17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A book about Colombia's forgotten poor, February 29, 2004
This review is from: Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza (Hardcover)
Michael Taussig is acclaimed in the New York Times as "one of the brightest and most original thinkers in anthropology." I would like to add that Taussig is also a profound student of philosophical anthropology, "the study of the nature and essence of humankind." To this end, "Law in a Lawless Land," is an enormous opening into the minds of Colombia's forgotten poor.
This book is like no other written on Colombia. Taussig does not borrow from the research of legendary historical graybeards like Vernon Lee Fluharty, Richard E. Sharpless, Orlando Fals Borda or German Archiniegas. He does not use academic journals, newspapers or magazines to prove a point. Instead he presents a lyrical diary of his extensive fieldwork. In doing so, the author provides a raw and unnerving documentation of Colombia's long tradition of violence.
Taussig's work is easy reading for students of Colombian - American affairs and Latin American specialists. However, this book will be a tough road for those unfamiliar with Colombia's culture of denial. For instance, Taussig condemns the government. His work is a glaring spotlight on the government's paramilitary utilization of "limpieza" or "social cleansing" of the bottom dwellers of Colombian society (desechables or throwaways). The author does not rely on Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International or even the U.S. State Department's repeated annual reports on the government's feeble human rights record. Taussig lives with the relatives and friends of victims and dumps eyewitness accounts on the reader instead.
The author laments how a handful of wealthy families underhandedly bought and then destroyed an enormously fertile valley for thousands of families...in order to establish the
Cali sugar industry and institutionalize poverty for the same families as cane workers. He also reports how Colombia's Army & Police intelligence officials create "lists" of people that are handed to paramilitary leaders for execution. Union leaders, teachers, priests and other defenders of the poor often make the lists. Taussig does not defend the guerrillas...he knows they are not angels. This book is more about how the poor are caught in a violent sandwich with no hope in sight.
This book discloses a simple fact of life in Colombia. That the ruthless paramilitary death squads are a part of the State strategy...particularly today. The leaders of the paramilitary death squads employ terror and this book is an honest chronicle of regular public assassinations in broad daylight. Yes, it is indeed tragic, that in Colombia the Army will stand aside and allow poor unarmed civilians to get cut to pieces because powerful members of society think this is how you protect democracy. Highly recommended.
Bert Ruiz
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Nation Book review August 16, 2004, February 7, 2006
This review is from: Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza (Hardcover)
Michael Taussig offers a glimpse of the possibilities in his book Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia--limpieza being the term the paramilitaries use to refer to "cleansing" a region of its undesirable elements. Taussig, an anthropologist at the other Columbia (the one on the Upper West Side of New York City) has been doing fieldwork since 1969 in a small city in the Cauca River Valley, a few miles from Cali. Some time around the year 2000, a tax-free, free-trade industrial zone was established just outside town. In February of the following year, a group of paramilitaries move in, hired--Taussig's informants tell him--by the "town's business elite." In the 1990s, in other regions of Colombia, the style of the paramilitaries would have been to move into a town such as Taussig's, identify the supposed guerrilla sympathizers and massacre them all at once, thereby creating headlines and embarrassing human rights inquiries. But in the new millennium the paramilitaries operate in a more discreet fashion, and their enemies are no longer so much political as they are economic.
In Taussig's town, they move into El Cupido, a love hotel downtown, with computer lists helpfully provided by military intelligence and go about the work of cleansing the town of its delincuentes--"undesirables," a few at a time. Their victims include not so much leftists or even political activists but street people: kids who've had "problems with the law," beggars, a madwoman, prostitutes not affiliated with El Cupido and a young man who, drunk in the middle of town one evening, makes the mistake of yelling at the paras: Que salgan hijeputas--"get out of here, you sons of whores!" He's killed for his outburst and his body lies on the street all night because people are afraid to move it. In neighboring towns other paramilitaries ban long hair or earrings on men, miniskirts on women, baseball hats worn backward and a gay beauty contest. Life under the paramilitaries doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun.
Taussig's book is based on a diary he kept during two weeks he spent in the town in May of 2001 during the fourth month of its paramilitary reign. His most interesting discovery is the support the paramilitaries have in town. One of his informants tells him that eight of ten of the townspeople are for them. There's a reason for this. Until the 1950s Taussig's part of the Cauca River Valley was dominated by small peasant farms. In their river-valley plots, the peasants (descendants of former African slaves) grew cacao trees, plantain trees, banana trees, coffee trees, orange trees, lemon trees, avocado trees, papaya trees, guava trees and many other trees besides. The peasants thereby created a mixed harvest that mimicked the tropical rain forest, required no store-bought fertilizers, no pesticides, little labor, little capital and, perhaps most important, created a continuous, year-round income.
But, sometime in the 1950s, the sugar industry arrived. The peasant farms were plowed under and everyone went to work on the new plantations (for the ultimate benefit, as Taussig points out, of a few white-skinned families in Cali). At first there was plenty of need for labor, but then, as Taussig puts it, "chemicals and machines made the workers idle." By the time the paramilitaries arrived, a shantytown of the unemployed had grown at one end of town, a slum that became so unruly that the police were afraid to enter. With no prospects for education or work, the kids formed gangs and turned to crime. Gradually, the town fell victim to a youth-gang-based crime wave that it would apparently do anything to solve. Taussig happens upon a gang funeral and witnesses the anarchic violence, the fights, the boombox hip-hop, the weird (for provincial Colombia) fashion, and the weird (for provincial Colombia) hair-dos. He notes one of the kids wearing an English-language T-shirt that says: Death Is Nature's Way of Saying Slow Down.
In Taussig's town, he notes that the paramilitaries have also been recruited out of the ranks of the unemployed. Former soldiers unable to find other jobs dominate their ranks. The murder of the street kids--the children of other unemployed Colombians--is bad enough, but beneath this obvious terror, Taussig perceives a deeper kind of terror. What he sees is an economic "culture of terror" that afflicts everybody in the neoliberal world of his town. The principal arm of this culture of terror is unemployment. Neoliberalism is supposed to generate jobs and solve unemployment, but that's an act of faith, really, and not enough attention has been given to the possibility that it might just be the problem cruelly masquerading as the solution. Although each town in Colombia has its own logic, Taussig makes a convincing case that in this new Colombia, "like the plants that went under, like the forest that disappeared, human nature as much as nature is facing a brave new world for which there is no history or pre-history."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5.0 out of 5 stars
Taussig making us feel Colombia, July 28, 2011
With this diary over two weeks Taussig not only explains but makes us desperately feel the violence of today's Colombia, the fear permeating people's life and consequently the breaking down of social networks, and the appearance and interplay of constant new "actors" on the war-scape. It is just such kind of war (maybe thought of as low-intensity), which is easily ignored by the medias and therefore by european citizens, too accustomed of feeling safe when there is a democracy in a faraway country, no matter, what is really moving around it.
Taussig also invites us to think about the very sense of writing a diary, which of course also means the sense of being "there", an anthropologist going back to a country where he worked during decades. Old friends are met, and some of them can not be met anymore or have taken other roads. Two weeks, embedded in a historical depth that helps to understand certain aspects of the today's terror.
I certainly recomend this book (as all the books of the author) not only to anthropologists and persons interested in Latin America, but anyone eager to understand the intimate relationship of local grinding poverty and violence, and global decision making.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
