of enemy images on the part of successive governments and their opponents (each and all of them well armed), and a fatalistic miasma shrouding much of Latin America society that there is nothing left to do to relieve one's situation but fight.
The constitution ratified in 1886 under a conservative government ostensibly functioned as Colombia's rule of law, but after 1948 the real power lay with anti-liberal peasant death squads and the ruthless competition for power among leftist guerrilla factions, military elites, conservatives, moderate conservatives, and liberals. The creation of the National Front by a military junta in 1957-58 led to a remission of La Violencia, plus liberal and moderate-conservative power sharing and economic and land reform tenuously tied to access to production and export of Colombia's all-important coffee crop. But La Violencia left a legacy of quasi-feudal land distribution, repression of dissent and suppression of reform by both liberal and conservative governments, complicated by widespread government corruption and uncertain coffee-production cycles. Social and labor protest proliferated and from time to time evolved into insurgency.
There is a widely shared consensus that La Violencia lasted until the National Front suppressed it by 1966, but the weight of evidence of current Colombian history is that it never really went away. Indeed, by the early 1980s, the limits of social and economic reform had long been sighted, and old rivalries, tortures, rapes, murders, abductions, and all the rest resurfaced. And by that time as well, the whole picture had been complicated by the emergence of the drug trade as a major factor of Colombia's economy, resulting in polarization at the extremes and ready recourse to armed force.
Colombia's politics throughout the 1980s and 1990s was characterized by abortive attempts at political, economic, and social welfare reform, negotiations with guerrillas, mili...