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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Gran Tolima 2. At the Threshold of a New Age 3. The Invisible State 4. Preface to the Violencia 5. The Violencia 6. Libano 7. Tolima's Tragedy Deepens 8. More Than a Political Solution 9. Aftermath 10. The Violencia and Tolima: An Assessment Appendixes Notes Glossary Bibliography Index ix 1 27 49 73 96 127 153 181 203 230 242 253 283 324 327 341 Maps Colombia: Rivers) Mountains) Plains Colombia: Political Divisions) Cities) Selected Towns Political Divisions of Tolima) Mid-Twentieth Century Physical Tolima The Municipio of Libano 12 13 16 17 154 Tables Table 1. Coffee Production in the Municipio of Libano) 1926 156 Table 2. Violentos in Colombia) ca. 1960 207 Table 3. Homicides per 100)000 Population 228 Photographs Calle de las Trampas) Colonial Honda 31 General Domingo Caicedo 35 Manuel Murillo Toro 43 Liberal veterans of the War of the Thousand Days 58 Fabio Lozano Tonijos 60 Munitions of the Bolsheviks) Libano) Tolima) 1929 70 Quintin Lame 76 Jorge Eliecer Gaitan campaigning for the presidency 100 Gaitan speaking in the Municipal Theater 112 Laureano G6mez and Mariano Ospina Perez shortly before the bogotazo 134 G6mez delivering his presidential address 148 Uladislao Botero and daughter Genoveva 158 Isidro PaITa 162 Surveying the Liliano Highway 164 Hector Echeveni Cardenas and editorial staff of Tribuna 183 IIChispas" and members of his cuadrilla 213 Graves of IIDesquite" and his followers 218 Jesus Marla Oviedo (IIMarlachi") and friends 220 Aerial view of HMarquetalia" 220 The people of Gaitania) Tolima) talk of Violencia with a reporter 221 Jose del Carmen PaITa and Luis Eduardo G6mez 225 Acknowledgments I \\!ish to thank the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Grambling State University Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for their support during the preparation of this study. Personnel of the National Library of Colombia and the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango were ever helpful in making available to me materials from their unique collections during my several research trips to Bogota. Special thanks are owed Eduardo Santa for his counsel over the years; and to tolimenses Rafael Parga Cortes, Luis Eduardo G6mez, and Jose del Carmen Parra for the hours they spent recounting to me their experiences, which span half a century of Colombian history. Finally, I thank my wife Linda for her editorial and other assistance. J!Vhen Colombia Bled Introduction The Violencia and Its Literature On the fourth of June 1949} the registrar of voters of Santa Isabel} Tolima} picked up a pistol and fired a bullet through his brain. The news caused a ripple of interest in the village} and for several days people mused on his untimely passing. A newspaper in the nearby town of Libano carried two articles on his death explaining that the pressures of his job drove him to pull the trigger.1 Then} after a week} interest waned and the registrar was forgotten. He was not a very important person after all} and indeed would never have been resurrected here were he not part of a larger story whose telling sheds new light on the Colombian Violencia. Next to the Mexican Revolution of 1910} it was the longest} most destructive civil war to befall any nation in the western hemisphere during the twentieth century. As many as 200}000 persons died before it ran its course} a majority of them simple country folk unlucky enough to live in one of the many regions where the conflict raged.2 One such place was the municipio of Santa Isabel in the central Colombian department (state) of Tolima. Violencia came to that municipality in the mid-1940s and hung on stubbornly there until the 1960s. Thousands of citizens were driven from their homes and hundreds murdered} many of them hacked to death with machetes. They were the anonymous victims of a perverse bloodletting they could neither halt nor} initially} understand. The registrar of Santa Isabel was not one of the hundreds counted 1 2 Introduction as victims of the Violencia, for he died by his OMl hand. Still, as holder of a politically sensitive bureaucratic post, he was plunged into the center of a maelstrom that was political in nature.3 And Colombia's Violencia was eminently political, the frUit of a hundred-year struggle that pitted the nation's Conservative and Liberal parties in unending contention for dominance in national affairs. Through a process whose dynamics are still not completely understood, these two parties came to enlist all Colombians, prominent...

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