ARTicles vol.4 i.1b: “A Monster of a Thousand Heads”*

1940s and 1950s
Fighting escalates between Colombia’s two traditional parties, the Conservatives and Liberals. Bloody conflict spreads from the cities to the countryside, inflamed by the assassination of populist Liberal leader, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Conservatives use both the police and death squads known as pájaros, “birds,” to attack Liberal strongholds. The Liberals organize their own armed forces – the guerrillas. Soon in-party fighting emerges between the guerrillas and Liberals. This bloody era is known as La Violencia. Two hundred thousand people are killed in the conflict.
In a bid to end La Violencia in 1958, the Conservative and Liberal parties issue a declaration in which a National Front is proposed. The parties agree to govern jointly, the presidency being determined by regular elections every four years. Despite the progress in certain social and economic sectors, many social and political injustices continue. The National Front is soon regarded as a form of political repression, banning other parties and widening its distance from the working classes whose needs are increasingly excluded.

1960 – 1980
Left-wing guerrilla forces emerge as a counterweight to the National Front. The Colombian military sends thousands of troops into rural communist enclaves where armed men and civilian supporters wait. These “Independent Republics” are destroyed and the communists flee, only to reorganize and form even more guerrilla groups. In the cities, the communist leaders glorify their resistance. The guerillas control the rural south of Colombia and become the backbone of the communist organization.

Radical communist guerrilla leaders create a new organization, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Yet more leftist guerrilla groups emerge in the sixties and seventies including the M-19, the National People’s Alliance and the Maoist People’s Liberation Army. The National Front gradually phases out by the early seventies.

1980s
The FARC grows and some of its leaders launch their own political party – the Unión Patriótica (UP) and enter into peace negotiations with the state. A violent political genocide starts. Thousands of UP members are killed or flee the country. Peace efforts are abandoned. The first privately sponsored right-wing paramilitary groups are created to combat the guerrillas.

1980s – Present
Colombia is engulfed in bloody strife between paramilitaries, guerrilla groups, and the state armed forces. The conflict is funded through drug trafficking – Colombia is the world’s largest producer of illegal drugs. Large portions of Colombia are controlled by the paramilitaries, guerrillas, or state forces. Domination of these areas shifts constantly as they vie for power. All sides are corrupt and cruel. The paramilitaries are infamous for their countryside massacres in which villagers are dismembered, disfigured, and publicly slaughtered in village squares. Currently, Colombian president Álvaro Uribe is negotiating a controversial peace process with the paramilitaries.

January 17, 2001
Fifty members of a paramilitary group known as AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia or United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) march into Chengue, a peaceful village of avocado farmers situated in northern Colombia – a region caught in the crossfire of guerrilla, military, and paramilitary forces because of its proximity to trade routes to the Caribbean. Under the direction of a woman known as “Doctor Beatriz” the troops kill twenty-six men and boys in the village square by crushing their heads with heavy stones. The people of Chengue, horrified by recent massacres in nearby villages, had previously written to Colombian president Andrés Pastrana and their regional military commander months before the massacre, demanding protection. They received no response. No military patrols came to protect them. According to the surviving residents of Chengue, on the day of the massacre the military assisted the AUC by blockading the roads to the village and providing air cover.

* A quote from historian Gonzalo Sánchez Gómez cited by Steven Dudley in Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia.

Sources: “Chronicle of a Massacre Foretold,” by Scott Wilson. Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society, by Frank Safford and Marco Palacios. Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia, by Steven Dudley.

Rachael Rayment is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.4-15