Amid the Violencia the Communist Party had formed ‘armed selfdefence’ zones or ‘independent republics’, as places of refuge for peasants who wanted or had to stay out of the way of the Conservative, or sometimes also the Liberal bands of killers. Eventually they became the bases of the formidable guerrilla movement of the FARC (Armed Forces of the Colombian Revolution). The best-known ‘liberated’ areas of this kind, Tequendama and Sumapaz, were surprisingly close to Bogotá śas the crow flies, but, being mountain country, a long and difficult way by horse and mule. Viotà, a district of coffee haciendas expropriated by the peasants in the reforming 1930s, and from which the landowners had withdrawn, did not need to fight at all. Even the soldiers kept away, while it ran all its affairs under the eye of the political cadre sent there by the Party, a former brewery worker, and sold its coffee peacefully on the world market through the usual traders. The mountains of Sumapaz, frontier terrain for free men and women, were under the rule of a home-grown rural leader, one of those rare peasant talents who escaped the fate patronized by the poet Gray in his famous elegy, that of being ‘some mute inglorious Milton
… some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood’. For Juan de la Cruz Varela was far from mute or peaceable. In the course of his varied career as chief of Sumapaz, he was prominent as a Liberal, follower of Gaitan, communist, head of his own agrarian movement and Revolutionary Liberal, but always firmly on the side of the people. Discovered by one of those wonderful village teachers who were the real agents of emancipation for most of the human race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he had become both a reader and practical thinker. He acquired his political education from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which he carried with him everywhere, marking the passages which seemed to him particularly apposite to his own or the political situation of the time. My friend Rocío Londoño, who worked on his biography during her spell of research at Birkbeck College, inherited his copy of the book from him with the rest of his papers. He acquired his Marxism, or what there was of it, rather later via the writings of a now forgotten English clerical enthusiast for the USSR, the late Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury (inevitably confused by everyone abroad with the Archbishop), which he appears to have got from Colombian communists, whose belief in agrarian revolution appealed to him. Long accepted as a person of power and influence, whose region was beyond the reach of government troops, he sat for it in Congress. Sumapaz remained beyond the reach of the capital even after his death, honoured – according to Rocío who attended the funeral – by a display of his armed horsemen. The first negotiations for an armistice between the Colombian government and the FARC were to be held on the hinterland of his territory.
The FARC itself, which was to become the most formidable and long-lasting of the Latin American guerrilla movements, had not yet been founded when I first came to Colombia, although its long-time military leader Pedro Antonio Marin (‘Manuel Marulanda’), another home-grown countryman, was already active in the mountains adjoining the old stronghold of communist agrarian agitation and self-defence in South Tolima.4 It was only born when the Colombian government, trying out against the communists the new anti-guerrilla techniques pioneered by the US military experts, drove the fighters out of their stronghold in Marquetalia. Several years later, in the mid-eighties, I was to spend some days in the birthplace of communist guerrilla activity in the coffee-growing municipio of Chaparral, in the house of my friend Pierre Gilhodes, who had married into the locality. The FARC, stronger than ever, were still in the mountains above the township, which was now easily accessible by car from Bogotá śand sufficiently in touch with the outside world and prosperous to sell Vogue in the news-kiosk on the main plaza . The mule-tracks and footpaths still led into the mountains up steep gullies. It was a quiet landscape, in which not surprisingly discretion was the golden rule. Chaparral farmers were about to discover the potential of poppy cultivation, but had not, I think, yet done so.
Colombia, as I wrote after my return, was experiencing ‘the greatest mobilisation of armed peasants (whether as guerrillas, bandits or self-defence groups) in the contemporary history of the western hemisphere, except, possibly, for some moments of the Mexican Revolution’.5 Curiously, this fact was either unnoticed or played down by the contemporary ultra left in and outside South America (all of whose Guevarist attempts at guerrilla insurrection were spectacular failures) on the ostensible grounds that it was linked to an orthodox Communist Party, but in fact because those inspired by the Cuban Revolution neither understood nor wanted to understand what actually might move Latin American peasants to take up arms.
III
It was not hard to become a Latin American expert in the early 1960s. Fidel’s triumph created enormous interest in the region, which was poorly covered by press and universities outside the USA. I had not intended to take a specialist interest in the region, although I also found myself lecturing and writing about it in the 1960s and early 1970s in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, adding appendices on the Peruvian peasant movement and the Colombian Violencia to the (first) Spanish edition of Primitive Rebels, and in 1971 spending a sabbatical en famille doing more serious research on peasants in Mexico and Peru. I continued to go there several times in each decade, mainly to Peru, Mexico and Colombia, but also on occasion to Chile, before and during the Allende period and after the end of the Pinochet era. And, of course, I did not even try to resist the sheer drama and colour of the more glamorous parts of that continent, even though it also contains some of the most anti-human environments on the globe – the high Andean Altiplano on the limits of cultivability, the cactus-spiked semi-desert of northern Mexico – and some of the world’s most uninhabitable giant cities – Mexico City and São Paulo. Over the years, I acquired dear friends such as the Gasparians in Brazil, Pablo Macera in Peru and Carlos Fuentes in Mexico, and students or colleagues who became friends. In short, I was permanently converted to Latin America.
Nevertheless, I never tried to become or saw myself as a Latin Americanist. As for the biologist Darwin, for me as a historian the revelation of Latin America was not regional but general. It was a laboratory of historical change, mostly different from what might have been expected, a continent made to undermine conventional truths. It was a region where historical evolution occurred at express speed and could actually be observed happening within half a lifetime of a single person, from the first clearing of forests for farm or ranch to the death of the peasantry, from the rise and fall of export crops for the world market to the explosion of giant super-cities such as the megalopolis of São Paulo, where one could find a mixture of immigrant populations more implausible even than in New York – Japanese and Okinawans, Calabrians, Syrians, Argentine psychoanalysts and a restaurant proudly labelled ‘CHURRASCO TIPICO NORCOREANO’ (Typical North Korean Barbecue). It was a place where ten years doubled the size of Mexico City, and transformed the street-scene of Cuzco from one dominated by Indians in traditional costume to people wearing modern (‘cholo’) clothes.
Inevitably it changed my perspective on the history of the rest of the globe, if only by dissolving the border between the ‘developed’ and the ‘Third’ worlds, the present and the historic past. As in García Márquez’s great One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which everyone who knows Colombia recognizes both the magic and the realism, it forced one to make sense of what was at first sight implausible. It provided what ‘counterfactual’ speculations can never do, namely a genuine range of alternative outcomes to historical situations: right-wing chieftains who become the inspiration of labour movements (Argentina, Brazil), fascist ideologists who join with a left-wing miners’ union to make a revolution that gives the land to the peasants (Bolivia), the only state in the world that has actually abolished its army (Costa Rica), a single-party state of notorious corruption whose Institutional Party of the Revolution recruits its personnel systematically from the most revolutionary among its university students (Mexico), a region where first-generation immigrants from the Third World can become presidents and Arabs (‘Turcos’) tended to be more successful than Jews.