http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Events/spring2002/02-14-bergquist/ "The Left and the Paradoxes of Modern Colombian History" Thursday, February 14, 2002
rofessor Charles Bergquist
Explaining the Emergence of Colombia's Guerilla Organizations: A Historical Approach By Chris Cardona, Department of Political Science
On Thursday, February 14, Professor Charles Bergquist presented a historical interpretation of the current political crisis in Colombia, focusing on the relationship between the failure of the democratic Left and the emergence of violent guerrilla organizations. His analysis could not have been more timely; a few days after the lecture, the government of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana put an end to a more than three-year peace process with the primary guerrilla organization, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). The crisis has entered a new, more militarized phase, and Bergquist’s lecture offered one historically grounded, political-economic explanation of the dominance of militarism within the Colombian Left.
Bergquist’s introduction was given by his former student and advisee Professor Margaret Chowning of the Department of History. Chowning praised Bergquist’s "seminal" work on labor in Latin America, and thanked him for showing her, and many others, "what it means to be a historian." After several years at Duke University, Bergquist moved to the public University of Washington for what Chowning described as "admirable political reasons." Bergquist’s recent work also reflects his political convictions, focusing on the causes and consequences of political violence in Colombia. Not one to shy away from controversy, Bergquist stated at the outset of his presentation that his interpretation of the current political crisis in Colombia might appear heterodox.
He began by praising the efforts of the UC Berkeley Colombia Working Group for its generation of dialogue about the crisis in Colombia, and in particular for the Spring 2001 conference, "Colombia in Context." Before delving into his historical analysis, which focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bergquist made a few contextual remarks about the current crisis. He cited recent shifts in Colombian public opinion toward a more aggressive military approach to the guerrillas (as reflected in high levels of support for hard-line presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Vélez), and the increasing interest of the U.S. government in providing military aid beyond that stipulated in the already controversial Plan Colombia. Combined with the increasing reliance of the FARC on kidnapping as a means of generating income, these trends augur an "escalation" of the conflict, creating sharp contrast with the "largely ineffectual and unsuccessful peace talks." For Bergquist, this reflects an "internal Colombian historical logic" that operates independent of international factors, important as the latter are.
Bergquist’s analysis proceeded on multiple levels, moving from the testimony of leftist leaders to patterns of voting to aggregate economic data on property ownership. Citing the recollections of Colombian Communist Party leader Nicolás Buenaventura, Bergquist identified a key tension within the Colombian Left in the early twentieth century: between the efforts of the Communist Party to achieve economic development and redistribution by increasing the numbers of small landowners and the "ethos" of the landowners, which "revolved around ownership of a viable family farm." Landowners were leery of the Communists’ goal of collectivizing property. Ironically, the very people the Communists helped, as a result of their land gains, began to turn away from aspects of the Communist ideology. For Bergquist, this incongruence between cultural norms and party ideology represents the key component of one "paradox of modern Colombian history": while the Left, in its violent, guerrilla version, is currently the strongest in Latin America, historically, it has been one of the weakest organizationally, ideologically, and electorally. It is the definition of a paradox that its two elements are only apparently contradictory, and Bergquist argued that indeed, the late 20th-century rise of a violent and extremist left is closely connected to the failure of a late 19th and early 20th-century democratic left. In essence, because the Left was so weak historically, it began to develop intransigent strategies that increasingly involved the use of arms.
Professor Margaret Chowning (left) and Professor Charles Bergquist (right)
Exacerbating this historical weakness has been the century-long dominance of the centrist Liberal and Conservative parties. The Left, whether Communist, Socialist, or populist, has had limited electoral success, and those third parties that have done well—such as that of populist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitán in the 1930s—have soon been co-opted by one of the two dominant parties. While this exclusion is undeniable, Bergquist asserts that the guerrillas, particularly the FARC, have developed a singular, and in his view counterproductive, interpretation of the meaning of this dominance. In written documents, the FARC cites the motivation for their insurgency as a "popular" response to the "violence of the Colombian state against its opponents." While state support for paramilitary groups does give credence to this view, for Bergquist, the guerrillas have developed an extreme and self- reinforcing view of the conflict that does not reflect historical reality.
Indeed, the thrust of Bergquist’s argument was that the guerrilla response is not a popular one, because the growth of the export economy in the late 19th and early 20th century generated, among the very people expected to support the Left, a conservative ethos of land-ownership based on individual initiative and respect for property rights that contradicted key tenets of leftist ideology. Colombia exhibits a unique combination of factors that led to the historical weakness of the democratic Left: widespread smallholding, lack of third-party electoral viability, and absence of an ethnic dimension along which leftists could organize alternative political identities. Taken together, these elements of Colombian society lead to a scenario in which leftists seeking to operate within the electoral- democratic context faced both an unfavorable institutional context and popular indifference. The FARC cites the former as a justification for their violent extremism; what they neglect, from Bergquist’s point of view, is the reality of the latter. This analysis thus undermines the main rationale offered by the FARC for its militaristic strategies.
A lively question-and-answer session followed. Most of the questions focused on contemporary aspects of the crisis that Bergquist did not include in his discussion, such as the rise of paramilitary groups, the emergence of drug trafficking as a source of income for the guerrillas, and the role of the U.S. in undermining the Left through anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War. Bergquist offered his opinions on the M-19, a former guerrilla organization that became a political party and played a prominent role in the writing of the 1991 Constitution (he saw it as a passing phenomenon, and one with different, more conservative ideological roots than the FARC), the current state of the two dominant parties (he sees the Liberal party as more solid and the Conservatives as falling apart), and what concerned citizens in other countries can do to help address the crisis (he suggested advocacy for reforming U.S. drug policy, support for human rights groups, and pressing for the elimination of international sources of support for the violent Left). Bergquist concluded by citing direct U.S. military intervention as the one thing that could legitimize the violent Left.