Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

in lifestyle, not to mention expected living standards, a forbidding obstacle. Few outside experts actually lived among the peasantry, though many had fairly good contacts in the countryside, including, as usual, the omnipresent researchers of various international organizations connected with the United Nations.

Most remote of all were those foreigners who relied for their knowledge of the Latin American countryside on the local intellectual left or the international press. The one, as so often, tended to confuse political agitation and Fidelista hope with information, the other relied on what reached its bureau chiefs in the capital city. Thus, when I first went to South America the major ‘peasant’ story, insofar as there was one, was about the Peasant Leagues in Brazil, a movement established in 1955 under the leadership of Francisco Juliao, a lawyer and local politician from the northeast, who had attracted the attention of US journalists by expressions of support for Fidel Castro and Mao. (I met him ten years later, a small, sad, disoriented exile from the Brazilian military regime, living under the protection of the dramatic central European ideologue Ivan Illich in Cuernavaca, Mexico.) A few hours at their offices in Rio in late 1962 showed that the movement had little national presence, and that it was clearly already past its peak. On the other hand, the two major South American peasant or rural upheavals which no observer with open eyes could fail to discover within a few days of arriving in their countries were virtually undocumented, and indeed virtually unknown to the outside world at the end of 1962. These were the great peasant movements in highland and frontier Peru and the ‘state of disorganization, civil war and local anarchy’ into which Colombia had fallen since the implosion of what had been, in effect, a potential social revolution by spontaneous combustion set off, in 1948, by the assassination of a nationally famous tribune of the people, Jorge Eliezer Gaitan.¹

And yet, these things were not always utterly remote from the outside world. The vast movement of peasant land occupations was at its height in Cuzco, where even tourists who did not read local newspapers could, when walking round the Inca blocks in the cold thin air of the highland evenings, observe the endless, silent columns of Indian men and women outside the offices of the Peasant Federation. The most dramatic case of a successful peasant revolt at the time, in the valleys of La Convencion, occurred downriver from the marvels of Macchu Picchu, known to all tourists in South America even then. Only a few dozen kilometres’ train ride from the great Inca site to the end of the railway line and a few more hours on the back of a truck took one to the provincial capital, Quillabamba. I wrote one of the first outside accounts of it. For a historian who kept his eyes open, especially a social historian, even these first, almost casual impressions were a sudden revelation, rather like the sight of the treasure-room in the Bogota sGold Museum for my eight-year-old son, when I took him there several years later. How could one not explore this unknown but historically familiar planet? My conversion was completed, a week or two later, among the endless slopes of stalls manned by squat, heavy-braided, bowler-hatted Aymara peasant women in the enormous street-markets of Bolivia. Unable to go to Potosi, I spent Christmas with another temporary loner, a French UN expert on village development, mainly in a hotel bar in La Paz. We drank and he talked, endlessly, passionately, the way a man back from a spell in the cold villages of the Altiplano unloads his experience on the only available willing listener. It was an intellectually and alcoholically rewarding Christmas, though otherwise short on the holiday spirit.

The New Year of 1963 after that Christmas I spent in Bogota. Colombia was a country of whose very existence hardly anyone outside Latin America seemed to be aware. This was my second great discovery. On paper a model of representative two-party constitutional democracy, almost completely immune to military coups and dictatorship in practice, after 1948 it became the killing field of South America. At this period Colombia reached a crude rate of homicide of over fifty per 100,000, although even this pales beside the Colombian zeal for killing at the end of the twentieth century. ² The browning press cuttings I collected from the local newspapers then are before me as I write. They familiarized me with the term genocidio (genocide), which Colombian journalists used to describe the small massacres in farm settlements and of bus passengers – sixteen dead here, eighteen there, twenty-four somewhere else. Who were the killers and the killed? ‘A spokesman of the war ministry said … no categorical information about the perpetrators could be given, because the districts (veredas) of that zone [of Santander] were pretty regularly affected by a series of ‘‘vendettas’’ between the partisans of traditional political affiliations,’ namely the Liberal and Conservative parties into one of which, as readers of Garcia Marquez know, every Colombian baby belonged by family and local loyalty. The wave of civil war known as La Violencia that had begun in 1948, long officially ended, had still killed almost 19,000 persons in that ‘quiet year’. Colombia was, and continues to be, proof that gradual reform in the framework of liberal democracy is not the only, or even the most plausible, alternative to social and political revolutions, including the ones that fail or are aborted. I discovered a country in which the failure to make a social revolution had made violence the constant, universal, omnipresent core of public life.

What exactly the Violencia was or had been about was far from clear, although I was lucky enough to arrive just at the time when the first major study of it was coming out, to one of whose authors, my friend the sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, I owe my first introduction to Colombian problems.³ I might have paid more attention at the time to the fact that the chief student of the Violencia was a Catholic Monsignor, and that some pioneer research on its social fallout had just been published by a spectacularly handsome young priest from one of the country’s founding clans, a great breaker of hearts, it was said, among young women of the oligarchy, Father Camilo Torres. It was not an accident that the conference of Latin American bishops which initiated the socially radical Theology of Liberation a few years later was held in the hilly Colombian city of Medellin, then still known for entrepreneurs in textiles and not yet in drugs. I had some conversations with Camilo and, to judge by my notes at the time, took his arguments very seriously, but he was still a long way from the social radicalism that led him three years later to join the new Fidelista guerrillas of the Army of National Liberation which still survives.

Amid the Violencia the Communist Party had formed ‘armed selfdefence’ zones or ‘independent republics’, as places of refuge for peasants who wanted or had to stay out of the way of the Conservative, or sometimes also the Liberal bands of killers. Eventually they became the bases of the formidable guerrilla movement of the FARC (Armed Forces of the Colombian Revolution). The best-known ‘liberated’ areas of this kind, Tequendama and Sumapaz, were surprisingly close to Bogota sas the crow flies, but, being mountain country, a long and difficult way by horse and mule. Viota, a district of coffee haciendas expropriated by the peasants in the reforming 1930s, and from which the landowners had withdrawn, did not need to fight at all. Even the soldiers kept away, while it ran all its affairs under the eye of the political cadre sent there by the Party, a former brewery worker, and sold its coffee peacefully on the world market through the usual traders. The mountains of Sumapaz, frontier terrain for free men and women, were under the rule of a home-grown rural leader, one of those rare peasant talents who escaped the fate patronized by the poet Gray in his famous elegy, that of being ‘some mute inglorious Milton

… some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood’. For Juan de la Cruz Varela was far from mute or peaceable. In the course of his varied career as chief of Sumapaz, he was prominent as a Liberal, follower of Gaitan, communist, head of his own agrarian movement and Revolutionary Liberal, but always firmly on the side of the people. Discovered by one of those wonderful village teachers who were the real agents of emancipation for most of the human race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he had become both a reader and practical thinker. He acquired his political education from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, which he carried with him everywhere, marking the passages which seemed to him particularly apposite to his own or the political situation of the time. My friend Rocio Londono, who worked on his biography during her spell of research at Birkbeck College, inherited his copy of the book from him with the rest of his papers. He acquired his Marxism, or what there was of it, rather later via the writings of a now forgotten English clerical enthusiast for the USSR, the late Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury (inevitably confused by everyone abroad with the Archbishop), which he appears to have got from Colombian communists, whose belief in agrarian revolution appealed to him. Long accepted as a person of power and influence, whose region was beyond the reach of government troops, he sat for it in Congress. Sumapaz remained beyond the reach of the capital even after his death, honoured – according to Rocio who attended the funeral – by a display of his armed horsemen. The first negotiations for an armistice between the Colombian government and the