Across the Americas

Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia
Steven Dudley, Routledge, 2004, 253 pp.

The mid-1980s birth of the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP), a new political party in Colombia, brought a fresh wind of hope to the violence-battered country. In those days the largest guerrilla organization, the FARC, was in peace talks with the administration of President Belisario Betancur. It appeared that the insurgency might be persuaded to demobilize an the long stranglehold of the Conservative and Liberal parties might eventually be broken. In pueblos and in the cities, the yellow-and-green UP flag fluttered over exuberant rallies. “The UP caught on in a way that surprised everyone,” UP propaganda chief Álvaro Salazar later remembered, “including me.”

Then the killings began. UP militants were gunned down, slain in bombings. However, party members refused to give up. In 1986 congressional and local elections, UP candidates won 24 seats as provincial deputies and 275 as representatives to municipal councils—as well as three seats in the national senate and four as congressional representatives. In presidential elections that year, the UP’s candidate, Jaime Pardo Leal, received over 325,000 votes, more than any “progressive” had ever attained in Colombia.

But the killings continued. Right-wing paramilitaries, fueled by drug trafficking and in cooperation with Colombia’s security forces, assassinated some 500 UP members in the party’s first two years of existence. One of the newly elected UP senators, Pedro Nel Jiménez, was soon a victim. In October 1987 Jaime Pardo Leal was assassinated as he was taking his family on a vacation trip. The UP’s next presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo, was killed a few months before the 1990 elections.

By now some 4,000 UP leaders and members have been assassinated in what the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has appropriately called a political genocide. Recently two UP survivors sat in our living room here in Chicago, and I asked them how many survivors there actually are. They looked at each other, held up fingers and counted: of UP members who had been elected to some level of public office, they could think of only three who were still alive besides themselves.

It’s a sobering tale, one that needs to be told and puzzled over. The UP is actually only one of several alternative parties that have emerged in Colombia since the mid-twentieth century, and in each case their leaders have been slain or silenced. Why?

Dudley’s book, which is based on a master’s thesis he wrote while filing reports for the Washington Post and National Public Radio in Colombia in the late 1990s, seeks to dig out the complicated roots of the UP. This leads him into tangled accounts of the FARC, drug trafficking and paramilitarism. He has many compelling stories to tell, and his research is wide-ranging.

Perhaps it’s an anxiety to really understand, to be the one who uncovers the secret dynamic behind Colombia’s entrenched violence, that trips him up in this earnest book. While he gives many examples of the UP’s independence from the FARC, he ends up essentially assigning the FARC credit for the party’s existence and even blame for the genocide. Jacket copy on the book says the UP was established by the FARC, and publicity for a recent book-promotion event in Chicago blithely defined the UP as “a sector of FARC guerrillas that disarmed.”

The reality is more complicated, as my UP survivor friends tell me gently. In those early years of hope, the UP attracted thousands of people seeking fresh political vision—people who, like my friends, never were members of the FARC and always upheld peaceful means of social change. Yet they were and are the victims of the state-sponsored paramilitaries; the few demobilized guerrillas who had joined the UP in the early days quickly returned to their comrades when things got too dangerous for them in the cities.

Right-wing forces still use the “guerrilla” label as a justification for their assassinations. A UP leader, Carlos Bernal, was murdered with his protective escort in Cúcuta as recently as April 1, 2004.

My UP friends’ fragile safety, in short, is further threatened by this book and the careless statements it has engendered.

Walking Ghosts is an anxious book that tries to do journalism, history and political analysis all at once. Probably it’s just too soon to produce a proper historical treatment of the UP. But it’s past time to face the hard work of reconstructing Colombia, building a true democracy where voices for peaceful change will not be silenced.

This review was written by Ruth Goring for The Colombia Observatory