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| Professor Mary
Roldan discusses the history of the violent conflict in Colombia. |
Leah Carroll, Sociology
For years before I met
her, I heard my Colombianist historian friends and mentors
tell of Mary Roldan and her work in awed tones. They referred
to the determination and resourcefulness with which she tracked
down sensitive and obscure documents; the thoroughness with
which she documented each statement; the boldness of her
analysis--and on top of all that, her energy and kindness.
My meeting with her a
few years ago had confirmed the personal attributes, and
the talk she gave on March 14 at CLAS, based on her new book Blood
and Fire, La Violence en Antioquia, 1946-1953, amply
demonstrated why her work is so admired.
Antioquia is an especially
instructive case. One of Colombia's most dynamic centers
of development, the epicenter of both the coffee and the
textile economy during the 19th and much of the 20th century,
it has also been wracked periodically--and currently--by
intense violence. At the same time, the very diversity of
Antioquia--its temperate mountains and tropical lowlands;
citizens of European descent, Afro-Colombians, and indigenous
peoples; devoutly Catholic Conservatives and more secular
Liberals; homesteaders and latifundistas--make it an ideal
microcosm for examining factors that may contribute to past
and present violence in Colombia as a whole. What's more,
Roldan is an ideal candidate to take on this analysis. Not
only is she a leading young historian, trained at Harvard
and now Associate Professor at Cornell, she is also immersed
in the much-studied Antioquian highlands culture, having
spent considerable time in Antioquia herself. She has published
extensively in Colombia, and is descended from Antioquian
roots on both sides of her family, going back to the 17th
century on the maternal side.
In her talk at CLAS,
Professor Roldan referred frequently to a colored map, which
revealed the stark contrasts in the levels of violence in
different areas of Antioquia during 1949-1953 that her analysis
attempted to explain. Astoundingly, only 5 municipios (roughly
equivalent to counties), out of the 30-odd that comprised
Antioquia at the time, accounted for half of all the political
violence that occurred during the period, and most of the
rest took place in adjacent municipios. Examination of a
wide variety of archival documents--land titles, newspaper
articles, electoral documents, and more--made clear the factors
that had contributed to this pattern.
The less violent regions
formed the agricultural "core" of Antioquia. Relatively long-settled,
adequate infrastructure connected them to the capital city
of Medellín. They were typified by non-extractive
economic activities with locally-based elites, such as coffee
and dairy cattle. And notably, they were ethnically and racially
homogeneous--of European descent, and bound by Antioquia's
particularly conservative and devout variant of Catholicism
-- a cultural factor that greatly facilitated elite and state
responsiveness to citizen grievances. Conflicts were negotiated,
services provided. The state responded to citizen demands,
and the population accorded it legitimacy.
The few most violent
municipios--Magdalena Medio, Uraba, Bajo Cauca, and Western
Antioquia--were shown as blotches of red and yellow standing
out in a sea of white on Roldan's map. Characterized by various
extractive activities--mining, timber, oil--they had recently
been settled by non-Antioquian homesteaders who came into
conflict with the large-scale extractive absentee landlords,
usually based in Medellín. If there was a transportation
infrastructure at all, it frequently connected not to Medellín,
but to a non-Antioquian city. Settlement was sparse, and
usually by people of Afro-Colombian or indigenous descent
whose cultures were viewed as inherently uncivilized and "dangerous" by
the typically white Antioquian elite and whose grievances
were therefore deemed unworthy of consideration. All of these
factors led to the major source of ongoing, endemic violence
in these zones; the state almost invariably responded to
citizen grievances with repression rather than negotiation
or provision of services or justice.
Nonetheless, in a finding
that Roldan called "absolutely astonishing", the citizenry
in these peripheral regions believed in the government; they
resisted peacefully for years, exposing themselves to violence
by writing and signing petitions to the government that repudiated
violence and begged the government to intervene to protect
them. This evidence refutes the oft-cited argument that Colombians
have no sense of citizenship or faith in the state; "it has
been eroded over the years", said Roldan, "but it was not
non-existent." Furthermore, while previous explanations have
focused on partisan conflict as the root of "La Violencia",
Roldan not only shows that class and ethnicity play a larger
role than partisan conflicts in explaining the geographic
contrasts she found in the 1949-1953 period; she also finds
that the period of most intense partisan conflict--1946-1949,
when Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was a rising political force--was
in fact much less violent in Antioquia than the period after
Gaitan's death.
The lessons for today
are clear. All the same places--or places very much like
them in other parts of Colombia -- are still the rural epicenters
of violence in today's Colombia, and for all the same reasons.
Lack of infrastructure and a repressive state and elite response
to citizen grievances (often justified by only thinly veiled
views of "red zone" residents as culturally inferior) contribute
as much now as 50 years ago to the ongoing bloodshed in Colombia.
Yet Roldan's peaceful cases are also instructive. Where the
government did negotiated with the citizenry, violent conflict
was overcome and has not recurred. There is still a chance
to reverse the repetition of history's mistakes.
Contributor's note: Leah
Carroll recently completed her dissertation (Sociology, UC
Berkeley) on political violence and democratization in Colombia,
1984-1994. She is Vice Chair of the Colombia Section of LASA.
