within the electoral system during the Betancur administration...
...The three political organizations, UP, FP, and A Luchar, had very different ideas about how to work with grassroots movements...
...In 1973, with 19.8 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants, Colombia was one of the most violent countries in the world-compared, for instance, to Thailand (15.6), Mexico (13), United States (9.7) or France (0.8...
...Many officers say, Why should we get ourselves killed for those who judge us without taking into account that we contribute our dead...
...In September 1988 the three announced their intention to join forces in a political front (Frente Politico de Convergencia), but it had great difficulty getting off the ground...
...the editor of the leading daily, El Espectador (Guillermo Cano...
...But the amount of money cocaine generated turned the pdjaro into the sicario, a well-equipped and welltrained professional...
...One example of the failure of reform attempts is agrarian reform...
...Alejandro Reyes Posada and Ana Maria Bejarano, "Conflictos agrarios y luchas armadas en la Colombia contempordnea: una visi6n geogrAifica," Andlisis Politico (BogotA), No...
...1 0 It depended, as it always had, on capturing the vote of a population essentially excluded from any genuine participation or influence in political life...
...Nueva Frontera (Liberal) is edited by former President Carlos Lleras Restrepo...
...ANAPO led Gen...
...national and departmental authorities refused...
...Despite serious strategic differences, six guerrilla organizations took the first remarkable step towards coordinating their activities in 1985, which culminated in October 1987 with the formation of the Sim6n Bolivar Guerrilla Coordinating Body (CGSB), made up of ELN, M-19, Quintin Lame, FARC and the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT...
...The ELN's growth between 1986 and the end of 1988 (which it estimated at 500%) was rapid...
...many were tortured...
...The business associations (gremios) maintained direct contact with the top levels of government to ensure that the economy served the interests of those who owned it...
...The 28-hour army siege that followed left the building gutted and 95 dead, including all the guerrillas and 12 Supreme Court justices...
...Nothing will remain as an alternative, neither one of the parties, nor the church, nor, as people have come to think, the armed forces...
...Social unrest had grown under Turbay's predecessor and the national civic strike of 1977 led to calls from the army for strong state action...
...His brother had been killed in 1988 along with 15 others including several children...
...It is the only organized force with a vision...
...But its primary activity today is blowing up oil pipelines, a tactic which engendered intense debate on the Left...
...And in this struggle, all institutions must take part...
...They are people who NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASwhile, drowned his peace initiative in blood by stepping up the dirty war against guerrilla sympathizers...
...The complicity of the army in these activities has been condemned...
...At least one guerrilla movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), emerged directly out of peasants' experiences in certain regions during La Violencia...
...It doesn't want torture, disappearances...
...Don't you believe in a political solution to the problem of subversion...
...In November 1989 the government did agree to an energy forum in which the ELN could make its case...
...Those with power acted as brokers between the population and the source of benefits and services, exchanging these for the only leverage available to the poor, their vote...
...diction in society less as that between capital and wage labor (which has won some privileges) than between capital and the excluded (unemployed, underemployed, street vendors, etc...
...Despite steady economic growth, the rise in urban population was not accompanied by matching increases in employment opportunities, or the provision of fundamental services or housing...
...But the very nature of economic modernization and growth sowed the seeds of political rebellion...
...They nonetheless cooperated over minimal common demands: respect for human rights, dismantling the paramilitary groups, the defense of national sovereignty.' 6 Each had lost hundreds of lives and endured considerable repression in exchange for a tiny opening in the political system...
...on February 5, 1989...
...Violence is not the route preferred by all of the ruling elite...
...Like the UP, the FP was meant to provide a way for broad sectors, rather than just the parties' own members, to participate...
...A study of municipal elections (undertaken in 1986) concluded that since 1981, 88% of municipalities have given a majority to the same political party...
...Although the pact lasted formally only until 1974, power-sharing arrangements have continued...
...Only subversion...
...BogotA: CINEP, 1988), pp...
...He graduatedfirst ofY 800 officers in the Chief of Stqffs course at Fort Leavenworth, and w'as commander ofthe XII Brigade in Caquetd...
...By 1964, MOEC had collapsed into factions...
...At first we were virtually the only ones fighting for him...
...And repression, the elite was to discover, can buy as much time, if not more, as reform...
...This is nowhere more evident than in ownership of the media...
...They controlled all the major means of communication, and the economics of electoral campaigns made it difficult for opposition parties to compete...
...He succeeded by appealing beyond the party machinery to the people, particularly the urban middle class...
...Luis Carlos Galan led an anti-corruption faction out of the party to found Nuevo Liberalismo...
...During the 1970s, Colombia's poor and excluded formed massive and combative movements, which soon overflowed the rigid boundaries of the political system...
...The campaign was launched at the end of 1986 under the slogan "Awake Colombia...
...The first competitive presidential election in 1974 brought a 58.1% turnout...
...his father was assassinated early last year, and his wife had left him because she could no longer stand the fear in which they lived...
...For people at the local level, government came to be personifled in the professional political fixer...
...If new political spaces and reforms are open, insurgency loses its reason for being...
...1 2 The decline of party struggle also meant the gradual decline of party loyalties, the heart of Colombia's social fabric...
...the Supreme Court must take into account the reason of state, the fact of a country in danger, and not abstract legal considerations...
...He was killed in 1961 while trying to establish a guerrilla center (foco) in the north of the Cauca Valley...
...A more educated population was less willing to be manipulated...
...Since 1986, this war has taken the lives of 8,000 peasants, workers, opposition politicians and left-wing activists...
...Their first foco was near San Vicente de Chucurf in the south of Santander, a region with a tradition of struggle, having housed the Comunero revolt in 1781, as well as the peasant leagues of the 1920s and Rafael Rangel's Liberal guerrillas in the 1950s...
...1978 and 1988 statistics are calculated from UP presidential candidate Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, assassinated on March 22 While the elite may well sort out its conflicts with a nouveau riche that has already penetrated many areas of state and society, it has shown itself to be unable to address the serious social problems the nation faces--other than through violence...
...Noticiero 24" by Mauricio G6mez, son of Alvaro G6mez Hurtado, and grandson of Conservative Party godfather Laureano G6mez...
...About 40 M-19 guerrillas stormed the Palace of Justice on November 6, 1985, and took over 100 people hostage, including the entire Supreme Court...
...Subversion, no...
...Though it had taken years to get through Congress, a constitutional amendment allowing the direct election of mayors was finally approved in December 1985...
...Among these groups, FARC and ELN stood at opposite ends of the tactical and strategic spectrum...
...The Statute for Defense of Democracy was left with no backbone when the Supreme Court annulled the right of the armed forces to carry out searches....We are not asking for a licence to kill...
...During 1988 and the first two months of 1989, over 230 union leaders and activists were victims of politically motivated killings...
...Even with the barriers to third party candidates, he managed to win 10.9% of the vote in the 1982 elections against the official Liberal candidate, former President Alfonso L6pez Michelsen...
...Since 1947, Colombia has lived almost permanently under state of siege...
...It wouldn't have arisen if from the beginning in the agreements the former were made responsible for what the latter did...
...FARC viewed its military prowess as the bargaining power necessary to force an opening in the political system, and as a defense against the armed forces, landowners and drug traffickers...
...Political VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990) 13Colombia violence is thus presented as senseless acts carried out by evil men-paramilitary groups, drug traffickers and guerrillas-with the armed forces and police only incidentally involved...
...9. Alvaro Reyes Posada, "Tendencias del empleo y la distribuci6n del ingreso," in Jos6 Antonio Ocampo and Manuel Ramirez (eds...
...in the 1976 legislative elections in Bogota, 80% did not vote...
...Elections to the legislature attracted even lower turnouts, an average of 40.3% from 1958 to 1978, with only 33.4% voting in 1978...
...7 OLOMBIAN NOBEL LAUREATE GABRIEL Garcia Mdrquez scoffs at his country's democracy...
...But in the meantime, a second generation of guerrilla movements had begun to form: Most importantly, some former members of the FARC joined with a sector of ANAPO in 1973, to found the April 19th Movement, M-19...
...But it won't accept the dirty war...
...A new generation of guerrilla armies emerged and found increasing support...
...At this moment it has all of them...
...6. Colombia Hoy (Bogotd), No...
...In joining forces to support the third national civic strike of 1985, for example, FP and UP sought to call for greater democracy and the fulfillment of the peace agreements...
...6, 1988...
...For many years loyalty to the two traditional political parties, Conservative and Liberal, was the link between the two worlds, sealed through generations of bloody vendettas in which people fought and died on behalf of one or the other faction of the ruling oligarchy...
...Besides, civil support to the police is not allowed as it is not legal...
...Jonathan Hartlyn, The Politics of Coalition Rule in Colombia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988...
...But with the cocaine boom of the 1980s, the homicide rate zoomed to 70 per 100,000 in 1988.5 Today's political violence overwhelmingly affects the poor...
...So little got done at the local level that people had no choice but to seek solutions outside the system...
...An additional 350,000 hectares were "ceded" to INCORA, but that was mostly barren land...
...Though increasingly at odds with its civilian allies, the UP and PCC, it endorsed their efforts to broaden support and further test the electoral waters...
...Their urban work gave new impetus to the armed struggle, a struggle which the repressive tactics of the government of the late 1970s fueled rather than checked...
...For a democrat, that is to be rejected...
...From 1961 to 1985 the agrarian reform institute INCORA bought up 472,470 hectares and expropriated 66,035 more...
...We are at war...
...The professional politician replaced the old-style political boss with his "natural" claim to leadership.13 In the shadow of the other coca: squatters in Bogota While caciquismo and clientelism sustained local party control in many areas, particularly in the countryside, fewer and fewer people actually voted...
...Indians demanded territorial and cultural rights in the South, banana workers waged a bloody battle for basic union recognition in the North, peasants fought for land and squatters for basic services in the East, and Blacks organized for the first time in Colombia's most backward department of Choc6 in the West...
...The next day, the civil authorities again asked the commander for explanations...
...The traditional party machines intervened to manipulate and divide...
...The new president, Turbay Ayala, had engaged in all sorts of political machinations and the election took place amid accusations of fraud and drug-financed campaigns...
...An elderly nun saw a bullet hit her bedroom...
...but A Luchar saw it solely as a front of the Left...
...THE MEDIA: A FAMILY AFFAIR OLITICS IN COLOMBIA IS VERY MUCH A FAM- ily business...
...In the smaller towns multi-class civic protests over lack of services became widespread, while in the larger cities labor sought to break free from the shackles of traditional party control...
...Turbay responded with a draconian security statute...
...PCC political machinery, the UP successfully established itself as the country's third political force and main opposition party...
...A series of decrees gradually increased the armed forces' control over affairs of public order, and diminished the ability of civilian authorities to protect the public against abuse...
...Military attacks have sparked town officials to unite irrespective of party in a Common Front for Life and Democracy, as agreed at the March 16 forum...
...In the 1950s Colombia's ruling class led its people into one of the bloodiest civil wars of the twentieth century, La Violencia, in which as many as 350,000 died...
...That dirty war exists, but the army is not linked to it...
...Between 1964 and 1985 the rural population grew less than 10%, while the urban population more than doubled to 19 million, out 14NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 14 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASof a total of 29 million...
...How to defend the country better, General...
...On June 1, 1989, Father Sergio Restrepo, Jesuit priest of Tierralta in the department of C6rdoba, who had been working with the Sind Indian community, was shot dead near his church...
...La Repdblica (Conservative) is owned by the family of former President Mariano Ospina Pirez...
...He hadn't attended himself, "because I knew that there would only be attacks on the army...
...The Colombia of macro-economic statistics is a success story...
...In the countryside, rapacious cattle ranchers forced thousands of peasants off their lands...
...After a strong showing in the 1960 legislative elections and the symbolic 1962 presidential vote-in which the Conservatives were guaranteed victory by pact-the government offered it access to high office in return for rejoining the Liberal mainstream...
...Of the six presidential elections since 1966, only three attracted more than half the registered electorate, and only two brought out more than half the eligible electorate.' 4 With high levels of abstention, the bosses had to mobilize fewer votes to secure a victory, removing the incentive to develop strong party institutions or accommodate opposition interests...
...General, the country is aware of that...
...Is itpossible within the institutional framework of a democratic system, without recourse to a dictatorship, which the democrats, the immense majority of the country, all reject...
...8. Semana, March 20, 1989...
...Entire towns went on strike to protest the lack of basic services...
...But the nation has to make the firm decision to confront subversion as an adversary, an enemy...
...During the past week, when the army was patrolling the streets and people were forced to hide in their homes, slogans were painted on walls and notes were put under doors...
...Within an hour the building was surrounded by troops and tanks...
...Those who opposed electoral politics and the peace plan gathered together in another movement, A Luchar, in 1984...
...Incorporating the large numbers of civilians under threat into the guerrilla movements was impossible...
...HOUGH THE 1985 STORMING OF THE PALace of Justice and the subsequent massacre severely weakened the M-19, guerrilla activity as a whole escalated in the mid-1980s.' 7 The ELN in particular, which had not entered into Betancur's "national dialogue," grew considerably...
...The army lost its capacity for combat, because it was taken away...
...I don't...
...More than 500 families fled...
...VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990) 19Colombia SMALL-TOWN LIFE IN THE MAGDALENA MEDIO T HE PEOPLE HAD NEVER SEEN THEM LIKE THAT...
...In 1987 it held its first national assembly which elected the national leadership...
...2 0 As popular support for Colombia's guerrilla movements began to build, the "dirty war" moved to close it off...
...That would create armed self-defense or paramilitary groups, it is thought...
...It does not include murders whose motive is unknown, of which there were 2,729 during 1989, up to Nov...
...Modernizing politicians, President Virgilio Barco among them, have sought a way out of the crisis by opening the system up to some democratic participation, strengthening the state, and making it capable of relieving some of the greatest suffering of the poor...
...Betancur launched an audacious initiative for negotiating peace with the guerrillas, and dedicated himself to the Contadora Group working for peace in Central America...
...Curiously, say council representatives, people are being forced out from the most productive lands, which are then being repopulated with people close to the paramilitary...
...The paramilitary Right, meanSome years back, General, the army had more initiative, it confronted the guerrillas, it defeated them, it recovered stolen arms...
...In March of this year, M-19 signed a peace accord with President Barco...
...65, Feb...
...The Constitution, the laws...everything in Colombia is magnificent, everything on paper...
...The effort was principally intended to be a vehicle for the guerrillas to enter the political arena...
...He was an organizer in the city of Monterfa in C6rdoba, where 20,000 refugees from political killings and army bombings of peasant villages live in miserable shanty towns...
...The 1978 election, with its poor turnout, represented a low point for the political system...
...The people remained at the margins of political life, to be manipulated as "electoral capital" by party bosses and their henchmen...
...These are neither errors, acts of vengeance, nor irrational acts on the part of some madmen who joined forces to slaughter Colombians hither and yon," said a former attorney general, Dr...
...Gui6n (Conservative) by former President Misael Pastrana Borrero, La Prensa (Conservative) by Pastrana Borrero's son, and the weekly Semana by the son of Liberal ex-President Alfonso L6pez Michelsen...
...No negotiations were attempted...
...Dozens of judges, magistrates, policemen, soldiers and other members of the establishment had also been murdered to persuade the government to abandon its efforts to prosecute the drug lords...
...Journalist and writer Apolinar Diaz Callejo described it as "hereditary power without monarchy...
...39-44...
...People were organizing around their real needs and sought no mediation from the parties...
...In order to develop, the guerrilla needs three supports: one political, another social and the third economic...
...These movements brought people into political life in an unprecedented way, forcing both the orthodox and revolutionary Left to question the elitism of the past and show greater respect for popular organizations and their autonomy...
...It is usually dated from the 1948 assassination of populist Liberal leader Jorge Eli6cer GaitAn...
...MRL was set up by Alfonso L6pez Michelson as a Liberal Party faction in opposition to the National Front pact...
...Amnesty International, Colombia Human Rights Developments-" 'Death Squads" on the Defensive?, (London, Sept...
...The violence of the so-called paramilitary groups comes from the transparent relationship between political groups and guerrilla groups...
...Rojas Pinilla's (president 1953-57) efforts to make a political comeback in the 1966 elections, and presented the National Front with its first major challenge...
...Peasants make up the majority of the victims who could be identified, with 840 in 1988...
...Eduardo Diaz Uribe, El clientelismo en Colombia (Bogotd: El Ancora, 1986), p. 46...
...At the same time, repression drove others closer to the various guerrilla organizations, which showed some NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS E " 16capacity to defend the movements under fire...
...Landowners and political bosses made use of both the paid assassin, the pdjaro, and private paramilitary armies during La Violencia...
...In these and other regions the UP has lost over a thousand people since 1985...
...In it the cartel does not stand alone, but is allied with businessmen, landowners and members of the armed forces...
...The personal loyalties of the past became pragmatic loyalties...
...The cartel had already killed a justice minister (Rodrigo Lara Bonilla...
...8 Each movement had a regional base...
...In only one-third of the municipalities was there anything resembling genuine competition...
...No reliable information exists on exactly how many guerrillas there are, though some suggest a figure of around 12,000...
...This culminated in the late 1940s and 1950s in La Violencia...
...It must create legislation which protects the army's witnesses...
...2. Monitoring of the press by the human rights office of the Jesuit research body CINEP, as well as the Church's Justicia y Paz, came up with a figure of 8,150, which includes "social clean-up" (limpieza social) murders of homosexuals, criminals, and prostitutes, as well as killings that are known to be political...
...One study found that in Cali the number of murders with firearms grew from 51% of all murders in 1980 to 85% in 1986, and in Medellin from 40% in 1979 to 76% in 1985...
...5, Sept./Dec...
...Source: Colombia Hoy, March and April 1989...
...The EPL was strongest in Urabl, C6rdoba and Antioquia, and had a small operational base in Norte de Santander and Putumayo...
...Julio C6sar Quintero Latorre, Z.Quj pasd con la Tierra Prometida...
...In the 1986 presidential election the UP won 4.5% of the vote, the largest in the history of the Left, and 14 UP candidates were elected to Congress...
...The selection of the president and other high officials came to be achieved through delicate secret negotiations among a few party leaders, within each party, and, finally, between parties...
...similarly, the FP saw it as generally anti-imperialist and anti-fascist...
...But there is also a "real" Colombia where the rule of law barely holds, deprivation and poverty are the norm, and democracy is just a word on a historic document...
...In 1973, 60% of Colombians were living in urban areas and M-19 was the first guerrilla group to acknowledge this demographic shift...
...The two parties quickly Cali squatters show the remains of their homes after police eviction: Lack of housing and services has spawned massive and combative "civic movements" \ irt VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990) E M 15Colombia suppressed any attempt by a politician to make a direct appeal to the people...
...Colombia was governed by de facto coalition rule in one way or another until 1986 when, for the first time since bipartisan government was developed, Virgilio Barco's Liberal administration ruled without the participation of the Conservatives...
...Nothing of that is seen today...
...In 1989 African palm workers in the departments of C6sar, Santander and Norte de Santander protested the murders of ten of their members...
...A Luchar wanted to protest the government's demagogic behavior on the peace issue...
...The Liberals responded with guerrilla warfare and massacres of their own...
...And guerrilla weakness in urban areas meant that revolution-and an end to the war-was not on the horizon...
...But in 1978 only 40.9% voted...
...He had been fighting guerrillas since he was sixteen...
...3 Political violence is better understood as the result of the elite's desire to preserve its privileges...
...What is happening...
...M-19's operational base was in the Southeast, in Valle, Cauca and Tolima...
...Ninety-nine members of the teachers union have been killed over the past three years, and death threats forced nearly a thousand to leave their jobs and homes...
...an attorney general (Carlos Mauro Hoyos...
...El problema laboral colombiano: informes de la Misidn Chenery, (Bogotd: Contraloria General de la Reptiblica, 1987...
...It was the zone which mobilized most people during the regional civic strike in 1987 and the peasant marches of May 1988...
...By 1989, the ELN had generated a considerable level of debate about national energy policy...
...In both cases they were virtually abandoned without credit or infrastructure...
...Why isn't there an effective military response to armed insurrection...
...These peasants poured into urban slums or colonized the forests and lowland plains...
...8 The paper Colombia is constitutional and legalistic, boasting all the trappings of a modem polity...
...Meanwhile, urban labor also became more militant, with public-sector workers leading the strike activity of the late 1970s...
...that is one and they are entitled to go out into the streets like that," the commander told them...
...ANAPO activists went on to co-found the M-19 guerrilla movement, named after the date of the alleged fraud...
...The war affected primarily sympathizers and innocents, not combatants...
...In the countryside, the caciques--often natural leaders with personal influence over servile peasant communities-traditionally could be counted on to bring out the vote...
...No longer confined to isolated marginal regions, they had grown strong in areas of strategic economic importance, such as the Magdalena NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASMedio and Urabd...
...This land was distributed to 30,000 families...
...But just to arrest, search, keep a detainee for eight or ten days and carry out an interrogation...
...4. La Violencia began as a final attempt by the ruling Conservative Party to crush the Liberal Party by outright massacre...
...It has no connection with reality...
...INCORA also distributed just under five million hectares of public lands, mostly in colonization areas where lack of infrastructure and credit, and constant harassment by cattle ranchers have forced peasants into bankruptcy or coca farming...
...But other reforms, including attempts to limit and account for campaign funds and to give minority parties more access to legislative posts, failed to get through Congress, and the two parties failed to agree on how to end Article 120 which perpetuated their coalition rule...
...Colombia has a long history of armed struggle, but only since the 1960s have independent guerrilla movements begun to pose an alternative structure of power...
...The present editor, Hernando Santos, boasted of the election of Virgilio Barco: "We didn't make the new president, but El Tiempo certainly was an important factor in getting him nominated...
...The community-based urban civic movements then took the lead with numerous strikes, culminating in the successful national civic strike of 1977...
...El Tiempo, the more conservative of the two, is owned by a great Liberal political family, the Santos...
...As night fell, the sounds of machine-gun fire, bombs and grenades filled the town...
...Not even as a police force, because the police have more powers...
...No longer would they put up with conditions tolerated at the beginning of the 1960s...
...The perception that a party could only survive if it had access to government coffers is deeply rooted in the political culture...
...In the evening, a group of guerrillas tried to take the town, the soldiers went out and followed them and there was a confrontation," he answered...
...Patricia Pinz6n, La oposicidn polftica en Colombia: aproximacidn al itinerario de lasf6rmulas (Bogotd: FESCOL, 1986), p. 9 .] Pinz6n also found that in 1984, 35% of the municipalities were still giving 80% majorities to one party...
...During the October 27, 1988 national civic strike residents paralyzed the town for eight hours...
...Given the average per capita income of $1,372, the "middle class" is more likely made up of those who have access to some form of wage employment, rather than well-paid professionals...
...But with hardly any time to consolidate, these young and fragile movements soon found themselves working in semi-clandestinity and subjected to systematic violent repression...
...The parties lost their mystique but retained their influence through material favors...
...A handful of today's commanders were legendary guerrillabandits during La Violencia...
...Repression is a taboo word...
...The signing of the National Front pact by the two parties in 1957 brought it formally to a close, although related banditry and violence continued until 1965...
...The national political class, however, is weak and divided, and the fear of losing power and privilege has kept reforms at an eternal impasse in Congress...
...It is being used as a preventive force, as a civic force...
...The "political war" was launched to crush these efforts to organize for change...
...1989, p. 9 and 1 ; Cien Dias (Bogotd), March 1989, p. 10...
...The political support it was lacking, it obtained through the peace agreements...
...On March 16, community organizations, the town council and the mayor sponsored a Forum for Life and Democracy in order to discuss with regional and national authorities measures to bring peace to the region...
...The PCC-ML broke away from the Moscow-line Communist Party (PCC) in 1965 as a result of the Sino-Soviet split, and began working among the peasants of Alto Sind in C6rdoba and the Bajo Cauca, a region in which the Liberal guerrilla Julio Guerra had influence...
...Latin America's first guerrilla priest, Camilo Torres, joined them the following year, only to be killed four months later...
...Paramilitary forces also target priests and members of religious communities who work with the poor...
...The indigenous movement set up the National Organization of Indigenous People of Colombia (ONIC...
...Many of A Luchar's members had strong sympathies for the ELN guerrillas, but no formal organic ties exist...
...Movements arose which weren't aiming to integrate the guerrillas into legal activity, but were simply their political projection, not explicit but camouflaged...
...The trade unions and civic movement moved toward unity, and those factions of ANUC which refused to capitulate to the government began rebuilding...
...The function of the army with respect to subversion is repression...
...They ran candidates in the March elections...
...However, the movement grew across the country and across the political spectrum...
...While the worst of the 1970s sectarianism had diminished, the Left remained locked in debate over whether the popular movements should seek reforms through existing institutions, or a radical transformation of Colombian society as a whole...
...The ELN was strongest in the Northeast, particularly Arauca, along the frontier with Venezuela and in the east of Antioquia...
...In 1986 the country's first independent labor confederation, the United Confederation of Workers (CUT), was formed, with the majority of the country's trade unions affiliated...
...By the mid- 1970s these movements were in deep crisis and faced virtual defeat...
...The FARC, with nearly 50 fronts, covered the largest area, and was strongest in places of peasant colonization-the eastern plains, the Magdalena Medio, the Alto Magdalena and in some parts of the South and East...
...THE MILITARY MIND General Rafael Pena Rios retired fiom active military service at the end of 1987 at the age of 49...
...This situation was hardly conducive to the emergence of a participatory political culture, let alone a sense of loyalty to the polity as such...
...The "dirty war" was immediately stepped up, and UP and FP politicians began to be murdered en masse by right-wing death squads...
...All evidence indicates that the killing was ordered by some of the country's most powerful traffickers in cocaine, the Medellin cartel...
...After that event, Rafael G6mez, commander of the D'Luyer battalion, wrote the mayor asking for tapes of the speeches and a list of participants...
...If this doesn't happen what will...
...The 1986 presidential election, held during a period of intense political debate and following improvements in the registration process, attracted just over 50% of the potential vote...
...We must recognize that there are insufficient troops to protect the thousand municipalities...
...The growth of third forces, such as the Revolutionary Liberal Movement (MRL) in the early 1960s and the National Popular Alliance (ANAPO) in the middle of that decade, was dealt with by co-option or fraud...
...The linking of the UP and the FARC has produced many assassinations...
...Marta Hamecker, Reportajes sobre Colombia: entrevista a dirigentes de la UCELN (Quito: Quimera, 1988) p. 87.] In June 1987 it merged with the MIR-Patria Libre (a split from the PCC-ML) and was subsequently known as the Uni6n Camilista-ELN (UCELN...
...In January 1989 the oil workers union broke off contract talks with the state company fearing for the lives of its negotiators...
...While party rivalry diminished, political battles continued-not over policy but over access to government resources...
...It must create legislation which supports our operations...
...The aim of these groups is subversive, that is the seizure of power by arms to change a system and a society...
...In the departments of Meta and Antioquia, attacks have been particularly systematic against left-wing politicians of the Uni6n Patri6tica (UP) movement...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 6
