Liberalism at Its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text

Chapter 4: The Violent Text: Separating the Social and the Political

The Violent Text SEPARATING THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL I wish I had two hearts: one to deal with bad people and another to deal with the good ones. Interviewee in María Victoria Uribe Alarcón’s Limpiar la tierra I NOW MOVE FROM abstract liberal theories of the relationship between civil society and the state to the concrete workings of Colombian governance. This is a strategy to engage the propositions of social scientists in their efforts to come to terms with situations that bear little or no resemblance to the re- fined abstractions of liberalism, where the state represents the condensation of the relations of social forces, organizes the power bloc, and balances sectorial relations to construct a popular national will that displaces class struggle through the construction of a general interest and common sense. I am struck by the enormous efforts scholars and analysts make to fit liberal concepts to illiberal societies, basically “failed” states.₁ I am swayed by their arguments and their genealogies: Colombia’s failed state is a consequence of nineteenth-century struggles for independence, when the two warring factions (liberal and conservative ) vying for power failed to reach consensus on the type of governance 95 Rodriguez CH4:Layout 1 12/26/08 5:39 PM Page 95 they wanted to institutionalize for the new republic. For certain, they failed to make the state the locus of national meaning, moral authority, and legitimacy. Incapable of debating their political ideas in a civil and public manner, they resorted to violence to eliminate opposition. Persuasion and debate were replaced by intimidation and silencing, and relentless and ruthless uses of force became the predominant form of politics. Extreme methods of inflicting pain, such as corporeal dismemberment, were practiced and displayed in the public arena to set an example through punishment, à la Foucault.² The internecine and protracted war waged by both groups against each other not only reveals the antagonistic character of their ideas on how to institutionalize power but also, and most gravely, set out the conditions of possibility for a cultural tradition of violence which established a seemingly irreparable rift between the social (civil society) and the political (the state). From its inception, the model of power established in Colombia contradicted any and all principles of liberalism ; I wonder, therefore, what purpose using its categories serves. I rehearse the arguments of social scientists, first, in order to demonstrate the difficulties implicit in reading illiberal and undemocratic societies against the background provided by the dominant model of liberalism.³ Also, in counterposing the efforts of social scientists to untangle the intricate web of data which constitutes the structure of a failed state to the testimonials rendered by local, subaltern, and grassroots people— those who do not know or expect politics to operate as a complete or fully empowered form—I contribute to public debates on issues of governance. The use of liberal categories to read illiberal and undemocratic forms of power only serves to obscure and entangle the object of study, and testimonials provide invaluable data to discuss issues pertaining governance. Scholarship on Colombian society serves as a point of comparison for studying confrontations—local and translocal—that originate in areas whose social formation, organization, and unachieved forms of liberal states do not quite fit the liberal model. Such scholarship is also useful for interrogating the methods social scientists normally use to approach social phenomena. A failed state is, tout court, an illiberal state, one that does not meet the horizon of liberal politics defined by liberalism. Liberalism’s “regulative idea,” in The Violent Text 96 Rodriguez CH4:Layout 1 12/26/08 5:39 PM Page 96 Arditi’s characterization, “is that political performances entail sovereign individuals casting their votes, political parties representing the people and competing for the right to shape the will of the state, and elected representatives deliberating on their behalf in legislative bodies in between elections. The state is neutral with regard to the competing conceptions of the good, government and elected officials are generally attentive to public opinion, relevant players abide by the rule of law, and external actors do not intervene in domestic politics.”⁴ In Colombian bibliographies, things are much less tidy, and the most felicitous phrase to refer to the state of affairs, this failed state, is Daniel Pecaut’s proposition of the separation of the social from the political. This...