I first met Leah Anne Carroll in Colombia in the late 1980s, when the systematic assassination of Patriotic Union political activists and candidates was well under way. Her fieldwork was very demanding, as it involved visits to three of the most violent rural areas of the country: Arauca, Urabá and Caguán. If I recall correctly, at that time she was going to Arauca. Her book is a remarkable achievement, which has taken some time to compile but gives us detailed accounts of patterns of violence in these three regions which have not previously been brought together in this interpretative fashion. This is not an ethnography of war, but an effort to draw out comparative learning for students of democratisation and social movements about the difference the latter can make in contexts of violence, armed conflict and state repression. As such, it is a welcome break from the focus on armed actors in conflict. After an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting – the rich detail does not make for an easy read) analysis, Carroll is able to arrive at conclusions that would escape the reach of other research. They are summed up in the final sentence of the book: ‘Slowly, as small steps are being made to bring the laws of the center even to the red zones, the peasant and labor movements of the war zones are acquiring the rights of citizenship.’ As Colombia enters a critical phase in its search for peace under President Santos, these words will be tested; they are an important measure of whether an outcome of Santos’ peace talks will be inclusive citizenship, thus paving the way for sustainable and inclusive peace.
To many, Carroll's conclusion will seem quite optimistic. However, as the current peace process gets under way in Colombia and attention focuses on the negotiators around the table in Havana (the government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC)), the book reminds us that the process is not just about those actors. In these three regions of colonisation, where peasants arrived as settlers and became small farmers in the piedemonte or foothills of Arauca, coca growers in Caguán and banana workers in Urabá, there have been significant social mobilisations and struggles for services, credit, better wages and respect for human rights. Carroll's book looks at when, whether and how such struggles managed to achieve some of their goals. The outcome is a very interesting analysis of how these social actors responded to opportunities opened up by the peace process and reforms of Belisario Betancur in the mid-1980s, the ‘carrot and stick’ approach of Virgilio Barco immediately after Betancur's failure, the resurgence of hostilities and ‘counter-reform’ following the partial peace process of Cesar Gaviria in the early 1990s, the impact of the Pastrana government's peace initiative later in that decade, and finally the Uribe government's military offensive and repression in the wake of Pastrana's failure. In classic social movement theory, each of these varied contexts provides windows of opportunity or the opposite. What is different here is the multiple variables that affected whether the different social movements pressed small advantages, disintegrated following private or state repression, or maintained leverage vis-à-vis both sources of violence as well as that from the guerrilla movements, with which some of the social movements were allied.
The book's strength lies in its embrace of the complexity of the variables involved. It mattered whether the region produced valuable commodities such as oil in Arauca and what kind of pacts could be made by guerrillas with competing elites, as new elites emerged around new commodities and commercial activities and challenged traditional holders of power. The rise and fall of the coca price greatly affected the leverage of the peasant settlers of Caguán, for instance, and the ability of large cattle ranchers to develop dairy herds restored their advantages, while banana growers consolidated their political power at times of high prices in Urabá. While much of the story is about the efforts of these wealthy elites to eliminate the threat of a Left empowered by the political space opened up by the peace processes, especially that of the first direct election of mayors in 1988, there is also the interesting story of social movements using these moments to win considerable concessions. Elite divisions as well as guerrilla divisions provided opportunities as well as threats to social activists. The story is very much of ebbs and flows, with extraordinary levels of state and paramilitary violence at particular moments, and lesser but still very significant guerrilla atrocities. What the book tells us, however, is that in the interstices of these moments, social movements did make advances, through decentralisation and new electoral opportunities in the 1980s and even at times during the repressive and militaristic Uribe years. In the latter decade of the new millennium they became adept at using international concern with human rights abuses to press their advances and protect their activists.
These are movements in the midst of, and often in support of, guerrilla organisations. The nature of this relationship is not interrogated enough, but sufficient evidence comes through to suggest that these movements were on the whole not simply manipulated by the guerrillas. There were times, particularly in the electoral periods and when the FARC was testing the political waters through the Patriotic Union and Democratic Front in the 1980s, when these movements played important roles in electoral mobilisation. They were often caught up in, and weakened by, efforts by different guerrilla groups to control a peasant or worker union. However, at the same time there were contingent possibilities for these organisations to articulate demands of their own. In Arauca, the settlers’ movement predated the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army, ELN) and FARC, for instance, and had considerable impetus of its own as well as that given to it by the support of the guerrillas, while in Caguán, state support for peace under Betancur enabled settlers to organise their own very interesting social processes in favour of peace, which helped them also to make their own claims on the state, at this time with some success. Another variable in all of this is the relationship of the local to the national state, and the decentralisation/recentralisation logics of the Colombian government at different moments between the 1980s and 2008. In the process, some undermining of local traditional clientelistic political control takes place and some sustainable shifts strengthen the prospects for democratic change, although these remained fragile.
The book is less successful, perhaps, in linking all these complex variables in the Colombian context, which is very particular, to the democratisation literature in Latin America, which deals with transitions from military rule. The regional diversity of Colombia makes it difficult to generalise from these three regions. However, the point that democratisation in Latin America is accompanied by great violence is worth highlighting, and Colombia certainly demonstrates that.
Violent Democratization is an altogether stimulating read, although one minor quibble is the translation of alcaldes as ‘county executives’ rather than mayors, to reflect the fact that the book covers rural areas, and the description of departments as ‘counties’. It would have been much better to have used the Spanish terminology. Nevertheless, this does not take away from the important and valuable contribution of this book to Colombian and Latin American studies, and it is altogether a stimulating read.
