Firm Hand, Big Heart … Then a Second Independence?

Colombia presents a history that is not one but multiple, not convergent but divergent. Its suffering—so important for Renan, who emphasizes the role of shared “suffering” at the hands of others in constituting a nation (19)—is of its own devising and has produced not unity but division. It is every day acknowledged that there is no national culture, that Colombia is a country of regions and regionalisms; the nominally national state has never even come close to making good on the idea that it should be present and effective in the remotest corners of the territory, nor to monopolizing the means of violence. And indeed, the current constitution gives up on the very idea of nation, for which wars of independence and revolution were fought, an idea that was compelling insofar as it offered identity, unity, and community in place of difference, fragmentation, alienation, and anomie. Worse still, though the current constitution and the break with the nineteenth-century idea of nation were expected to lead to the pacification and democratization of the political process, political violence has only continued. Colombia's founding violence—which Renan, again, insists needs be lost in the mists of time if the nation is to cohere—is unfortunately ever renewed and thus obscenely unforgettable. Neoliberal politics have taken their toll too. In the early nineties, during the presidency of Cesar Gaviria, Colombia liberalized its economy, leading to the structural dislocations that we've seen in so many countries in recent decades. Many of the wealthy were humbled by bankruptcy, and the poor became even poorer. While the legitimate economy more or less seized up, the illegal economy based on narco-trafficking blossomed. Indeed, since the latter did provide some nice multiplier effects, many were quite happy to turn a blind eye to it. Others, including the sectors of the armed forces, actively participated.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the country seemed be in free fall, and commentators were not averse to talking of a failed state (Browitt; McLean; Richani; Rotberg; see also DeShazo, Primiani, and Mclean, whose point of departure for their recent study of Colombia is that in 1999 the country was “on the brink of collapse”).