Populist Passions

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Chapter Two: Populist Passions

As we look back over Colombian history it is clear that there were occasions when

the victims of the violence perpetrated by those who pursued the national interest hadlittle notion of what the nation meant. But when they did refer to it, as was often the

case, their complaints tended to focus on how the ideal of the nation had been

appropriated by corrupt rulers or destructive enemies for their own selfish ends. The

hope remained that one day, we whoever we happened to be would finally be

allowed to build the real nation, the one they Conservatives, priests, oligarchs,

Liberals, free masons, atheists, communists, foreign interests had stopped us from

constructing:la nacin soada . It is rare in Colombian history to encounter an echo of

the old Spanish anarchist slogan Ni Dios, ni Patria, ni Amo , with its express rejection

of patriotism as a stratagem through which subalterns are persuaded to accept their

subordination. Instead, the nation is cherished, unimpeachable, beyond criticism. There

is something about the nation, it seems, that resists rational criticism, a mystique whoselustre is rarely tarnished, whatever the horrors committed in its name.

At the same time, however, we might ask what role the nation really played in the

lives of the majority of the inhabitants of the state that came to be known as Colombia.

The answer to that question, of course, depends on what we mean by nation. Is the

nation an ideal of political community that promises liberty, equality and political

participation for all? Is it a territorial unit over which a state establishes its sovereignty,

an institutional order, a synonym for the state, an ethnocultural group, or an imagined

repository of eternal values? And for whom is it meaningful, and when? Does it mean

the same thing to rival elite factions? What, if anything, does it mean to subaltern

groups?


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Before going any further, therefore, it seems appropriate to restate the central

premise of this analysis: the nation here is understood as a legitimizing political fiction.

Whether it is used to invoke the common good or promoted as a transcendent cultural

ideal, the nation will therefore continue to be interpreted as a discursive category that is

deployed in order to universalize particular interests. Rather than as the name for a

community that precedes, transcends or justifies the state, the nation is conceived of

simply as a discursive nexus a nodal point in the terminology developed by Laclau

and Mouffe that is available for articulation in different ways by competing political

discourses. Indeed, in this respect I have attempted to follow Rogers Brubakers

in junction to think nationalism without the nation (Brubaker p.17). From this

perspective, nationalism is conceived of as a form of politics: contingent, opportunist

and discontinuous.

What follows, then, is not a study of the Colombian nation but of nationalism in

Colombia, understood as a set of discourses that have attempted to construct an idea of

the nation at a particular place and time, for particular political ends, with unpredictable

results. With this in mind, we can approach certainaspects of national history from a

slightly different angle. Rather than thinking of the nation as a sociological fact, or as a

predestined goal, we can analyze the effects and implications of articulating the nation

in different ways.

In this regard, I shall continue to follow the conventional route of understanding the

discourse of the nation as a central component of the search for hegemony. That said, I

want to stress the need not to overstate its significance in the attempt to both institute

and legitimize authority. While it is hard to disagree with the view that nationalist

discourse is a hegemonizing force indeed, it is hard to think of it in any other way

we can overestimate the importance ofactive acquiescence in the establishment of


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hegemony. Winning consent by persuading the population to identify with a particular

kind of national project is not the only way to construct and maintain authority. There

are other mechanisms, including more local projects and socioracial prejudice, not to

mention the use of violence, that play a major role in reproducing societies that are, to

borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall,structured in domination .

Furthermore, the way individuals understand their interests and act accordingly is

both more complex and less reflexive than can be grasped through any explicit debate

on the meaning of the nation at any particular conjuncture. It would be as implausible to

suppose that the state always pursues active consent through the production of various

forms of nationalist ideology as it would be to claim that political subjects always

actively question authority. Thus while we shall be considering ways in which various

groups have sought to use the term nation in order establish the legitimacy of their

political claims, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that hegemony generally has

more to do with the naturalization of a particular state of affairs than with the

foregrounding of any overt political claim. In her excellent work on the history ofla

Violencia in Antioquia, Mary Roldn illustrates precisely this point by citing Derek

Sayers assertion that it is the exercise of power pure and simple that itself authorizes

and legitimates; and it does this less by manipulating beliefs than by defining the

boundaries of the possible(Roldn p.30). Though this formulation is problematic for a

number of reasons, the central point stands, namely that passive acceptance of a state of

affairs works just as well as informed consent, if not better, given that the hegemony of

the state is also exactly what is most fragile about the state, precisely because it does

depend on people living what they much of the time know to be a lie (Sayer p.377).

This is an area that I shall be exploring in detail in the following chapter, which

analyzes how ordinary Colombians understand the nation today. For the moment,


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however, I simply want to note the multiplicity as well as the contingency of the factors

that combine to produce a given state of affairs. Nationalist discourse is one of these, an

important one, to be sure, but by no means always the most important. Political

discourse itself stands in complex relationship to other contingent factors, such as the

vagaries of capitalist development and the impact of extraterritorial forces. We need,

therefore, to bear in mind that in spite of their universalizing and unifying pretensions,

the discursive practices analyzed here are limited in their scope and impact.

For the same reason, I want to emphasize that this chapter is not an attempt to

produce an alternative history of twentieth century Colombia. Instead I simply want to

show how elites have articulated the nation, in what circumstances and with what

consequences, in order to help us to interpret the utterances of present day Colombians

when invited to deliberate on the meaning of nationhood. This will allow us to identify

some of the ways in which different and often contradictory forms of nationalist

discourse have become part of contemporary common sense and thereby serve as the

basis for future re-articulations. At the same time, however, I will frequently refer to

what we might think of as thehegemonic version of Colombian historythe history

in which the nation always appears as a flawlessimage of shared community in an

attempt to go some way towards de-familiarizing this numbingly conventional narrative

whose apparent objectivity is in itself the result of the qualified success of a number of

hegemonic projects. In particular, I want to question the supposition that the

development of nationalist discourse was part of a coherent or unified project that needs

to be understood through the overarching explanatory narrative of nation building.

Indeed, the notion that nationalist discourse developed is in itself problematic as it

implies precisely the sense of teleological continuity that I seek to undermine through


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an examination of what it meant at any given to time to claim that a fundamentally

unequal and divided social order was in some sense anation.

Before embarking on the analysis proper, however, I want to sketch out some of the

general themes that help to situate an approach to nationalist discourse in Colombia. As

we have already seen, in the nineteenth century both the nation and the people were

invoked as legitimating devices. However, these terms were articulated in different

ways by both competing and overlapping discourses. The nation, for example, meant

one thing in a discourse that claimed its universality through references to the

inalienable rights of sovereign nations everywhere and quite another in a discourse that

emphasised the Hispanic cultural heritage of Colombia or New Granada. Similarly, the

people could be articulated with both kinds of discourse, in the former as the source of

legitimacy of any rational political regime and in the latter as the repository of specific

national values, often understood in spiritual and therefore moral terms. At other

times, however, the nation and the people seemed to refer to the same thing, particularly

when they referred to the concept of popular sovereignty.

The penetration of Colombian Conservatism by liberal and republican ideals meant

that civic nationalism, with its emphasis on citizenship, was very much to the fore in

both of the historic parties. Rather than ethnocultural nationalism, therefore, it was

patriotism, understood as loyalty to a state, which became the focus of elite discourse.

This was in a sense quite understandable, given the complexities of the system of caste

identities that had developed under Spanish rule, heavily influenced by the obsessive

concern withlimpieza de sangre that dominated colonial understandings of social and

cultural difference.Furthermore, during the nineteenth century this spontaneous

sociology was bolstered by the circulation of scientific and pseudo -scientific discourses

that claimed to explain social difference in terms of race, thus effectively confirming the


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marginal status of much of the population. For our purposes here, it is important to bear

in mind that these taxonomies were fundamental to the construction of the regional

identities that continue to be so important in the sociocultural imaginary of Colombia,

with its Andean core and tropical periphery. The logic that dominated this network of

representations had always emphasized difference rather than similarity, dividing up

social space betweenblancos , mestizos , mulatos, indios and negros . Indeed, the

existence throughout Colombia of a kind of informal social apartheid reveals an acute

awareness of what separates social subjects rather than what unites them and thereby

constitutes a formidable barrier to the construction of an idea of the nation as a

horizonta l solidarity, to use Andersons evocative phrase. Thus in spite of liberal

appeals to reason and justice, equality before the law and individual freedom, what

everyone knew about society included the common sense realization that not all

Colombians were citizens and that not all citizens enjoyed the same rights. Nor did they

share the same culture.

A gulf therefore separated the promises of nationalist discourse and the everyday

experience of life in Colombian society. After independence, new forms of domination,

exploitation and exclusion emerged and Colombia, in each of its incarnations,

remained an impoverished state in which the vast majority of the population was tied to

the land and effectively disenfranchised. Peasant and indigenous groups fought to make

the best of the changing institutional framework, and at certain key moments the Liberal

party mobilized the black population in areas like the Valle del Cauca but in general the

disputes over the meaning of the nation centred on the rivalries between different elite

factions. In the twentieth century, however, elite efforts to impose a particular form of

political regime were increasingly contested from below, giving rise to conflicts that can

be understood as a struggle for hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of the term. Official


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political discourse began to articulate the demands of emergent socio-economic groups

and political actors (peasant coffee producers, textile workers, trade unionists and even

the urban unemployed) in order to incorporate them into what came to be seen as the

national project. For their part, these gr oups rearticulated key elements within

nationalist discourse and gave them a popular inflection in order to further their own

claims. The twentieth century can therefore broadly be characterized as the period

during which the discourse of the nation was popularized, in the most general sense of

the term.

This process became a central part of political debate with the Liberal regimes of the

1930s and 1940s which invoked the people as the privileged subject of national history,

and the theme of populism in Colombia, and its failure, will be an important part of

what follows. The polity based, nation shaping nationalism of the period reveals the

contradictions inherent in official discourses, in particular the impossibility of

reconciling the concept of popular sovereignty with what Marco Palacios has called the

fear of the people, the deep -rooted suspicion of the rascal multitude that needs to be

kept in its place not only because it is uncultured and uncivilized but, more importantly,

because its unruliness threatens elite control of the state (Palacios 2002).Palacios

phrase is, as ever, suggestive and there is no doubt that fear was one of the ways in

which social prejudice manifested itself amongst the upper classes. It is important to

recognize, however, that this sentiment was not just an aberration that prevented

otherwise enlightened elites from carrying through a policy of radical democratization

but wholly in keeping with the socioracial imaginary within which elite identity

continued to be constructed. Thishabitus framed political action in such a way that even

the politicians who attempted to nationalize the people baulked at the prospect of

articulating a discourse of national identity that would include the marginalized cultural


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identities that together made up the political category of the popular. This was so

because cultural difference was still understood largely through the prism of theories of

race which equated modernization withblanqueamiento . Indeed, one of the many

contradictions of what is often regarded as the populist moment in Colombia was that

the summoning of the people to the political stage was accompanied by an intense

scrutiny of the racial origins of what were to come to be known as the popular classes.

Though ethnocultural heterogeneity is by no means the only cause of populisms

failure, it does help to explain why populist politicians never came to power in

Colombia. That said, populism continued to be a hugely important force in the 1940s

and might well have propelled Jorge Elicer Gaitn to the presidency but for the

caudillo s assassination in 1948, which sparked off more than a decade of violence in

certain areas. However, the experiences ofla Violencia, presented by the elites as a

moral fable underlining the dangers of stirring up popular passions, may have weakened

populism but they did not destroy it entirely. Nor did the repositioning of official

political discourse in accordance with the exigencies of Cold War, a period dominated

by the desarrollismo and technocratic elitism of the National Front. Instead, the

national-popular was invoked against the traditional parties authoritarian civic

nationalism by groups such as the Alianza Nacional Popular (ANAPO) and the left

nationalists of M-19. The discourse of this guerrilla movement in particular is

significant because of its influence on the drafting of the constitution of 1991,

Colombias most recent foundational document , in which an attenuated form of

populism appears alongside the ideals of social democracy, the demands of a neoliberal

economic agenda and the acceptance of a rudimentary multiculturalism.

Even this prcis , however, strays too far in the direction of presupposing a

continuous narrative of nation building. We might still think in terms of the


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development of a single discourse, suitably matched by institutional reforms, in the

direction of modernity and inclusivity,culminating in a move towards

multiculturalism. But, as I have already pointed out, such an interpretation is

unsatisfactory both because it fails to capture the disjointed and contingent nature of the

struggle for hegemony and because it represents precisely the kind of wishful thinking

that sees the discourse of the nation as constantly on the point of fulfilling its promises.

Happy endings are best left to Hollywood, however, and in order to avoid the tendency

to overemphasize continuity and development I will attempt to contextualize certain key

moments in order to provide a better approximation of the role played by the nation in

political discourse.

Territorial Anxiety and Patriotic Elitism: The Case of Panama

As we saw in Chapter One, the Regeneration may have been promoted by a NationalParty, but the nation imagined by its ideologues was under stood in narrow and

exclusive terms, almost unrecognizable today. Rafael Nez, Miguel Antonio Caro and

the other architects of the authoritarian constitution of 1886 were modernisers in so far

as they believed wholeheartedly in the development of the republican state but they

understoodnational values as a Hispanic, Catholic cultural heritage to be preserved by

the elites rather than as a set of beliefs and customs that resided in the people. As

Palacios and Safford put it,[t]he mentality of the Colom bian elite could not subscribe

to a nationalism based on the mestizo populace, or on an appreciation of its values. 1

1 Catherine LeGrand (1986) distinguishes between Colombia and other Latin American countries in thisregard, claiming that in Colombia, where immigration did not provide an alternative source of labour, the

native settler was alluded as a hardworking, determined, even heroic type whose efforts to open newlands advanced the cause of national development. The prosperity of the Antioqueo colonization regioncontributed notably to this image, which stood in sharp contrast to the derogatory vision of the squatter in


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Nor could it conceive an image of a national culture compatible with modernity or the

changes occurring in the broader world (Palacios and Safford p.251). In purely political

terms, Caro himself opposed the principle of popular sovereignty and favored the two

chamber system precisely because it was not exclusively democratic and therefore

allowed for the distinction between the people or crowd and the organizedinterests

which were the organic members of the State. 2 In other words, although this form of

nationalist discourse continued to claim that even the least member of the national

community should be ready to die for the patria , it continued to understand society as

fundamentally divided between the cultured elites and the ignorant lower orders and left

the direction of the state firmly in the hands of the former.

Along with this basic elitism, a key feature of official discourse at the start of the

twentieth century is the sense of crisis that derived from two central events, both of

which seemed in their different ways to pose a threat to the continuing viability of the

patria . The first of these was the Thousand Day War, a vicious conflict between rival

factions over the control of the state, which Marco Palaciosdubbed the struggle for the

soul of the nation , a phrase that uncharacteristically presupposes the existence of both

the nation and its soul. The ideological divide that structured elite competition in the

nineteenth century seemed to have been temporarily resolved in favour of a

Conservative, Catholic authoritarianism when, under the aegis of the short-lived Partido

Nacional , the alliance of Rafael Nezs Independent Liberals and Miguel Antonio

Caros Conservatives attempted to impose order through a centralist reorganization of

Chile and Brazil ( LeGrand, p. 17). However, her claim misses the ethnocultural prejudice of theanioqueo ideal, which has always stressed the whiteness of the so-called raza paisa . 2 Dentro del concepto exclusivamente democrtico, no cabe la dualidad ni multiplicidad de cmaraslegislativas; porque si slo el pueblo ha de ser representado, y el pueblo es uno, uno e indivisible ha de serel cuerpo representativo del pueblo, como lo han sido en otras ocasiones pocas las convenciones yasambleas en Francia [] La dualidad de cmaras ha de apoyarse y se apoya en efecto en un fundamentoverdadero y slido: en la distincin entre el pueblo o muchedumbre que forma la cmara popular, por una

parte, y por otra los miembros orgnicos del Estado, clases o intereses sociales en cualquier formaorganizados, que deben constituir la alta cmara. Cited in Ospina, J.D., Los constituyentes de 1886, Bogot: Banco de la Repblica, 1986, pp. 458-459


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the state. However, the constitution of 1886 was too ideologically skewed to be taken as

the basis for a politically and culturally conservative political hegemony. The Liberal

rebellion of 1899 was the result, as the excluded sections of the elites took up arms,

leading to a bloody confrontation that ended with their defeat in late 1902. Unlike most

of the civil wars of the nineteenth century, which were limited in scale, the Thousand

Day War was extremely destructive and greatly weakened the state, thereby facilitating

the conditions for the second critical event, the secession of Panama, which occurred

almost exactly a year after the end of hostilities in November 1902.

From the perspective of this study, the initial reactions to Panamanian independence

are fascinating in so far as they reveal the shape of the dominant forms of nationalist

discourse at the turn of the century and it is therefore on this loss of sovereignty over

what had hitherto been claimed as an integral part of the states territory that I want to

concentrate here. The first discursive response in the face of the immediate external

threat was an increased anti-Americanism, hardly surprising given theUSs role in

Panamanian independence. The immediate context within which the loss of Panama

was framed by official discourse in Colombia was provided by the already widespread

circulation throughout Latin America of representations of the US as an aggressive and

expansionist power. Many magazines and newspapers had made ironic references to

American territorial designs and these were increasingly prominent after the Spanish-

American war of 1898. In Colombia itself the difficult and often hostile atmosphere

surrounding the canal treaty negotiations and the cultural conflicts associated with the

presence of large numbers of American citizens in the isthmus fuelled this tension. Thus

it was no surprise when, sixteen days after the declaration of Panamanian independence,

Liberal newspaper El Espectador complained plaintively that

Ya no cabe duda alguna: Panam se ha arrancado de Colombia por s mismo, si bienvalindose infamemente de nuestras propias armas, de nuestros propios soldados, la vez


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que de armas y soldados extranjeros; se ha robado Colombia, digmoslo sin esbozo, paradarse los Estados Unidos en venta torpemente disfrazada. Y los Estados Unidos apoyanesa segregacin traidora, con el descaro de matones con que pretenden volcar hoy, pordondequiera, el derecho internacional moderno, para sustituirlo con el antiguo derecho delms fuerte, en su forma ms primitiva y brutal.( La tregua de la patria, El Espectador , 18 de noviembre, 1903)

This passage appeals to the supposedly universal principles of national sovereignty

and an imagined and imaginary community of nations in an attempt to find a forum

within which to condemn US actions. It positions itself on the side of modernity, in the

guise ofmodern international law, against the old fashioned law of the strongest , in

its most primitive and brutal form, which would be something like the Hobbesian state

of nature. However, it forgets that the Hobbesian Leviathan is able to protect its

citizens precisely because it is able to exercise force. In contrast, the community of

nations governed by international convention was little more than a fiction and in the

real world neither Colombia nor any other regional power was in a position to oppose

US interests. The editorial, however, continues:

La Patria ha sido despojada y ultrajada [] La soberana de nuestra Repblica no slo hasido destruida en Panam, sino que, debido la facilidad con que el despojo se haverificado, queda amenazada en todo su territorio. Si Colombia consiente con mansedumbreese atropello, sin embargo, y si el mundo civilizado lo deja pasar como corriente,envalentonado por el buen xito de su pirtica hazaa se apresurar el devorador de pueblos tomar de nuestra nacionalidad los bocados que vayan tentando su gula, si no es que decidaengullirse el todo de una vez.

The nation, understood here asnuestra nacionalidad , is simply conceived of as the

territory over which the state claims sovereignty. But there is also a cultural dimension

to the complaint that sets up a division between the civilized world and the US , which

thereby acquires a negative identity vis--vis its victims as a piratical, rogue state.

Indeed, it is worth remembering that until at least the middle of the twentieth century

the discourse of an important sector ofColombias Cons ervative elites would emphasize

a view of national identity that opposed Anglo -Saxon Protestantism and mechanical

culture to the spiritual values of Hispanism and Catholicism. As well as the religious


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divide, however, anti-Americanism within both the Conservative and the Liberal parties

fed on the resentment caused by the racist concept ofmanifest destiny and the so-

called Monroe doctrine which, in spite of its beginnings in 1823 as a declaration of anti-

colonial intent, had by the turn of the century become synonymous with US

expansionism. A typical strategy in the Colombian press, whether Conservative or

Liberal, was to undermine this imperial ideology by pointing out that the supposedly

superiorAnglo -Saxon r ace was nowhere near as civilized as it liked to make out. In

November 1903, for example, El Espectador reported on the lynching in Welmington,

New York, of a black man accused of raping and murdering the seventeen year old

daughter of a protestant minister. The lynching itself is represented as a cruel and

unlawful act, provoked by the fire and brimstone sermon of another preacher, a friend of

the murdered girls father, which is quoted in full. The point of the articles publication

in a contemporary Colombian newspaper is foreshadowed by its ironic headline: They

are coming to civilizeus. 3

But the blame for the humiliation of 1903 did not fall on the US alone. The problem

of how to represent the Panamaniansand their betrayal of the patria also had to be

resolved. In this endeavor colonial prejudices played a more important role than any

appeal to republican values. Indeed, such attitudes may well have been decisive in

establishing the circumstances that favored Panamanian independence. Alfonso Mnera

argues persuasively that the neglect of the isthmus, which in economic terms should

have been a central priority of the state, was due to the place it occupied in the social

imaginary of the dominant Andean elites. This represented the temperate slopes and

mesetas of the highlands as civilized, while the lowland areas of the river valleys, coasts

3 Contemporary American views of Colombia were hardly flattering. Roosevelt referred to them ascontemptible little creatures, inefficient bandits y a corrupt and pithecoid community (Palacios 1994 p.

70).


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and plains were considered to be backward and primitive.4 Panama, low lying and

coastal, with its large black andmulato population, was clearly closer to barbarism than

civilization. The Andean elites who had used nationalist discourse to universalize their

particular perspectivetherefore found it easy to articulate Panamanian treason

alongside one of the features that did indeed make Panama different, from them at least,

namely its blackness. As we saw in chapter one, blacks occupied a precarious and

ambiguous position at best within the patria and it was therefore convenient that the

part of the nation that had proved disloyal could be caricatured in this way .

There are many contemporary examples that illustrate this strategy. A cartoon in the

magazine Mefistfeles , on the eighteenth of March, 1904, depicts Colombia as a

weeping white woman sitting on top of the national coat of arms. In the background we

see the black Panamanian independence leader General Huertas, holding a bag marked

bribe in his hand. Just behind Colombia, a stereotypically black figure crawls

forward on all fours and reaches out to steal Panama from the Colombianescudo . It is

marked with the words the Panamanian traitor and, like Huertas, holds a bag labelled

bribe. Behind this figure, with one boot (marked Cuba) placed firmly upon its rump,

stands Uncle Sam, with a sack over his shoulder bearing the words weapon of

conquest: 40 million, a knife identified as the right of peoples in his right hand, and a

roll of paper marked Monroe Doctrine in his left. 5

This attempt to explain away Panamaniantreachery was part of the widespread

deployment of a patrician concept of patria , couched in the high-flown language of the

elites, which was often barely intelligible to the rest of the population. It is a discourse

4 To illustrate his point, Mnera cites Miguel Samper, brother of Jos Mara:Los que descubrieron y conquistaron esta parte de la Amrica encontraron la barbarie ms completa

sobre las costas y en las hoyas de los ros, en tanto que las faldas y mesetas de nuestra cordillera servan

de morada a pueblos relativamente adelantados en civilizacin. Cerca de cuatro siglos van transcurridosdesde que ocurri aquel hecho, y las cosas no han cambiado sensiblemente. (Mnera 2005, p. 116).5 Mefistfeles , 18 November 1903.


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full of references to violation, besmirched honor and treachery in which the patria

conventionally appears as a white female who has to be protected from desecration. The

events in Panama meant that she had been violated , a slight which had to be avenged

if her honor was to be restored. Such rhetoric took it for granted that the nation was

symbolically white and therefore invited ordinary Colombians to understand their

relationship to the patria through the ideological prism ofblanqueamiento . It did not,

therefore, understand national identity as having a direct link with the traditions and

beliefs of the people.There is no equivalent of Mother Russia available, no

articulation and interpellation of the narod , nor is there , as in the Marseillaise, a call

for the citizenry to protect their political freedoms by shedding foreign blood. On the

contrary, the people were often represented as unrepresentative of the patria or even

unworthy of the lofty ideals of patriotism.

To take just one example, in a debate on the eleventh of September, 1903, the

Conservative senator Marcelino Arango complained about the appointment of Jos

Domingo de Obalda, a supporter of the canal treaty with the US, as governor of the

department. Arango speculated about what might happen if the government simply

ignored the views of Congress and proceeded regardless with its own agenda. El

Espectador reported the incident in the following terms:

Preguntaba con amarga irona el H. Senador Marcelino Arango qu hara el Congreso si,despus de aprobar la proposicin de censura al Gobierno, ste insista en los nombramientosy remociones vituperados; y como aadiese: Nosotros estamos solos, no tenemos respaldo!,una voz de la barra le grit: Aqu est el pueblo! El pueblo? pregunt el Sr. Arango, el pueblo, habituado a obedecer y a callar, nos dejar solos!6

Arangos ironic outburst implies that the destiny of the patria is far too important to

be entrusted to a fickle and above all passive multitude and sums up the attitude of

much of the political class to the people, at least when this category was taken to mean

6 Graves declaraciones, El Espectador , no. 501, 21 de octubre, 1903, p.18.


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something more than a legal abstraction. Accustomed to obeying and being silent,

the people are regarded as both apathetic and unpatriotic. Given this fundamental

elitism, the dominant forms of nationalist discourse could not appeal directly to the

majority of the population as national subjects. Although the people had frequently been

invoked as part of a strategy of political legitimation, and to a lesser extent as the

bearers of a distinct cultural identity,7 the nationalization of popular customs and

traditions had yet to take place.

In fact, the feelings of the majority of the population about the loss of Panama are

hard to determine. However, an intriguing detail emergesamidst the newspapers

attempts to marshal patriotic sentiment. This is a reference to state decree 1022, which

called on all men between the ages of eighteen and fifty to report for possible

enlistment. The decree also made it clear that it was not to be regarded as a draft, given

that en tratndose de la defensa nacional, el recurso de reclutamiento es innecesario,

si se tiene en cuenta que es innato en todos los pueblos de la tierra el instinto de propia

conservacin .8 This claim rings hollow in the light of the fact that there were no

spontaneous acts of violence aimed at preserving the national territory, nor was there

any rush to enlist. Indeed, after the initial skirmishes no military action whatsoever was

taken. Though popular resistance in the face of US opposition would almost certainly

have failed, the apparent lack of response to the patriotic call to arms raises the question

of whether, in spite of nearly a century of such rhetoric, there was a widespread sense

that either a Colombian people or a Colombian nation existed or whether, along with

the direction of the state, the sentimental attachments of nationalism were the preserve

of the elites alone.

7 Thus, for example, Jos Mara Samper referred to the people as the creators of the bambuco , whichwas an expression of theirsoul.

8 El Espectador, 18 November, 1903, p.103


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For most Colombians, to be sure, there was little at stake, but that has often been no

obstacle to the waging of extremely destructive wars with great loss of life. What counts

is the states ability to maximize the use of ev ery discursive resource to mobilize

support for the national cause. In the Colombian case, however, neither of the parties

had had to offer the concessions required to achieve a form of hegemony that would

effectively nationalize the majority of the popu lation. Furthermore, no prolonged

foreign wars had had to be fought, and no external enemy, until now, had threatened the

survival of the republic. Thus the absence of strong nationalist feeling amongst the

people was hardly surprising. Indeed, David Bushnell tells us that after the loss of

Panama the sense of national unity as a whole continued weak (Bushnell 154). And

although one could focus on the historical peculiarities of the local merchant elites in

order to make a case for Panamanian exceptionalism, there were other areas of

Colombia which could have expressed significant grievances with the centralized

regime.

Bushnell, for example, refers to the scattered voices that called for further acts of

secession and which were a source of concern for the elites based in Bogot. General

Ospina, quoted in El Espectador just before the Panamanian declaration of

independence, raised fears about the possible loss of other parts of the states territory

by stating that la disolucin de Colombia germina en todas las almas; Cauca,

Antioquia, Panam, Bolvar, Santander, piensan en disgregacin . 9 Thus in spite of all

the struggles of the nineteenth century, capped by the centralising efforts of the 1886

constitution, the idea of Colombia as a natural state -nation did not go unquestioned.

9 El Espectador , Graves declaraciones, 21 de octubre de 1903, p. 1 8.


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Rather, local elites continued to ask themselves whether their particular interests might

not be better served by alternative configurations of power. 10

Populist Love, Fear and Hate

Within three decades this situation had changed radically. Under pressure from the

socialist, Marxist and syndicalist discourses that had begun to organize the demands of

subaltern groups, Colombian nationalism acquired a populist tint as the previously

marginalized popular masses began to be represented for the first time as the true

source of political legitimacy. But before we can attempt to understand the emergence

of a different kind of nationalist discourse in the 1930s, we need to take into account the

processes that had transformed Colombia in the intervening years.

In political terms the principle of minority representation lasted until the end o f

what has come to be known as the Conservative hegemony in 1930.11 This accord,

implemented in order to avoid a repeat of the Thousand Day War, helped to limit elite

conflict, and although the ideology of Catholic Conservatism remained in the ascendant

the discourse of the ruling party moved towards a more technocratic form of

desarrollismo , summed up by Pedro Nel Ospinas dictum: Colombia necesita un

gerente . During the 1920s, however, the rivalry between Liberals and Conservatives

was complicated by the development of new discursive strategies that tried to capture

the allegiance of a number of emergent socio-economic groups.

10 R ecognition of the contingent nature of the nation is a feature of Spanish American nationalistdiscourse. Thus to envision secession has remained a possibility in some Spanish American contexts, asin the recent examples of the state of Zulia in Venezuela and Santa Cruz in Bolivia, though it has yet to become a reality. Though the nation in Western Europe is just as much a product of contingent needs andconfigurations of power, its origins are more deeply buried, and the nationalist mystique has taken adeeper hold.11

Article four of the reform act of 1905 stated that En toda eleccin popular que tenga por objetoconstituir corporaciones pblicas y en el nombramiento de Senadores, se reconoce el derecho derepresentacin de las minoras, y la ley determinar la manera y trminos de llevarlo a efecto.


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Indeed, Colombias poli tical environment at the populist moment cannot be

understood without a consideration of the ways in which capitalist growth began to

transform physical and social space, creating new forms of regional identity that were

nonetheless interpreted in national terms. At the beginning of the twentieth century

Colombia was by any reckoning amongst the weakest states in the region. War had

devastated its already fragile economy, in particular the centers of coffee production in

the Santanderes, and with its four million inhabitants still overwhelmingly dedicated to

working the land, it was one of the most isolated territories in the Americas, especially

in terms of its relationship to international capital. The poorly integrated local

economies of its diverse regions attracted a tiny percentage of British and US

investment in the region, while local exports accounted for only two percent of the Latin

American total (Palacios 94 p. 74).12

The beginnings of change were driven by the desire to improve communications

between small economic areas. During RafaelReyes presidency Bogot was linked to

the Magdalena, the main communication route, through the Girardot railway line and

several hundred miles of roads were built.13 In the years following 1910, however,

coffee production expanded rapidly and by the 1920s was the principal motor of

economic growth. Exports doubled and by 1924 accounted for eighty percent of the

countrys total export revenue, which by this time was six times that of 1898. 14

Production of bananas and oil, two industries dominated by foreign interests, also

increased, while the growth of local manufacturing, especially in textiles, led to the

formation of a small urban working class in Medelln, Barranquilla and Bogot. The

Banco de la Repblica , the countrys first modern cent ral bank, was set up in 1923.

12 The figures for British and US investments were 0.5 and 1.5 percent respectively.13

For tables on the growth of the total amount of railway and road building done in the first 30 years ofthe 20th century, see Urrego 2004, pp. 91-94.14For coffee figures see Kalmanovitz p. 210 and Bushnell pp.155 and169.


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Something approaching a small scale modern economy was beginning to emerge,

though it remained highly localized and poorly integrated.

This period of economic growth was boosted by the ratification of the Panama

indemnity offered by the US in 1922, which meant that the state was finally able to get

the loans needed for investment in infrastructure.15 The administration of Conservative

president Pedro Nel Ospina almost doubled the railway network (to 2,434 kilometers)

and built many more roads. Even so, the main form of transport from the Caribbean to

the interior continued to be the steam ships that travelled between the coast and

Girardot. Revenue continued to be a problem because, windfalls apart, most of the

states fiscal income still came from customs duties. Income tax, introduced in 1919,

was largely symbolic and education and health, the sectors most often funded through

this kind of taxation, were certainly not priorities. Indeed, basic literacy was low and by

1930 life expectancy was still a mere thirty-four years (Bushnell 167).

Nonetheless, these economic changes brought with them new demographic realities.

In the years between 1900 and 1930 the population doubled, reaching around nine

million inhabitants. By 1925, nearly a quarter of these lived in cities, and the urban

population was growing twice as fast as that of rural areas (Bejarano 205). A gradual

incorporation of voters into formal democracy took place as these processes of

urbanization increased citizenship. In 1914, a mere 7% of the total population

participated in the presidential elections; for the congressional elections of 1949 this

figure reached 29%, in spite of the upheavals of La Violencia (Palacios 125). The nature

of participation in the Colombian polity was changing, and as it did so the nation began

to be articulated in different ways in political discourse.

15 $10M was received in 1923, $5M in 1924, $5M in 1925 (Bejarano, 2007, p.223).


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From the perspective of what might be considered the classic theories of nationalism

this is entirely predictable. Indeed, the period between 1930 and 1946, commonly

known as the Liberal republic , could be thought of as the Gellnerian moment, the

period when the citizen mobilizing and citizen influencing state recognized the need to

homogenize and rationalize society in order to meet the demands of the booming coffee

economy. Though in the Colombian case linguistic standardization, a key aspect of the

basic Gellnerian thesis, was largely unnecessary due to the acculturation, assimilation or

destructionof the countrys largest indigenous groups during the colonial period , the

educational reforms of the thirties, which gave a leading role to the state rather than the

church, and the setting up of the Radiodifusora Nacional in 1940, can be taken as

examplesof the states desire to reach previously forgotten or marginalized sections of

the population and turn them into literate and productive citizens. Indeed, 1938 saw the

setting up of the Academia de la lengua with theslogan la lengua es la patria .

Certainly, there is a sense in which it could be claimed that the Colombian state as we

understand it today comes into being during this period. However, the hegemonic

narrative of Colombian nation building presupposes that state, territory and nation were

and are synonymous. But was it really anation that was emerging? Though the

institutional framework of the state was being modernized, and significant resources

were being dedicated to the ideological work of promoting a sense ofnational

cohesion, what was actually happening was that the capitalist developments of this

period were creating space in characteristic fashion. Just as small industrialized areas in

northern England, often no more than twenty or thirty miles across, revolutionized the

hierarchy of socio-economic space in nineteenth century England, what today is known

as the eje cafetero (the coffee axis) became the hub of the Colombiannational


22/85


23/85

and replaced by the Communist party in 1930. Indeed, the 1920s was characterized by

what Palacios describes asan ambiente nacional de agitacin ideolgica as radical

political movements began to make an increasing impact in Colombia. Socialist,

communist and syndicalist ideals began to spread throughout the country, not only

amongst industrial workers but also amongst the small scale capitalists, sharecroppers

and seasonal workers of the coffee regions. Organized workers and peasants began to

force concessions fromhacendados and landlords, and from local and particularly

central government. By 1919, for example, the right of association of employees had

been accepted, as was the right to strike, while peasant leagues were established in

Cundinamarca, the capitals rural hinterland (Kalmanovitz p. 90).

The struggles over land here and in adjoining Tolima department began to break up

the hacienda system, forcing it to abandon such pre-capitalist practices as requiring

payment for land usage to be made through labouron the owners estate. They proved

surprisingly successful in challenging thelarge landowners illegal acquisition of public

lands (Bejarano 257) and the role played in them by the Communist Party, the Liberal

Party and Jorge Elicer Gaitns short -lived Unin de la Izquierda Revolucionaria

(UNIR) lent them increasing prominence. Elsewhere, the measure of the success of

local peasant movements is apparent in the fact that small scale coffee production

increased dramatically throughout this period, a development that contributed to the

coffee boom because of the greater productivity of these smaller holdings.

However, the enduring symbol of the growing demands from below was the strike in

the banana growing region around Santa Marta, where workers in the United Fruit

plantations protested against their treatment by the company. The American company

had turned the area into a private fiefdom, taking the best land and dislodging

Colombiancolonos , and gaining complete control of transport and policing by bribing


24/85

local officials. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the slogan that animated

the strikers por el obrero y por Colombia sought to lend universal validity to

their particular demands by appealing to economic nationalism against foreign interests

(Palacios 1994, p.119). The workers made full use the resources that nationalist

discourse had made available and combined them with a discourse that emphasized

social emancipation, revolution and anti-imperialism. Though the strike was vigorously

repressed and ended in the infamous massacre in the town of Cinaga in December

1928, the assertiveness of peasant organizations became increasingly apparent.

Unemployed workers began to occupy United Fruit land, calling themselvescolonos . In

a petition to the administration in Bogot in 1930, they claimed the right to be granted

land because we are colonos [...] and therefore are, according to the Minister, the first

citizens of Colombia; and also because we believe that now is the time the public land

laws must be put into effect so that they no longer constitute ornamental illusions for the

poor and for the North American imperialist capitalists real and effective means for the

easy accumulation of property. 16 Throughout Colombia peasant organizations not only

adopted a legalistic approach to land struggle in an attempt to turn the existing

institutional framework to their advantage but frequently claimed that their occupation

of unused lands was in the national interest (Legrand 1986, p.119).

However, that these events became a wider symbol of state repression was partly the

work of a young Liberal lawyer, Jorge Elicer Gaitn, described by Palacios as the

capitalizador de la masacre de las bananeras (Palaicos 1994, p.122).Gaitns

withering denunciations of the treatment of the striking workers indicate the direction in

which the more radical sectors of the Liberal party were moving. Indeed, the failure of

socialist movements to win mass supportthrough a discourse of the national popular

16 Archivo Nacional de Colombia, Bogot Ministerio de Industrias, Correspondencia de Baldos, volume72, folio 293.


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26/85

At this point there is a need to reflect on the meaning of the term pueblo and the

implications of its use. As we saw in Chapter One, in the early declarations of

independence and in documents such as the constitution of 1863 the pueblo was

invoked to establish the idea of popular sovereignty. The concept of the pueblo as a

source of legitimacy was therefore already firmly installed in the constitutional

discourse of the Colombian state, though it was largely superseded in the 1886

constitution by the termnacin , which nonetheless meant something similar. This view

of the people sees it as the abstract source of what Bernard Yack has described as that

constituent sovereignty which is unlimited and always remains with the people,

understood as the whole body of a territorys legal inhabitants (Yack p.519, italics

mine). Furthermore, Yack notes

the people exists by right rather than by custom or consciousness raising. To assert or deny itsexistence is a matter of ideology rather than a matter of sociology. It exists as long as one believes in a particular theory of political legitimacy. Those who deny its existence are guiltyof an injustice rather than a misdescription. Perhaps that is why we talk so little about 'people- building,' in spite of all our talk about 'nation-building. (Yack, p.521)

Almost everyone, by definition, forms part of this sort ofpeople hence Yack s

point about the strangeness ofthe idea of people - building, a term so inclusive that it

is, in effect, politically inert. But the populist moment, while continuing to invoke the

concept of popular sovereignty, articulates the people as part of a fundamental political

antagonism which, again by definition, cannot be so all embracing. In this context the

people is constructed in opposition to theoligarchy and thereforepeople building is

the political task par excellence , as Ernesto Laclau has shown so clearly (Laclau 2005).

This task necessarily involves the articulation of relations of equivalence, conceived of

as bonds of solidarity, which unite the diverse claims of particular groups into universal,

populist demands. In Colombia, workers, peasants, the urban unemployed and the petty

bourgeoisie would soon be invoked in this construction of a peopleagainst an oligarchy


27/85

that would be presented as fundamentally non-national precisely because of its failure to

show solidarity.

However, official discourse of the mid 1930s understood the popular as a political

force that had to be channeled and tamed as well as mobilized. The fear of unleashing

the unruly mob was never far away and it was the Liberal tribunes, therefore, who were

to represent the popular will and speak the peoples words . This substitution had the

advantage of hiding the fact that the fragile unity of national popular discourse was

grafted onto the enduring colonial imaginary of racial, regional and social apartheid that

made the attempts to represent political antagonism as a simple conflict between the

people and the oligarchy difficult to maintain. Populist discourse had to skirt around

this issue, or else completely avoid it, which resulted in a constant tension between the

reality of socio-racial apartheid and the claims of what was to become official rhetoric.

The Liberal party finally returned to power with the election of Olaya Herrera in

1930. However, the new currents in political discourse were only to occupy center stage

with the election of his successor, Alfonso Lpez Pumarejo. Lpez was elected without

opposition from the Conservative party, which had not only failed to resolve the internal

divisions that had allowed the Liberals to achieve power in 1930 but also claimed that

the likelihood of a fair election was slim. The increasing polarization of the supporters

of the two main parties meant that the relative peace that had been established during

the years of Conservative hegemony was under threat and in certain areas the conditions

that led tola Violencia were already present. Yet Lpezs election in 1934 seemed to

usher in a new era in Colombian politics. The political rhetoric associated with his

programme of government, which was presented as the Revolucin en marcha ,

constitutes a major departure in ways of talking about the national community. It was

the first time that a governing party invoked the needs and desires of the ordinary


28/85

people, which now explicitly included peasants and workers, as a fundamental source of

legitimacy.

An examination of Lpezs ina ugural address allows us an insight into a form of

political discourse that was not quite populist in nature. It focuses openly on the

rhetorical changes taking place within Colombian political discourse, thus drawing

attention to the ways in which the more radical faction within Liberalism was self-

consciously re-inventing itself in order to appeal to subaltern groups that were

beginning to understand themselves as part of a class whose interests were

fundamentally opposed to those of the elites. Even though the elevated tone reminds us

that these words are uttered by a doctor , a member of the educated elite, the shift in

political discourses center of gravity is immediately apparent. Rather than simple

economic development and modernisation, or even national pride, it is social change

and the needs of what Lpez calls the popular masses that take center stage.

In his preamble, Lpez claims that his election represents the end of la primera etapa

de un ambicioso proceso de movilizacin intelectual de las masas populares que ha

principiado a sacudir la estructura ideolgica de la Repblica con vigor, y ha creado

una necesidad de cambio social como quizs no se sinti tan intensa en otra poca de

la vida colombiana (Lpez, p. 111). The appearance of concepts such as ideology is in

itself evidence of the inroads made by discourses of the left into contemporary political

common sense. The same goes for the revitalizationof the people as the popular

masses, no longer the co wed and passive lower orders scorned by Arango but the

proper subject of a more democratic politics. Indeed, the slow opening up of

Colombias political system is apparent in the fact that the majority are now significant

precisely because they are a majority. But rather than presenting the logic of democratic

politics as a series of conflicts and negotiations between a wide range of political


29/85

interests and identities, Lpez portrays this majority as a monolithic entity that is

representative of the countrys true being. Thus he claims that it is not just some sectors

of the population but [e]l pas entero that is conmovido por una aspiracin

revolucionaria .

Numerous anxieties and inconsistencies are apparent, however. The populist logic of

Lpezs discourse recognizes that it is no longer enough for politicians simply to make

decisions on the basis of what they think is good for the patria . Instead, they have to

identify and then embody the popular will. Yet the changes that have occurred and are

yet to come, profound though they are, are presented as originating within the political

class itself. Lpez claims that it is the Liberal government that has overseen the

intellectual mobilization of the people, thus starting the process through which the

masses supposedly emerge into national history. Even as it recognizes the legitimacy of

the popular desire for change, therefore, the speech articulates the relationship between

the people and the party in a paternalistic way.This is entirely in keeping with Lpezs

own understanding of the people, whom he once described as pueblo dcil y firme, leal

y altivo, al que se le ha prohibido hasta ahora el ejercicio de una varonil y nobilsima

inclinacin de su nimo: la poltica (Lpez, p.77). The opinions of the populist leaders,

then, were not so very different fromArangos view of the people as obedient, silent

and suffering

There is another deeply contradictory aspect to all of this, however. In spite of the

paternalism that stresses popular passivity and loyalty to the party, Lpez is concerned

to channel collective desire so that it does not get out of control. In spite of the

revolutionary rhetoric, therefore, the leaders appeal to the people is full of calls for

patience, discipline and, above all, respect for existing democratic institutions:

Y el pueblo, enterado de que no lo invitar nunca a abandonar la paz, ni a salirse de lasnormas que le dieron sus legisladores y constituyentes, no encuentra obstculo para localizar


30/85

en el Gobierno prximo las esperanzas de transformacin que otros le ofrecen vanamente conla promesa de romper las instituciones, quebrantando el sistema democrtico para sustituirlo por la dictadura de las minoras arbitrarias, y abriendo una solucin de continuidad en latradicin que ms nos enorgullece desde que las heroicas espadas de la ltima guerra civil seguardaron silenciosamente sobre el puente delWisconsin . (Lpez, p.111)

Through the reference to theWisconsin , the US warship on which the treaty that

ended the Thousand Day War was signed, Lpez tries to link contemporary popular

demands with the Liberal struggles of the past. The Liberal party makes its claim on

popular loyalty by suggesting that the cause of change is best served by an approach

which recognizes the achievements and, crucially, the legitimacy of past

legislators and delegates. The norms they produced are to be observed, and those

who would advocate a complete transformation of the political system are to be resisted

because they threaten to undermine the democratic institutions of the state. Thus while

Lpez does not mention Marxism by name in this extract he clearly has socialist

ideology in mind as a rival for the peoples affections. He therefore issues a warning:

though these groups offer profound change a real revolution one might be tempted

to say the price is the end of democracy and the dictatorship of the few. Ultimately,

then, the Revolucin en marcha reveals its reformist rather than revolutionary slant. The

people may have been recognized by the architects of the system, and invited to

participate more fully in it, but the system itself is not to be tampered with. Most

importantly of all, it is herethat Lpezs discourse veers shies away from populism

proper in so far as it stops short of attacking the reigning political order. It fails to reach

that certain point at which, in the words of Ernesto Laclau,what were requestswithin

institutions became claims addressedto institutions, and at some stage they became

claimsagainst the institutional order (Laclau 2006 p. 655).

However, populist discourse is only able to overcome the obvious heterogeneity of

the popular masses and construct an idea of the people through a relationship of


31/85

equivalence that opposes them to the oligarchy and thereby lends them their political

identity. Were the oligarchy to disappear, the category of the people would collapse

under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies. When it comes to examining the

causes of social inequality, therefore, the oligarchy is blamed for the monstrous

injustices that weigh on Colombian society: [l]as monstruosas injusticias que pesan

sobre el conjunto social colombiano no estn todas protegidas por la ley, y muchas de

ellas habran tenido remedio si no se hubiese dado una interpretacin oligrquica a

unas instituciones en cuya letra no podra haber perdurado una aberracin contra la

voluntad de la Nacin entera (Lpez, p. 113). Even here, however, the implication is

that the sufferings of the people are the result of the Conservatives perverse

manipulation of republican institutions that are fundamentally just in their inspiration.

Indeed, the populist rewriting of national history as a communitys journey towards

development, equality and a respected place in the family of nations seems full of

emancipatory potential. At the same time, however, this re-fashioning of the national

narrative connects the people to the nation as an ideal to be lived up to, as something

above and beyond the popular. Thus Lpez speaks of:

[t]odo lo que significaba haber contribuido decididamente a la libertad de cinco naciones; el

buen xito de las armas colombianas cada vez que fueron probadas, en los tiempos en que era

aquella la suprema demostracin de vitalidad nacional; y, ms tarde, el florecimientouniversitario y acadmico que asombraba a nuestros vecinos con la constante renovacin de

nuestros hombres de letras; la admiracin que causaba en el Exterior el progreso de nuestras

instituciones polticas, y hasta la forma heroica con que ellas eran defendidas o atacadas en la

tribuna, en el Parlamento o en los campos de batalla; todo esto se fue perdiendo en un largo

proceso de egosmo nacional, fomentado por gobernantes sin ambiciones que slo deseaban

resolver sus problemas internos y que no lograban acomodar su espritu a la idea de buscar


32/85

para Colombia un puesto de mayor influencia, de ms prestigio, en el concurso de las

naciones latinoamericanas.

Lpezs rhetoric suggests that national history is a fundamentally glorious narrative in

which corrupt individuals have played the role of villains. The early heroes are mythic,

aristocratic idols, impossibly noble, while the nation itself is a source of immense pride.

The mystique of the nation, therefore, is inscribed in the rhetoric of the populist

moment, as popular affect is simultaneously stimulated and nationalised. Thus the

nation here is not only as aneffect of hegemony (Beverley 1999) but a crucial tool in

establishing it.

Indeed, the discursive strategy of the Revolution on the March was to connect popular

emotion to the nation in order to avoid radical institutional change. There were some

obvious reasons for this, foremost amongst them the Liberal partys investment in the

status quo . But the rhetoric of the Revolucin en marcha was also constrained by a

distrust of the very affect on which populism thrives. The references to democracy,

discipline and order that pepper Lpezs speech may have been part of an attempt to

allay the fears both of the Conservatives and of the powerful conservative sectors within

his own party, but they represent more than a tactical ploy. Though Lpezs text claims

that there is una dcil y espontnea facilidad en la democracia colombiana para hacer

revoluciones sin violencia, sin imposicin, sin alterar el ritmo legal y la estabilidad

republicana (Lpez, p. 111).it also recognises that [n]uestra democracia se resiente

todava de un apasionamiento que, cuando interviene en la propaganda de las ideas,

las enaltece, y enaltece a quienes las profesan con vigorosa insistencia; pero que se

desva frecuentemente a buscar en los atributos humanos razones para la admiracin o

el odio frenticos . (Lpez, p. 112)


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A call to heed the dangers of extreme forms of partisan politics was understandable in

the light of the increasing levels of inter-party violence in some parts of the country. Yet

there is also a development here of nineteenth century fears of inflaming passions that

are a threat precisely because they are popular. The suggestion, hidden behind the coded

references to ideas, is that while the civilized elites are capable of managing political

rivalry, the ignorant masses are likely to turn to violence. The difference, however, is

that by the thirties these ltimas capas de la sociedad can no longer be so completely

ignored.

The Liberal project envisaged by the Revolution on the March, then, has as much to

do with taming the passions as it does with exciting them. Populist love implies the

existence of its opposite, a destructive hate for the oligarchy that needs to be

domesticated within a civilized democratic framework. The populist discourse of the

thirties and forties contends that the existing institutional order is capable of delivering a

just society, provided a Liberal government is in control of the executive. It appeals to

the people and demands that they hand over sovereignty to their leaders, thus

simultaneously invoking and neutering the proposed revolution.

Even this reformist approach, however, provoked tremendous resistance. The

Revolution on the March lasted barely two years, reaching its peak in 1936, after

which a revolt by moderates within his own party led him to announce a pause,

especially in the light of the success of this tendency in the 1937 elections to the

Chamber of Representatives, at which point Lpez offered to resign (Palacios and

Safford: 294). However, in 1936, the key year of populism in power, a series of

measures were introduced which established the legacy of this brief moment of

reformist zeal. The now legendary Agrarian Reform law was passed.17 The government

17 Increased taxation on uncultivated lands and the acceptance of possession as the determining principlewhen it came to granting title to the peasantry remodelled the relationship between the state, the


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also encouraged workers to unionize and theConfederacin de Trabajadores

Colombianos was duly set up in 1936. The same year brought significant amendments

to the constitution, as the Liberals attempted to break out of the authoritarian

straitjacket of 1886. With the abolition of the literacy requirement for voting, universal

male suffrage was finally established in Colombia. Article seven of law one of August

the fifth, 1936 stated baldly that Son ciudadanos los colombianos varones mayores de

veintin aos , replacing article fifteen of the 1886 constitution which had stipulated

that in order to be considered a citizen an individual needed some profesin, arte u

oficio, o [] ocupacin lcita u otro medio legtimo y conocido de subsistencia .18 A

more complicated amendment stated that property rights were no longer paramount but

had to be weighed against social rights and obligations.19 Furthermore, the primordial

role of the church in state education was removed. From now on it was the state, rather

than the church, that was to assume responsibility in this area.

As the Revolution on the March stalled, the discourse of populism radicalised. To

understand this, we need to consider the fate of populism after the initial failure of the

Revolution on the March. This brings us to perhaps the most mythologized figure in

twentieth century Colombian history, Jorge Elicer Gaitn. Bushnells claim that it was

Gaitn who made the term oligarchy a household word in Colombia, and a bad word at

that may be overstated but it indicates how populist currents coalesced around the

impoverished rural majority and the immensely privileged landowning class. While not quite being ableto cast itself as the defender of the dispossessed, the state had established its role as mediator in ruraldisputes and as final arbiter when it came to adjudicating between conflicting claims to agricultural land.18 Though it had been enacted for the first time in the 1850s, the bill was swiftly rescinded (Bushnell, p.189).19 Article ten therefore states that Se garantizan la propiedad privada y los dems derechos adquiridoscon justo ttulo, con arreglo a las leyes civiles, por personas naturales o jurdicas, los cuales no pueden serdesconocidos ni vulnerados por leyes posteriores. Cuando de la aplicacin de una ley expedida pormotivos de utilidad pblica o inters social, resultaren en conflicto los derechos de particulares con lanecesidad reconocida por la misma ley, el inters privado deber ceder al inters pblico o social.

La propiedad es una funcin social que implica obligaciones.Por motivos de utilidad pblica o de inters social definidos por el legislador, podr haber expropiacin,mediante sentencia judicial e indemnizacin previa.


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figure of the Liberalcaudillo (Bushnell, p. 198). As we mentioned earlier, Gaitn, the

son of the owner of a second hand bookshop in Bogot, first came to political

prominence in the aftermath of the infamous massacre of striking workers in 1928.

After his election to the Chamber of Representatives in March 1929, his investigation of

the events in Cinaga and subsequent passionate interventions on the subject in the

Chamber of Representatives gained him a significant following amongst the radical

sectors of the Liberal Party.

Gaitns ideas are perhaps most succinctly resumed in El pas poltico y el pas

nacional . By 1945, when this speech was delivered in the Chamber of Representatives,

Lpez Pumarejo was about to resign from his second presidency in the wake of an

attempted coup. Within a year, the Conservatives would be back in power. In less than

three, Gaitn would be dead and La Violencia would be under way. At this point,

however, the populist agenda seemed to be once more in the ascendant. Gaitanista

discourse is important because it claims that the Liberal political class is as culpable in

the failure of the nation as the Conservatives. It seeks to undo the basic antagonism

between the parties, the unthinking and irrational allegiances that establish the divide

between red and blue as a hereditary passion rather than a programmatic divide.

In El pas poltico y el pas nacional the split between the people and an ol igarchy

whose lack of vision and selfishness are supposedly responsible for the nations ills is

expressed very clearly. The passion that was missing in Lpez Pumarejos attenuated

form of populist discourse returns here as Gaitn launches a coruscating assault on the

political class. The speech, however, initially focuses on the Liberal leaders concerns

about the direction being taken by the national project. Setting out the problems that

afflict Colombia at the end of the Second World War, Gaitn adopts the uncontroversial

position that modernizing development is the key to prosperity. However, the distinctive


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themes of the speech begin to emerge with the suggestion that before real progress can

be made another more pressing issue has to be dealt with. This is the problem of the

political culture that is debilitating the nation.

Gaitns famous division between the political and the national moves boldly in

the direction of the national popular by privileging the nation, that is to say, the

people, over politics, the corrupt politicians who fight to control the state . Those who

make up the national country want jobs, better living standards, education and health

care, whereas the political country, made up of a parasitic oligarchy, has no other goal

than to perpetuate itself in power. Politics here connotes politiquera , the pursuit of

power and influence rather than concrete policy goals.20 Thus while the people

supposedly have a collective agenda that focuses on sus problemas econmicos, en sus

problemas sociales, en el enriquecimiento de la agricultura, en la bondad de los

campos, en la defensa del parto de sus mujeres, en la curacin de la sfilis, en la lucha

contra el alcoholismo, en la destruccin de los parsitos, en la campaa contra del

paludismo, en la defensa del hombre y la grandeza de Colombia que se asientan sobre

la salud, la inteligencia y la capacidad del colombiano , the other group, the political

class no piensa en esas cosas [] tiene como razn vital de su actividad, de su pasin,

de su energa, los votos ms o los votos menos; la firma de fulano o el escamoteo de la

de zutano, la habilidad salvadora de un fraude, la promesa de una embajada, el halago

del contrato, en una palabra el solo y simple juego de la mecnica poltica que todo lo

acapara ! The Liberal leader ends this part of his sp eech by saying that Colombia is

actually two countries: [e]n Colombia hay dos pases: el pas poltico que piensa en

sus empleos, en su mecnica y en su poder, y el pas nacional que piensa en su trabajo,

en su salud, en su cultura, desatendidos por el pas poltico (Gaitan p.162) The

20 A term much used in recent Colombian politics, but with a long pedigree stretching back to thenineteenth century. Laureano used it frequently when disparaging his opponents.


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implication is that one of these must be destroyed if the nation is to truly come to its

own.

This antagonism runs right through society dividing it into two warring camps. Gaitn

develops his argument by claiming that the system of government that pertains in

Colombia is oligarchic, a form of political control that is not only el dominio de la

plutocracia but best defined as la concentracin del poder total en un pequeo grupo

que labora para sus propios intereses, a espaldas del resto de la humanidad (Gaitn

163). In a coruscating assault both on the privileges of the elites and on the practices of

many of those listening to him in the chamber, he treats his audience to a satirical sketch

of the contemporary political scene, which he divided into a number of political types.

The first category is made up of the political bosses, in turn subdivided into those who

lust for power and those who hunger after wealth, unos que no quieren sino el dominio,

el IMPERIUM en el sentido romano de la palabra, que su voz sea la voz del amo sin la

cual no se puede mover ninguna de las actividades colombianas, and others who

aspiran a que todas las riquezas, la especulacin, los contratos, los negocios, sean

para la camarilla afortunada (Gai tn 163) The middle-men follow, intelligent men

with secretarys souls ( almas de secretario ), who are well aware that they have no

vocation for the service of the people and who dedicate themselves instead to fawning

on the party leaders ( [s]aben que no han logrado por s mismos la aptitud de vivir para

su pueblo; reducen todo a rendir pleitesa a quienes los dirigen ). In third place come

the tentacles of the political machine, the fixers who insinuate themselves into every

nook and cranny of political life and make surethat the electoral scam is arranged to

their masters benefit ( los brazos que penetr[a]n a todos los lugares, que [van] desde

el ambiente municipal al barrio, a la asamblea, al comit; que atiendan al tinglado

electoral para beneficio del pas poltico , Gaitn 164). In return they will be treated


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with exaggerated and undeserved respect. Part of their reward will be to be accorded the

title doctor, though they will not have earned it ( [n]o tendrn ttulo pero sern

doctores Gaitn 164).

The entirety of this corrupt political establishment is described as having turned its

back on the nation. It now situates itself de espalda a los intereses de la nacionalidad .

Here, nationhood resides squarely in the people. In fact, the people are the nation, as

this term designatesall of those who are moved by idealism ( grandes ideales ) or feel

passion for things that have historic perspective ( perspectiva histrica ), those who

understand that el hombre no se aferra con empeo sino a sus ideas, sus amores, su

hogar, su pedazo de tierra; a sus tumbas y sus escuelas, a aquello que le da razn a su

vida (Gaitn 163 /4). The monolithic, idealized and ultimately abstract nature of this

people -nation stands out, along with the fact that the realization of the populist utopia

is blocked by an enemy that under this scheme can only be thought of as non-national.

Populism, in other words, claims the nation against its enemies, whom it represents as

renegades.

Within this populist nationalism is that the people are not a cultural unit but a political

one. Popular identity is constituted on the one hand by a monolithic popular will

understood here as a desire for progress and the struggle against a common enemy.

The question of exactly what constitutes popular identity, however, remains a problem

because even within gaitanismo the modernizingand whitening paradigm of

contemporary common sense is still clearly present. Although members of his own

party called him el negro Gaitn, a nickname that used race to refer to Gaitns

humble origins (hewas also known by the elite sections of his own party as The

Madman and The Idiot), the Liberal caudillo was not about to use this social identity

to make political capital (unlike Hugo Chvez today, for example, who openly states


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that he is indio y negro ). Gaitn may famously have identified himself as the

incarnation of people ( Yo no soy un hombre; soy un pueblo ) but he had no intention of

identifying himself with the culture of the people. He was thoroughly steeped in the

ideology that saw popular customs and practices as backward. As mayor of Bogot he

banned the wearing by municipal employees of theruana , the woolen poncho of the

peasantry, andalpargatas , the rough sandals worn by the poor. Even for the arch

populist Gaitn, it seems, development and progress were at odds with the cultural

practices of the pueblo . Even though political capital could potentially have been

accrued by appropriating these humble forms of dress as symbols of the people, and

indeed of the nation, the populist leader remains aloof, culturally on the side of the

elites. The symbolic capital of thecaudillo , which resides partly in his ability to speak

to the elites in their own language, also separates him from those to whom he referred as

the forgotten people of Colombia.

Fear and Love: Populism Meets the Colonial Imaginary

A description of the 1936 May Day demonstrations in Bogot by the Liberal writer

and journalist Armando Solano, one of the more radical Liberals of his day, illustrates

the ambiguities of the relationship between educatedlopistas and the pueblo that they

claimed to represent.21 His treatment of the spectacle of thousands of people marching

through the Plaza Bolvar in Bogot on May Day 1936, with its barely disguised

mixture of fascination and disquiet, brings to mind both the hysterical enthusiasm

elicited by the Nazi gatherings at Nuremburg and the near panic caused amongst the

elites by the sight of popular mobilization, reminiscent of the grande peur described by

21 Author of La melancola de la raza indgena and founder of the influential journalSbado .


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nineteenth century mass psychologists. Emotion, politically advantageous when

tempered by discipline but perilous when uncontrolled, provides the central axis along

which Solano organizes his account. Thus he not only describes the tumultuous scenes

he witnessed but reflects on his own feelings in the face of this outpouring of politically

inflected affect.

Having set the tone by telling us that Colombias young democracy is profundamente

emotiva y emocionada , Solano reinforces this sense of deep emotional commitment so

that a breathless sense of awe in the face of unfettered populist passion emerges. At the

same time, however, he also attempts to position himself, and by implication his

readers, as a thinking man, as a rational rather than an emotional subject. This is partly

an attack on Conservative obscurantism but it also foregrounds the problems posed by

the affect that pervades the contemporary political world.

From the outset it is clearly a contradictory approach. As he establishes what is to be

understood as the overall meaning of the scene, Solano claims that [a]sistimos a uno de

los ms bellos espectculos que le sea dado contemplar al patriota y el hombre de

pensamiento .22 Emotion therefore sneaks in at the very beginning as our thinking

subject is also a (sentimental) patriot. In any case, the sheer theatricality of the report

undermines any pretensions of cool rationality as it goes on to describe [e]se oleaje

humano, apretado, palpitante, vibrante, loco de entusiasmo, que desfil frente al

presidente Lpez aclamndolo con delirio . Indeed, Solano expressly gives up on the

attempt to capture the scene in words. Rather, he feels that he is engaged in a doomed

attempt to represent the ultimately indescribable spectacle of populist rapture:

Cmo daramos idea justa, representacin grfica y total, de la efusin, de la llama, del

impulso, de la vitalidad desbordante, del ro caudaloso que pasaba lentamente, sonoramente,22 El Tiempo , 3rd of May, 1936, p. 4.


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y no conclua de pasar, trepidante con el clamor glorioso que se alzaba como un trueno

inextinguible que estuviese creando ms anchos horizontes para dilatarse y resonar? No, no es

posible y debemos renunciar a tal empeo.

As he himself begins to feel affected, the author finds t his fervour both attractive

and troubling. He sees its potential to overflow the approved channels and transform

itself into something more threatening, and he therefore feels the need to constantly

reassure himself, and his readers, by underlining the discipline of this human tide:

Qu magnfica, qu formidable, qu ilusionadora manifestacin de potencia, de capacidad, de

fuero y de autodominio. La multitud que desfil para expresarle su apoyo al gobierno y para

exhibir la fuerza indestructible que se opone a la reaccin era toda Bogot, dominaba la

situacin, no hubo mulo ni resistencia posible, hubiera hecho de la ciudad confusa y sumisa,

todo lo que quisiera.

The fact that the city was momentarily at the crowds mercy should not concern us, he

implies, as calm and discipline prevailed. But as Solano begins to describe the various

Documents

Populist Passions