The Puzzle of Historic Violence in Colombia

The last 150 years of Colombian history reveal the tragedy of virtually permanent and widespread bloodshed, commonly referred to as la violencia. Sometimes gravitating around political or organized crime lines, and sometimes being just anarchistic, this violence sur­passes in its recurrence and multifaceted nature the violence experienced in most if not all other national states of the modern era.

To give an exact definition of the object of analysis now is a rather elusive task; a sim­ple empirical characterization of it, in terms of certain kinds of crimes or victims, or modes of action, runs counter the specific concern of our analysis which involves the transforma­tion of social “behaviors” (observed isolated violence acts with no imputable macro­purposes) into “social agency” kinds of violence. For this reason the objects of analysis are constructed and specified along with the development of the argument, rather than given at the outset.

The puzzling aspect of Colombian violencia has been essentially the lack of any plausi­ble explanation for the exceedingly high levels, varieties, and recurrence of violent deaths and violent crime in general, especially throughout the last 100 years. This phenomenon of violence includes political and non-political kinds, and within the latter, organized and non­organized types, in great excess of what could be considered “normal” parameters of the phenomenon from comparable countries in Latin America (Comision de Estudios sobre la Violencia, 1987; Sanchez and Penaranda, 1995; Camacho and others, 1997).

Our concern here is with the pattern of recurrence of such kinds violence, which shows, for instance, that Colombian guerrillas are the oldest in Latin America, and yet, even after the collapse of Soviet Socialism, continue to threaten the Colombian political establishment with more force than ever: they control vast areas of the nation's territory, and have “infil­trated” (i.e., made their permanent presence felt by intermittent symbolic or real violence acts) practically all regions of the nation, to the point of provoking several rounds of “peace talks” with the central government, directly and through intermediaries, abroad and within Colombia itself.

This rather commonsense view has clearly something important to do with the question of la violencia. Yet, the recurrence of the phenomenon, and especially its eventual divorce from within traditional politics, sealed with “El Frente Nacional,” requires a much deeper and comprehensive explanation. El Frente Nacional was that unprecedented political agreement between the two traditional parties which arranged for them to share the exercise of government for sixteen years, taking turns for the presidency, and dividing all state bu­reaucracy positions equally.

The Colombian case of la violencia represents then, much more than spurts of regional political protest movements such as the case of Chiapas in Mexico. The “Sendero Lumi­noso” movement in Peru perhaps did come to represent at some point a threat to the central government, but the overall force of such movement was much weaker; and most impor­tantly, Sendero does not follow a century or more of continuous armed insurrection and/or anarchistic violence, as is the case in Colombia. The same basic difference in relation to the Colombian violencia appears in the case of the Central American guerrillas, especially in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the two most prominent movements in that region of the world.

There are also in recent history several examples of long-lasting, large-scale violent so­cial conflicts in other parts of the world besides Latin America, and many have involved guerrilla warfare, including Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Vietnam and many other Asian and Afri­can conflicts. Yet, in all of these, again, in spite of the clear-cut racial, religious, or class na­ture of the conflicts, or some mixture of them, they were never intertwined with a compara­ble volume of long-lasting periods of anarchistic violence. Thus, clearly, neither religious, ethnic, nationalistic, or class conflicts, by themselves or in combination, nor the autonomy of culture, widely recognized today (Alexander and Seidman 1990), can account for the puzzling pattern of historic bloodshed in Colombia. What is different in the latter? How do any such differences account for the extremely high levels, recurrence, and mixed pattern of la violencia?