Guerillas, Soldiers, Paramilitaries, Assassins, Narcos, and Gringos: The Unhappy Prospects for Peace and Democracy in Colombia

Driven By Drugs: U.S. Policy Toward Colombia. By Russell Crandall. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002. Pp. xiv+193. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Killing Peace: Colombia's Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention. By Garry Leech. (New York: Information Network of the Americas, INOTA, 2002. Pp. x+106. $10.00 paper.)

More Terrible than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America's War in Colombia. By Robin Kirk. (New York: Public Affairs, 2003. Pp. xxiv+311. N.p.)

The Heart of War in Colombia. By Constanza Ardila Galvis. (London: Latin America Bureau, 2000. Pp. 223. N.p.)

Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey into the Violence of Colombia (2nd ed.). By Herbert Braun. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003. Pp. 304. $69.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Systems of Violence: The Political Economy of War and Peace in Colombia. By Nazih Richani. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002. Pp. x+225. $65.50 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia Colombia, 1946-53.By Mary Roldán. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+392. $64.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.)

Colombia: The Economic Foundation of Peace. Edited by Marcelo M. Giugale, Olivier Lafourcade, and Connie Luff. (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2003. Pp. xlviii+994. $65.00 cloth.)

Colombia Años 50: Industriales, Polà�tica Y Diplomacia. By Eduardo Sáenz Rovner. (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002. Pp. 265. N.p.)

Finally approaching its own overblown cliché of a country awash in violence, Colombia today is not unlike Germany during the Thirty Years War. Overrun by private armies and opportunistic soldiers of fortune, it is home to many powerful people who find political and economic advantage in the fluid and lawless situation. Not surprisingly, few of these individuals show any eagerness for peace. It is a plundered land full of displaced and desperate people, and while none of the combatants is strong enough to prevail, none is so weak as to quit the field.

This violent history stands in stark contrast to the Colombian experience of the mid-twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s especially, Colombia's political system moved in increasingly democratic directions under the reforms instituted by the governing Liberals, a movement that achieved critical mass under Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the populist left-wing party leader. In the presidential election of 1946 Gaitán split the Liberal vote, giving the minority Conservative party the institutionally powerful presidency for the first time since 1930, although the contest did lead to his taking control of the Liberal party in 1947. It was, in fact, the Liberals that ushered in the return of political violence, so prevalent in nineteenth-century Colombia, by attempting to intimidate Gaitanista Liberals in the 1946 election. The Conservatives, aware that a reunited Liberal party under Gaitán would prevail in the 1950 presidential election, intensified the campaign of political repression begun by the establishment Liberals. It was under this cloud that Gaitán was assassinated on April 9, 1948, bringing the violence to levels not seen since the last and bloodiest conflict of the nineteenth century, the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902). During the ensuing period known as La Violencia (1946-1966), Colombia suffered more than 200,000 violent deaths and hundreds of thousands more were displaced by the violence.

Ironically, from the end of World War II until the late 1990s Colombia enjoyed almost continuous economic growth, and avoided the debt crisis that plagued most of its neighbors in the region. But even in the midst of its successful capitalist expansion, Colombia also experienced almost six decades of partisan civil war. In the last thirty years, the country has undergone violent revolutionary and counterrevolutionary struggles, and the violence of everyday life has never really...