BiblioVault - Books about Colombia

A Century of Violence in a Red City

Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia

Lesley Gill

Duke University Press, 2016

In A Century of Violence in a Red City Lesley Gill provides insights into broad trends of global capitalist development, class disenfranchisement and dispossession, and the decline of progressive politics. Gill traces the rise and fall of the strong labor unions, neighborhood organizations, and working class of Barrancabermeja, Colombia, from their origins in the 1920s to their effective activism for agrarian reforms, labor rights, and social programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Like much of Colombia, Barrancabermeja came to be dominated by alliances of right-wing politicians, drug traffickers, foreign corporations, and paramilitary groups. These alliances reshaped the geography of power and gave rise to a pernicious form of armed neoliberalism. Their violent incursion into Barrancabermeja's civil society beginning in the 1980s decimated the city's social networks, destabilized life for its residents, and destroyed its working-class organizations. As a result, community leaders are now left clinging to the toothless discourse of human rights, which cannot effectively challenge the status quo. In this stark book, Gill captures the grim reality and precarious future of Barrancabermeja and other places ravaged by neoliberalism and violence.

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Chronicle of a Failure Foretold

The Peace Process of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana

Harvey Kline

University of Alabama Press, 2007

Charts the progress and failure of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana’s efforts to bring an end to sixty years of civil war.

The civil war in Colombia has waxed and waned for almost sixty years with shifting goals, programs, and tactics among the contending parties and with bursts of appalling violence punctuated by uneasy truces, cease-fires, and attempts at reconciliation. Varieties of Marxism, the economics of narco-trafficking, peasant land hunger, poverty, and oppression mix together in a toxic stew that has claimed uncounted lives of (most often) peasants, conscript soldiers, and people who just got in the way.

Hope for resolution of this conflict is usually confined to dreamers and millenialists of various persuasions, but occasionally an attempt is made at a breakthrough in the military stalemate between the government and the Marxist groups. One of the most promising such attempts was made by new Colombian President Andrés Pastrana at a time when the main rebel groups seemed receptive to serious dialogue. This book is an account of that effort at peace, accompanied at the outset by domestic and international support and hope, and yet doomed like so many others to eventual failure.

Through interviews with many of the actors in this drama, as well as an understanding of the various interest groups and economic forces at work in Colombia, Dr. Kline charts the progress and ultimate failure of this effort, and thereby hopes to increase understanding of the causes of its lack of success. The importance of the resolution of the conflict to the region and to ordinary citizens of this troubled land cannot be
overstated.

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Citizens’ Media against Armed Conflict

Disrupting Violence in Colombia

Clemencia Rodríguez

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

For two years, Clemencia Rodríguez did fieldwork in regions of Colombia where leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the army, and drug traffickers made their presence felt in the lives of unarmed civilians. Here, Rodríguez tells the story of the ways in which people living in the shadow of these armed intruders use community radio, television, video, digital photography, and the Internet to shield their communities from armed violence’s negative impacts.

Citizens’ media are most effective, Rodríguez posits, when they understand communication as performance rather than simply as persuasion or the transmission of information. Grassroots media that are deeply embedded in the communities they serve and responsive to local needs strengthen the ability of community members to productively react to violent incursions. Rodríguez demonstrates how citizens’ media privilege aspects of community life not hijacked by violence, providing people with the tools and the platform to forge lives for themselves and their families that are not entirely colonized by armed conflict and its effects.

Ultimately, Rodríguez shows that unarmed civilian communities that have been cornered by armed conflict can use community media to repair torn social fabrics, reconstruct eroded bonds, reclaim public spaces, resolve conflict, and sow the seeds of peace and stability.

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Civilization And Violence

Regimes of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Cristina Rojas

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

Civilization and violence are not necessarily the antagonists we presume-withcivilization taming violence, and violence unmaking civilization. Focusing on postindependence Colombia, this book brings to light the ways in which violenceand civilization actually intertwined and reinforced each other in the development of postcolonial capitalism.

The narratives of civilization and violence, Cristina Rojas contends, play key roles in the formation of racial, gender, and class identities; they also provide pivotal logic to both the formation of the nation and the processes of capitalist development. During the Liberal era of Colombian history (1849-1878), a dominant creole elite enforced a "will to civilization" that sought to create a new world in its own image. Rojas explores different arenas in which this pursuit meant the violent imposition of white, liberal, laissez-faire capitalism. Drawing on a wide range of social theory, Rojas develops a new way of understanding the relationship between violence and the formation of national identity-not just in the history of Colombia, but also in the broader narratives of civilization.

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Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910

Charles W. Bergquist

Duke University Press, 1978

The appearance of Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910, had several important consequences for the entire field of Latin American history, as well as for the study of Colombia. Through Bergquist's analysis of this transitional period in terms of what has been called the dependency theory, he has left his mark on all subsequent studies in Latin American affairs; questions of economic development and political alignment cannot be dealt with without confronting Bergquist's work. he has also provided a major contribution to Colombian history by his examination of the growth of the coffee industry and Thousand Days War.

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The Colombia Reader

History, Culture, Politics

Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Marco Palacios, and Ana María Gómez López, editors

Duke University Press, 2017

Containing over one hundred selections—most of them published in English for the first time—The Colombia Reader presents a rich and multilayered account of this complex nation from the colonial era to the present. The collection includes journalistic reports, songs, artwork, poetry, oral histories, government documents, and scholarship to illustrate the changing ways Colombians from all walks of life have made and understood their own history. Comprehensive in scope, it covers regional differences; religion, art, and culture; the urban/rural divide; patterns of racial, economic, and gender inequalities; the history of violence; and the transnational flows that have shaped the nation. The Colombia Reader expands readers' knowledge of Colombia beyond its reputation for violence, contrasting experiences of conflict with the stability and significance of cultural, intellectual, and economic life in this plural nation.

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Community of Peace

Performing Geographies of Ecological Dignity in Colombia

Christopher Courtheyn

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Achieving peace is often thought about in terms of military operations or state negotiations. Yet it also happens at the grassroots level, where communities envision and create peace on their own. The San José de Apartadó Peace Community of small-scale farmers has not waited for a top-down peace treaty. Instead, they have actively resisted forced displacement and co-optation by guerrillas, army soldiers, and paramilitaries for two decades in Colombia’s war-torn Urabá region. Based on ethnographic action research over a twelve-year period, Christopher Courtheyn illuminates the community’s understandings of peace and territorial practices against ongoing assassinations and displacement. San José’s peace through autonomy reflects an alternative to traditional modes of politics practiced through electoral representation and armed struggle. Courtheyn explores the meaning of peace and territory, while also interrogating the role of race in Colombia’s war and the relationship between memory and peace. Amid the widespread violence of today’s global crisis, Community of Peace illustrates San José’s rupture from the logics of colonialism and capitalism through the construction of political solidarity and communal peace.

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Contentious Republicans

Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

James E. Sanders

Duke University Press, 2004

Contentious Republicans explores the mid-nineteenth-century rise of mass electoral democracy in the southwestern region of Colombia, a country many assume has never had a meaningful democracy of any sort. James E. Sanders describes a surprisingly rich republicanism characterized by legal rights and popular participation, and he explains how this vibrant political culture was created largely by competing subaltern groups seeking to claim their rights as citizens and their place in the political sphere. Moving beyond the many studies of nineteenth-century nation building that focus on one segment of society, Contentious Republicans examines the political activism of three distinct social and racial groups: Afro-Colombians, Indians, and white peasant migrants.

Beginning in the late 1840s, subaltern groups entered the political arena to forge alliances, both temporary and enduring, with the elite Liberal and Conservative Parties. In the process, each group formed its own political discourses and reframed republicanism to suit its distinct needs. These popular liberals and popular conservatives bargained for the parties’ support and deployed a broad repertoire of political actions, including voting, demonstrations, petitions, strikes, boycotts, and armed struggle. By the 1880s, though, many wealthy Colombians of both parties blamed popular political engagement for social disorder and economic failure, and they successfully restricted lower-class participation in politics. Sanders suggests that these reactionary developments contributed to the violence and unrest afflicting modern Colombia. Yet in illuminating the country’s legacy of participatory politics in the nineteenth century, he shows that the current situation is neither inevitable nor eternal.

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Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change

Experiences from Rural Latin America

Edited by Marcela Vásquez-León, Brian J. Burke, and Timothy J. Finan

University of Arizona Press

Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change presents examples from Paraguay, Brazil, and Colombia, examining what is necessary for smallholder agricultural cooperatives to support holistic community-based development in peasant communities. Reporting on successes and failures of these cooperative efforts, the contributors offer analyses and strategies for supporting collective grassroots interests. Illustrating how poverty and inequality affect rural people, they reveal how cooperative organizations can support grassroots development strategies while negotiating local contexts of inequality amid the broader context of international markets and global competition.

The contributors explain the key desirable goals from cooperative efforts among smallholder producers. They are to provide access to more secure livelihoods, expand control over basic resources and commodity chains, improve quality of life in rural areas, support community infrastructure, and offer social spaces wherein small farmers can engage politically in transforming their own communities.

The stories in Cooperatives, Grassroots Development, and Social Change reveal immense opportunities and challenges. Although cooperatives have often been framed as alternatives to the global capitalist system, they are neither a panacea nor the hegemonic extension of neoliberal capitalism. Through one of the most thorough cross-country comparisons of cooperatives to date, this volume shows the unfiltered reality of cooperative development in highly stratified societies, with case studies selected specifically because they offer important lessons regarding struggles and strategies for adapting to a changing social, economic, and natural environment.

Contributors:

Luis Barros
Brian J. Burke
Charles Cox
Luis Alberto Cuéllar Gómez
Miguel Ricardo Dávila Ladrón de Guevara
Elisa Echagüe
Timothy J. Finan
Andrés González Aguilera
Sonia Carolina López Cerón
Joana Laura Marinho Nogueira
João Nicédio Alves Nogueira
Jessica Piekielek
María Isabel Ramírez Anaya
Rodrigo F. Rentería-Valencia
Lilliana Andrea Ruiz Marín
Marcela Vásquez-León

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Countering Development

Indigenous Modernity and the Moral Imagination

David D. Gow

Duke University Press, 2008

Cauca, located in southwestern Colombia and home to the largest indigenous population in the country, is renowned as a site of indigenous mobilization. In 1994, following a destructive earthquake, many families in Cauca were forced to leave their communities of origin and relocate to other areas within the province where the state provided them with land and housing. Noting that disasters offer communities the opportunity to remake themselves and their priorities, David D. Gow examines how three different communities established after the earthquake wrestled with conflicting visions of development. He shows how they each countered traditional notions of development by moving beyond a myopic obsession with poverty alleviation to demand that Colombia become more inclusive and treat all of its people as citizens with full rights and responsibilities.

Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted annually in Cauca from 1995 through 2002, Gow compares the development plans of the three communities, looking at both the planning processes and the plans themselves. In so doing, he demonstrates that there is no single indigenous approach to development and modernity. He describes differences in how each community defined and employed the concept of culture, how they connected a concern with culture to economic and political reconstruction, and how they sought to assert their own priorities while engaging with the existing development resources at their disposal. Ultimately, Gow argues that the moral vision advanced by the indigenous movement, combined with the growing importance attached to human rights, offers a fruitful way to think about development: less as a process of integration into a rigidly defined modernity than as a critical modernity based on a radical politics of inclusive citizenship.

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Cowards Don't Make History

Orlando Fals Borda and the Origins of Participatory Action Research

Joanne Rappaport

Duke University Press, 2020

In the early 1970s, a group of Colombian intellectuals led by the pioneering sociologist Orlando Fals Borda created a research-activist collective called La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Research and Social Action). Combining sociological and historical research with a firm commitment to grassroots social movements, Fals Borda and his colleagues collaborated with indigenous and peasant organizations throughout Colombia. In Cowards Don’t Make History Joanne Rappaport examines the development of participatory action research on the Caribbean coast, highlighting Fals Borda’s rejection of traditional positivist research frameworks in favor of sharing his own authority as a researcher with peasant activists. Fals Borda and his colleagues inserted themselves as researcher-activists into the activities of the National Association of Peasant Users, coordinated research priorities with its leaders, studied the history of peasant struggles, and, in collaboration with peasant researchers, prepared accessible materials for an organizational readership, thereby transforming research into a political organizing tool. Rappaport shows how the fundamental concepts of participatory action research as they were framed by Fals Borda continue to be relevant to engaged social scientists and other researchers in Latin America and beyond.

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Cumbe Reborn

An Andean Ethnography of History

Joanne Rappaport

University of Chicago Press, 1993

According to legend, Cumbe ruled the Colombian community of Cumbal during the Spanish invasion. Although there is no documentation of Chief Cumbe's existence, today's Cumbales point to him as their ancestral link to Pasto ancestors. His image reappears often in popular music, theater, community organization, and militant politics as the Cumbales attempt to reinvigorate their indigenous heritage and reclaim the lands this heritage justifies.

Joanne Rappaport examines the Cumbales' reappropriation of history and the resulting reinvention of tradition. She explores the ways in which personal memories are interpreted in nonverbal expression, such as ritual and material culture, as well as in oral and written communication. This novel approach to historical consciousness is grounded on a unique combination of historical and ethnographical analysis.

Cumbe Reborn makes a significant contribution both to our understanding of ethnic militancy in the Americas and to the broader methodological discussion of non-western historical consciousness under colonial domination. It will attract a wide audience of anthropologists, historians, specialists in Andean ethnohistory and Latin American studies and literature, and folklore specialists interested in subaltern discourse.

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