Even those with a passing knowledge of Brazil are likely to be familiar with the aphorism ‘the country of the future’. Far less recognised is the similar place that the Llanos Orientales, the grasslands and jungles that comprise the majority of Colombia's territory, have occupied in the Colombian imaginary. In the 1950s, various Colombian presidents described the Llanos as ‘a zone of the future’ (p. 77), ‘a reserve for future centuries’ (p. 80). Jane Rausch's book outlines the Llanos' evolution from this land of potential to, by the late twentieth century, a region ‘very much at the center of the country's “present” expectation for prosperity’ (p. viii). This is familiar ground for Rausch, who has dedicated her career to the study of the Llanos. After summarising her earlier work in Territorial Rule in Colombia's opening chapters, Rausch concentrates her attentions on the second half of the twentieth century and opening decade of the twenty-first.
Four themes underlie Rausch's study. The first is space. Physically separated for centuries from Colombia's Andean core, the Llanos remain tenuously connected to the rest of the nation. Rausch conveys well this isolation: even the road between the Llanos' major city, Villavicencio, and Bogotá, some 120 kilometres distant, was frequently rendered impassable by rain and mud. Venezuelan currency, not Colombian, circulated in areas of the northern Llanos. Modernisation has but modified the terms of the Llanos' segregation. Revenues from the oil extraction that has transformed the Llanos into Colombia's ‘present’ flow predominantly to other regions.
Three additional themes central to modern Colombia, inequality, violence, and population movements, intermingle throughout Rausch's narrative. The Llanos are synonymous with cattle ranching; the high levels of inequality inherent to this socio-economic system contributed to the mass armed mobilisation of impoverished country folk in the mid-twentieth century, the grandest component of the internal conflict known as La Violencia. Indeed, if ever the Llanos embodied Colombia's present before the late twentieth century, it was in 1953, when the threat of social revolution on the plains is said to have helped precipitate a military coup in Bogotá. For a time, the nation's attention focused on the Llanos, as the military government pursued the pacification of the Llanos.
Rausch's most insightful contributions involve the relationship between population movements and violence. During both La Violencia and the recent oil boom, fighting between guerrillas, the military, and the latter's paramilitary allies has concentrated Llanos residents in urban areas even as thousands of migrants from other parts of Colombia flood the region in search of their personal futures. The Llanos thus capture in miniature something of the larger paradox of modern Colombia, the coexistence of violence alongside economic growth. This dual consideration of violence and development is moreover rare in regional histories of Colombia, which tend to focus on the former.
Rausch's treatment of each of her four themes is ultimately limited. In terms of space, numerous facets of the Llanos' history (its ties with Venezuela, the significant presence of foreign missionary groups and international non-governmental organisations) would suggest the utility of a transnational approach. However, such methodological considerations are limited to the book's final chapter. Rausch's historiographical exploration there is also autobiographical, for she has played a central role in the formation of historical thinking on the Llanos over the past 50 years. The insights in this chapter, namely the conceptualisation of the Llanos as a transnational region and a border zone, could have enriched the remainder of the book. Rausch otherwise offers a straight-forward account of (to quote the title) ‘territorial rule’. Utilising published government reports, articles from Bogotá's foremost newspaper, and official speeches, she dutifully catalogues the administrative history of eastern Colombia. There is little mention of culture, discourse, gender, or race/ethnicity. Moreover, Rausch's treatment of the sources is frequently uncritical, giving the book something of its sources' boosterish flavour.
Rausch also misses an opportunity to tell an integrated story about inequality. She writes that presidents Alfonso López Pumarejo (1934–38, 1942–45) and his son Alfonso López Michelsen (1974–78) ‘showed a special affection for the Llanos’ (p. 13). Yet no mention is made of the family's enormous landholdings in the region. Did López Pumarejo's interest precede his acquisition of frontier lands, or vice versa? Colombian historiography rarely names the individuals who comprise the oligarchy, landowning or otherwise. With her extensive knowledge of the Llanos, Rausch would seem uniquely poised to elucidate regional and national networks of property and power.
Rausch's analysis of violence similarly falls short. The book employs the term ‘banditry’ to describe any number of deviant behaviours, without offering a definition or explaining how its usage might differ from that of government officials in the 1950s. The careful work that characterises the chapter on La Violencia is not repeated in the chapter on the contemporary period, where armed groups appear sui generis.
Finally, errors of fact occasionally detract from the text. Some of these are minor. Chapter 4 in particular misstates dates and names. More significant is the faulty account of national politics in the 1970s, in which Rausch argues that agrarian reform petered out during the latter part of the decade. Overlooked is the 1972 Pact of Chicoral, through which the state connived with landowners to terminate land redistribution, a crucial moment in the perpetuation of Colombia's rural inequality.
Today the Llanos once more embody Colombia's future. As the country contemplates the shape of post-conflict national life, the Santos administration has advanced development proposals that would allow for the consolidation of massive landholdings in the Llanos, Colombia's last agrarian frontier, a Colombian attempt to replicate Brazil's agro-export boom. Rausch's book helps to place this potential future in long-term perspective. Rausch is also the only Colombian historian writing in English who has provided evidence for a comparative history of the plains of Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil. It nonetheless remains up to the reader to connect the numerous pieces contained herein.
