Contentious Republicans

Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Bibliographic Data

ID2839212
AuthorsW John Green (Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington, DC; and University of South Carolina–Columbia, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume85
Issue2
Pages348-349
Publication date2005-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-85-2-348
OpenAlexW2102086511
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Colombianists are often struck (or at least I am) by a jarring contradiction between Colombia’s long history of democratic and popular mobilization and the somewhat condescending image of “false democracy” generated by a more recent and journalistic focus. James Sanders’s excellent new book once again drives home this recurring sense of discontinuity. He dives into the popular politics of the nineteenth-century Cauca Valley, a key region where many of the nation’s pivotal political struggles were won or lost. In the process, he exposes the complexity of Colombia’s recurring subaltern mobilizations, as well as the multiple interpretations and meanings of republicanism.Offering a welcome antidote to the ungrounded truism that popular participation in Colombia’s nineteenth-century wars and electoral struggles was devoid of ideological motivation, Sanders explores the various republican discourses of the region’s popular classes. Migrants from Antioquia moving into Cauca from the north stressed liberty and independence, reflecting their smallholder interests. The popular conservatism of Indian villagers privileged the concept of fraternity, with an eye to protecting their communal landholdings. And finally, the popular liberalism espoused by the Cauca Valley’s Afro-Colombian residents emphasized equality, the “most troublesome element” of liberalism for the elites (p. 43). Sanders documents how Colombians of the subaltern classes “dramatically succeeded in creating a political culture in the Atlantic revolutionary tradition.” Whether examined in terms of voting or popular participation in military campaigns, these political experiences were as vibrant and democratic as any found in contemporary North America or northern Europe and could not be “dismissed as hollow facades masking corrupt oligarchies that ruled omnipotently” (p. 17). Making a definitive republican break with the corporatist identities of the colonial period, all Colombians asserted their new status as citizens. They forced elites of both major parties to cut deals and take their popular demands into account.Just as important, Sanders highlights the ever-present tug-of-war at the heart of Colombian politics, the waxing and waning conflict between those who want a full-fledged democracy and those who want to roll back, control, and suppress popular participation. The triumph of the restrictive and centralized 1886 constitution that forbade all permanent subaltern political associations was especially injurious to the dynamism of nineteenth-century politics in the Cauca Valley. What is more, Sanders demonstrates that there is nothing new in the bag of tricks employed today by those who would rule without consent. The old patterns include closing off legal and institutional openings to restrict popular access, creating dysfunctional mechanisms that discourage participation, warping successful popular efforts with fraud, and finally, resorting to overt violent repression when all else fails.Sanders also offers enlightening insight into the present moment of pessimism laced with expectation. He shows that, unlike some of its less fortunate neighbors in the region, Colombia has traditions of democratic participation with such deep roots that when the current manifestation of violencia and repressive dirty war does eventually subside, the nation will have a foundation on which to build a new democratic society. This is, however, the point at which Sanders leaves the final implications of his study unstated, and he fails to push his analysis through to the obvious and logical end point of his story. Perhaps giving in to an overly scrupulous impulse to avoid overreaching in his conclusions, he neglects the clear continuity between his nineteenth-century popular liberals and their twentieth-century descendents. Bringing his account to a close with the elite “Regeneration” at the end of the nineteenth century and the subsequent repression of popular politics, Sanders remains curiously silent regarding the true high-water mark of Colombian popular mobilization in the 1930s and 1940s, in the interconnected liberal movements of Alfonso López Pumarejo (the so-called Revolución en Marcha) and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (known to history as Gaitanismo). Reiterating many of the same themes as his Cauca subalterns, popular elements of the Liberal Party carried them to new orders of magnitude in the first half of the twentieth century, as Colombians entered the epoch of true mass politics. Such a nod would only have strengthened an already powerful argument.Sanders has, nevertheless, written a clear, extremely well-researched, and appealing book that undergraduates will find quite manageable. It is essential reading for all students of nineteenth-century Latin American politics, popular mobilization, and popular discourse

Democracy · Fraternity · Ideology · Independence (probability theory) · Liberalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Popular sovereignty · Sociology · Subaltern · Gender Studies · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law

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