The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the historical, social, political, and economic context in which violence in Colombia needs to be understood, and then to discuss whether violence, fostered in the form of domestic government policy and as a consequence of government policies of such engaged nations as the U.S., is in fact a realistic means of putting an end to the apparently incessant violence in the region. That is, is the "carrot" stronger or more effective than the "stick" in the project of breaking the cycle of murder and suffering plaguing the Andean region?
For the last sixty years, Colombians and neighboring countries have been using the stick, praying, as it seems, that one day the violence would end. But the truth is that, despite brief periods of respite and attempts at social reform, official bodies have throughout the twentieth century by and large ignored, or at least left unresolved, issues that have historically underlay what could be called the uncivil societies of Latin America. Income maldistribution, lack of upward social and economic mobility, the creation of enemy images on the part of governments and their opponents (each and all of them well armed), and the fatalistic feeling permeating much of Latin American society that there is nothing left to do to relieve the situation but fight: These phenomena and more inform the critical mass of misery surrounding La Violencia, the name given to the thousands of deaths occurring in Colombia over six decades that can be traced to either the experience or the project of social injustice. The high public profile of the Andean (especially Colombian) drug trade has intensified the violence, complicating traditional political and economic loyalties and antagonizing armed guerrillas, the citizenry, and the powers that be, and jeopardizing the position of the affected nations in the ever-increasingly complex environment of the global political e...