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Hispanic American Historical Review 83.3 (2003) 596-597



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Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953. By MARY ROLDÁN. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 392 pp. Cloth, $64.95. Paper, $21.95.

This work on La Violencia is filled with peaceful and law-abiding citizens of the agriculturally and industrially rich department of Antioquia: rank-and-file members of the Conservative Party who protested the killing of Liberals, Liberals who turned against the violent actions undertaken by men in the name of their own party, and moderate Conservative leaders who worked successfully to make sure that members of the opposition could vote. Roldán introduces us to people in every region of Antioquia who continuously sought the protection of the state for themselves and for others. They clamored to be heard. They wanted peace and the rule of law. It is as though the state's often feeble presence made Antioqueños yearn for it all the more. We do not encounter organized groups fighting to overthrow the state. The old question about the revolutionary character of guerrillas and others in the countryside in the 1950s can be left behind, not only for Antioquia, but perhaps for the rest of the nation as well.

Yet, this is a book about violence. But where once we took the violence in the Colombian countryside during the 1940s and 1950s as inevitable and self-evident, it appears here suddenly in strangely stark relief. Now that we know that many Antioqueños did not engage in violent acts—although they were encouraged to do so and knew that they would almost certainly not only get away with it but also stand to gain monies, lands, and political resources—we can ask why it was that some did, and some did not, engage in violent acts. [End Page 596]

Four geographically specific narratives tell the story of conflict and compromise in different regions of the department. Roldán's careful use of surprisingly rich and previously untapped archival sources enriches these local histories with densely descriptive detail. It also appears that Roldán knows every nook and cranny of this large department, as her love for this place, its people, and their history permeates the pages of this book.

Roldán offers two broad frameworks for understanding the contrast between peaceful and violent behavior in Antioquia. The first is institutional and surprisingly familiar. In the core areas of the capital city of Medellín and its surrounding towns, where the national and regional state and political parties were accountable and accessible to their followers, conflict tended to be nonfatal. An emerging group of middle-class Conservatives regarded their elders' moderate politics of convivialismo as an elite ploy to keep them out of politics and set out to oust Liberals from public office. Some men gained jobs and resources, while others lost them. When they got drunk, they got into heated arguments and insulted one another, but there was little blood spilled. This conservatizing project got out of hand in various ways in the periphery, where rank-and-file Conservatives were more isolated and where Liberals were left to fight for their lives and their livelihoods. Roldán's second framework is not as fully elaborated but is still deeply suggestive. Where men shared common cultural values, they tended not to resort to violence. Those who lived in the core areas believed that they shared a moralizing, paternalistic, and racialized white culture of Antioqueñidad that kept them from ripping one another apart across party and class lines. They were also convinced that the more darkly complected people of the more rural, coastal, and tropical areas of the department were rowdy, coarse, and indolent—that is, people who did not share in the values of Antioqueñidad. A hierarchy of cultural difference infused the symbolic life of the department.

Roldán asserts that much of the violence in the peripheral areas resulted from an effort...

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