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By Root 1641 0

even these first, almost casual impressions were a sudden revelation, rather like the sight of the treasure-room in the Bogotá śGold 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 Potosí, 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 Bogotá. 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 García Márquez 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 Medellín, 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