Forgotten Peace: Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia (Violence in Latin American History) (Violence in Latin American History, 3, Band 3) - Softcover

Karl, Robert A. A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520293932 ISBN 13: 9780520293939

Verlag: University of California Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Forgotten Peace examines Colombian society's attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere's worst mid-century conflict and shows how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. Robert A. Karl reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history--including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language--Karl provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Broad in scope, Forgotten Peace challenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert A. Karl is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

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“The remarkable strength of this book is its lucid, intelligent, artful narratives. Chapter after chapter, Karl takes scattered local and national actors and creates a stunningly integrated and compelling story about what he conceives of as the rise and fall of an effort at forging a national peace in Colombia during the complex period of 1957 to 1964. This is historical storytelling at its best.”—Paul Gootenberg, Stony Brook University

“Forgotten Peace provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the mid-twentieth-century conflicts that became known as La Violencia, with important implications for peace efforts today. In a vivid narrative that traces the interactions of local actors, intellectuals, and the Colombian state, Karl provides an entirely new explanation for the emergence of the FARC guerrillas from an ambivalent and fragmented peace process.”—Nancy P. Appelbaum, author of Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Aus dem Klappentext

&;The remarkable strength of this book is its lucid, intelligent, artful narratives. Chapter after chapter, Karl takes scattered local and national actors and creates a stunningly integrated and compelling story about what he conceives of as the rise and fall of an effort at forging a national peace in Colombia during the complex period of 1957 to 1964. This is historical storytelling at its best.&;&;Paul Gootenberg, Stony Brook University

&;Forgotten Peace provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the mid-twentieth-century conflicts that became known as La Violencia, with important implications for peace efforts today. In a vivid narrative that traces the interactions of local actors, intellectuals, and the Colombian state, Karl provides an entirely new explanation for the emergence of the FARC guerrillas from an ambivalent and fragmented peace process.&;&;Nancy P. Appelbaum, author of Mapping the Country of Regions: The Chorographic Commission of Nineteenth-Century Colombia

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Forgotten Peace

Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia

By Robert A. Karl

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Robert A. Karl
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29393-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Peace and Violence in Colombian History, 
1. Messenger of a New Colombia, 
2. Encounters with Violence, 1957–1958, 
3. The Making of the Creole Peace, 1958–1960, 
4. Peace and Violence, 1959–1960, 
5. Reformist Paths, 1960–1964, 
6. Books and Bandits, 1962–1964, 
7. Confrontation, 1963– 1966, 
Epilogue: The Making of "La Violencia", 
A Note on Citations, Institutional Abbreviations, and Archives, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Messenger of a New Colombia

The morning's scenes offered a living tableau of the interpretation that he was about to deliver, a portrait of a nation "unbalanced in space ... [and] in time." Alberto Lleras Camargo had commenced the two-hundredth day of his presidency with a tour through the sprawling hillside complex of Popular Cultural Action (ACPO; Acción Cultural Popular), the Colombian Catholic Church's most dynamic social initiative. Before viewing the facility's state-of-the-art radio equipment, the technological heart of ACPO's educational and spiritual outreach, Lleras met with a select group of young rural leaders who had come to ACPO's classrooms from across Colombia's Andean heartland. Their stories of home, of communities beset by sickness and isolation, and their aspirations for uplift, underscored for Lleras the necessity of national solidarity with the countryside. "You all," he remarked, "are the messengers of a new Colombia, the Colombia that we all vehemently desire."

We have no record of what the largely anonymous students whom Lleras addressed made of his words. But the speech that Lleras recited later that day — on the obligations that government, large landowners, and campesinos had to one another; on their collective task of leveling the nation's inequities — roused excited comment in various corners of Colombia's social and physical landscape. Broadcast through the air by ACPO's powerful transmitters, and in print by many of the country's leading publications, within a matter of days Lleras' speech entered public consciousness as a penetrating summation of the president's agenda. For a struggling but socially minded landowner in the coffee zones of southern Caldas, Lleras's words rejuvenated hope that bureaucrats would concede to his designs for a land reform in miniature. One of Colombia's most distinguished lawyers took Lleras's talk of responsibility as a rallying cry for his profession, an invitation to "throw ourselves into the task of promoting better understanding between all citizens, whose equal rights are frequently prone to violation by ... elements whose [sole] rationale is force."

The setting and the diffusion of Lleras's oration signaled, no less than did the content of his message, the negation of force and a confirmation of rights. For the better part of the preceding decade, Colombia's legislative institutions had lain dormant, shuttered under a constitutional state of siege that at times also silenced the country's press. Lleras's weekend tour through the highlands northeast of Bogotá, culminating in his appearance at ACPO, reaffirmed Colombia's recent emergence from this authoritarianism. As Lleras's retinue rubbed elbows with ACPO's cassocked priests under a brilliant Andean sky, the president carved out time to speak with delegates of the recently reconvened local municipal council. If Lleras's visit substantiated the deep relationship between the Catholic Church and the Colombian state, so too did his presence and words recast that Sunday in February as a celebration of temporal power and an expanding, democratic public sphere.

Before reconstructing the story of the creole peace, this book first introduces the larger tale of Colombian politics. Few figures were as closely linked to the arc of the twentieth century — not solely the changing fortunes of administrations or parties, but also the relationship between words and power — as Alberto Lleras. Part of a generation of lettered Colombians who did not initially conceive of their nation as a place of violence, Lleras labored to maintain convivencia in Colombian public life as well as global diplomacy. The shepherd of Colombia's democratization and the primary exponent of the reformist possibilities that accompanied the transition, Alberto Lleras emerged in the late 1950s as the paramount messenger of a new Colombia (figure 1). But just as Lleras's path indicated the will of many Colombians to move beyond force in all their affairs, so too did it expose the limits of urban Colombians' engagement with the countryside — a divergence at the heart of struggles over violence, peace, and nation.

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALBERTO LLERAS CAMARGO, 1906–1947

When Colombian Liberals spoke of politics, they commonly invoked two lexicons. The first was the language of party, which identified Colombians as belonging to the Liberal and Conservative parties, the two great collectivities of public life. The second lexicon became popularized in the middle third of the twentieth century by the Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Even as he operated within the bipartisan logic, Gaitán's humble origins led him to conceive of Colombia as divided into distinct corporate bodies. The largest of these, the país nacional, represented the popular, organic nation. The destiny of this authentic Colombia was in turn steered by the país político, the gentlemanly country of politics that ruled from the halls of power in Bogotá. Though Gaitán never spoke of it, it is possible to discern a third division within his schema. The país letrado, the lettered country, was the smallest of the three, a virtual subset of the country of politics. Like their brethren in the país político, the writers, journalists, and lawyers of the país letrado idolized the capacity of words both to describe and to transform the world around them. Working in different genres, from the printed newspaper page to the composition and exercise of the law, these men slid fluidly in and out of the país político as circumstance and personal predilection dictated.

Alberto Lleras Camargo straddled the border between these countries of letters and politics. In the estimation of Colombia's most famous journalist-turned-writer, Gabriel García Márquez — a native of the Caribbean coast who normally possessed little patience for the upland país político — Lleras was "a great writer who was twice president of the Republic." Yet Lleras started life distant from even the país letrado. Born on the hardscrabble outskirts of Bogotá in 1906, Lleras ultimately relied on a family birthright to escape his parents' "nomadic poverty." While Alberto's father Felipe toiled on the marginal lands of rented farms, other relatives carried on the family vocation as schoolteachers. With Felipe's death in 1915, these uncles and cousins eased Alberto's entry into the capital city and its lettered circles. This move to the heart of Bogotá, which Colombians styled the "Athens of South America," allowed Alberto to immerse himself in the written word. As he later...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520293932
• ISBN 13: 9780520293939
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 338
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland