Description
Cultural sensibilities of urban politicians and their middling rural clienteles lie at the origins of the outbreak of violence in the Colombian countryside in the 1950s. As the politicians turned away from them, rural clients struggled to revive their old relationships. Whereas the scholarship on these conflicts has focused on the emerging rural insurgency in the 1960s as an expression of class and political antagonisms, it has rarely been recognized that the politicians did more to try to stop the rural conflagration than to egg it on, and that the guerrillas themselves have in the main sought to re-integrate themselves into the institutions of the nation. They struggled to survive. Theirs has been a quest for reconciliation by overcoming the deep feelings of humiliation they suffered when they were left behind, and the agonizing solitude in the countryside they have endured. The guerrillas have fought to restore their sense of honor and their membership in the broader body politic. Feeling only barely responsible for the origins of the conflict in the 1950s, the civilian leaders have not heard the call for reconciliation. Rural folk have lived with memory; urban folk in amnesia. Rather than a conlict etched in stone, far less divides the contestants throughout the second half of the 20th century and today than has been widely assumed. The initial cultural tensions that led to the outbreak of the violence in the 1950s, however, have undermined the negotiations over the decades, leading to the tragic continuation of the conflict to this very day.
