MADRID – Before the latest carnage reported from Colombia is shunted down into the archives and certainly before the Bush administration decides it is going to re direct its military aid to Colombia, now concentrated on defeating drug trafficking, in the direction of fighting leftist guerrillas, we should all take time out to reconsider the last 100 years or more of Colombian history. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s Nobel Prize winning novelist, has reminded us, Cicero wrote two thousand years ago, “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child”.

In Colombia’s case the continuing political violence has cut across all levels of society on and off all through the last century and much of the century before. (The common Colombian term La Violencia is usually used for the particular intense period of civil war between 1946 and 1966, to distinguish it from the War of a Thousand Days fought between 1899-1902.) Nearly all Latin American societies have had their civil wars but nowhere have they been so continuous and seemingly unending as in Colombia. The historian R.W. Ramsey described the phenomenon as the “western hemisphere’s largest internal war in the twentieth century”. Politics have never been tranquil or harmonious in Colombia.

At the same time Colombia has long prided itself on its Athenian tradition of democracy, on its sophisticated literary traditions, on its relatively free press and not least its commitment to regular elections. Its military, although an important element, do not rule behind dark glasses. For nearly all its history the civilian politicians have called the shots, as they do today.

Colombia’s violence is rooted in the almost equal contest of electoral politics, between Liberals and Conservatives, whose original highly charged dividing line between an oppressed peasantry and working class and the Church-supported, landed aristocracy has become dulled over time. For decades now what matters most is what political tribe you are born into. As for the Church, according to one study made in Aritama in remote northern Colombia, the political polarization of contemporary society is so complete that the two factions even have their own saints: the Virgin, San Rafael and San Antonio are said to be Conservatives associated with the colour blue while the Sacred Heart of Jesus and San Martin are liberals, and therefore “reds”.

In the course of La Violencia brutal methods of torture and assassination became commonplace in rural Colombia. In the small towns and villages violence was often perpetuated by people who had grown up alongside their victims. The brutality has been literally handed down from grandfather to father to son. For the last 38 years the leftist rebels have concentrated on fighting the government but in recent months much of the rebels’ action has been in moving against the rightists’ paramilitaries. Last week’s largest civilian massacre for decades was a result of a clash between the country’s two biggest irregular armies- one leftist, living off income from the coca trade and the other a paramilitary force supported by landowners and elements of the army. The free-lance armies have begun to eclipse the regular army even though it is now heavily backed and supplied by the U.S.

The endless cycle of violence has been a constant preoccupation of Garcia Marquez – the violence of civil war and economic exploitation in his One Hundred Years of Solitude; the violence of partisan political hatreds in No One Writes to the Colonel; the structural violence of dictatorship in The Autumn of the Patriarch; and the sexual violence of a repressive society in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In all of them he tries to plumb the reasons for the violence and at the same time to steer outsiders from their caricaturing of the South American as “a man with a moustache, a guitar and a revolver”. But the bitter irony remains, the novels of La Violencia, as Garcia Marquez himself once said, are “the only literary explosion of a genuinely national character that we have had in our history”. Violence is deeply ingrained in the Colombian personality and to root it out will be the work of generations.

Yet despite the writings of this literary master and despite the brave overage of events in Colombia by reporters like Scott Wilson of the Washington Post who brought us the news of last week’s massacre in remote Bellavista, we watch the juggernaught of the American military machine rolling into Colombia with an insouciance that is almost awesome, if it weren’t so foolish. If there were no chance of American intervention working in relatively tiny but also violence-gripped Haiti – where it has been tried twice in the last ninety years, most recently by President Bill Clinton – there is less than zero chance in Colombia. Adding outside violence to inside violence will not solve Colombia’s problems. If there is a solution it will be the slow work of political reform making Colombia’s democracy more open and more relevant to the poor; it will mean weaning society off violence by enforcing the law on human rights abuses; it will mean economic reform that gives the peasantry their own land, legislated away from them in the nineteenth century; and, for the outside world, it will mean the liberalization of drugs so that the drug barons and the illegal armies that hold Colombia to ransom have the financial ground cut from under them. The rest is simply illusion, perhaps fit only for a final chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com

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