Guadalupe Salcedo Prototype Liberal GuerilleroTime
Monday, Aug. 18, 1952
War Without End
"Death has become commonplace in Colombia," said a well-informed U.S. traveler returning from Bogota last week. "The words assassination and murder are bandied about with no more emotion than we talk of beans, butter & bread."
He was talking about the bloody, matter-of-fact, half-underground rural war that has raged for the past three years between Colombia's Liberals and Conservatives. The most cautious estimates of the men, women & children killed now run to 15,000; other estimates go as high as 20,000 or even 50,000.
In Mountain, In Plain. The struggle pits guerrillas of the out-of-power Liberal Party against the troops and military police of the Conservative government. On the map, the guerrillas hold a third of the country, but their third, the rolling, grassy eastern llanos, is thinly populated. In the llanos, 5,006 irregulars commonly ambush and cut down invading government troops and steal their arms. The guerrillas themselves are targets of futile bombing.
Fighting has been reported recently in other areas around Riosucio, Puerto Berrio, and near Cali, but most of rural, mountainous Colombia has felt such battling at one time or another since 1949. The cities have escaped because big army garrisons control them.
Inter-party warfare is not new to Colombia; in the 19th century her citizens fought some 70 civil wars, big & small. One of them cost 80,000 lives, another 100,000. Colombians fight because each and every person, with rare exception, is emotionally given over to party loyalty as much as to national loyalty. Citizens are born Liberal or Conservative.
From France, From Spain. Ideological distinctions, originally stemming from Liberal admiration of the French Revolution and from Conservative roots in monarchical Spain, have become blurred. The most frequently mentioned issue nowadays is religious: Liberals are mildly anticlerical (although Colombia is 99.5% Catholic); Conservatives warmly embrace the church and its hierarchy. There is no clean economic cleavage between the parties, but industrialists, labor, white-collar classes tend to be Liberals, while landholders, many farmers and most priests are Conservatives. Liberals, in the last contested election, polled 58% of the vote.
Elaborate attempts have been made by statesmen from both parties to strike a truce—but they could not control the countryside partisans. More recently the Catholic Church, bulwarked by an appeal from Pius XII and parades displaying great fervor for peace, tried to halt the war but failed. Now the only limitation on the ferocity of the struggle seems to be the amount of arms the guerrillas can smuggle over the border or seize from dead policemen
