The Making of the Creole Peace, 1958–1960

This chapter discusses how the Lleras administration's political pardon and agrarian lending program extended to frontier Communists such as Manuel Marulanda an opportunity to restore their rights and livelihoods. Though Latin American historians have concentrated on the grander utopian visions of geopolitical insurgency and revolutionary politics that took shape after the Cuban revolution of 1959, the crux of Colombian politics remained in these local, regional, and national contexts. Moreover, situating peace alongside violence accordingly entails a sweeping reinterpretation of not only Colombian history but also the Latin American 1960s—ostensibly an era of revolutionary violence. A focus on peace reveals a greater coherence to the words and decisions of well-known historical figures such as Marulanda.

Messenger of a New Colombia

This chapter details the larger tale of Colombian politics. Few figures were as closely linked to the arc of the twentieth century as Alberto Lleras. Part of a generation of lettered Colombians who did not initially conceive of their nation as a place of violence, Lleras labored to maintain convivencia in Colombian public life as well as global diplomacy. The shepherd of Colombia's democratization and the primary exponent of the reformist possibilities that accompanied the transition, Alberto Lleras emerged in the late 1950s as the paramount messenger of a new Colombia. But just as Lleras' path indicated the will of many Colombians to move beyond force in all their affairs, so too did it expose the limits of urban Colombians' engagement with the countryside—a divergence at the heart of struggles over violence, peace, and nation.

Peace and Violence, 1959–1960

This chapter looks at how Marulanda's changing relationship with the state from the creole peace to the FARC owed much to the mutual transformations of ideas and practices of violence. In key moments of the transition, violence-as-practice in the countryside—particular forms of homicide in specific spatial contexts—intersected with political events in the capital to shape notions of peace and violence. One such instance came about during the very formation of the creole peace in 1959–60, when returning desplazados were met with threats and assassination. The chapter explores how, for Marulanda and others, the consequent change in relations with the government seemed to demand a return to physical force.

Encounters with Violence, 1957–1958

This chapter considers how, for urban Colombians, the excitement that accompanied the country's return to democracy in 1957–58 was joined by frank realization of how little they knew about “national problems,” violence foremost among them. With the veil of censorship lifted, observers inside and outside the state engaged in sociological, ethnological, economic, and partisan readings of violence. While these converged on select points of agreement regarding the origins and consequences of violence, no unified explanation emerged. The frightening resurgence of violence-as-practice in the countryside, especially across Tolima, only served to intensify the search for solutions. Moreover, the debate over violence in Bogota generated rumbles of discontent from the provinces, where expectation generated by democratization mixed with resentment over the capital's condescension.

Confrontation, 1963–1966

This chapter focuses on the place of Colombian Communism within the redefinition of democracy, convivencia, and reform in the countryside. The construction of the FARC out of this convergence cemented Manuel Marulanda's status as Colombia's best-known frontier Communist. However, Marulanda exemplified but one of many possible paths for Gran Tolima's Communists between 1962 and 1965. In concert with regional elites, Bogota's social scientists, and select military officers, many of Marulanda's comrades chased peaceable solutions to displacement and development until the end. The absence of these actors and repertoires from accounts of the FARC's creation highlights a final step in the creole peace's fade from memory. As the product of Marulanda's alienation from the National Front experiment, the FARC's formation represented a rural counterpart to Fals' La Violencia.

Reformist Paths, 1960–1964

This chapter examines how, although various indicators of violence continued to fall, the practice of peace proceeded differently at the local, regional, and national levels after 1960. In Bogota, a fresh vision of convivencia took hold, the creation of a new class of letrado. Led by the sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, social scientists pioneered developmentalist policies that picked up where the Lleras administration's initiatives to “rehabilitate” rural Colombia had left off. By cataloging the country's social realities and designing state agencies to meet the perceived needs of the pais nacional—thus hopefully eliminating the structural causes of violence—these social scientists advanced their own variant of convivencia. Their applied scientific knowledge and role in a growing government apparatus moreover placed them at the forefront of global developmentalism.

Epilogue

This concluding chapter explains how La Violencia came into being as Colombia was witnessing far less violence. The period beginning in the late 1960s was dissimilar to the peace that had come a decade earlier, lacking the trust or optimism of 1958. The fight against banditry and the independent republics between 1962 and 1965 had left Gran Tolima and other regions of central and southern Colombia traumatized and militarized. Nonetheless, the particular forms of state, partisan, and bandit violence seen in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s came to an end, as the overall incidence of homicide also fell. Recourse to the technique of violence in public life, though not banished, had been greatly reduced from midcentury.

Books and Bandits, 1962–1964

This chapter provides the biography of La violencia en Colombia, Colombian social science's crowning intellectual achievement of the 1960s. The work's first volume both furnished a new language to describe the violence of the past and shaped the politics of the transition. In addition to publicizing the previously unaired tales of violence and displacement collected by Father Guzman, La violencia en Colombia provided Orlando Fals Borda a forum to present novel variants of violence-as-idea. For instance, Fals began to put the term “violence” in quotation marks, a demarcation that resignified it as a temporal category rather than as a generic “technique.” However modest a step, it signaled the sort of intellectual experimentation necessary for the evolution of “la violencia” into La Violencia.

Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses how Colombians grappled with the violence during and after the period known as La Violencia. It shows that, far from enjoying widespread usage during the era it defines, “La Violencia” only came into being in the mid-1960s, the result of alienation from a nearly decade-long experiment with democratization and social reform which thus failed to define Colombia's recent past. The emergence of La Violencia as a temporal concept is moreover the story of the FARC's (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) creation, for the latter formed less out of the politics of 1960s revolution than from disillusionment with that same intervening period of democratic and reformist projects.