"Colombia Vive" 25 años de resistencia

Neonovo says on Jan 14, 2008, 23:25:

Not that I'm taking sides, but this video should start earlier, with Gaitan's murder in 1948 and include an interview with the grand-father of all guerrilla fighters, Pedro Marín, aka Manuel Marulanda Vélez, aka tirofijo (sureshot). Hence the same of the video should be "58 años de resistencia."

Marín headed for the hills in 1949 to avoid certain death at the hands of his enemies, a direct consequence of Gaitan's murder. Otherwise, he "would likely have...become a posperous merchant, perhaps the major of a town, or the chairman of the local chamber of commerce and the sponsor of a soccer team" (pg 28, Robin Kirk's "More terrible than death.)

In 1960 Arturo Alape fresh from revolutionary Cuba met Marín and became his biographer. Alape reports that for Marín "There was no abstract cause, like land reform or social justice. Marín did not even have a name for what he planned or who his allies would be. "We did not call our group guerrillas, we had no idea what a guerrilla was.""

Marín just didn't want to be another floating-dead in the Tuluá river where many of his kinfolk and neighbors had ended. By 1960, Kirk remains us "Compared to what these men (Marín's) had already gone through, Castro's journey on the Granma, the boat he used to transport his men to Cuba to begin the revolution, must have seemed a pleasure cruise."

Yet Manuel Marulanda's grueling fight had just began. In his 80's he shows no signs of giving it up, his movement kidnapped by a different generation with different objectives and motives.

I also gathered from Kirk's book and other sources that the self-defense groups didn't start with Valencia and the cattle-ranchers trying to twart cow-ruslers and lowlifers. It was conservative president Laureano Gomez who started organizing civilians into irregular maraudin bands of killers to take care of the liberal opposition members, mostly on politcal grounds. These killers-for-hire were dubbed by common folks "pájaros", and to this day that name implies a perjorative.

As always, these observation are subject to correction at your will.

Neonovo.

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juancegomez says on Jan 15, 2008, 17:26:

I didn't see the entire documentary, which was shown on TV over several days (that's how long it is, the videos here aren't the entire thing)...having said that...

Neonovo: You seem to be thinking about a different kind of "resistencia" than the one the documentary wants to consider, but it's understandable...sort of.

In any case, the authors themselves admit in SEMANA that they weren't exactly trying to make a comprehensive history of everything related to the conflict itself or even to Colombia's history as a whole, which is more in line with the documentary's ultimate focus (hence my previous commentary). 25 years might be an arbitrary limit, but it's an understandable one.

As for Marulanda...I could say several things, but right now I'd like to point out there are excerpts from past interviews or videos with Marulanda in at least several of the chapters of the documentary, both earlier and later. It's not like they don't even show him speaking or anything, you know...

Regarding the self-defense groups, it depends on what you want to consider a "self-defense group" or not. I can say that the "pajáros", however, were hardly the only people (even among conservatives) going around starting violence or simply killing in general...far from it, though they did bring a lot of death and destruction in their own right.

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webmanco says on Jan 16, 2008, 04:17:

...A yo, déjenme queto y no me jodan má! ...

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Neonovo says on Jan 16, 2008, 12:37:

Hay suficiente video en el Internet para narrar una buena parte de la historia contemporánea.

Gracias.

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