Context of Violence in Colombia

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 i

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e assassinated by sicarios on suicide missions just weeks before the election in May 1990. The assassination of the three presidential candidates in 1990, as well as front-page headlines accompanying the violent deaths of judges and government ministers in the years that followed, were said to be masking the numerous thousands of anonymous others who were engaged in or caught by a third wave of La Violencia, which amounts to a culture of violence that arises out of Colombia's history and that pervades Colombia to this day. It is to this culture, articulated not as historical background but as what might be called the breaking story, that we may now turn. The Culture of Violence Data on violence in the Andean region are easy to come by. In 1997, the Inter-Congregational Commission of Peace and Justice, a Catholic religious-order administration entity, documented human-rights abuses in Latin America, citing 2,700 cases of political murder and disappearance identified during the 17-year junta that was run by Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Over the same number of years (although entailing years after Pinochet's fall from power), the figures for Colombia were far more dramatic. In 1986, homicide was Colombia's leading cause of death;

Category: Foreign - C