Forgotten Peace (Violence in Latin American History) by Robert A. Karl

Author:Robert A. Karl [Karl, Robert A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: America Latina, Colombia
ISBN: 9780520293922
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2017-03-27T22:00:00+00:00

IDEAS AND PRACTICES OF VIOLENCE, 1963

Despite the political hubbub in the capital, La violencia en Colombia continued to modify the terms with which Colombians talked about violence. For instance, Communist Party intellectuals—already familiar with Fals’s earlier works of social science—found La violencia en Colombia’s first volume an unusually satisfying read. One of the party’s leading theorists delighted in what he portrayed as the país político’s hysteria toward the book, telling other party members that it would be “difficult to find in history [a similar] case where the dominant class publicly renounces out of pure fear its right to direct the debate over the national crisis.”92 Additionally, the letrados’ structuralist take on violence hewed closely to the Communists’ conviction that violence was an inevitable outgrowth of the “current political and economic regime”; unlike most contemporary explanations of violence, La violencia en Colombia avoided assigning much if any blame to the Communist Party.93

Above all, Fals’s innovative move to put the term “violence” in quotation marks heralded a wider intellectual shift within the country of letters. Describing the recent conflict as “la violencia” allowed for Communist Party intellectuals to distinguish it from “other eras of violence,” namely the civil wars of the nineteenth century. La violencia en Colombia gave Communist letrados an enduring vocabulary through which to write about violence.94

Violence remained at the center of intellectual life in the year after La violencia en Colombia’s publication, in no small part because the real-world practice of violence continued in the same molds as 1962. Two days shy of Colombia’s 1963 independence day celebration, half a dozen uniformed men halted a line of vehicles at a spot called La Italia, a mile deep into northeastern Caldas on a stretch of road parallel to the Tolima line. Despite the fact that the army had finally caught up to Chispas seven months prior, these slopes of the central Andes had gained little respite due to stepped-up depredations by what must have seemed the remaining horsemen of the apocalypse: Sangrenegra (Blackblood), Desquite (Revenge), and Tarzán.

The trio shared similar origins. Desquite had been an army veteran and small-time thief who swore retribution on the world for the lynching of his best friend (or for the death of his father at the hands of Conservatives; the stories varied). The Three Horsemen often acted in concert, but at La Italia Desquite had a smaller complement at his side. Their relatively narrow mandate to eliminate Conservatives went out the window when the forty-plus men ordered from their vehicles tried to fib about their partisan affiliations. At close quarters, Desquite’s little band killed and dismembered nearly the lot of them. The scope and brutality of the episode vaulted Desquite to uncharted heights of notoriety, entrenching in the region’s memory an already familiar modality of violence-as-practice.95

Building upon the intellectual work of 1962, Bogotá’s letrados formulated a second round of ideas out of these atrocities. Their insights oftentimes remained buried in well-trodden arguments. One of Fabio Lozano Simonelli’s columns, for instance, dedicated considerable attention to the question of foreign Communist support for Colombia’s upheavals.

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