Colombia and the United States: the Making of an Inter-American Alliance, 1939-1960 (review)

Historian Bradley Lynn Coleman's monograph deals with military relations between the United States and Colombia during a 21-year period. The book represents an important contribution to the field of U.S.-Colombian (and more generally, U.S.-Latin American) military and diplomatic history. Given the recent notable increase in United States military assistance to Colombia (about 6 billion dollars since 2000) the work is timely, and will help readers understand that the United States's interest in the Colombian military did not begin with President Pastrana (1998-2002) and President Clinton's "Plan Colombia"—a military alliance designed, ostensibly, to save Colombia from total collapse at the very beginning of this century. Overall, though, Coleman's treatment is excessively sympathetic to both nations' military personnel and leadership; he divorces military history from larger socio-cultural questions, and is disappointingly uncritical of an exceedingly powerful institution that has profoundly influenced the histories of both Colombia and the United States.

The book is carefully and copiously researched. Professor Coleman provides a helpful, generous six-page "Essay on Archival Research" at the conclusion which will prove instrumental to future researchers. He has consulted the important archives in Colombia and the United States and the book is firmly grounded in primary source, archival material. But, the text is somewhat anachronistic since the author fails to take into consideration the important economic, social, and historical research that has been in vogue since Jaime Jaramillo Uribe—forty or fifty years ago—challenged Colombian historians to move away from a focus on politicians, priests, and generals so that a new emphasis on social questions could emerge. Coleman's institutional history stresses policy questions, diplomatic conferences, military decisions, and the give and take between policy makers in Washington and their Colombian counter-parts. Acknowledgement of the socio-cultural context of these important policy questions would have improved this work, and given greater gravitas to the military/diplomatic decisions discussed by the author.

Coleman's history, in places, seems simplistic and overly optimistic. The author offers only demure, tepid criticism of some of the major disasters of contemporary Colombian history. Regarding "the violence" (la violencia) of the 1940s and 1950s, Coleman writes how this period of utter chaos … "placed passionate, anticommunist politicians in a decision-making structure that allowed for bold action" (p. 96). Other more critical authors (Gonzalo Sánchez, Charles Bergquist, Orlando Fals-Borda, et al.) have suggested that the violence (which claimed as many as 200,000 lives in Colombia) represented a complete break-down of political, social, ecclesiastic, and military order. Coleman buys into the notion of a Colombian "democratic heritage" during the twentieth century, an unfortunate myth, oft-repeated by politicians, policy makers, some scholars and those interested in creating political, economic, or military alliances between Colombia and the U.S. Given that an undeclared civil war raged for about twelve years (c. 1946-1958), considering how Colombian presidents ruled through "State of Siege" decree (during the 1950s, '60s and '70s), and counting the extraordinary high number of homicides in Colombia in recent decades, the term "Colombian democracy" certainly requires contextualization. "Electoralism" could aptly characterize the Colombian political system over the past fifty years or so—voting takes place, people are elected—but it's not exactly democracy.

Professor Coleman is eager to demonstrate the "collaborative" nature of the Colombian-U.S. military alliance over the years and this need to emphasize cooperation is distracting; he seems to hope—by publishing this book—to correct the work of less sanguine scholars (such as Herbert Braun, Bergquist, Bruce Bagley among others) who offer more nuanced, complex interpretations of the recent relationship that divides and unifies the United States and Colombia. For example, Coleman—throughout the text—uncritically accepts the explanation (as offered by U.S. and...