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Que haiga paz!

History and Human Reconciliation in Colombia Herbert Tico Braun University of Virginia (Preliminary, incomplete draft)
Todos los colombianos, cada uno en su medio y en la medida de sus posibilidades, tenemos que meter el hombro por el pas. A la gente hay que explicarle, o recordarle si saba y se le olvid, lo que significa en la vida tener pas. Y tal vez la mejor manera es mostrar la penuria, la soledad, el desconcierto que se clava en lo ms hondo del ser, cuando no se tiene patria, o cuando tenindola, no se disfruta porque los peligros fuerzan su ausencia. Ivan Marulanda, El que quiere pas, que ayude hacerlo, El Espectador, February 16, 2001 (emphasis added)

!Que haiga paz! exclaimed Manuel Marulanda Vlez, Tirofijo, in grammatically incorrect, lower class, folk Spanish as the La Uribe peace negotiations were getting underway in 1984. Alfredo Molano recalls that Las puertas de Casa Verde [the FARC guerrilla headquarters, since destroyed by the Army] se abrieron, y el pas supo quines eran los comandantes de las Farc. Oyeron hablar a Marulanda a Jacobo, oyeron hablar a Cano y a Rul Reyes. Ms de uno se sorprendi de que hablaran castellano y muchos mostraron como evidencia del grado de atraso de las guerrillas la frase de Tirofijo, Que haiga paz!1 Tirofijo, struggling for some thirty-five years, was little known. He was out in the countryside. More than anything else about him, it was his death that had been rumored time and again. When President Andrs Pastrana went out into the countryside for his third, historic visit with Tirofijo on February 8 and 9, 2001, urban columnist Mara Isabel Rueda, writing in Semana, seems to discover the guerrilla leader once again. She sees in him for the first time a rural nature, an astucia natural de este campesino malicioso y desconfiado. She understands that many in Colombia look down at him. Ni el hecho de que sea un autntico campesinopor lo cual unos simplisticamente lo daban por ignorante y otros por ingenuoni el hecho de ya llevar varios aos a las espaldas, han evitado que Manuel Marulanda sea lo que es: el que manda in the guerrilla movement.2 The past in Colombia is a whispered country. The past is rural. It is known to be primitive. Colombians react with understandable fear and disgust when reminded of the violences that wracked the countryside in the 1950s and beyond, In the 1960s the cultured elites and most of those, both rich and poor, who lived in urban centers, were able to turn away from the past as the carefully constructed,

conciliatory, and rational rules of the Frente Nacional seemed so clearly to provide a divide from the strangely passionate and irrational behavior of cruel peasants who hacked one another up, sliced fetuses from the bellies of dying women, yanked the tongues out of the mouths of men who would in any case no longer speak, and smirked at children who looked in bewilderment at their fathers mutilated bodies lying before them on the ground. While all this behavior was quite spectacular and sensationalist at the time, there were clearly no positive lessons to be drawn from it.3 These pathologies were practiced by other people, better forgotten, left behind, whispered about. French sociologist Daniel Pcaut has understood that La paz del Frente Nacional implicaba el silencio sobre lo acontecido, e impeda, otra vez, la construccin de un relato colectivo que permitiera la elaboracin simblica de la experiencia de las vctimas.4 All along, these behaviors were paradoxically also understood in these cultured and urban circles as somehow predictable, for they were the expression of a dark underside of the Colombian nation that made itself felt in the intrinsically narrow and enclosed lives of provincial, ignorant, and superstitious rural folk. They were whispered about, often quite loudly. Much of this elite understanding of rural lower class behavior derives from a deep cosmopolitan, urban suspicion of, and disdain for, the countryside and its inhabitants. As the vast majority of Colombians have moved on, often boisterously, into an uncertain modern future and have managed to disconnect themselves from these traditional pasts, scholars have been since the 1960s studying this historical period, which has come to be known as La Violencia. While the literature is rich and varied, it has on the whole been broadly conceived in macro terms through materialistic and structuralist approaches. Most of the scholarship begins with the assumption that there is a profound opposition between the rural insurgency and the civilian institutions and politicians, and that the rebels have risen up in resistance and rebellion against the social order. Rural poverty, class conflict, labor exploitation, and political exclusion have been understood to be the driving forces behind the conflicts.5 Only deep structural changes could possibly bring them to an end. Historians and social scientists have generally concluded, to their dismay, that the violences in the countryside in Colombia have not turned out as they should, or as they would have wanted them to, and that the nations history is thus composed of a series of frustrations, detours, and inconclusive processes.

The actions of rural folk against the social order have been understood as not sufficiently collective, as too localistic, often more private than public, not fully class conscious, not truly revolutionary, and often more emotional than rational.6 The rural rebellions have thus not contributed to the needed structural change. Today the nation is generally understood to be incomplete, its building process inconclusive. As in the popular imagination, the past has been left behind in this scholarly literature. Here too, there are few if any lessons for the future of the nation that can be drawn from the past. The prevailing view among scholars and politicians who have sought to negotiate an end to the conflict and who have been engaged in the peace process since at least 1983 has been summed up recently by a prominent political scientist in the first words in the first essay of a book titled Reconocer la Guerra para Construir la Paz: Este ensayo no pretende hacer un recuento de la mitologa que se ha ido tejiendo en torno al origen de la guerrilla en Colombia, un pas que ya tiene suficiente violencia con sus grandes mitos fundacionales: guerras de independencia, la de los Mil Das, la violencia de los aos cincuenta.7 Little if anything, then, is to be gained by looking back at a history that is little other than violent. The past is myth. Memory can serve no useful purpose. The nation appears to be stuck. The conflict between the State and the rural guerrillas has grown to gigantic proportions in the collective imagination, and also in daily practice. The divide is now seen to be etched in stone. Today it is believed that the nation is at war. Since the early nineties guerra is the term most commonly used to describe the conflict. Some even believe that there is a civil war. Others claim that the conflict has degenerated into a war against society, although it is not clear what that might mean. Now, without a past that informs the present, the conflict is concieved of as having been historically inevitable. This may help explain the recent utopian dimension of the negotiations between the State and the guerrillas, in which agrarian, urban, fiscal, judicial, and political reforms are all on the table, even though it is difficult to believe that these sorts of deep structural changes are actually going to be negotiated in conversations with leaders of rural guerrilla movements, or that they would be put in practice should such agreements in principle actually be reached.8 While the materialistic and structural scholarship has added immensely to our store of knowledge about the different forms and expressions which the rural violences took on over the years, it has done little to help us come to an understanding of cultural relationships across time between the urban political

and intellectual elites and their rural clienteles. In the 1950s, while the State in most other Latin American countries was seeking in various ways to integrate the countyside more thoroughly into the fabric of the nation, in Colombia the political elites, and especially the Liberal leaders, found that they were trying to disentangle themselves from the widespread, often intimate, personal connections that tied those followers emotionally, even passionately to them. Theirs is a human, a personal history, more so than it is an institutional or even an ideological
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one. It is part of and emerges from a broad political culture which Malcolm Deas as describes as being

unusually communicative, fluid, unmanichean. These personal histories have resulted, he states, in a historiography [that] is rich in memoir, anecdote, incident, sketch; it is intimate,conversational, personal, evenin its recent revolutionary versions. Guerrilleros and urban politicians have lived a long, half-century filled with intimacies and distances, expectations and fears, understandings and misunderstandings. It is a discursive universe made possible by travels back and forth, with guerrillas coming to the city and civilian leaders going out into the countryside, with negotiations, discursos, declaraciones, proclamas, peticiones, llamados, cartas, correos, comitivas, comisiones, delegaciones, reuniones, entrevistas,and conversaciones. Guerrillas and civilians have been engaged in a long ritual of intensely verbal, literate, and intelectualized peaceful exchanges that are deeply meaningful and highly valued by all sides, but perhaps especially so, at least until recently, by those from below, those who have understood themselves, often proudly, to be los de abajo. Indeed, when seen from countryside, these exchanges are absolutely vital. And from the very start, it seemed that one of the guerrilla leaders was particularly focused on these exchanges. Isauro Yosa recalls that Tirofijo ni le gustaba el trago ni le gustaba la pelea. l soaba con negociar. (Molano, 53) The urban politicians and the rural guerrillas conformed a highly gendered, convivial and tensionfilled existence in which men encounter one another as males. Encounters begin and end, whenever the hierarchical distance between these men is not too large, or whenever the distrust is not overwhelming, with abrazos. At times, formal saludos would have to do, a ceremonious, collective shaking of hands in some careful order, from the most important men of each side, to the least. While these encounters are ritualized and culturally scripted, they are far from formulaic, and can often be quite awkward. Last March when a group of the most important capitalists in the land went out to meet with the guerrilleros, they did

not quite know how to greet one another. Saludaron al mximo comandante guerrillero con un brazo por encima del hombro, como se saludan los hombres a quienes les parece insuficiente darse la mano pero darse un abrazo les parece demasiado.10 Cigarrettes are passed around. The men drink, and it appears that it is usually whisky and brandy that is shared, both of which are foreign and elite drinks rather than local beer, rum, or aguardiente. Theirs, finally, and most significantly, is a world defined by honor, and when seen in its long historical trajectory in Colombia during this half-century, especially by its loss, by humiliation. The humiliation of human beings is, of course, a universal phenomenon. But we might venture that it has a particularly conspicuous place in the history of Colombia. Pcaut seemd to have found it so when he first came to Colombia in the early 1960s. Percib que a lo largo de la historia [de Colombia]se haba creado un sentimiento de humillacin de las clases subalternas, muy diferente del sentimiento pur de la pobreza. La humillacin es el revs de lo que las lites llamaban las clases humildes. Tal sentimiento tena que ver con el hecho de que realmente nunca se haban consagrado derechos civiles y sociales. No era slo una cuestin de derechos concretos, sino de la carencia de una simbologa nacional capaz de hacer que todos se sintieran miembros de una misma comunidad poltica. This humiliation, in his view, made for a prevalence of vnculos de dependencia social, of local, clientelistic and arbitrary networks that worked against a more collective, a more democratic and igalitarian social order. Humiliation, in other words, either depeleted nationhood, or was an expression of its sparse existence.11 But the widespread sense of humiliation that apparently makes itself keenly felt across time in the lives of many Colombians is less a sign of a lack of nationhood as it is an expression, a painful one of course, of the very vitality of nationalistic bonds in Colombia. For human beings feel humiliated by others when they have deep emotional connections to them, when the relationships that they have established are meaningful and people have invested themselves in them, when these relationship embody expectations of reciprocity. In Colombia, individual and collecitve humiliation derives less from the fact that civil and social rights are lacking (which of course, they are) or due to a dearth of broad national symbols, than from the belief and the expectation of those from below, los de abajo, precisely those who become humiliated, that they are indeed tied to others who are above them in the social order, that they share with them thoughts, ideas, ideals, heroes, and a belief in a better society. Together they can shout Viva el Partido

Liberal!, and Viva el Partido Conservador! and Abajo el Partido Liberal!, and Viva Colombia!, and sense that somehow they are expressing the same thoughts and feelings the same emotions. Individuals and goups can be humiliated when the feel that have the right to make claims, to clamar and to reclamar, to use the felicitous phrases that Michael Jimnez employs as the underpinning of the social bargaining which he sees as being at the heart of social relations in the Colombian countryside in the first half of the twentieth century.12 This humiliation appears to be deepest when those claims are rejected from above, when the connections are broken. For as we know, the political parties in both their narrow clientelistic networks and in their broad ideological messages, have made deep connectons throughout the Colombian countryside since shortly after independence almost two centuries ago.13 These connections intensified dramatically in the 1940s, as Jorge Elicer Gaitn mobilized thousands upon thousands of Colombians in towns and villages throughout the nation, promising them a new and more intimate integration into the life of the nation.14 That promise too, of course, was broken by the actions of a lone assassin one rainy Friday afternoon in the city. Much of the vitality of the Colombian nation, although by no means all of it, comes from below. ********* Alfonso Lpez Pumarejo, at the time president of the Direccin Liberal Nacional went hesitantly into the countryside in 1952, to the Llanos to visit with the emerging Liberal guerrillas. He was sixty-six years old. At first he said he was coming, then he demurred. The guerrillas wondered whether they were going to be left con los crespos hechos. What would happen with their bandera izada, nuestras chicas de gala, el pan y las conservas, las botellas de wishky (sic), los cigarrillos, y todas esas cosas que se adquieren de contribucin? O qu gran chasco y tanta prdida de energa , por muchas leguas a la redonda, si el jefe no viniera! He finally did show up, but only once he had secured a group of military men to back him up. His arrival created gran expectativa y alboroto, on the part of the men in arms and among the surrounding rural population. Once he had gotten off his horse, the former president of the republic wasrodeado de un pueblo atento a todos sus gestos y palabras, writes Eduardo Franco Isaza in his remarkable testimony of that period, Las guerrillas del Llano.15 The guerrillas made formal, elaborate plans to receive Lpez. El doctor Guillermo Ramrez, encabezando una comisin de notables, a nombre de nuestro comando recibira al doctor Lpez y su

comitiva, luego le presentara una nota de saludo y la invitacin muy corts para seguir a Alcal sobre el lomo de los mejores caballos chusmeros. Al mismo tiempo, cinco guerrilleros, tocados de botas y cascos, con todas sus armas encima, haran honores y escoltaran al viejo Alfonso Once the old man was standing before him, the guerrilla writer describes him in detail. Es de elevada estatura, un poco cargado de espaldas; muy elegante, y de gesto mundano; cara rosada con vvisimos ojos azules, que escrutan tras de los anteojos de ncar. Lo cubre un sombrero marrn que deja entrever la cabeza blanca de canas, pero los ademanes demuestran mucha energia. And then, when Lpez asked whether the military officers who accompanied him to the military base could join them at the camp, the response of the guerrillas was unequivocal. Doctor, usted es el jefe de este comando. No tiene ms que ordenar. The protagonists engaged in various rounds of conversations over a period of two days. Many of the guerrillas had their chance to intervene, and jokes were made by all as a sense of confidence and conviviality developed. They drank. Franco Isaza asks a coronel, Seor, se clava un whisky? Caballero, me clavo el whisky, the coronel responded. !Por Colombia! Salud caballeros! Lpez remained cautious. El doctor Lpez acaricia su vaso, sin casi haberlo probado. Nevertheless, hay alegra, los cuchillos cortan el asado, pasan bandejas con otras viandas. Los tiples y las maracas echan al viento el joropo. Los fusiles pasan de guerrillero en guerrillero. They talked and talked. Little of substance was discussed, but that did not much matter. Se hacen grupos y se habla de muchas cosas al mismo tiempo, sin que falte la mana colombiana de hacer discursos. No hay vivas ni abajos. Es una fiesta fraternal. The guerrilleros understood that Lpezs very presence legitimated them as carriers of a broad tradition of liberalism and connected them to the party, the city, other guerrilla groups, and to the nation. As corrieron las horas, sin nada concreto; quizs al doctor Lpez le fuera suficiente conquistar la confianza de los guerrilleros, cosa que consigui, desde luego, ya que hasta el momento nada iba en contra del movimiento rebelde. Al contrario, estbamos adquiriendo postn.. .Muchos pensarn que se estan discutiendo cosas importantes, pero las cosas importantes no se han abocado. Vamos en sondeos y sin que se haya hablado mucho, ya hay un hecho: que los bandoleros no son bandoleros, son revolucionarios. Eso lo est cantando la presencia del doctor Lpez en los Llanos, justamente en un

cuartel guerrillero. Maana y pasado la prensa lo publicar en documentos grficos. In addition, not knowing quite how Lpez was going to react, the guerrillas demand the impuesto guerrillero of fifteen thousand pesos from Fernando Reyes, a rich local landowner, in the jefes presence. It must have been a difficult moment for the former president, but he came through. Fernando, son quince Franco was ecstatic. Y en esas tres sencillas palabras, el impuesto ganadero guerrillero qued amparado por la Direccin Nacional Liberal sin que los comandos guerrilleros dependieran de tal entidad. The guerrillas needed the endorsement of the politicians. The respect and the admiration that these guerrillas felt for their leader shines through in these pages. They had come from cities, from towns, and from the countryside to congregate in the Llanos in order to fight the Conservative government, and to defend themselves from the onslought of the regimes formal and informal police forces, the much feared chulavitas. Franco Isazas testimony from beginning to end is a plea for leadership from the city, for orientacin.. Tirofijo tells Yosa and other hay que mandar un propio a Bogot a ver qu orientaciones hay. (Molano 44-5). The liberal guerrillas accepted unquestioningly the leadership of the liberal elites. They self-evidently understood the superiority of their chiefs, the jefes. The guerrillas, from the Llanos and elsewhere, followed events taking place in the city with abiding interest. They read the newspapers with regularity, they wrote to the politicians, traveled to departmental capitals and to nations capital city continuously. No acabbamos de salir recalls Isauro Yosa, cuando comenzaron a gritarnos: que vengan, que vengan. Haba llegado un correo de Bogot. (Molano, 46) Mail from the city was like a life-line They knew many of the national leaders personally. The guerrillas talked about national politics all the time. Rumors flew. They were constantly awaiting the next coup detat against the Conservative government. When Minuto, one of the Llanos guerrillas traveled to Bogot to inform the Liberal leaders about events there, el doctor Lleras Restrepo, en mi libreta, apunt, con su puo y letra los nombres de los traidores del golpe. His trip was worth something tanglible as well although far from what he had hoped. Recib tres docenas de camisas, tres docenas de alpargatas, mil tiros calibre 22 y 150 cartuchos de revlver. And he was given instructions by Lleras Retrepo to stay a few more days in the city, because another golpe was being planned. They protected the jefes. Hernn dorma en casa del doctor Echanda, pues se deca que a ste lo iban a matar, y haba que cuidar al viejo. De pronto mataron al hermano del

doctor Echanda, de u n tiro que era para el viejo Daro [Echanda]. Eso fue frente a Bavaria. Ese da, si don Echanda no se avispa y se aarrastra de tripa, tiemplan al viejo! (p. 63-4) In the mid 1940 Isauro Yosa, also known as Mister Lister, and one of the first liberal guerrillas to later join the communists, or the comunes as they were called, recalled his encounter in the city with the civilian leaders, also with Lpez. Los colonos me nombraron en una comisin para ir a conversar con el presidente Lpez,pero el no nos quiso recibir. En cambio, Lleras Camargo fue muy atento con nosotros. Nos prometi su intervencin personal. Recuerdo todava los trminos. Nos devolvimos muy contentos por haberle dado la mano a un doctor tan alto y encopetado.16 Here other statements of admiration

But the guerrillas in the Llanos after that meeting did not simply hand themselves over to Alfonso Lpez. Throughout the visit, Lpez must clearly have understood that he was being successfully pressured from below, that the guerrillas were turning him into their spokesperson. Both sides knew they were different from one another. When Lpez was invited to stay overnight at the guerrilla camp, he informed the guerrillas that he could not do so for fear of what the Conservative government might make of his close ties to the guerrillas. When the president asks Franco to join him overnight at the air base instead, the guerrilla writer says, Doctor, yo no puedo abandonar nuestro comando, ni tratar nada fuera de l. And Lpez forthrightly stated his differences with the guerrillas. He told them that he had come at the behest of President Urdaneta, and not the Direccin Liberal Nacional, and that he had come to arreglar la cosa. The guerrillas heard him to say in no uncertain terms that the position of Liberals in the city estaba ceida a una poltica de paz, completamente ajena a nuestra rebelin, aunque no desinteresada de nuestro destino, por cuanto encarnaba la accin colectiva del partido frente a la violencia oficial. Pero, que desgraciadamente no podamos tener un buen desenlace, ya que no poseamos una fuerza suficiente, capaz de echar abajo al brbaro sistema imperante, para mucha desgracia de nuestro pueblo. He made it clear that guns and ammunition would not be forthcoming from the city. The guerrillas, in any case, knew not to trust Lpez and the other jefes. They had been trying for months to get the Liberals to back their struggle, largely without much success. They sensed that the civilians were not behind them. When Lpez asked them how many guns they had, they laughed, for this

was a secret no one was to know, not even he. They tried to rely on themselves. Se habl otro poco y conclumos que no debamos harcernos ilusiones con armamentos y promesas llovidas del cielo. Nuestra actitud debera ceirse a nuestros propios recursos. (63) At the very beginning of his visit, Lpez recounted an old anecdote from his youth. He had been strangely ill for months, had visited doctors in London, had been put under all kinds of treatments and medications, all to no avail. He went to New York, where he found el mejor mdico, un yanqui muy inteligente, who told him to just forget about all the treatments. No se haga nada, despreocpese, the doctor told him, and young Lpez quickly left his illness behind. Vea Franco, el remedio tan sencillo, Lpez concluded. Francos immediate thoughts on hearing Lpez story, are telling. Medit un instante, quizs el viejo zorro nos quera dar el remedio infalible para ese terrible mal que era la rebelin: el olvido. Franco was expressing the guerrillass most abiding fear, that they be forgotten, left alone in the countryside, unconnected to the party and its leaders and all that they meant. Lpezs visit was a victory for los de abajo because it meant that they were not bandoleros, bandits. This was a matter of deep personal pride for all of them. They could be referred to as revolucionarios, and not esa otra palabra que tanto hiere el espritu, que tanto martilla en los diarios, que desmoraliza al pobre pueblo humillado y que hace ms dao que una bayoneta clavada: bandoleros. These words may have a melodramatic and propagandistic ring to them as they are read and understood today outside of the immediate context of the rural combatants lives. But they are deeply revealing. For many of these guerrilleros the difference between being a bandit and a revolutionary was a matter of honor. If they were bandits, they acted for themselves, selfishly, for loot. As revolutionaries, they were at the service of the Liberal Party, of liberty, their highest ideological aspiration, and the nation. They could understand themselves as part of the large historical project of Colombian and world liberalism, however vaguely they might understand that ideology. As revolutionaries they acted in a disinterested manner. They were more than themselves, more than each of them to themselves. Even more existentially, perhaps, as bandits they could only be but local actors. For if they were bandits, the liberal leaders could clearly not endorse them, support them, be with them. As bandits they were disconnected from the nation. As revolutionaries, they could be the very nation. As revolutionaries, they were Colombians, patriots. As

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bandits they they they were forgotten, isolated, living in silence. The rural combatants could not do without their urban leaders. Without them they could have no honor. Without them, they were alone. The rural guerrillas feared nothing more. Franco Isazas testimony is filled with this abiding fear. Llegara el Batalln Vargas y entonces todos nosotros en la paz del hato, la fundacin o el rancho del conuco, seramos allanados, aprehendidos, fusilados o hechos prisioneros como unos delincuentes comunes. Quin hara nuestra defensa? Quien ira con autoridad a decir que no ramos unos bandoleros, sino hombres, hijos de la Patria, lanzados a la rebelin por la violencia oficial? They lived in anguish. One thing was to be attacked. Quite another was to left behind. As the Liberal leaders removed themselves more and more, Franco writes that nuestro partido haba enmudecido, and he refers to their mutismo desastroso, of directivas liberales ensordecidas, and of el pueblo solo, la soledad infinita and el silencio pegajoso. Being alone, roaming the countryside and protecting themselves from the well-armed and organized chulavitas who were out to kill them was terrible fate. Habamos escapado como ratas, nos sentamos dbiles criaturas sobre cuyas conciencias gravitaba la sensacin del vaco y la miseria. Aquellos eran los fuertes, los poderosos, a quienes todo corresponda por derecho de conquista, hasta nuestros sentimientos. Por eso se llevaron a la mujer. Tena que ser as. Quizs ella estara conforme, el ancestro de hembra arrebatada por la fuerza como presa codiciada le estara cantando en las venas. Los fierros relucientes de los triunfadores la seduciran, como siempre fu desde el principio de los tiempos. Senta el desespero de la humillacin y los celos. Yo, el rebelde fugitivo, no tena derecho a la compaia y amor de las mujeres. Ninguno de los nuestros poda mirar tan alto. Nuestra compaera no poda ser ms que la soledad en la espesura. La tibieza de unos labios, la tersura de una piel, las lgrimas y el orgullo de una mujer, blsamo que cura todas las heridas, no son consuelo de los dbiles, sino adorno de los vencedores. Se deslizaba lentamente el tiempo y un silencio embrarazoso nos haca enmudecer. Nadie hablaba, las miradas cruzbanse fugitivas disimulando algo. (p. 163) Franco sensed that what they were fighting for was something that they previously had, but now was lost. Avspate viejo Emiliano. Las cosas no siempre se dan silvestres y a los jvenes de hoy nos toca luchar por algo que se ha perdido y que todos no ven a tiempo, sino cuando se hallan despojados, humillados, sus casas violadas y la familia de luto. (77)

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Here transition to Tirofijo Qu planes tienen? Que dicen los Lleras, los Lpez? Nada, silenciadosQue dice la direccin liberal departamental? Poca noticias. Nada en absoluto, dejaron de abrir la boca, la sellaron de pensamientos, por lo tanto dejaron de pensar por miedo fsico. O por lo menos ya no actan. Nosotros no sabemos nada en absoluto, esta gente est perdida en la bruma de la legalidad de las ciudades[E]sta situacin est muy complicada, parece que todo cambi de carcter, entonces hay que buscar una solucin. Ya no se deca, pero con quin la buscamos? A quin recurrimos? Las armas, dnde estan las armas, cmo se consiguen? Si nos quedamos as de tranquilos, nos van a matar a todos. El cuerpo ya no resiste ms humillacin.17 The fear of being alone, of solitude, of soledad appears to be a central, driving force in Colombian history. It is a major themes in Colombian letters. According to Gene Bell-Villada, Gabriel Garca Mrquez is among the most powerful writers of human solititude and isolation, of abandonment and loss, o f the lonely battle for survival, of desolation and even alienation. Few solitudes in fiction can compare with that of the illegitimate Aureliano Babilonia, friendless and bereaved, with total kowlwedge being scant consolation as Macondo rushes to its end.18 The solitude not only of Colombia but of Latin America was also the theme with which Garca Mrquezs accepted the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. He laments the great distance of Latin America from the rest of the world, its cultural remoteness, and especially its misaprehension by the major powers.19 The classic novel of the period, El cristo de espaldas, by Eduardo Caballero Caldern evokes life in a tiny village far from everywhere, where rank and file members of the two political parties conspire against one another for their own economic and political gain by enveloping their private desires in the cloak of public purposes. Life out there in that pueblo triste is one desolacin. It is remoto and annimo. The novel revolves around a young priest who wishes to go out there and minister to good people far from the cities. The bishop warns him. En ese pueblo, si bien es cierto puedes encontrar el paraso espiritual en el silencio, la soledad, la ausensia de mundo, la simplicidad de las costumbres y la sensillez aldeana, tambin puedes caer de bruces, sin saber a qu horas, en el infiernillo de la pequeeces. (19) The priest finds the silence,and cant deal with it. Era un paisaje muertoEs la muerte, y detrs de esta muerta de las cosas no est sino el silencio. En esta cuenca vaca de la tierra no queda ni el recuerdo de la luz que se

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iriza y se refleja en la pupila de un lago o en la retina de una fuente. Este silencio plano y sin profundidad me aterra, com si aqu la tierra estuviera muriendo continuamente y su cadaver se disolviera en una niebla densa y pegajosa. Dios mio, Dios mio! Por qu esta soledad, y esta desolacin, y esta muerte? (141) The frontier in Colombia appears to play a much different, even opposing role to what it has played in the history of the United States. Here my contrast, briefly taken from previous essay. Alberto Lleras Camargo, in his elegant autobiography, Memorias notes the place of solitude in both the countryside and the city. La guerra resultaba un ejercicio alegre que, con sus tiros y sus gritos,sus asaltos y atropellos a la propiedad y a la mujer del prjimo, rompa la srdida rutina del trabajoPorque al campesino aislado en su rancho, ms que al habitante de la aldea, se lo devoraban la soledad, el silencio, la oscuridad nocturna, el impenetrable rostro de la mujer, el ladrido de los perros, el llanto de las criaturas.La guerra era el correo popular, y a veces el nico. tedio, al fro, a la desolacin Luego, todos salamos por la Avenida de la Repblica, morosamente, a mirar mujeres, a saludar a otros amigos, a tomar el sol tibio de los veranos, a sentirnos, siempre, en otra parte, menos en esa aldea montona, poblada de seres grises, vestidos de negro Todos nuestros contemporneos ---y no tenamos ms que los intelectuales, porque todos los dems seres nos tenan sin cuidado--- iban encontrando, uno a uno, por la va oficial o por la aventura privada el modo de escaparse al ancho mudoY los dems sentamos, cada vez que alguien se iba, que eramos nufragos en nuestra isla meditarrnea, entre las nubes heladas, tan cerca de los 3,000 metros, separados del mar y la civilizacin por espacios sin trmino. The guerrilleros strove mightily against this solitude. Their many efforts at being collectives, of entidades, the word that comes up again and again, of being disciplined, cohesive, organized, had much to do with politics. Una entidad que pudiera recoger las guerrillas y organizarlas haca el trabajo unidas en ntimo asocio y contacto con el gobierno, pero responsables ante nuestro pueblo. Una entidad que quedara como fruto de tanto sacrificio y que en todo momento representara a nuestra gente. Una entidad, en fin, que hiciera la gran unidad llanera y se extendiera a todo el liberalismo y al pueblo en general, saldando las distancias creadas por los malditos chulavitas entre guerrilleros y contraguerrilleros. Una fuerza organizada de trabajo capaz de hacer cumplir del gobierno y de quien sea, lo convenido. (324) It

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was also an effort to keep from becoming bandoleros. They were always recounting their exloits. Franco tells of one guerrillero who exclaims !A discrecin todo el mundo! ---grito--- Yo soy el General Eliseo Velsquez Lpez, quien viene a abrirse el corazn en esta tierra por defender al pueblo. Yo soy aquel And then Franco states, Sigui un largo discurso (101) And the were always talking, conversando. Y se entabl as una conversacin animada a lo llanero, con tpicos de caballera y vaquera, comentarios alusivos a la rebelion y conjeturas sobre las prximas aventuras (51) And they were always making sure that they remembered who they were, and what they had done. They called it hacer historia. Despus de hacer historia y exmen de la situacin a travs de toda la lucha, entramos en materia, exponiendo un programa (324) Here examples from Tirofijo. As it dawned on the guerrilleros that they were indeed going to be left out in the cold, that their struggle to be organized and disciplined, that their effort to carry the banners of their party, their desire to overthrow the Conservative government, that is, to make what they understood as la revolucin, would all come to nothing, they felt betrayed by their leaders, traicionados . Many of them reacted with a visceral disgust for the notables. Franco Isazas text is dripping with sarcasm. Ni autorizamos ni desautorizamos ---dijo el doctor Lleras Restrepo---digales a esos muchachos que estamos de corazn con ellos. (153) One liberal leader was described as un flamante jefe liberal de los de arriba. (227) --Que grandes jefes tenemos! dijo con rabio Tulio Esos viejos locos lo hacen matar a uno sin saber a qu horas,concluy con sorna Minuto. (63-4) Mientras que Daro Echanda recomendaba parsimona al pueblo liberal, they were out there in the countryside without any guns with which to even defend themselves. Al mismo tiempo las directivas, los intelectuales y clases privilegiadas del liberalismo huan a sus torres de marfil y hacan el pequeo esfuerzo de callar, olvidando desde la palabra hablada en las tertulias hasta la expresin escrita por la prensa (64) Tirofijo thought the dilemma through in perhaps the simplest manner. Marulanda ya haba comensado a ver que lo que decan los doctores de la direccin liberal era una mierda. (Molano, 66) The guerrilleros turned on that world of the jefes. Planean y hablan de revolucin, conspiraciones, sistemas, y panaceas para resolver los problemas inmediatos. Teoras brillantes, caractersticas de toda junta de notablesQu les importa a los guerrilleros cuanto digan o hagan los

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notables? La cuestion es a tiros. El ideal: tomar fusiles. Los discursos estn totalmente desprestigiados. Los hombres de la rebelin no conocen de sutilezas, ni de paos de agua tibiaLas nobles teoras y los altos ideales de todos los notables del mundo, frente a una ola de barbarie, tendran que afincarse sobre las culatas de los fusiles o perecer. En aquellos das el pueblo no poda seguir sino a quienes le aseguraban pan y vida. (66-7) While praising the attitude of some of the leaders, others, Muchos, los ms desvalorizados, disminudos en sus legtimas proporciones, sin accioned en pro ni en contra de la tirana. Los menos arrastrando su indignidad y su traicin a los pies del tirano, revestidos en ocasiones de falso ropajes de patriotas conciliadores, pero en realidad prostitudos, degradados hasta en su condicin de hombres. (306). The guerrillas rejected the civilian leaders because they were men who did not really act like men. They were pusilanimous, cautious, frightened, and parsimonious men, men who where chicken, who did not stand up for what they thought and believed, who did not make their presence felt. Mientras tanto, all lejos, en Londres un jerarca del partido liberal, Alfonso Lpez, se ocupaba de una novia y una luna de miel, sin preocuparle poco o mucho la angustiosa situacin en Colombia y sin mostrarse siquiera indignado por el monstroso atentado de que fue victima, el que dej como saldo una casa destrozada y sus archivos e invaluables recuerdos familiares destrudos. (305) The guerrillas find it hard to understand that Lpez would not even seek to defend his own home in the city, when it was burned by a Conservative mob. Eduardo Santos, desde su tranquila residencia en Paris.Carlos Lleras Restrepo, aorando en Mxico.Daro Echanda, en su casa de la 39, fatigado y satisfecho.Alberto Lleras Camargo al margen de los hechos, amparando su silencio con la investidura de funcionario internacional que le daba el cargo de Secretario de la OEA. (306) Worse still, Minuto tells that when he urged Echanda to defend the death of his brother, el viejo se call, explicando que l no guardaba rencor a nadie. (63)

*********** While the guerrilleros clearly understood that they were being betrayed, the jefes in the city saw matters far differently. They were not about to lead their rural clienteles in an armed rebellion against the Conservative government. To their minds, this would be the height of irresponsibility. Alfonso Lpez had made this patently clear to the guerrillas of the Llanos when he went to visit them, as we have seen. Upon

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his return to Bogot, Lpez wrote a long letter on August 25, 1952, to the moderate Conservative and former president, Mariano Ospina Prez, laying out the views of the leading liberals in what he knew was a vain effort to bring about an understanding with the opposing party. Lpez made it clear that he and his colleagues understood that they would almost certainly have to break their ties to their followers. For the sake of peace, they were willing to do so. Si es esta la ltima oportunidad que tienen los directores del liberalismo para cumplir su destino histrico, segn los contemplan o interpretan los jefes de la revuelta armada, estamos resueltos a perderla; y ms todava, a que se produzca el rompimiento definitivo con el pueblo que ellos nos anuncian, antes de allanarnos a dejar de servirlo como nosotros creemos mejor, o a defraudar la confianza pblica en la seriedad de las convicciones y propsitos con que hemos venido apersonando la poltica de paz y concordia. (291) To fight would be to lose their hard-earned place as civilian politicians who believed in the viability of their institutions. It would be to go against everything they believed in. Eduardo Santos made the point just as dramatically. On March 3, 1953, he wrote that No se puede luchar contra un ejrcito organizado con escopetas, revlveres y garrotes. Tratar de hacerlo tan solo perjuicios trae para la causa que se quiere defender. En Colombia, la obra de los guerrilleros, cualquiera que sea el mvil que tengan, ha producido infinitos y daos incalculables a miles y miles de liberales y adems de esto, ese camino no lleva a ninguna parte. Yo deseo abiertamente que todos cese, que se abandonen esos mtodos de lucha, que nos concretemos tan solo a la accin civil que requiere tanto valor como otra, y quizs ms. Por los caminos de la violencia armada, las guerrillas, la guerra civil, el liberalismo no tiene nada que ganar y s mucho que perder. (227) To fight would be to lose on the battlefield, and to be left with nothing. To urge their followers to get up and fight would be to demand that many give up their lives in a bloodbath that could have no positive results for anyone. This was something that the Liberals were clearly not prepared to undertake. They would not ask for such a huge human sacrifice, when little if anything was to be gained from it. Santos was desparate. He dearly wanted a return to peace and tranquility, but there was not much that he could do to bring it about. The liberal leaders knew that they could send out one proclama after another to the various liberal bands, but that many of them would not heed their call to put down their arms. The influence and control over their followers was extremely limited. Their party was little more than a

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series of personalistic ties between them and middlemen in the countryside, who in turn could not have convinced those bands that remained in arms, to stop what they were doing. Many of the jefes may also have understood why the guerrillas would not put down their guns. Lpez did. Los revolucionarios consideran muerta la poltica de paz y de concordia que hemos venidos desarrolando, y, de consiguiente, declaran descartada toda posible colaboracin con el adversario; vale decir, con el gobierno y con el conservatismo. Lgicamente, desde su punto de vista, nos invitan a acampaarlos en el movimiento en que ellos estn comprometidos (290) As Lpez and his colleagues faced this plethora of claims from below, he must have sensed that while there was a considerable respect coming at them from below, that the general picture of Colombian society is not one of deference, as Deas would put it years later.20 Lpez comprehended the claims that were being made on him and his urban colleagues. Yet, he could not accept them. The Liberals also knew that they could do next to nothing to control the Conservatives, that their ties to Laureano Gmez and Urdaneta Arbelez had been broken, and that the Conservative government was out to restore its power and influence in the countryside, that chulavita violence was their means of accomplishing that end. Lpez placed the blame for the violence not on his liberal followers, but squarely in the lap of the Conservative government. La impunidad de que el presidente Gmez lamentaba ver enfermo el pas, no disminuye. No es exagerado decir que el govierno la estimula de varias maneras, directa o indirectamente. No batalla contra ella. The inability of the Liberals to exert influence over the rural followers was also due to the Conservatives. El fracaso de estos esfuerzos ser el mejor testimonio de que el gobierno no ha querido la paz en las coyunturas que la vo acercarse con el concurso de la Direccin Liberal. Estoy convencido que no la ha querido ni la quiere as. Tampoco quiere que la bandera de la paz se vea flotando en manos de ella. (292) The Liberals were between a rock and a hard place, and they knew it . The very existence of the Liberal bands made it possible for the Conservative government to increase its violence against them, and they could do little to bring those bands back into the civilian institutions of the land. Yo pienso que el estado de sitio permanente y la censura de prensa son condiciones esenciales del ensayo de gobierno falangista a que estamos asistiendo, y que las guerrillas suministran a los ingenieros del nuevo orden la

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ms socorrida disculpa para mantener el rgimen de fuerza. (293) To fight would be to play into the Conservatives hands. Perhaps more so than any previous generation of leaders, those who were living through the beginnings of La Violencia were urban men. They lived at a far greater distance from the countryside and its rustic ways than did those leaders of the previous century who led their men into battle. Doing so now was simply unimaginable. Riding horses was little more than a hobby. Getting on that horse in the Llanos must not have been an easy or pleasant task for Alfonso Lpez when he went out to visit with Franco and his guerrilleros. He certainly made sure that he did not spend the night in their camp. They were lawyers and engineers, poets and writers, intellectuals, men of civilian politics. Some indeed were landowners, and afluent ones 21at that, but they no longer saw their rural workers as men whom they could also take away from their laboring tasks to encourage them to rise up for the bellicose aims of their respective political parties. Indeed, there can be little doubt that they would feel downright foolish doing so. They were concerned for their followers, to be sure, even though they held them at a distance, and generally thought little of their lives. They looked down on rural folk. There is no question that they had urged them on from the city to defend the ideals of the party, and that these calls often led to violenca and to death. The newspapers were filled with this partisan verbal warfare. The American Ambassador,

Willard Beaulac, was disconcerted by it all. But violence, I found, was more or less taken for grantedWithin a few months of my arrival [in 1947], open warfare between partisans of othe two political parties had broken out in several provincesI could not find, he states, chillingly, that these things caused excessive concern in Bogot. The embassador, found, much to his shock, that press reports and editorials, and the no less violent statements of certain political leaders ecacerbated feeling and incited further violence. He referred to the leaders of Colombia as complacent democrats.22 Pcaut, when he arrived some fifteen years later, was also struck by the great distance between those at the top of society and the rest, even in the city. He notes a cierto desprecio haca las percepciones propias de las clases subalternas. Sorprenda ms bien la manera como se hacan visibles las diferencias de estatus social por la manera de vestirse, unos con ruana y otros con corbata de empleado o cn el traje y las gafas negras de los ejecutivos, pero tambin por la manera de caminar en la sptima y las formas de dirigirse unos a otros,

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por el Su Merced boyacense que tanto se escuchaba. It is unlikely that the Liberal leaders were reluctant to call their followers out to battle because they saw much of themselves in their lives, or that their was a sense of fraternity. More likely, they felt a need to help protect those who did not know how to take care of themselves, or at least to not encourage them to engage in activities that would make their lives either much more difficult, or shorter. As importantly, perhaps more so, was the very fact that the Liberal leaders saw themselves as men of peace, and were convinced that the future of the country resided in the civilian institutions they had been carving out in the cities. The distance between jefes and guerrilleros was large. It can be seen crystallized in the relationship between Minuto and Daro Echanda which we have examined earlier. The fact that the jefe he could live a life in which he strove to be free of rencor, of animosity, towards those who bore him ill will, was for him a source of abiding pride and satisfaction. It defined him as a man of reason who could reach compromises with those with whom he disagreed, a man who separated his personal feelings from his politics. For Minuto it mean that the leader was not really a man. Echanda in turn understood that revenge was an intergral part of the lives of his followers, and the fighting was never going to be far from their lives. Thus, the behavior of the guerrilleros and of all those in the countryside who went at each other in those early years of La Violencia, was somewhow predictable, even inevitable. The Liberals best, and perhaps only option, was to leave those struggles behind, to not add to them, to make sure that they did not incite the passions of their followers any more than they were already inflamed. This must have appeared to them to be the most reasonable course under the horrendous circumstances in which they had been forced to live. One is reminded of the anecdote about that gringo doctor that Lpez recounts for Franco Isazas benefit: No se haga nada, despreocupese. Olvide la dolencia, me alent y aqu estoy. Ve Franco, el remdio tan sencillo. Breaking off with the guerrilleros, was of course, no easy remedy, but it was perhaps the best one. And it made a great deal of sense. If only the liberal bands would just forget the whole thing and return to their daily lives, the Conservative government and its chulavitas would have no one to fight and peace would be quickly restored. Lpezs notion was not, moreover, hatched from nowhere. The notion of letting go may have been widely shared at the time. In El cristo de espaldas, the bishop tells his frustrated young priest, who has returned to the city after having failed to minister to his flock after only a few days of insistent, sincere work in one of the

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furthest little town in the countryside, that Aguarda, hombre de Dios! Para todo habr tiempo. Tienes que aprender que en los pueblos no hay problemas impostergables. Como por lo general se resuelven solos, la experiencia me ha enseado que lo mejor es no resolverlos.23 But, as we now know from hindsight, things did not take care of themselves in the countryside. As matters worsened, the urban leaders turned away all the more, in fear and disgust. Clearly, there was little they could do about all the bloodletting. When they encouraged Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to take over the reigns of power,they could understand that it was now the task of a new government, and of the military, to take care of matters. When they orchestrated the Frente Nacional, they felt that they had devised a formula to return the nation to peace. When peace only came in a peacemeal fashion, they wondered what was going on. When the guerrillas claimed to be communists, they felt that what they did no longer their responsibility, if it ever had been, and was now more the results of international forces than anything they had or had not done. When the guerrillas kept on struggling into the 1980s and 1990s, many must have been puzzled. After all, there are many countries in Latin America and throughout the world that with rural poverty, inequality, and imperfect political institutions. But only one country in Latin America continues to have an on-going guerrilla insurgency. With the past shrouded in mystery, the current conflicts are perplexing to behold, and difficult, if not impossible to explain. After all, nothing that has ever taken place in the countryside during the past five decades has resembled anything like a civil war. Not even in the 1950s when local Liberals and Conservatives here and there went after each other, has this conflict pitted two sides of a nation against each other, each with an army, an ideology, a reason to defeat the other side. On the contrary, it is a conflict in which the vast majority of the population, urban but also rural, have not been involved. Nor is this a class war in which the poor and their guerrilla leaders rose up against capitalist classes in the countryside in an effort to lay claim to the land for those who worked it, and to bring about a new social order in Colombia on the basis of the new power of that new rural class. There are deep economic features to these conflicts, or course, but they are more amorphous, ambiguous, sporadic to be seen as a class war. If anything, the guerrilleros protection of the colonos over time has been mainly a defensive to keep them alive, to move them away from the attacks of those above them, than to form them into armies to fight the

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social order. In fact, there have been no armies to speak of in this entire period, on any side, perhaps even including the national Army, for it has only sporadically been an actor. Nor are there any religious issues that separate the combatants. In fact, religion binds them, for they are all Catholics. In the last encounter between Tirofijo and the President, the guerrillero stated that they ought all implore the help of God for the success of the negotiations. Nor can we detect any ethnic rivalries that might explain the conflicts. Nor do issues of race infuse the conflicts in any perceivable way. The Colombian guerrillas do not have anything like the semi-ethnic, semi-racial, and rural identity which seemed to motivate the Shining Path in Peru, in its attack against the city and its largely white, cosmopolitan elite. Nor can we say that this is a cultural war, with uncultured rural folk rising up against the nations cultured elites. Indeed, the respect for those above apppears still to widely felt among los de abajo and the many of the guerrilleros appear to have a deep respect for learning, and wish to be known as people who are cultos and who read books. Whereas we normally associate war with levels of passion, and with a hatred for the enemy, these feelings are difficult to detect behind the actions or in the words of any of the protagonists (with the possible excpetion of of the paramilitaries.) In fact, the conflicts have turned prosaic, as Pcaut has so aptly stated. People are killed in calm, routine, mechanical fashion. It is almost as though the protagonists in these conflicts sense that the crazed passions of the 1950 can make the violence trun amok, that they will lose control, that they are destabilizing. Emotions are shuned. The actions are instrumental. Nor are there any separatist movements in Colombia. The guerrillas do not seek zones of distention in order to leave the nation behind and form their own exclusive enclaves of communities. To the contrary, these seek these zones in order to more effectively engage the nation, with guns and with words., and perhaps to rest. What, one might want to ask, can possibly be going on? Much remains myterious, writes Malcolm Deas, even after seemingly exhaustive scholarly examination.24

******* From its proximate origins in the late 1940s and the early years of the 1950s, the conflicts of Colombia that have taken place over the past five decades have generally been understood to have changed substantially from one period to another. The differences rather than the commonalities across time have

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been emphasized, beginning with the crazed partisan bloodletting between Liberals and Conservatives of the 1950s, to a defensive guerrilla strife of the early 60s, to the ideologically Communist inspired insurgency within the context of the Cold War, to the growth of more locally focused guerrilla movements after the fall of the Berlin Wall, closely tied to local power, and caught incertainly between being defensive and offensive. There are also abiding commonalities across time in the conflicts in Colombia. The guerrilla movements have never been strongly programmatic or ideological. The Marxism of the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and its remaining vestiges today, might best be seen as a superficial overlay to the insurgencies that made considerable sense to many of the rural leaders, gave them a public voice, a sense of connection to the outside world, and a way of disciplining their own followers. This ideology also made considerable sense to the urban intellectuals that studied these movements, as many of those scholars also had a Marxist or left-leaning, anti-capitalist outlook, who thereby lent credence to the ideology. But more often than not, the guerrilla movements have understood their struggles in a self-evident sort of manner, their statements are mechanical slogans, and they reflect little deep analysis of the local conditions of the country and their particular place in it. Largely through the Marxism of the middle periods, the guerrillas have expressed themselves in terms of the structures of the social order, about matters of poverty and exclusion. However, the roots and even the continuing source of their struggle, also lie elsewhere, in the personal, cultural exchanges and misunderstandings between the between the jefes and the guerrilleros. It remains a matter of having been left behind, rejected and betrayed, in solitude in the countryside, and periodically attacked. The proximate origins of the conflicts in Colombia reside in the humiliation of the guerrillas and in their lost sense of honor. While it is often stated that the conflict in Colombia has become degraded in the 1990s, it is difficult to conclude that it has not been degraded form the beginning. The distinction between violent acts as a form of politics and violent acts for private ends, between guerrilleros and bandidos, or common criminals as they are referred to today, has been weak in Colombia throught this entire period. This is perhaps the central, defining features of the conflicts in the Colombian countryside, and which distinguished Colombia from many of the more overtly political and ideological conflicts that have taken place in Latin America in the past century. The violences are part of the daily fabric of life, and they have

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been so from the beginning. Since at least the late 1940s, the violences meshed with the private lives of people. It took place in their homes, in their places of work and where they spent some leisure time. The kidnapping of individuals for political and material gain began in the 1950s, and have remained a continuous phenomenon throughout this long period. Violence then and violence now has served as a way of obtaining the goods and resources of others. The lives of individuals who have little to do with organized groups of any kind, who seek to live on the margins of the conflict, were not respected in the 1950s, and they are not respected today, or during any period in between. The rejection which the guerrilleros felt in the early 1950s was, after all, a highly personal matter. The struggles have been personal ever since. The passions that were bred by the personal rejection decades ago are now less acutely felt. Those are difficult to maintain over a long period of time. Much of the hatred is no more. But the desire to be recognized, to be respected, to be understood for all the struggles which the guerrilleros have engaged in since being left behind, to live, appears to be as strong today as it was then. Finally, there is a third commonality to these conflicts that are central to our understanding of them. It has been succinctly stated by Jorge Orlando Melo. Aunque durante gran parte del siglo XX Colombia haya vivido ms o menos en paz, los largos aos de guerra y violencia parecen cada da ms a ser la esencia de nuestra historia reciente. Pero muchos de estos aos han estado acompaados de negociaciones, acuerdos, amnistas, indultos y otros procesos de paz, desde 1901 hasta los esfuerzos de negociacin que se han desarrollado sin cesar desde 1981 hasta hoy. Desde 1954 1958, cuando se amnisti o indult a guerrilleros y defensores del gobierno, la paz negociada siempre ha sido evocada como la nica buena salida al conflicto.25 Politics in Colombia continues to be an art form in which a few men, and now also, a few women, more among los de abajo than los de arriba, get together in order to get to know on another, to converse, to reach for deals. Personal and public conversations are still the stuff of which public life is made. There is an electricity in the air in Colombia when these encounters take place. They call forth a deep sense of personal protagonism among the negotiators. The belief that each one of t hem might be the one to striek the deal that will bring peace to the nation is clearly intoxicating. These encounters are minutely described in the press. They even elicit something of a popular audience in a nation in which most people want to know little about politics. They are instense, existential rituals.

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The euphoria that filled the hearts of urban politicians and the leaders of the FARC as they traveled, drank and sang together through Europe in February, 2000, in what was dubbed as the Eurotour, reveals the deep ties and the strong bonds of nationhood that still bind these antagonists. When they arrived in Norway, Una de las mejores rumbas del viaje tuvo lugar ah. Estbamos tan felices que casi nos subimos a las mesas. As somos los colombianos, exclaimed Victor G. Ricardo, the governments High Commisioner for Peace. Hablamos de paz y tambin de poltica Fue un ejercicio de convivencia, declared the coordinator of the Thematic Committee, que esforz la idea de que somos parte del mismo equipo. Rafael Reyes, one of the leaders of the FARC declares, Los colombianos no podemos seguir matndonos26. This moment between the antagonists was acutely perceived by Alfredo Rangel Sarez, with whose words about the past as mythology we began this essay. Esto ha sido algo as como la presentacin formal de una debutante inquieta a la sociedad culta27 There were some pretty heavy hangovers all around on the next morning. There are profound differences between the urban and rural protagonists which are revealed in some of these exchanges between them. The cultural distance between the urban and the rural negotiators keeps making itself felt. The urban disdain for rural people and their ways is rarely far removed. Se podra tener la sensacin de que a los comandantes guerrilleros les pasa lo mismo que a los generales: que cuando se quitan el uniforme verde oliva, pierden mando. Pero cuando uno los ve rodeados por los altos cacaos de la paz, atentos todos al menor guio de cualquiera de los miembros de las FARC, sabe que la diferencia especfica, como decan los jesuitas, existeEs entonces, cuando se constata que son, ante todo, un movimiento de estirpe y modales campesinos o que han olvidado su origen urbano y sus sueos de bachillerA ninguno ---excepcin hecha de Simn Trinidad, que es el nico que se hace el nudo de la corbata al estilo ingls y no americano--- a ninguno le sienta el vestido de pao. Parecen disfrazados.28 The old guerrilla leaders think about the past. For the urban politicians, there is no past that matters. When President Pastrana went out to meet with Tirofijo in el Cagun on January 7, 1999, the president declared that Hoy hemos venido a cumplir una cita con la historia. Nos hemos demorado medio siglo en hacerlo. The president was both wrong, and he was right,. for there had been many such encounters before, but they had not dealt with the fifty year history of the conflicts. It appeared that perhaps the chief of state was going to address them. But he did not. Tirofijo, on the other hand, could hardly thing

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about anything else but that history. Just as the guerrilleros of the Llanos that we have seen before, Tirofijo had to hacer historia, to account for the past and for his actions and that of his opponents years past. His spokesman, who read the guerrilla leaders speech, made a detailed recounting of what had happened since the early 1960s. He thanks his guest for coming, for this meeting was the first reunion en treinta y cuatro aos de confrontacin armada declarada por el Estado en 1964, a cuarenta y ocho hombres, con la asesora militar y la asesora econmica de los Estados Unidos quien le entreg quinientos millones de pesos al presidente de ese entonces, Guillermo Len Valencia, para acabar con las supuestas repblicas independientes que existan tan solo en la mente del Parlamento en cabeza del doctor Alvaro Gmez ) que en paz descanse), quien promovi un forzoso debate contra stas, para justificar la represin. And the guerrilla leader recalled the 1990s, when the Army came in and dislodged them from their headquarters at Casa Verde. Con esa nueva agresin, el ejrcito oficial se apodera de trescientes mulas de carga, setenta caballos de ganado, cuarenta cerdos, doscientas cincuenta aves de corral, cincuenta toneladas de comida The guerrillas words sounded strange, out of place. These petty details about chickens taken from the years before did not seem to fit such a momentous historical occasion. Some of the urban guests were startled. Others smiled, with that smug form of urban condescension. They must have wondered who they were dealing with, whether this small peasant was really up to the task of engaging in serious political discussions. But Tirofijos words are precise, meaningful, and to the point. He thinks about the past constantly, for that is what his struggle is all about. He feels the wounds of years gone by, of being betrayed, of being attacked, and once again, in 1990 being forced from his home, his things, his things, chickens cattle, pgis, the staples of daily life of the guerrillas, taken from him. He feels humiliated once again, and tells his counterparts about it. But they cannot understand. And, at that moment, Tirofijo keenly sensed the deep distance between him and the urban politicians that has been at the root of the conflicts from the beginning, as he complains about how the guerrillas have been forgotten, and left behind. He refers to what has happened, tellingly, as a manipulated, partial amnesia. A pesar de la gravedad de todos los hechos, la clase poltica, valindose de la manipulacin de los medios de comunicacin, ha querido sembrar de manera articifial la amnesia

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parcial en la mente de los colombianos, para que olviden estos hechos, los que permanecern latentes en la memoria histrica de nuestro pueblo29 When in March of last year Tirofijo met with those prominent capitalists, he was initially as diffident and aloof as he usually is in these encounters. When one of the entrepreneurs, Hernn Echavarra Olzaga, the majority owner of the Grupo Corona was giving his discurso, the guerrilla leader appeared to perk up and pay attention. When Echavarra was finished, Tirofijo went up to him and asked, Perdn, pero usted cmo se llama? El comandante de las FARC estaba impresionado no slo con la erudicin del empresario sino con su memoria histrica. Las referencias del patriarca empresarial a la violencia de los anos 30, cuando l era apenas un nio, sorprendieron a Tirofijo. Pero cuando Echavarra le aclar que en dos semanas cumplira 90 aos, el jefe guerrillero hizo con su puo un gesto de admirada comprensin. Afterwards, Tirofijo was overheard to say, !Ese hombre es un berraco! Moroever, the two old men were in agreement that the land had to be taxed and made productive again. Then, Marulanda es remiti a la historia. A su historia30 We may now begin to fully understand the words which Arturo Alape gathered from Tirofijo many years ago, and which so impressed me when I first read them in 1989. Ya son muchos los aos que llevamos gateando en esta luchaPero creo que hemos tenido un enemigo, el peor de todos los enemigos. Saben cul ha sido? Hablo del aislamiento de esta lucha, que es peor que aguantar hambre por una semana seguida. Entre ustedes, los de la ciudad y nosotros, que hemos estado enmontados, hay de por medio una gran montaa. Las voces de ustedes, las voces de nosotros no se escuchan, pocas veces se hablan. No es una distancia de tierras y de ros, de obstculos naturales, no es la montaa atravesada. De nosotros es poco lo que se sabe entre ustedes, de ustedes es pocal la historia que conocemos aqu.31 These are not the words or the sentiments of a man who has risen up against a social order. They are the expressions of a man who has been saddened all these years for having been left on the outside. Here is a man who appears to be struggling to be included, to be part of the nation, to be honored and respected. Perhaps his towel is of greater significance than the Colombian people may have realized. Tirofijos speech of January 7th, 1999 from which we have quoted extensively, ends with a call for reconciliacin and for the reconstruccin of the country. These two words appear time and again in the declarations of the guerrillas, and in their conversations with the urban leaders. The latter term appears at

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times in the discourse of the politicians, but as construccin no reconstruccion. They speak, as do contemporary scholars of nation building, in terms of la construccin del pas, or, more abstractly, as la construccin de pas, or la construccin de nacin. Without a past, or with one that has no meaning, there is nothing to rebuild, to reconstruir. They talk instead of the future, of one that will be better than the past, one that will be negotiated, negociado. But for the guerrillas it is a matter of restoring some of the ties that were broken in the past. It is a matter of history. The term reconciliacin is entirely absent from the language of the civilian politicians. This is easily understandable. The actions of the politicians in the past, or, if one wishes, of the State, were not, in the eyes of those politicians, either aggressive, or an onslought againt the rural population. Quite the contrary. As we have seen, the politicians sought to remove themselves from the lives of their rural clienteles, and they could, more often than not, understand their actions as being for the good of rural folk. They do not see themselves as responsible for the violences that took place, even though they must understand at some level that they cannot extricate themselves from them entirely. Living in the city, surrounded by others, in constant social and political activity, in endless conversations, they can have little idea of the desolation and the solitude in which the guerrillas were left in the early 1950s, and from which they have been trying to get away from ever since. They do not perceive a historical relationship with the guerrillas They do not perceive a historical relationship with the guerrillas. For them, there is nothing to conciliate, nothing to conciliar. But if the politicians are going to construir un futuro, they may have to talk about more than the structures of that new world. If they are going to contribute to the building of a nation at peace, they will have to come to terms with the clamor from los de abajo, and with the strength and vitality of the Colombian nation form below, with all those who want to be a part of the nation, who want to participate, to be respected, to stand up and be counted, to feel the honor of being a Colombian. Que haiga paz!

Alfredo Molano, Trochas y fusiles, Bogot, Instituto de Estudios Polticos y de Relaciones Internacionales/El ncora Editores, 1994, p. 207. 2 Mara Isabel Rueda, El Presidente y el guerrillero, Semana.com, Febrero 15, 2001 3 Controversy over the violencia book.

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Daniel Pcaut, Un mayor compromiso con este pas. Discurso con motivo del Doctorado Honoris Causa, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, in Anlisis Poltico, No. 41 (September/December 2000) 119-124. 5 A notable exception to the generalized perspective, is the work of English historian, Malcolm Deas. Yo sostengo que la poltica estuvo en la base de la violencia en Colombia, una politica irreducible a trminos que le parecieran ms aceptable a cierto tipo de acadmicos, como tenencia de tierras, pobreza relativa o marginalidad. El Tiempo, January 8, 2000. See his trenchant analysis, Violent Exchanges: Reflections on Political Violence in Colombia, in David E. Apter, ed., The Legitimation of Violence, New York, New York University Press, 1997, pp. 350-404. This essay can also be found, together with a complementary essay by Fernando Gaitn Daza, in Dos ensayos especulativos sobre la violencia en Colombia, Bogot, Tercer Mundo Editores, 1995. 6 While this is not the place to review this literature, 7Alfredo Rangel Surez, Las FARC-EP: Una mirada actual, in Malcolm Deas and Mara Victoria Llorente, eds., Reconocer la guerra para construir la paz, Bogot, CEREC, Ediciones Uniandes, Editorial Norma, 1999, p. 23. 8 For a recent critique of this unrealistic dimension of the peace negotiations, see Eduardo Posada Carb, La paz rediseada? El Tiempo, February 16, 2001. 9 Malcolm Deas, Reflections on Political Violence: Colombia, in David Apter, ed., The Legitimization of Violence, New York, New York University Press, 1997, pp. 379-380. 10 Juanita Len, Crnica de un encuentro en el Cagun, El Tiempo, March 19, 2000. 11 Pcaut, Un mayor compromiso, p. 120-121. 12 Michael Jimnez, Struggles on an Interior Shore: Wealth, Power and Authority in the Colombian Andes, Durham, Duke University Press, forthcoming. 13 Here Malcolm Deas, and others 14 Here Green and Snchez 15 The book was published in Bogot in 1959 by Editorial Mundial. Lpezs visit, and the words quoted here are on pages 262-267. 16 Molano, Trochas y fusiles, p. 29. 11 Arturo Alape, Las vidas de Pedro Antonio Marn Manuel Marulanda Vlez Tirofijo, Bogot, Editorial Planeta, 1989, pp. 107-108, 77-78. 18 Gene H. Bell-Villada, Gara Mrquez, The Man and His Work, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina, 1990, p. 12. 13 The Solitude of Latin America, in Doris Meyer, ed., Lives on the Line: The Testimony of Contemporary Latin American Authors, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988, p. 230-234. 20 Deas, Reflections, 362. 21 Pcaut, Un mayor compromiso, pp. 121, 120. 22 Willard L. Beaulac, Career Ambassador, New York, 1958, pp. 226, 556. 23 Caballero Caldre{on, El Cristo de espaldas, p. 118. 24 Deas, Reflections, p. 365 25 Jorge Orlando Melo, La paz: una realidad utpica? in Semana, December 2, 1999. 26 Juanita Len, Chistes, coplas, y brindis par la paz, El Tiempo, February 27, 2000. 27 These words were cited by Larry Rohter, Battling in Colombia but Touring Together in Europe, The new York Times, February 28, 2000. 28 Guerrilleros de Everft, Revista Cambio, February 28, 2000. 29 Tirofijos speech is in Jaime Zuleta Nieto, ed., et.al., Conversaciones de paz: redefinic[on del Estado, Bogot, 1999, pp. 300-305. Pastranas words are also in this volume. The citation used here is on page 295. 30 Len, Crnica de un encuentro en el Cagun; Actualidad: Nacin, Seman.com, Marzo 19, 2000; Lozano 31 Arturo Alape, Las vidas de Pedro Antonio Marn Manuel Marulanda Vlez, Editorial Planeta, 1989, p. 19
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