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"The research involved in putting this manuscript together is truly awesome and involves a major synthesis of Colombian political, economic, urban, and social history which has not been achieved to date either in Spanish or in English."-- Maurice P. Brungardt, Loyola University of New Orleans "Henderson's life-and-times study of Laureano Gómez provides a cogent analysis of a rapidly modernizing Colombia as well as a vivid portrait of one of the most powerful 20th-century Latin American conservative thinkers and politicians."-- Jane M. Rausch, University of Massachusetts, Amherst The life of Laureano Gómez (1889-1965), Colombia's combative Conservative politician and reviled public figure, serves as the backdrop for this modern history of one of the hemisphere's least understood nations. Tracing the complex process of development in Colombia, James Henderson explores the civil violence that defined the Gómez era even as the country experienced economic growth unparalleled in the rest of the Americas. Gómez was a consummate debater, a spellbinding orator, and an influential newspaper editor. Early in his career he was a thorn in the side of Liberals and Conservatives alike, while in later years he led the Conservative opposition in Congress. He made and unmade presidents, served as president himself, and all the while figured prominently in Colombia's transition to modernity. Henderson gives us the best and worst of Gómez and his adversaries during this era, a time of alternating political peace and progress, punctuated by spells of extremist invective and bloody violence. Thus he shows that much of recent Colombian history is rooted in developments from the Gómez years. Few Colombians can speak calmly of Gómez, and many blame him for the violence that plagued the country from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. Henderson's objective and thorough discussion exposes the myths and assumptions surrounding Gómez and offers especially effective analysis of his writings, speeches, congressional debates, and editorials (as well as his rejoinders, one-liners, and put-downs, classics in the lexicon of Colombian history). Henderson also chronicles the titanic political rivalry between Gómez and Alfonso López Pumarejo, an arch-Liberal, showing how the two men who began their careers as friends became bitter enemies and ultimately led Colombia into the fratricidal civil war known as La Violencia. This important history of Colombia's political, economic, urban, and social life will become the definitive study of the nation during its critical period of modernization. James D. Henderson, professor of international studies at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, is general editor of A Reference Guide to Latin American History. He has written two other books on 20th-century Colombia, both best-sellers in their Colombian Spanish-language editions.
Timely lessons from Colombia on the coexistence of civil democracy and political violence in the context of international affairs and institutional reform
Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars’ work in Spanish to provide an expansive view of the country’s political conflicts. Steele shows how political reforms in the context of Colombia’s ongoing civil war produced unexpected, dramatic consequences: democratic elections revealed Colombian citizens’ political loyalties and allowed counterinsurgent armed groups to implement political cleansing against civilians perceived as loyal to insurgents. Combining evidence collected from remote archives, more than two hundred interviews, and quantitative data from the government’s displacement registry, Steele connects Colombia’s political development and the course of its civil war to purposeful displacement. By introducing the concepts of collective targeting and political cleansing, Steele extends what we already know about patterns of ethnic cleansing to cases where expulsion of civilians from their communities is based on nonethnic traits.
In Peace and Rural Development in Colombia: The Window for Distributive Change in Negotiated Transitions, Andrés García Trujillo investigates whether peace agreements geared towards terminating internal armed conflicts trigger rural distributive changes.
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.
For decades, Colombia has contended with a variety of highly publicized conflicts, including the rise of paramilitary groups in response to rebel insurgencies of the 1960s, the expansion of an illegal drug industry that has permeated politics and society since the 1970s, and a faltering economy in the 1990s. An unprecedented analysis of these struggles, Guns, Drugs, and Development in Colombia brings together leading scholars from a variety of fields, blending previously unseen quantitative data with historical analysis for an impressively comprehensive assessment. Culminating in an inspiring plan for peace, based on Four Cornerstones of Pacification, this landmark work is sure to spur new calls for change in this corner of Latin America and beyond.
This book investigates demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration (DDR) in Colombia during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The six large peace processes and amnesties that took place in Colombia over this period were nation-led, providing an interesting case study for the wider DDR literature, which has historically focused on Africa and Asia. The continuous process of creating and demobilising illegal armed groups has been pivotal in building the Colombian state. Although the peace settlements and amnesties have brought renewed cycles of violence, they have also been key to the negotiation of democracy and citizenship rights for both ex-combatants and wider sectors of the population. Here the author analyses the role of DDR programmes in building state and citizenship. Comparing DDR during Alvaro Uribe’s presidency and the peace process with the FARC guerrilla under the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos, the book draws on extensive fieldwork conducted with local authorities, officers on the ground and ex-combatants themselves. It details the process of creating and implementing DDR policy and explores the difficulties, challenges and security dilemmas ex-combatants may face in integrating within a post-conflict society in social, economic and political dimensions. Bringing us right up to date with the implementation of the FARC's peace process and the challenges ahead in the reintegration of ex-combatants under a new president, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of politics and development in Colombia, and to those with an interest in peace-building, state-building and DDR in other countries and conflicts.
This interdisciplinary volume investigates the cultural and political landscapes of Colombia through citizenship, displacement, local and global cultures, grass-root movements, political activism, human rights, environmentalism, and media productions.
Governments fail to provide the public goods needed for development when its leaders knowingly and deliberately ignore sound technical advice or are unable to follow it, despite the best of intentions, because of political constraints. This report focuses on two forces—citizen engagement and transparency—that hold the key to solving government failures by shaping how political markets function. Citizens are not only queueing at voting booths, but are also taking to the streets and using diverse media to pressure, sanction and select the leaders who wield power within government, including by entering as contenders for leadership. This political engagement can function in highly nuanced ways within the same formal institutional context and across the political spectrum, from autocracies to democracies. Unhealthy political engagement, when leaders are selected and sanctioned on the basis of their provision of private benefits rather than public goods, gives rise to government failures. The solutions to these failures lie in fostering healthy political engagement within any institutional context, and not in circumventing or suppressing it. Transparency, which is citizen access to publicly available information about the actions of those in government, and the consequences of these actions, can play a crucial role by nourishing political engagement.
State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.