Evil Hour in Colombia

by Hylton, Forrest

• ISBN13: 9781844670727
• ISBN10: 1844670724
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-10-16
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

The most up-to-date book on Colombia: from the mid-19th century to today's guerrilla narco-traffickers and paramilitaries. Colombia is the least understood of Latin American countries. Its human tragedy, which features terrifying levels of kidnapping, homicide and extortion, is generally ignored or exploited. In this urgent new work, Forrest Hylton, who has extensive first-hand experience of living and working in Colombia, explores its history of 150 years of political conflict, characterized by radical-popular mobilization and reactionary repression. He shows how patterns of political conflict after 1848, and especially after 1948, explain the war currently destroying Colombian lives, property, communities and territory. Evil Hour in Colombia also traces how Colombia's "coffee capitalism" gave way to the cattle and cocaine republic of the 1980s, and how land, wealth and power have been steadily accumulated by the light-skinned top of the social pyramid through a brutal combination of terror, expropriation and economic depression.

Table of Contents

Introduction : remembering Colombia	p. 1
Radical-popular republicanism, 1848-80	p. 15
From reaction to rebellion, 1880-1930	p. 23
The liberal pause, 1930-46	p. 31
La Violencia, 1946-57	p. 39
The national front : political lockout, 1957-82	p. 51
Negotiating the dirty war, 1982-90	p. 67
Fragmented peace, parcellized sovereignty, 1990-98	p. 79
Involution, 1998-2002	p. 97
The edge of the precipice, 2002-5	p. 109
War as peace, 2005-6	p. 121
Conclusion : amnesia by decree	p. 129
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