Vol. 12 No. 6 · 22 March 1990
pages 3-6 | 4865 words
Homicide in Colombia
Malcolm Deas
Around 1890 Colombia was governed by Dr Rafael Nuñez. This ravaged old intellectual, a late convert from the fleshpots of Liverpool – he had been Consul there – and liberalism, exerted his influence from a breezy summer-house on the beach near Cartagena, and left the day-to-day business of government in Bogota to the ultramontane grammarian, schoolteacher, Virgil-translator and polymath Miguel Antonio Caro, who in the course of a long life, legend has it, not only never bothered to see the sea, which was then many days distant, but even drew the line at going to see the River Magdalena, close enough for someone of even the feeblest geographical curiosity.
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[*] Yale University Press, £22.50, 1989.
[†] Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, 1989.
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 9 · 10 May 1990
From Gordon Guthrie
I read Malcolm Deas’s ‘Homicide in Colombia’ with interest (LRB, 22 March), but feel that some of his conclusions are rather evasive. Formal democracy certainly exists in Colombia, but it is ‘regulated’ by mechanisms whose importance he has underestimated. The elections, as he makes clear, happen regularly, with low turn-outs by any standard (except that of the USA). Continued attempts to ‘read more Gramsci and embark on a frank struggle for a new hegemony’ have been made, and there is a clear correlation between levels of political violence and the success of these frank struggles. The assassination of Gaitan did, after all, produce a civil war which has passed into history as La Violencia, and which lasted for 17 years. Political violence has worsened considerably since the mid-Seventies, whose murder rate Deas chooses to quote. Recent figures for political deaths and disappearances given in Jenny Pearce’s Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth show an increase from 96 political murders in 1978 to 2182 murders and 1140 disappearances in the first 10½ months of 1989.
Deas comes to the rather relaxed conclusion that Columbia will just sort of get by, in its rough-and-ready democratic-ish way. The US Government is embarking on a ‘War on Drugs’ which is likely to have serious consequences for Colombia, as well as the other Latin American countries affected, Bolivia and Peru. Whilst there is no doubt that the international drug business is a problem, there are strong grounds for believing that armed intervention by the US will be worse. The US has long proposed a policy of ‘substitution’: that is, the replacement of coca with other crops. The ‘War on Drugs’ initiative aims to back this with steel. The problem is that where there is large-scale drug cultivation in Latin America there are also guerrillas. Wherever there is large-scale cash crop cultivation for export, involving repression of peasant organisation by legal (or quasi-legal) force, or displacement of the peasantry, there are also guerrillas. There is no reason to believe that the US intends to replace coca cash-cropping with effective land reform, nor is there reason to believe that the ‘War on Drugs’ will take precedence over the ‘War against Subversion’ that the US has waged since the Alliance for Progress. There is ample anecdotal evidence for this claim: vide Noriega and drugs when he was ‘our sonofabitch’, and before he got uppity.
Gordon Guthrie
London W6
Vol. 12 No. 10 · 24 May 1990
From Malcolm Deas
I do not agree with Gordon Guthrie (Letters, 10 May) that there is a clear correlation between levels of political violence in Colombia and the ‘success’ of ‘frank struggles for a new hegemony’, nor do I agree that I have underestimated the importance of the mechanisms by which Colombian democracy is ‘regulated’. I would like to take particular issue with several points in his letter. First, my article refers to the current murder rate, not to that of the mid-Seventies, which he says I choose to quote. I have no intention of minimising the increase in recent years or the present appalling level of killing. Secondly, though I share reservations about some aspects of US anti-drug policy, it is misleading to write of US ‘armed intervention’ as likely, and to imply that the US determines Colombian policy on crop substitution or land reform. Armed intervention is not likely and the United States does not govern Colombia. Certainly I hope that Colombian democracy will survive and become more meaningful. Among its current enemies Guthrie must list, besides guerrillas, certain drug barons. Since I wrote my piece these last (not the Colombian Government, not the US) have assassinated two Presidential candidates of the Left, Bernardo Jaramillo of the Union Patriotica and Carlos Pizarro of the M-19, to add to their murder of Luis Carlos Galan last August. Of course, nobody who cares about Colombia can be ‘relaxed’ in the face of these events. Simple notions that blame the US and ignore the country’s complex realities are a form of relaxation.
Malcolm Deas
St Antony’s College, Oxford
