The statistics and stories of violence in Colombia make chilling reading:
millions killed over the life of the country
the largest national displacement of a citizenry in history
the ongoing kidnapping, murder, and “disappearance” of activists and journalists; and
levels of domestic and street violence that both color and transcend the conflict
Mass killings in what is now Colombia began with the Spanish state’s attacks on the Muisca people in 1595. The Catholic Church collaborated: it sought the destruction of alternative religious materials and customs, with information obtained through torture, and further punishment meted out via the Inquisition. Ever since, human devastation has taken so many forms, and in so many, often isolated, parts of the country, that even with the increasingly systematic collection of data, judicial and medical statisticians, the police, and peace activists all doubt the reliability of the numbers they produce, because these tend to neglect rural violence.
Of the quarter-of-a-million people killed by firearms worldwide in 2016, half perished in the Americas, with Colombia a leading contributor. South America shows very significant statistical variations. The northern part, notably Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela, has higher rates of homicide than the southern cone, and the highest in the world after Southern Africa and Central America. Colombia now averages 30.8 murders per 100,000 people, whereas the figure is 7.9 for Uruguay and 3.1 for Chile. Historical variation also plays its part—the number of killings in Colombia was greatest during the fever pitch of the conflict, the 1950s and 1990s. It decreased with the introduction of limited hours of alcohol sales, but was spurred on again by contests over cocaine production and distribution (Miller, Citation2020).
The first official Colombian murder statistics, from 1938, counted sixteen murders per hundred thousand residents. The ratio increased in the 1950s and hovered between twenty and thirty until a dramatic hike in the 1980s, from forty deaths per hundred thousand people to eighty; by 2015, it had fallen to seventeen, but that was still almost double the level considered to be endemic. Well over two hundred thousand people have been killed and almost eight million displaced in ‘the conflict’ since the 1960s—but the state only began systematic collection of this data in 1985, and 85% of murders probably elude human-rights discourse. They approach warlike figures, especially with three thousand people a year kidnapped at the turn of the century and an annual average between 1990 and 2010 of 1,800 (Miller, Citation2020).
Beyond those numbers and that history, there are philosophical, ethnographic, religious, and cultural stories to be told that both incarnate and resist the horror.
We are fortunate that a distinguished group of Colombian scholars consented to contribute to this dossier on the history of the conflict. They did so just before widespread state and paramilitary violence broke out across the country, almost in sync with the spread of the Covid-19 syndemic (Miller, Citation2021). It continues today as these forces endeavor to suppress a new spirit of progressive activism, which for the first time has unharnessed their politics from the shame of guerrilla violence, yet elicits an identical response from a government and its right-wing allies as did the old Marxism.
References
- Miller, T. (2020). The Persistence of Violence. Rutgers University Press.
- Miller, T. (2021). A COVID Charter, a Better World. Rutgers University Press.