Forgotten Peace covers aspects of Colombian history from the formation of the Frente Nacional in the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, with the formal emergence of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) guerrilla army. The book's institutional focus is on the peace commissions of those years and the accompanying beginnings of Colombian social science, and its geographical centre is Tolima, Huila and adjacent departments.
Readers unfamiliar with Colombian history may find it hard to discern in these pages what exactly is going on, and English-reading students will still need to refer to older works, particularly those by John Martz, Robert Dix, James Payne, Jonathan Hartlyn and James Henderson, to understand the context of Karl's work, the background to the agreements reached between Liberal and Conservative leaders to end the intense sectarian conflict of the decade after 1946 and to remove the short-lived military government, 1953–7, of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.
Those who do not need such introduction may be put off by the author's excessive attachment to his own labelling. ‘Forgotten peace’? Hardly the case in Colombia, where the rights and wrongs of the Frente Nacional have always been the subject of debate. ‘The creole peace’?: the peace was certainly creole in the sense that the terms were made exclusively by Colombians, without the help of the numerous diplomats, international agencies, NGOs and experts in conflict resolution and transitional justice who are now the inevitable accompaniment of such deals. But ‘the creole peace’ is not a term used in Colombia, and there is something faintly condescending about it. Karl too is strangely fond of letrado, an antiquated designation previously used mostly for lawyers, which he applies without much discrimination to academics, journalists and even soldiers, and which will certainly strike Colombian readers as odd. He is also wedded to the tired trope of making distinctions between país político and país nacional, not much help in a country as politicised as Colombia, to which he then must add país letrado.
Readers will look to Forgotten Peace to see what it has to say about the achievements and limitations of peace-making in these years, and for its account of the birth of the FARC. Though ‘Great Tolima’ was not Colombia, it was the area that had suffered most in the violence of the 1940s and 1950s, and Karl gives plenty of detail on the very complex pattern of local antagonisms and vendettas that resulted. Though in the long run the Frente Nacional's power-sharing arrangements effectively dulled the old sectarian motives for conflict, their effect was not immediate. Peace remained in many parts fragile and incomplete. Karl gives a well-documented and convincing account of the efforts made by early peace commissions, of their not contemptible achievements in the face of intricate difficulties and limited resources.
He also naturally raises the question of how much truth was faceable at the time, particularly as shown in the careers of Orlando Fals Borda, Monseñor Germán Guzmán and Camilo Torres, and in the controversy around the publication of Fals, Guzmán and Eduardo Umaña Luna's two volumes La violencia en Colombia in 1962 and 1964. Here I do not think he faces quite squarely enough the impossibility at that time of any truth commission, and I detect a slight Liberal bias. True, the Liberals were on the receiving end of government violence after 1946, but the deep fault lay in a winner-takes-all system in which they were not entirely innocent, and which produced plenty of Conservative victims as well, as Karl himself shows. In the years covered by this book there was no chance at all of reaching a consensus on the causes of, and responsibilities for, la violencia, and any persistent official attempt would have threatened the bi-partisan accord.
Forgotten Peace evokes the early days of Colombian social science. Perhaps it underestimates how precarious and embryonic it then was, and is too gushing about its protagonists. Fals Borda had previously written valuable works of rural sociology, but his particular and theoretical contribution to the La violencia volumes has not worn well, and lacks the lasting value of Guzmán's empirical chapters. He was also not good at politics, neither academic nor national. The sketch of Camilo Torres at odds with an impossibly obscurantist church hierarchy is also too simple: a martyr, but always impatient, and as any reader of his last writings must conclude, naïve.
What of the origins of the FARC? Colombian historians Medófilo Medina, Eduardo Pizarro and others have studied the Tolima complexities from which that guerrilla army arose, and Karl provides a complete résumé, with a sometimes gnomic commentary. Something is lacking here: like nearly all Colombian commentators, he plays down the international context, and the Cuban revolution receives scant attention. Yet without this element any reconstruction of the political climate of Colombia in the early sixties is incomplete. The lucha armada (armed struggle) was seen by many as a very real option. President Alberto Lleras Camargo, here the principal author of the ‘creole peace’, followed Kennedy vis-à-vis Cuba, and broke diplomatic relations with Castro. Karl omits Castro's response, which was to inspire and back the Colombian Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army, ELN). Not to be outflanked on the Left, the hitherto hardly warlike Moscow-line Colombian Communist Party found its own guerrilla credentials in the FARC.
That helps to account for the guerrillas’ origins. Their persistence, which until the 1980s was not a significant threat, is another matter, outside the scope of the book.
