Coyuntura Socio-Política

Hay muchos escritos sobre la democracia en Colombia, y su crítica. En este caso Luis Fernando Medina se plantea un interrogante de gran calado y significación. Los apartes son tomados de un correo remitido por el colega y ciberandante Oscar Delgado de la U. del Rosario. N de la D de la Red Escuela Ciudad Blanca.

Ending The Endless War

Will Colombia’s democracy survive the violence?

Luis Fernando Medina

Luis Fernando Medina is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia and author of A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change.

According to popular Colombian lore, a bridge was inaugurated in Eastern Colombia to much fanfare in the mid-twentieth century. Colombia’s Eastern Plains are a vast flatland with roaring rivers, and so the bridge was engulfed by the river a few rainy months later.

By the time the dry months returned, the river had settled on a different course, leaving the bridge alone, rising awkwardly above a dry patch of land.

I have heard the story several times from different sources, but I don’t know if it’s true. It deserves to be, since it captures something about the paradoxes of Colombia.

This is a country that in 1991 drafted one of the most modern and enlightened constitutions, consecrating a vast array of citizens’ rights, and during the following decade saw around 3 million of its citizens, more than one in fifteen, internally displaced.

Colombia boasts one of the longest democratic traditions in the Western Hemisphere, 120 years of contested elections and peaceful transfers of power; but, in a slow year, more than a thousand Colombians, including union leaders, journalists, and human rights activists, fall victim to political violence.

Sometimes the number is two or three times that. An exemplar of prudence and professionalism in its economic management, Colombia hosts one of the largest illegal economies in the world, as the international leader in cocaine production.

Life in Colombia’s cities goes on as it would in any other country—and probably with more partying—while right-wing death squads roam the countryside. By some estimates, they have killed more than 40,000 people since the late 1980s, including women, children, and the elderly.

There is no agreement on when Colombia’s plight began or even what to call it. Most say it started 40-50 years ago; however, in 2008 Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez spoke of its “sixty-year war,” while an influential World Bank paper from 2000 places its origins between 1980 and 1984.

Colombia’s orgy of killings during the 1940s and ’50s went down in history as the period of La Violencia (The Violence), a generic name suggesting just how difficult it was to comprehend. Similarly, Colombians often refer to their current situation as the “armed conflict,” thus avoiding a more conventional label such as “civil war.” The sitting administration of Álvaro Uribe refused to use the word “conflict” for a while, offering instead “attack against democracy.”

The Colombian and American governments claim that the violence in Colombia—whether twenty or 60 years old, whether armed conflict or civil war—seems to be turning a corner. Such bouts of optimism are an invitation to careful analysis.

With a land mass comparable to that of Alaska (and South Africa) and a population of 45 million (comparable to that of the West Coast of the United States), Colombia is a significant presence, and events there reverberate from the Caribbean to the Amazon basin to its sizable diaspora.

Related Articles

Charles Tilly, Violence, Terror, and Politics as Usual
Helena Cobban, The Legacies of Collective Violence
Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez, United By Hate

Future textbooks in Colombia will likely refer to the end of the current conflict as the foundation of a new republic.

But after decades of bloodshed, what kind of republic will it be? Will it enshrine the violence or will it bequeath to new generations the peace, tolerance, and solidarity that evaded previous ones? Both outcomes are possible and only time will tell.