Evil Hour In Colombia Pa

by Hylton,Forrest

• ISBN13: 9781844675517
• ISBN10: 1844675513
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-10-17
• 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.

Author Biography

Forrest Hylton is a researcher in history at New York University. He is an editor of and contributor to Ya es otro tiempo el presente: Cuatro momentos de insurgencia indígena, 2nd edition, and the co-author, with Sinclair Thomson, of Revolutionary Horizons: Popular Struggle in Bolivia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
List of Acronyms	xi
Prologue, by Gonzalo Sanchez	xiii
Introduction: Remembering Colombia	1	(120)
1 Radical-Popular Republicanism, 1848-80	15	(8)
2 From Reaction to Rebellion, 1880-1930	23	(8)
3 The Liberal Pause, 1930-46	31	(8)
4 La Violencia, 1946-57	39	(12)
5 The National Front: Political Lockout, 1957-82	51	(16)
6 Negotiating the Dirty War, 1982-90	67	(12)
7 Fragmented Peace, Parcellized Sovereignty, 1990-98	79	(18)
8 Involution, 1998-2002	97	(12)
9 The Edge of the Precipice, 2002-5	109	(12)
10 War as Peace, 2005-6	121	(8)
Conclusion: Amnesia by Decree	129	(8)
Notes	137	(28)
Index	165