10-23-06, 9:44 am

Evil Hour in Colombia Forrest Hylton New York: Verso Karl Dallas

COLOMBIA, prior to the Anglo-US invasion of Iraq, used to be unique in the world for its combination of comparatively weak central government and regional paramilitaries, whose terrorisation of the populations under their control was, and still is, totally without checks or balances.

Forrest Hylton suggests, in this encyclopaedic analysis of how Colombia got here from what was once a promising example of social inclusion, that 'Colombia may have become a model for 'successful' counter-insurgency and 'lot-intensity' democracies worldwide.'

In other words, just as Iraq and Afghanistan have followed the Colombian model, then we can expect other victims of the 'war on terror' to follow the same way. A bleak prospect indeed.

It would be fairly easy to use this terrible story as a stick to beat US imperialism with and such a critique would serve a valuable polemical purpose. But this is not that kind of book.

Hylton begins his account in 1848, when 'radical-popular political mobilisation put Colombia at the leading edge of Atlantic republican democracies.'

In occasionally daunting detail, he straddles the century and a half since then, the reaction from that high point and the rebellions against that reaction.

He charts the liberal attempt to forge a more socially conscious political model, the terrible reaction to that in La Violencia in the post-war decade and the growth of what he calls the 'parastate' of officially backed paramilitaries and their paymasters, the narcobourgeoisie.

Hylton demonstrates the dialectics of repression, explaining that the impoverishment of the Colombian peasants made agriculture a non-viable economy, making the country dependent upon a single cash crop - coca, the raw material for cocaine.

Since the country's terrain made it possible for insurgents to control great swathes of territory, coca also provided the finance for guerilla movements such as FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces), which has set up what amounts to a state within a state, paralleling the parastate of the paramilitaries.

Hylton is not blind to the faults of FARC, describing it as motivated by 'an ossified Marxism' and being almost as prone to use terror as the paramilitaries.

But he also acknowledges that, like Hamas in Palestine, its success is based equally upon its provision of social services such as clean water, education and health, which are neglected by the state.

What Hylton does not do is propose any concrete way forward out of this abyss, except the rather pious conclusion that 'surveying the Colombian past, we might draw hope from the fact that, time and again, radical-popular movements have arisen to demand self-determination in a more peaceful, equitable and just policy.'

But Colombia cannot be observed in isolation from the general uprise of left-wing social democracy in neighbouring countries like Venezuela and Brazil, not forgetting the continued survival, against all the odds, of revolutionary Cuba and it may be that, as the balance of power across the continent shifts in that direction, Colombia could be swept back into the vanguard of progress once again.

From Morning Star