Across the Americas

Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia
Michael Taussig, The New Press, 2003, 208 pp.

The inimitable Michael Taussig, professor of anthropology at Columbia University (New York), has been doing fieldwork in Colombia since 1969. In these essays he bends his ironic eye (ironic but also fascinated, bewildered, and loving) on the effects of paramilitary occupation of a town near Cali.

Limpieza means “cleansing”; like many other perfectly good Spanish words it has been—ironically!—stained by wartime use. It has come to mean social cleansing: the right-wing paramilitaries’ project of getting rid of petty crime, gangs, drug abuse, and begging in cities and towns by murdering the offenders.

In previous years Taussig had spent periods of time workin and living in the nameless town that is his subject. The paramilitaries planted themselves there in February 2001, and he returned in May of that year to see what their presence meant. In the process of recounting his observations and experiences, he delves into history (e.g., major landowners assembled “private police” to deal with cattle rustlers in that region as far back as the 1930s), tells innumerable stories told to him by local residents, draws on his previous fieldwork, reflects rather skeptically on diary keeping and the whole enterprise of anthropological research.

Above all, he asks questions.

A key theme of Taussig’s musings is what law means in Colombia. There “the universe of right and wrong is territorialized by a grid of laws, and each law is numbered.” New laws are generated regularly. Yet victims of lawbreaking often avoid telling the police. After E.’s son was stabbed viciously, he filed no charges. “You make enemies,” he explained. “With the denunciation, the person you accused wants revenge and [does] even worse to you . . . What’s more, if you go to the police, suddenly you find you’re being held on suspicion of something and have to pay to get out of it.”

Before arriving, the paras sent warnings to the church and the authorities of the town: The town needs to get 300 coffins ready. Heads up! The priest better be ready to work overtime.

Many of the stories Taussig collects are stories of deaths: a man knifed in a pool hall, a man shot at a bus stop, bodies found “trussed with barbed wire in the trunk of a car,” bodies by the river bridge. The paras or pistoleros ride around town on motorbikes with a list; in a crowded place they call out your name from the list, and when you turn around in response you are shot dead. The townspeople tell these stories eagerly, sometimes approvingly—unless the victim is their own relative.

Taussig’s diary is beautifully written and deeply sad—appropriate for the wild beauty and wrenching irony that is Colombia.

This review was written by Ruth Goring for The Colombia Observatory