Evil Hour in Colombia [Paperback]

Forrest Hylton (Author), Gonzalo Sánchez (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2006

In the English-speaking world, Colombia is the least understood of Latin American countries. Its human tragedy is generally ignored or exploited for political ends. In this work, Forrest Hylton, who lives and works in Colombia, explores its history of 150 years of political conflict, characterized by radical-popular mobilization and reactionary repression.

Evil Hour in Colombia shows how patterns of political conflict, from the mid-nineteenth century to today's guerilla narco-traffickers and paramilitaries, explain the wear currently destroying Colombian lives, property, communities and territory. In doing so, it traces how Colombia's "coffee capitalism" gave way to the cattle and cocaine republic of the 1980s, and how land, wealth, and political power have been steadily accumulated by the light-skinned top of the social pyramid through a brutal combination of terror, expropriation, and exploitation.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Colombia's long-drawn-out internal strife between guerrillas, paramilitaries and the state is confusing to many outsiders. The numerous groups fighting for land and power, combined with the presence of powerful narco-traffickers, have created an environment of violent chaos and political conflict. Hylton, a researcher in history at New York University, helps make sense of this disorder in his detailed and concise history of Colombia over the last 150 years. In this short book, he manages to create a full picture of Colombian history and the violence that marks it. At a quick, consistent pace, the book moves through the early causes of radical mobilization in the mid-19th century and the system of repression that emerged in response. Hylton examines the fractured social and political circumstances that spawned the extremist groups as well as the forces, such as the rise of coffee exports after 1880, that have fueled them. He also examines the major role the United States has played in Colombia's history, and how the "war on drugs" was often executed with Washington's broader political and economic goals in mind. By the end of this well-researched book, Hylton clarifies Colombia's endemic violence as a social and political phenomenon. (Nov.)
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Review

As Forrest Hylton argues, the view that violence is inherent to Colombian society ignores...the country's...history of democratic reform. --James Sanders, London Review of Books

A major theme of Hylton's book is to bring ethnicity as well as class into the account of the historical and contemporary violence in Colombia. --Jenny Pearce, Journal of Latin American Studies

Colombia’s war-without-end has been sustained by US intervention and subsidized by our own ignorance and indifference to the fate of this great country. Evil Hour in Colombia is a brilliant investigation of a complex and tragic history, as well as an eloquent indictment of Washington’s policies.

(Mike Davis )

A corrective to those servants of empire who would have us believe that the main threat facing Latin America today is left-wing populism, Forrest Hylton’s Evil Hour in Colombia describes in alarming detail the real danger to the region: the spread of paramilitarism, which in Colombia has grown beyond its rural death-squads roots to graft itself into the highest branches of government, crime, and society. This book is an exacting portrait of the face of American ‘hard power’ in the Andes, a must read for anyone interested in what awaits the rest of the world if Washington’s power remains unchecked.

(Greg Grandin )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 174 pages
• Publisher: Verso; 1 edition (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844675513
• ISBN-13: 978-1844675517
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,264,251 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Something Different About Colombia, April 5, 2007

By 

T. Ballve "Teo Ballvé" (Bogotá, Colombia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evil Hour in Colombia (Paperback)

As someone who lives in Colombia, I've spent countless conversations with friends and colleagues talking about this country's civil war. The conversation often turns to whether there will ever be a peaceful end to this nightmare of the longest running civil war in the Western Hemisphere. In trying to find an "out," the intellectual exercise inevitably evolves into a discussion about the "true" origins of the war. Why this war? Why this country?

With this excellent book, I feel like I've come as close as possible to "definitive" answers. The epigraph to Chapter 3, quoting Eric Hobsbawm, briefly sums part of the argument convincingly laid out by Hylton, as to the sources of the war: "I discovered a country (Colombia) in which the failure to make a social revolution had made violence the constant, universal, and omnipresent core of public life." The other part of Hylton's argument explains why "social revolution" in Colombia stumbled, or rather (to continue the metaphor) he describes that it didn't stumble as much as it was tripped.

The author skillfully traces how this caused a violent pendulum swing in Colombian history. In the Introduction, Hylton writes, "One effect of the long-term use of political terror in Colombia and elsewhere has been to erase the memory of the political alternatives to which terror responded." Indeed, one of the most compelling elements of the book is that it rescues from oblivion the recurring moments in the country's history marked by radical-popular mobilization and the consequent--if, sometimes limited--reforms. These impressive steps forward were violently crushed by reactionary forces, including large landowners, bankers, the Church, security forces, paramilitaries and conservatives in politics to name a few, taking the country several steps back.

Hylton also highlights the emergence of the country's guerrilla groups, and what he calls the "progressive hypertrophy of armed Left insurgencies." While examining the evolution of these groups to their now deteriorated political legitimacy, he does not shy away from the treacherous role they continue to play in the conflict. His characterization of today's armed Left is certainly not a romantic one.

Without leaving the reader pinballing to and fro throughout history, Hylton successfully manages to show how the current form of the conflict bears uncanny resemblance to those of the past. For instance, if the coffee boom fueled a conservative offensive to accumulate land, power and wealth in the past; today, the cocaine explosion serves a similar purpose, with similarly tragic results.


-Teo Ballvé is an editor at the North Ameriacn Congress on Latin America (NACLA), publisher of the most widely read English-language publication on Latin American affairs.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Colombia in the Crosshsairs, January 21, 2007

By 

Lesley Gill "Lesley Gill" (Washing, D.C.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Evil Hour in Colombia (Paperback)

Evil Hour in Colombia unravels the complicated dynamic of Colombia's decades long civil war, and it is must reading for anyone interested in understanding the violent social and political landscape of this war-torn country. Speared headed by newly rich drug lords and their paramilitary henchmen, Colombia has experienced a massive counter-agrarian reform, and it has the second largest internally displaced population in the world. Moreover, an impunity-powered campaign of terror against trade unionists, human rights activists, journalists, and peasant, indigenous and Afro-Colombian leaders have left thousands dead and the perpetrators -mostly among the right-wing security forces and allied government security forces--free to continue terrorizing and dispossessing innocent people. The book demonstrates how, in recent years, the right-wing government of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, flush with massive infusions of U.S. military assistance and support from the Bush administration, has transformed the country into a model counterinsurgent "democracy," where regular elections accompany widespread state terror, and where officially imposed impunity legitimizes the violent concentration of wealth and power. As a result, Colombia in the early 21st century is evolving into a neoliberal paradise with a growing supply of dispossessed workers, unaccountable security forces available to suppress opposition, and a government opposed to redistributive policies and supportive of a vicious brand of unregulated capitalism. Yet the roots of the human tragedy unfolding in Colombia go much deeper than the present moment.

While many analysts of the Colombian conflict give only a passing nod to history, Hylton argues that a historical analysis is key to understanding the complexities of the current situation. The book provides a concise, tightly argued account of the violent upheavals that have shredded the Colombian social fabric from the onset of 19th century coffee capitalism to the contemporary cocaine economy. It demonstrates with great clarity and precision how dramatic social ruptures, imposed silences, and unresolved tensions have transformed people's sense of what they can do by themselves and with others and what is improbable or unimaginable. The book also speaks powerfully to the ways an exclusionary political system and widespread impunity have nurtured various radical popular movements, armed and unarmed.
By highlighting over a century of struggles by frontier settlers, Afro-Colombians, indigenous peoples, and peasants and rejecting an exclusive focus on the actions of elites, Hylton shows that, despite successive periods of brutal terror, marginalized people have developed organizational forms to advance their demands for land, justice, and equality. He uncovers some of the pathways to peace, self-determination, and state accountability that were blocked by political terror and the violence unleashed by U.S.-trained security forces and shadowy paramilitaries. By so doing, he lifts the fog of amnesia that obscures a deeper understanding of the defeated political projects in Colombia that have struggled to broaden the parameters of democracy. Hylton also dismisses the over-generalized media portrayals of Colombia as a nation mired in a "culture of violence."

Interwoven with the discussion of radical populism, Hylton lays out an incisive analysis of the rise and expansion of narco-politics and right-wing paramilitarism; indeed, this discussion is one of the highlights of the book. Beginning in the 1980s, regionally based paramilitary groups blocked new political movements from formally entering the political arena, and by the end of the decade, they had wiped out much of the Colombian Left. Tied to drug traffickers, powerful landlords, and state security forces, the paramilitaries expanded in the 1990s within and alongside the state, becoming a parastate that spearheaded the concentration of land ownership, consolidated power in many regions of the country, and penetrated the congress, the courts, and the intelligence agencies. When thousands of paramilitaries "demobilized" between 2003 and 2005, the so-called Justice and Peace Law provided no mechanism to force them to relinquish stolen property, reveal the clandestine structure of their organizations, or provide information about their victims, and it mandated light prison sentences of 8 years or less for even the most heinous criminals. All of this furthered the paramilitary incorporation into politics and society and the fusion of the state with organized crime.

Today, Hylton points out, the paramilitaries are stronger than ever, and their growing autonomy from the state that nurtured their expansion makes them the biggest threat to a peaceful resolution of the Colombian conflict. Evil Hour in Colombia offers a nuanced account of a complex and poorly understood county. It is well written, and its analysis should be taken seriously and discussed widely.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Social conflicts in the republican history of Colombia, May 18, 2007

By 

E. Guzman (Boston, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Evil Hour in Colombia (Paperback)

This is an important account of the social conflicts in Colombia during the last 170 years supported by careful
research on such an important topic. It helps to rescue a historical memory that the dominant narrative in that South American country wants to permanently erase. It emphasizes the democratic and consistent resistance of what Hylton calls "subaltern" groups throughout the republican history of Colombia. Although the voices and struggles of the urban and rural working classes have not been emphasized enough in this book, they occupy a prominent place. These struggles have not produced sensationalist and flashy headlines like those of the armed groups, yet they have consistently and heroically helped to organize un-unionized rural and urban workers. Mr. Hylton has been critical of all the armed actors in this conflict and rightly provides a general context to better understand their actions. While it is true that leftists in Colombia have emphasized, to their own detriment the call to arms, there has also been a Left that has consistently called for the self-organization of the urban and rural working class. Indeed, most of the armed groups have in a sectarian fashion ridiculed the organization of the urban working class. The narrative of violence has been tragically overemphasized by a Left (perhaps because of the feudal nature of the recent past and the weakness of working class traditions in a semi feudal society) that needs to respect all minorities and their democratic traditions as Mr. Hylton very well documents in his book. His narrative gives us an overview and a general context that complements those of anthropologist Taussig and journalist Molano.