A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggles, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia by Lesley Gill (review)

Lesley Gill’s study takes a reader through nearly a century of economic and political transformation in Colombia’s northwest, from the 1920s, when the area was a foreign oil enclave, through the 1960s era of nationalized oil and state-controlled unionization, to a more recent period of what the author terms “armed neoliberalism” (19). It’s the story of how an interventionist and nationalist state asserted subsoil rights to establish the state-run ECOPETROL and then allowed its development model to morph into a violent neoliberalism, greatly weakening the city’s working class along the way.

Gill focuses on the Middle Magdalena region, specifically, the town of Barrancabermeja (also known as Barranca), an area that in the 1920s was controlled by the foreign-owned Tropical Oil Company (TROCO). In a particularly strong section of the work, Gill examines how foreign oil production transformed the area, with the company so dominant that it could force the Colombian government to declare the zone an independent municipality. That political arrangement meant few checks on the powers of TROCO but also resulted in strong class identifications. “The stark contrast,” Gill writes, “between the power of foreign managers and the relative powerlessness of Colombian workers nurtured . . . solidarity among oil workers and between them and the peasants and petty merchants who came to the enclave” (46). A strong anti-imperialist nationalism developed “as workers, peasants, and merchants pushed back against the control and abuse of the foreign corporation” (47). Drawing on the work of E. P. Thompson, Gill is interested in the long and uneven process by which that happened, “how a heterogeneous mix of working people . . . crafted new forms of solidarity through struggles to improve working conditions and end the suffocating strictures on daily life imposed by the TROCO” (48). The story is most interesting when Gill draws from memories of participants. As one worker portrayed the development of working-class political culture over the course of the twentieth century, “Little by little a political consciousness developed that has formed us here in Barranca and that we inherited. We inherited it because the struggle has been permanent, continuous, and without rest” (58).

A growing nationalism and state interest in Import Substitution Industrialization prompted the Colombian government to acquire TROCO’s holdings when its concession expired in 1951, and the state-owned ECOPETROL became the new entity dominating Barranca. While this was a “crowning achievement” of the popular struggle against foreign control, it coincided with an expanding Colombian state and plans for capitalist development. It also unfolded within an intensifying Cold War. The state under the National Front (1958–74) violently repressed efforts at labor independence and “routinely resorted to anticommunism to discredit leaders, workers, and organizations that did not abide by its policies” (62). In other words, state-run oil did not bring an expansion of working-class political participation, but the continuation of tightly controlled and exclusionary political practices and soon a violence that would obliterate worker networks.

As workers pushed against the National Front, the state responded to challenges with increasing repression, fueling guerrilla insurgencies. Guerrilla forces, especially the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, had considerable support in the area in the 1960s and 1970s, which then generated more attention from counterinsurgent forces. With vicious paramilitaries aiming to subdue area militancy, “the Middle Magdalena entered a spiraling vortex of violence that would eventually unravel working-class Barrancabermeja” (93). The town fell under the control of the notorious paramilitary organization, Bloque Central Bolívar, in the early 2000s, sealing the fate of working-class organizing. As Gill demonstrates, “The paramilitaries dismantled the ideological and institutional framework that tied residents to each other, and they stunted popular demands that the state care for its citizens” (93). It was a context in which neoliberalism could flourish: “Political terror made the Middle Magdalena governable in the interests...