by Feiling, Tom
When I got back to San Gil, I had a look at the mayor of Mogotes’ official website, but it made no mention of the ELN guerrillas that had once ruled the village or the peace community that had taken their place. The ‘history’ link took me from 1706, when the town had been founded, until the early nineteenth century, when it had risen up against Spanish rule. It seemed that the struggle to live free of the current armed conflict wasn’t worth mentioning. Perhaps the airbrushing was understandable: Santander was pitching itself as a tourist destination and was keen to forget its past.
So was President Uribe: shortly after coming to power in 2002, he declared that he would have no truck with the peace communities. To him, they were an affront: Colombia was a democracy under siege from terrorists, and unity in the face of the common enemy was imperative. He ordered the Army and police back into Mogotes.
Ricardo hadn’t been back since, so I had no way of knowing how the people of Mogotes had responded to their return. But I was left with a more pressing question. How had the guerrillas of the ELN – which in 1963 had set up their first unit only a few miles from Mogotes – become so unpopular with the very people they claimed to represent? The same might be asked of the FARC, the Army and the police. What had they all done to become so unpopular?
The towns and villages of Santander have a long history of insurrection. Socorro and Vélez were among the first towns to rise up against Spanish rule. In 1781, 15,000 santandereanos took up arms in protest at colonial taxes and the Spanish nobles who depended on them. ‘We ought to live in a brotherly fashion and he who attempts to dominate and advance himself more than is suitable to equality will be separated from our community,’ they warned. In Socorro they formed a popular assembly, which elected five local creoles as leaders. Their rallying cry was ‘Long live the King, and death to bad government.’
But no sooner had their leaders won concessions from the Crown than they renounced them. Unbeknownst to their followers, all five leaders of what became known as the Comunero Rebellion had betrayed the patriot cause. They had put their names to a secret oath, in which they denounced the commune, protesting that they had only accepted their posts under pressure.
The price of that betrayal was paid by their followers. Rebels were executed, and their heads, hands and feet paraded on poles through public squares. The house of José Antonio Galán, a second-rank leader who resisted arrest and ended up with his head on a pole, was razed to the ground and the site strewn with salt, as the Romans had done at the final defeat of Carthage. Other rebels were exiled to Africa. Those lucky enough to escape fled to the upper reaches of the Cordillera Oriental. The betrayal of the Comunero Rebellion is widely acknowledged as the first act of treachery on the part of the creole oligarchy.
It was a less than auspicious start to Colombia’s struggle to free itself from Spanish rule. Even after declaring independence in 1819, Simón Bolívar sensed greater troubles ahead. ‘The day that we don’t fear an external enemy will be the day that all misgivings will begin for Colombia. On that day, the trumpets of civil war will sound.’ Bolívar was right: civil wars bedevilled the young republic from its inception.
Ultimately, the origins of today’s FARC and ELN guerrillas lie in the earliest days of the republic. Their forerunners had been Liberals. The idea that followers of John Stuart Mill, John Locke and Jeremy Bentham might take up arms in defence of their beliefs is a strange one, but it goes to the heart of Colombia’s peculiar history, which until the 1960s was emphatically revolutionary and spectacularly violent without ever being particularly left-wing.
At the heart of that history was the issue of land: who owned it, what they did with it and how they treated the vast majority of peasants who didn’t own a thing. Land ownership was tightly concentrated, and so was political power, which ebbed and flowed between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party, the oldest political parties in South America.* Although both parties were dominated by the elite, Colombians of all classes, races and regions were affiliated to one or the other. When wars broke out, everybody seemed to have a stake in the result. Since neither side had the resources to raise large armies, wars tended to be fought with small arms, machetes and swords. And because Liberals and Conservatives were generally equally matched in numbers, neither party was able to keep the upper hand for long. Wars would rumble on spasmodically for years at a time.
The War of a Thousand Days that straddled the opening years of the twentieth century seemed the last lesson in the futility of armed politicking. After seventy-five years of near-constant fighting, the government was bankrupt, as were its opponents. They couldn’t even afford to keep the country’s three leper colonies going, so the patients were left to wander the countryside. Worse, Colombia’s leaders had been so busy fighting one another that they hardly noticed when in 1903, just as Liberal and Conservative leaders were putting their names to a definitive peace treaty, the province of Panama renounced all ties to Colombia and declared its independence. It was a national humiliation, made worse by the opportunity it gave the United States to establish a puppet government on Colombia’s doorstep. US president Theodore Roosevelt rubbed salt into the wounds, calling Colombians ‘contemptible little creatures’ and the ‘inefficient bandits’ of a ‘corrupt and pithecoid community’.
Fortunately, winds from the north were about to fill Colombia’s sails and lift the country out of the whirlpool it had floundered in for so long. Global demand for coffee was rising and Colombia was well positioned to become the world’s biggest supplier. For the time being at least, the party patriarchs stopped politicking and turned their attention to making money.
But as regional elites turned their attention to the world beyond their borders, the notables of smaller towns retreated into cultural isolationism. Their near-feudal outlook only made the poverty that defined the lives of most Colombians more glaring. Like Spain, Colombia was ‘a land without men, of men without land’, with the best bits being given over to cattle ranching. Unemployment and under-employment were high, the diet was poor in protein, and disease was rife. It was a land perfectly compatible with an illiterate population.
Those fortunate enough to be able to read and write were easily seduced by their standing. As David Bushnell has written, ‘Men of letters produced learned essays and clever conversations on almost any subject except the deprivations suffered by the Colombian masses.’* The elite seemed content to stand the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’ on its head, as their factions fought over the right to tax a perennially impoverished population.
Between 1930 and 1946, a series of Liberal administrations inaugurated a tentative land reform programme, in an attempt to alleviate the poverty of their campesino followers. A handful of neglected or under-used estates were confiscated, broken up and divided among the landless. But the Conservative Party, which had long been dominated by powerful landowners, regarded these reforms as a threat to privileges that they considered nigh on ancestral. When the Liberals were voted out of office in 1946, the new Conservative government took back the land that the Liberals had distributed, by a combination of bribery, intimidation and outright violence.
The Liberals were divided over what to do next. Land reform was key to keeping their campesino followers onside, but the party leaders were themselves from an oligarchy that took the country’s great estates for granted. These estates were a legacy of the Spanish, but had long sustained the wealthy creole families that had usurped them. Besides, the mass mobilization of increasingly confident and ambitious campesinos could only threaten stability and the elite’s narrow definition of ‘national progress’.
Amidst the confusion, a charismatic leader from the land reform movement challenged the old guard for leadership of the Liberal Party. Unlike most politicians, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was from the artisans’ barrio of Las Cruces in Bogotá. He used the word ‘oligarch’ as a term of abuse and railed against a Colombia divided between ‘the political country’ of the creole eli
te and the ‘national country’ that the vast majority of Colombians lived in. Gaitán looked likely to be the Liberal Party’s presidential candidate.
For the first time in history, Colombians would have a credible, populist leader to vote for. For the old guard, the world looked set to be turned on its head by a godless alliance of the ignorant and the amoral. On 9 April 1948, Gaitán was gunned down outside the offices of El Tiempo in Bogotá. His assassination unleashed the Bogotazo – several days of great violence and looting in the capital. Popular mobilization was intense, widespread and chaotic. One of those who witnessed the stillborn revolution was a young Fidel Castro, who happened to be in Bogotá for a meeting of the Pan-American Council. Castro remarked that, ‘what was absent on 9 April was organization … there was absolutely no organization.’
The Bogotazo proved to be only the opening salvo in a nationwide orgy of grief-stricken vengefulness, known simply as La Violencia. As news of the assassination of Gaitán spread across the country, popular insurrections broke out in virtually every city where his followers were dominant. In the town of Puerto Tejada, south of Cali, Gaitanistas decapitated local Conservatives and played football with their heads.
In the period 1930–46, when the Liberals had been in power, they had turned the national police force into an appendage of their party, expelling long-serving police officers and replacing them with loyal Liberals. It was a move that was to have dire consequences during La Violencia, when the police were once more ‘Conservatized’. Police officers loyal to the Conservatives took their revenge on Gaitanista Liberals, setting to with bloodthirsty relish.
Conservative volunteers were known as chulavitas, since many of them originally came from the town of Chulavita, where Liberal violence had been widespread in the thirties. Others were simply known as los pájaros – the birds – for the way they would ‘fly’ into villages to exact retribution before ‘flying’ back to resume their day-to-day lives in the city. In the valley of the River Cauca, their gangs cut out the eyes and tongues of Liberals. Los pájaros pioneered ‘the necktie cut’, whereby the tongue was pulled through the victim’s slit throat, and ‘the florist’s cut’, by which the victim’s severed limbs were stuffed into his decapitated neck.
Their opponents responded with equal cruelty. In Santander, the Liberal Rafael Rangel returned to San Vicente de Chucurí, where he had been police commander in the 1940s, and massacred 200 Conservative civilians. Bands of Liberal peasants rallied around commanders who sported names such as Capitán Desquite (‘Captain Vengeance’) and Sangrenegra (‘Blackblood’).
Gradually, the Conservatives won the upper hand. With the Army barracks, police stations and mayors’ offices all in Conservative hands, Liberals found themselves increasingly ostracized from public life. In 1949 Conservatives led a furious chorus of toy whistles whenever Liberal members rose to speak in Congress. At a later session, bullets took the place of whistles: one hundred shots were fired and two members of Congress were killed. The Liberal Party instructed its members to withdraw from all official bodies except Congress. As one party leader put it, ‘For Conservatives, not even a greeting.’
Alberto Lleras Camargo, who was to become president in 1958, described the processes at work with customary eloquence. ‘The most typical violence of our political struggles is that which atrociously makes victims of the humble people in villages and in the neighbourhoods of the cities, as a product of the conflicts that alcohol illumines with the livid flames of insanity. But the explosives have been sent from urban desks, worked with cold unconcern, elaborated with guile, in order to produce their fruits of blood.’
It was a pattern that was to re-emerge time and again in the years that followed. While the vigilantes and their victims were overwhelmingly poor peasants, the intellectual authors of the violence were often bogotano party apparatchiks, most of whom hailed from the country’s ruling families. Thanks to their long domination of political life, it would be another twenty years before any organized alternative to their duopoly made it onto the ballot. The sense of being pawns, to be pushed into battle by the more powerful pieces on the Colombian chessboard, was what inspired many of those peasants to join the FARC in the years that lay ahead.
One of the oddities of Colombian history is that the savagery of La Violencia bore little relation to the ideological differences between Liberals and Conservatives. Ostensibly, those differences were real. For 150 years, the party leaders had argued over the role the Catholic Church should play in their children’s education. They bickered over how much power should be granted to the regions and how much protection the government should give to the country’s native industries. The Liberals’ defence of the sovereign individual, religious freedom and free trade irked Conservatives, who trusted in the traditions of oligarchy and deference to the Church. But ultimately both parties were born of that oligarchy, and though they hated to admit it, they had a common enemy in Gaitán.
With Gaitán dead, the need to appease the rank and file of the Liberal Party receded. The ferocity of the Conservative mobs that were roaming the countryside prompted little concern from the leadership of the Liberal Party. The vulnerability of the Gaitanistas was made worse by the fact that the police did nothing to protect them or to prosecute those who attacked them. With little prospect of seeing formal justice done, the violence ebbed and flowed as each side sought to avenge the losses inflicted by the other.
Colombians have long struggled to account for the wanton cruelty of La Violencia. At the time, wealthier Liberals tried to distance themselves from their followers and blamed ‘criminals who distorted the authentic grief of the people’. But this interpretation was itself a distortion, and allowed the elites of both parties to speak in the most extravagant terms about the impossibility of ever civilizing the Colombian masses.*
Ironically, very often it was civilization – or the Colombian version of it – that fanned the violence. The chulavitas were among the most upstanding members of their communities. They considered theirs to be a holy war, that pitted the forces of order and authority against the atheists, freemasons and communists travelling under the Liberal Party banner. Their struggle against Liberalism was akin to a crusade, and as such, it tapped into the ancestral passions of a people raised in the company of saints and demons. Far from discouraging the violence, many local Catholic priests gave the killers their blessing from the pulpit.
By 1952, Colombia’s cities had returned to something like normality. But the countryside was another story. Once unleashed, Conservative Party leaders found it hard to control their contrachusma (counter-scum) forces. That year more than 200 Conservative-affiliated gangs roamed the villages of Colombia in search of scalps. On the eastern plains, thousands of Liberal peasants took up arms to defend themselves. With the assistance of Communist Party activists, they formed a 10,000-man army. These Liberal peasants were an audacious force. They issued the ‘Second Law of the Plains’, a legal code that combined quick justice with an egalitarian vision of how best to govern land and labour. When an Army patrol was sent to hunt them down, Liberals under the command of the guerrilla Guadaloupe Salcedo ambushed it, killing ninety-six soldiers.
Their belligerence inspired the formation of small guerrilla groups across the country. The government branded them ‘bandits without political labels’, but this was a hard sell: the small cattle-raising communities of the eastern plains had been among the principal bearers of liberty in 1819, when Colombia was struggling against colonial rule from Spain. Their cowboys embodied the heroic, near-mythic origins of independent Colombia. This only made their turn to guerrilla warfare all the more troubling – and the need for speedy repression all the more pressing. For the time being at least, Washington didn’t see it that way and declined the Colombian government’s request for 1,000 napalm bombs.
Clearly it was time to put dampeners on the inter-party conflict. It seemed that a brief period of military dictatorship was the only way to calm both sides. In 1953
an anti-communist strongman, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, came to power. The General decreed an amnesty for all combatants, bar the communists. The by-now-infamous Guadalupe Salcedo accepted the terms of the amnesty, but shortly after putting his name to the agreement he was shot and killed by a Conservative hit man. The remaining guerrillas saw that laying down their arms would be suicidal and decided to fortify their positions.
In 1955, Rojas Pinilla committed himself to a military defeat of the rebels. This time the gringos were more forthcoming, keen to snuff out a guerrilla organization with clear ties to the Colombian Communist Party. Backed by a $170 million loan from Washington, the Colombian Army began bombing the guerrillas’ positions. The Liberal rebels were forced to retreat into the jungles of the Andean foothills. A second column made a long march onto the eastern plains, where they founded colono towns like El Guayabero in Meta.
One peasant guerrilla who emerged as a leader of this Liberal uprising was Pedro Antonio Marín. Later known as Manuel Marulanda or Tirofijo – ‘Sure Shot’ – he was joined by Jacobo Arenas, a charismatic ideologue who described himself as a ‘professional revolutionary’. Together they built a community based on economic self-sufficiency and military self-defence. Marulanda went on to become commander-in-chief of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – the FARC – a position he was to hold from the group’s formation in 1964 until his death in 2008.
Once the party leaders had agreed to draw a line under their sectarian strife, they no longer needed Rojas Pinilla, and the general was forced from office in 1957. From now on, the two parties would share public office and their leaders would take turns as president. This National Front ensured that once again, the two big political parties dominated the country’s politics, while the big landowners dominated the rural economy.