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| Professor Charles
Bergquist |
Explaining the Emergence
of Colombia's Guerilla Organizations: A Historical Approach
Chris Cardona, Department
of Political Science
On Thursday, February
14, Professor Charles Bergquist presented a historical interpretation
of the current political crisis in Colombia, focusing on
the relationship between the failure of the democratic Left
and the emergence of violent guerrilla organizations. His
analysis could not have been more timely; a few days after
the lecture, the government of Colombian President Andrés
Pastrana put an end to a more than three-year peace process
with the primary guerrilla organization, the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). The crisis has entered
a new, more militarized phase, and Bergquist's lecture offered
one historically grounded, political-economic explanation
of the dominance of militarism within the Colombian Left.
Bergquist's introduction
was given by his former student and advisee Professor Margaret
Chowning of the Department of History. Chowning praised Bergquist's "seminal" work
on labor in Latin America, and thanked him for showing her,
and many others, "what it means to be a historian." After
several years at Duke University, Bergquist moved to the
public University of Washington for what Chowning described
as "admirable political reasons." Bergquist's recent
work also reflects his political convictions, focusing on
the causes and consequences of political violence in Colombia.
Not one to shy away from controversy, Bergquist stated at
the outset of his presentation that his interpretation of
the current political crisis in Colombia might appear heterodox.
He began by praising
the efforts of the UC Berkeley Colombia Working Group for
its generation of dialogue about the crisis in Colombia,
and in particular for the Spring 2001 conference, "Colombia
in Context." Before delving into his historical analysis,
which focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, Bergquist made a few contextual remarks about
the current crisis. He cited recent shifts in Colombian public
opinion toward a more aggressive military approach to the
guerrillas (as reflected in high levels of support for hard-line
presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Vélez), and the
increasing interest of the U.S. government in providing military
aid beyond that stipulated in the already controversial Plan
Colombia. Combined with the increasing reliance of the
FARC on kidnapping as a means of generating income, these
trends augur an "escalation" of the conflict, creating
sharp contrast with the "largely ineffectual and unsuccessful
peace talks." For Bergquist, this reflects an "internal
Colombian historical logic" that operates independent
of international factors, important as the latter are.
Bergquist's analysis
proceeded on multiple levels, moving from the testimony of
leftist leaders to patterns of voting to aggregate economic
data on property ownership. Citing the recollections of Colombian
Communist Party leader Nicolás Buenaventura, Bergquist
identified a key tension within the Colombian Left in the
early twentieth century: between the efforts of the Communist
Party to achieve economic development and redistribution
by increasing the numbers of small landowners and the "ethos" of
the landowners, which "revolved around ownership of
a viable family farm." Landowners were leery of the
Communists' goal of collectivizing property. Ironically,
the very people the Communists helped, as a result of their
land gains, began to turn away from aspects of the Communist
ideology. For Bergquist, this incongruence between cultural
norms and party ideology represents the key component of
one "paradox of modern Colombian history": while
the Left, in its violent, guerrilla version, is currently
the strongest in Latin America, historically, it has been
one of the weakest organizationally, ideologically, and electorally.
It is the definition of a paradox that its two elements are
only apparently contradictory, and Bergquist argued
that indeed, the late 20th-century rise of a violent
and extremist left is closely connected to the failure of
a late 19th and early 20th-century
democratic left. In essence, because the Left was so weak
historically, it began to develop intransigent strategies
that increasingly involved the use of arms.
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| Professor Margaret
Chowning (left) and Professor Charles
Bergquist (right). |
Exacerbating this historical
weakness has been the century-long dominance of the centrist
Liberal and Conservative parties. The Left, whether Communist,
Socialist, or populist, has had limited electoral success,
and those third parties that have done well-such as that
of populist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán in the 1930s-have
soon been co-opted by one of the two dominant parties. While
this exclusion is undeniable, Bergquist asserts that the
guerrillas, particularly the FARC, have developed a singular,
and in his view counterproductive, interpretation of the
meaning of this dominance. In written documents, the FARC
cites the motivation for their insurgency as a "popular" response
to the "violence of the Colombian state against its
opponents." While state support for paramilitary groups
does give credence to this view, for Bergquist, the guerrillas
have developed an extreme and self-reinforcing view of the
conflict that does not reflect historical reality.
Indeed, the thrust of
Bergquist's argument was that the guerrilla response is not a
popular one, because the growth of the export economy in
the late 19th and early 20th century
generated, among the very people expected to support the
Left, a conservative ethos of land-ownership based on individual
initiative and respect for property rights that contradicted
key tenets of leftist ideology. Colombia exhibits a unique
combination of factors that led to the historical weakness
of the democratic Left: widespread smallholding, lack of
third-party electoral viability, and absence of an ethnic
dimension along which leftists could organize alternative
political identities. Taken together, these elements of Colombian
society lead to a scenario in which leftists seeking to operate
within the electoral-democratic context faced both an unfavorable
institutional context and popular indifference. The
FARC cites the former as a justification for their violent
extremism; what they neglect, from Bergquist's point of view,
is the reality of the latter. This analysis thus undermines
the main rationale offered by the FARC for its militaristic
strategies.
A lively question-and-answer
session followed. Most of the questions focused on contemporary
aspects of the crisis that Bergquist did not include in his
discussion, such as the rise of paramilitary groups, the
emergence of drug trafficking as a source of income for the
guerrillas, and the role of the U.S. in undermining the Left
through anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War. Bergquist
offered his opinions on the M-19, a former guerrilla organization
that became a political party and played a prominent role
in the writing of the 1991 Constitution (he saw it as a passing
phenomenon, and one with different, more conservative ideological
roots than the FARC), the current state of the two dominant
parties (he sees the Liberal party as more solid and the
Conservatives as falling apart), and what concerned citizens
in other countries can do to help address the crisis (he
suggested advocacy for reforming U.S. drug policy, support
for human rights groups, and pressing for the elimination
of international sources of support for the violent Left).
Bergquist concluded by citing direct U.S. military intervention
as the one thing that could legitimize the violent Left.
