Blood and Fire

Between 1946 and 1958 there was a surge of violence in Colombia that left 200,000 dead in one of the worst conflicts our hemisphere has ever experienced. This little-studied period of terror, known as La Violencia, is the subject of Blood and Fire. Scholars have traditionally assumed that partisan politics provided the underpinning for La Violencia, but Mary Roldn challenges earlier assessments of the motives behind the brutality by providing a nuanced account of the political and cultural context of the events. Through an analysis of the evolution of violence in Antioquia, a region of Colombia, Roldn demonstrates how tensions between regional politics and the weak central state, the privatisation of state violence into paramilitary units, and prejudices about race, geography, class, and ethnicity all ultimately fed into surges of violent activity. Although the author acknowledges that partisan animosities played a key role in the disintegration of peaceful discourse, she argues that these politics were intensified by other concerns. Roldan's reading of the historical events suggests that Antioquia's experience of La Violencia was the culmination of a brand of internal colonialism, whereby regional identity formation was based on assumptions of cultural superiority and used as an opportunity to justify violence against racial or ethnic "others" and a chance to seize their resources. This is the first study to analyse intersections of ethnicity, geography, and class to explore the genesis of Colombian violence, and it has implications for the study of repression in many other nations.