Across the Americas

Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: Tales of Drugs, Mules, and Gunmen
by Alfredo Molano
Translated by James Graham
Columbia University Press, 2004, 158 pp.



The Dispossessed: Chronicles of the Desterrados of Colombia
by Alfredo Molano
Translated by Daniel Bland
Haymarket Books, 2005, 250 pp.

Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia
Steven Dudley, Routledge, 2004, 253 pp.

The mid-1980s birth of the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP), a new political party in Colombia, brought a fresh wind of hope to the violence-battered country. In those days the largest guerrilla organization, the FARC, was in peace talks with the administration of President Belisario Betancur. It appeared that the insurgency might be persuaded to demobilize an the long stranglehold of the Conservative and Liberal parties might eventually be broken. In pueblos and in the cities, the yellow-and-green UP flag fluttered over exuberant rallies. “The UP caught on in a way that surprised everyone,” UP propaganda chief Álvaro Salazar later remembered, “including me.”

Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia
Michael Taussig, The New Press, 2003, 208 pp.

The inimitable Michael Taussig, professor of anthropology at Columbia University (New York), has been doing fieldwork in Colombia since 1969. In these essays he bends his ironic eye (ironic but also fascinated, bewildered, and loving) on the effects of paramilitary occupation of a town near Cali.

Limpieza means “cleansing”; like many other perfectly good Spanish words it has been—ironically!—stained by wartime use. It has come to mean social cleansing: the right-wing paramilitaries’ project of getting rid of petty crime, gangs, drug abuse, and begging in cities and towns by murdering the offenders.