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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.
Evil Hour in Colombia shows how patterns of political conflict, from the mid-nineteenth century to today's guerilla narco-traffickers and paramilitaries, explain the wear currently destroying Colombian lives, property, communities and territory. In doing so, it 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.
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Evil
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http://archive.org/details/evilhourincolombOOhylt
Evil
Hour
in
Colombia
FORREST HYLTON
NORTH END
V
VERSO London
•
New York
In
memory of Michael
First
Jimenez (1948-2001)
F.
published by Verso 2006
©
Hylton 2006
Forrest
All rights reserved
The moral
rights
of the author have been asserted
13579
8642
10
Verso
UK: 6 Meard USA: 180 Varick
Street,
WIF OEG
London
New
Street,
NY
York,
10014-4606
www.versobooks.com
J
^-,
Verso
^1
is
the imprint of
New
Left
Books
ISBN- 13: 978-1-84467-072-7 (hbk) ISBN- 10: 1-84467-072-4
^60^ X A
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-551-7 (pbk) ISBN-10: 1-84467-551-3 British Library Cataloguing ia Publication
catalogue record for this
book
is
available
from the
Data British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A
catalog record for this
book
is
available
from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Garamond by Hewer Text Printed in the
3/^/^ ^7-
UK
UK
by Bath
Ltd, Edinburgh
Press
Contents
Acknowledgments List
ix
of Acronyms
xi
Prologue, by Gonzalo Sanchez
Introduction: 1
Remembering Colombia
Radical-Popular Republicanism, 1848-80
2 From Reaction
to Rebellion,
1880-1930
xiii
1
15
23
3 The Liberal Pause, 1930-46 4 La Violencia, 1946-57 5 The National Front: Political Lockout, 1957-82
31
6 Negotiating the Dirty War, 1982-90
67 79 97
7 Fragmented Peace, Parcellized Sovereignty, 1990-98 8 Involution, 1998-2002
9 The Edge of the Precipice, 2002-5 10
War
as Peace,
2005-6
39 51
109 121
Conclusion: Amnesia by Decree
129
Notes
137
Index
165
Acknowledgments
Thanks
to Perry