Showing Teeth to the Dragons: State-Building by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2002–2006 by Harvey F. Kline (review)

The Latin Americanist, September 2010 scientists, and ethnographers, Amazonia and the people who populate this vast and various place are marked by fluidity and heterogeneity, transculturation and hybridity. Early in the editors’ introduction the reader is reminded that “‘to edit’ can mean ‘to adapt’” (xi). The title of the collection, Editing Eden, is thus revealed to be less about the process of redaction in the outside world’s ongoing written and imaginative construction of Amazonia , than Amazonians’ ability to adapt to and adapt new circumstances, particularly global capitalism, and to have fruitful exchanges with “others who do not call this place their home” (xi). Lesley Wylie Department of Spanish University of Leicester SHOWING TEETH TO THE DRAGONS: STATE-BUILDING BY COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT ÁLVARO URIBE VÉLEZ, 2002-2006. By Harvey F. Kline. Tuscaloosa: U Alabama P, 2009, p. 320, $32.95. The peace talks between the world’s oldest active guerrilla group— the FARC (Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)—and president Andrés Pastrana, ended up in a ferocious counterattack whose gunfire can still be heard in the most remote areas of the country. Harvey F. Kline, a political science professor at the University of Alabama, documented the reasons for the break in peace negotiations in his award-winning volume Chronicle of a Failure Foretold: the Peace Process of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana (U Alabama P, 2007). His new book, Showing Teeth to the Dragons, is an amazingly well researched analysis of the process that followed Mr. Pastrana’s “defeat” in 2002 with the appointment of the right-wing politician Álvaro Uribe Vélez as president of Colombia. The FARC had a crucial word in the presidential elections of this South American country in the last fifteen years in two contradictory ways: Pastrana promised peace and the people elected him. The FARC, however, continued to roam freely across 16,200 square miles of Colombian territory, all the while strengthening their finances and arsenal. This, in turn, increased their potential for exerting violence and hence shattered the civil population’s hopes for peace. It was Uribe’s turn. He vowed war and this won him the election. One of the greatest merits of this book lies in the sources that Kline used for developing his conclusions on the first four years of Mr. Uribe’s presidency. The resources are mostly anonymous interviews of political scientists, sociologists, historians, officials of private foundations, and journalists . He also quotes the names of the most prominent columnists in the country. The nature of the sources confirms that the topic that Kline confronts is extremely recent and therefore volatile: it is moderately difficult to give a certain assessment of the first term of President Uribe even today , four years later. However, by considering the intrinsic difficulties of 104 Book Reviews building a strong state in Colombia—a country that since its foundation has entrusted forces not belonging to the state with its own security—the author describes the policies of Mr. Uribe on three fronts: the program of Democratic Security, the Law of Justice and Peace and, as a consequence of the latter, the peace processes with the rebel groups and the paramilitary. Kline departs from an assumption that may be questionable for some but evident for others: the situation in Colombia reached its lowest point in 2002. Drug gangs exerted violence over the main cities, the guerrilla kidnapped tourists and nationals at gunpoint on the major highways, and the paramilitary committed brutal human rights violations against the civil population. According to the figures and statements quoted by the author, Colombia is a much less violent country thanks to the policies of Democratic Security, a plan designed by President Uribe and backed by US dollars through the Plan Colombia, which envisioned a higher number of army and police personnel that would expand a stronger and more secure state. The significant growth in numbers in both the army and the police led, according to Kline, to a noteworthy decrease in the levels of homicides and kidnappings and a “smaller number of political archipelagoes controlled by army groups” (168). By 2006 the reality was—and for the most part still is...