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195 CHAPTER SEVEN Class War of a Thousand Days Two lethal years had already passed when the police inspector for Pié de la Popa informed the prefect about the troubles in his district caused by the armed conflict. The inspector complained that every Sunday hundreds of men and women, “among them army deserters, convicted criminals, and other bad elements who, due to the state of war, do not pass through the public streets or live in this place, but who on the days of fiesta gather in large groups.” The crowds made a mockery of his authority, since “due to the distance and the lookout position that they establish, they are confident that they will never be captured.” The distance described by the inspector in his September 1901 report was not a physical one, however, since Pié de la Popa lay within sight (and cannon shot) of the walls of Cartagena and a leisurely half-hour walk from the headquarters of the region ’s civil, military, and religious institutions.1 Instead, the crowds there seemed to fall into the interstices between the protective inclusion of the wartime government and a social anonymity that a monopoly of force could not surmount. In the conflict that came to be known as the Thousand Days’ War (1899–1902), this distance often proved unpredictable yet ineluctable all the same. Launched by Liberals in October 1899, the Thousand Days’ War erupted into other ongoing conflicts that helped explain its terrible prolongation . Partisan motivations for the war were clear on both sides. The militant faction of the Liberal Party rebelled in attempts to regain political power and public standing after fifteen years of near total exclusion under the Nationalists. In response to the unfolding rebellion, the partisan government became increasingly intransigent, as personified by officials like Bolívar’s civil-military governor, Joaquín Vélez, a Conservative from Cartagena who had fought against Juan José Nieto’s popular coup in 1859. Yet within this political violence, which was not unlike earlier partisan clashes, appeared other social struggles. In addition to fast depreciating scrip, the state and insurgents funded the war by expropriating property, labor, and commodities. As the country’s commercial economy verged on collapse, the military strategy of expropriation changed the nature of fighting and closed off possibilities for peace long after the exhaustion of 196Class War of a Thousand Days partisan hostilities. As battlefields passed from standing armies to locally organized guerrillas and progovernment civic battalions, banditry, coercion , and theft entered the logic of sustaining combat forces. The guerrillas ’ survival strategies and government’s policy of taking no quarter were guided by similar exigencies. Both the Liberal insurgents and the Nationalist (after July 1900, Conservative ) government forces marshaled supporters of all social ranks, yet deepening differences in geography and status shaped the war for material survival. Bogotá was rarely under imminent military threat from rural guerrillas, and while the Liberals enjoyed a wide range of movement this was only in the increasingly distant backlands. The state pooled its resources and followers in the cities, where it defended citizens deemed legitimate and honorable while policing impoverished urban working populations. The reproduction of lettered distinctions allowed legitimists to portray the war as a rebellion of nobodies, which deprived guerrillas of standing as formal combatants and made negotiations unacceptable. Denying the rebellion legality also permitted government expropriations of property and labor from a growing class of Colombians designated as enemy subversives.2 The divide between lettered legality and unlettered subversion did not prevent the appearance of internal tensions within each camp over status and legitimacy, which hampered the war effort for the Liberals and government alike. Estimates on the war dead, which range from 40,000 to 100,000, were a grim reflection of partisan hatreds but also of the bureaucratized and mechanized violence guided by material dispossession and the mass denial of citizenship rights.3 In the Caribbean region, social and cultural distinctions prevailed from the start of the war. From the foothills of the coastal Sierra Nevada, Sabas Socarrás was one of the first to join the Liberal rebellion, and over the years he rose through its ranks and earned respect from fellow insurgents. With few standing armies and a vast countryside relinquished by government forces, Socarrás and members of other guerrilla bands dominated the region. Yet camaraderie among Liberals of various classes, regions, and backgrounds did not provide them with the military capacity to take on the cities. Nor did...

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