Eduardo Posada contends in this book that any hope of Colombia becoming the country he dreams of – a country that is peaceful not violent, one that is ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’, terms he defines in ways that we shall get to in a moment – will depend in large part on Colombia's intellectual elite. These ‘opinion makers’, who include creative artists, journalists, historians and social scientists, must cease being ‘defeatists’ and learn to be ‘proud’ of their country and its history. They must ‘avoid stereotypes’ and instead appreciate ‘the dynamics of very complex historical processes’ (p. 298).
Unfortunately, especially since the 1960s, according to Posada, most Colombian intellectuals have not been up to this important task. Enamoured with the Cuban Revolution and seduced by Marxism-Leninism, they have denigrated the nation's liberal democracy and propagated the notion that the ‘establishment’ has systematically thwarted meaningful reform. These leftist intellectuals have thus justified and nourished the Marxist inspired guerrillas who proliferated in the 1960s and remain a serious threat to the nation today.
Posada believes that this leftist view is wrongheaded and inaccurate, and against it he offers his own reading of the nation's history, emphasising its ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ traditions. His definitions of these terms are narrow. The essence of ‘liberalism’ is the desire to limit state power, while ‘democracy’ is primarily about voting (p. 101). Both ‘liberalism’ and ‘democracy’ are essentially unrelated to the third term in the subtitle of his book, ‘violence’. That Colombia is a violent nation today Posada can hardly deny. But for him the nation's contemporary violence, like that of the past, is exogenous to the positive liberal and democratic values and institutions he reviews in his survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian history.
In order to sustain this interpretation, Posada must present a highly selective, distorted and superficial account of the nation's history. To his credit, he recognises that Colombia, unlike many of its Latin American neighbours at the start of the republican period, was a relatively homogeneous, mestizo nation. This helps to explain the early extension of male suffrage in Colombia and the degree of popular identification with Colombia's two traditional parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. But Posada fails to analyse the implications of these conditions, which historians have shown caused many Liberal political leaders to fear the radical potential of their popular allies, leading them eventually into an alliance with Conservatives to limit popular power, a goal codified in the restrictive Constitution of 1886. Posada also ignores the struggles over Church power, slavery, tariffs, land law, the gold standard and other aspects of liberal reform that are the lynchpins of Colombia's (and Latin America's) nineteenth-century civil wars, the bloodiest of which was fought in Colombia between 1899 and 1902.
Similarly, Posada's narrow conception of liberalism and democracy allows him to celebrate the expansion of the suffrage and the peaceful transfers of power (in 1930 and 1946) between the Conservative and Liberal parties that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century, while essentially ignoring the conflicts over land and labour and political partisanship that culminated in the phenomenon known as La Violencia at mid century. The largest civil conflict in Latin America since the Mexican Revolution, La Violencia is the focus of some of the best historical writing on Colombia, virtually all of which escapes attention in this book.
Once he gets past La Violencia, however, and begins his treatment of the period he himself has lived through as an adult (he enrolled in Colombia's premier Catholic university in 1974), his political analysis becomes more cogent. He admits that the Frente Nacional, the power-sharing agreement designed to eliminate partisan violence between Liberals and Conservatives in force from 1958 to 1974, was restrictive and prevented third parties from competing for the presidency and qualifying for appointive office. But he demonstrates that a significant amount of electoral competition in fact occurred during this period while freedom of the press was maintained. In any case, he notes, the Frente was short-lived and in subsequent years institutional reforms broadened Colombian electoral democracy and, especially after the constitutional reforms of 1991, made it easier for non-traditional parties to compete.
Since the late 1970s, Posada insists, Colombian governments have been willing to negotiate peace accords with the guerrilla insurgents. To those who would blame the political establishment for the virtual elimination of the Unión Patriótica (UP), the party formed in the 1980s to participate in elections during a period of negotiations between the largest guerrilla group, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and the government, Posada argues that its case was exceptional. It was complicated by the lack of a real ceasefire and by the disastrous policy of the Communist Party and the FARC that supported the UP's peaceful electoral strategy while at the same time refusing to renounce armed struggle. Finally, he argues that the guerrilla groups that did lay down their arms exercised major influence over the constitutional reforms of 1991 and he notes that in recent years the Colombian electoral left has won considerable influence, capturing, among other posts, the office of mayor of Bogotá and the governorship of the important department of Valle.
Overall, Posada's treatment of his nation's history is designed to vindicate the Colombian political establishment's vision of itself. According to him, elite fidelity to liberal and democratic values has served as a bulwark against the dictatorships and militarism commonplace in Latin America. But while this contrast between Colombian and Latin American history is meaningful, its causes are much more complex than Posada is willing to admit. Comparative analysis of Colombian history shows how the country's ethnic composition favoured construction of popular identities that coincided with those of elites (we are all Colombians), while the country's failure to develop a viable export economy during the nineteenth century limited the power and appeal of liberal political economy among the elite. Both conditions help explain the violent and inconclusive nature of Liberal-Conservative conflict throughout that century and the partisan, clientelist, exclusivist two-party political system that resulted from such conflict. That system endured through most of the twentieth century in part because the export economy that moulded Colombian life until recently – a coffee economy dominated by small, family-run farms – severely constrained the strength of organised labour and the parties of the left. It is the weakness of popular forces and the left that best explains the relative absence of militarism and dictatorship in Colombian history.
But if Posada's overall thesis is simplistic and self-serving, his argument concerning the relative competitiveness of Colombian elections both before and especially after the Frente Nacional is compelling. Those who interpret the historical weakness of the Colombian left as the result of a conspiracy by an especially astute and repressive ruling elite are deluding themselves. The Colombian elite, far from being more repressive than its counterparts in other Latin American nations, has in fact been less so. This is true not so much because of the liberal and democratic values that Posada celebrates in his book, but because popular forces during most of the nineteenth century, and labour and the left during the twentieth century, have been weak.
Fortunately, the conditions that have long weakened the Colombian left are now on the wane. And it seems likely that once the left is freed of the weight of the guerrilla insurgency – and of the leftist myths that have helped to sustain it – its electoral fortunes will soar and its own broad understandings of liberalism and democracy will flourish. Posada's book may not be very good history but, to the degree it helps undermine those leftist myths, it contributes in its own way to la nación soñada.
