Book Reviews

Hylton, Forrest (2006) Evil Hour in Colombia, Verso (London and New York NY), xiii + 174 pp. 12.99 pbk, 50.00 hbk. At rst sight, this book appears to be another tract against Plan Colombia and President Alvaro Uribe. It is an expansion of the authors New Left Review article, undertaken at the urging of Tariq Ali. It is in part just what one would expect: it has nothing to say in favour of US policy or Uribe, it lays the emphasis of blame for Colombian violence on state terror, it denounces neoliberalism and it lauds populism. Though he works in New York University, the author also poses as an opponent of fashionable

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academia, which he somehow thinks is dominated by supporters of the Colombian status quo. One wonders who he has in mind. All the same, it is a stimulating read. The author has done much more reading on the history of the country and cites a wide range of authorities: Sanchez who writes a prologue Palacios, Henderson, Pizarro, LeGrand, Thoumi, Wade, Cubides, Richani, Molano, Dudley, Pecaut even, when it suits him, Deas. His polemical version of Colombias past will at least whet the curiosity of readers and make them think, and from time to time this reviewer found himself in agreement with it. From time to time, most of the time, he did not. Hylton is a follower of Eric Hobsbawm, who discovered in Colombia a country in which the failure to make a social revolution had made violence the constant, universal and omnipresent core of public life (p. xv). Though one runs the risk of being called a reactionary for saying so, there are many reasons for questioning Hobsbawms hypothesis, the most banal being that there are many countries that have not had social revolutions that are not violent. He also endorses the view, recently put forward by Jeremy Adelman, that spells of populism have benecial effects, that they empower people, giving them a lasting condence in the possibilities of collective action, and that one of Colombias problems is not having enjoyed such an experience. One can doubt that the Latin American record shows that as clearly as Hylton thinks it does. In Colombias past and present he sees oligarchs everywhere, though the careful reader may notice that a great deal of the past and present politics that he describes cannot be categorised as oligarchic. Can so much subaltern protest, so much faction, so much regional autonomy, so much competition and conict, really be tted into a framework of oligarchy? One can concede that that is not logically impossible, but is it likely to be a satisfactory diagnosis? Would it not be more fruitful to try some other tack? Hylton often does not see the contradictions between what he describes and the labels he puts on things. He is another case among writers on Colombia who confuse political rhetoric oligarch has been a term of abuse in the republics politics from their very start with sober analysis. A list of my reservations about his historical verdicts would be a long one, but on it would be his interpretation of the National Front, where he exaggerates its exclusiveness and anti-communism, his views on racialism, and in general his relentlessly negative view of the past, where even good times, of which there have been some, are transmuted into bad; the prosperity of the 1920s is an example. But more important for his purposes are his views of the present. It would not be true to say that he is always uncritical of the guerrillas, particularly of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC): over-militarised, ideologically fossilised, kidnappers on a grand scale, frequently murderous in their tactics. But they are nonetheless, as far as drugs are concerned nothing like a cartel (p. 80). They are not a cartel, certainly, but why nothing like? He leaves the impression that he has not quite made up his mind about them. The chief villains are clearly on the other side, the paramilitaries and the government, particularly that of Alvaro Uribe. Uribe is not credited with any achievements, and is never given the benet of the doubt. Among other more grievous faults he is accused of making the specious claim to have achieved control over all of Colombias municipalities (p. 90); he has claimed to have restored police presence to all, not at all the same thing.
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Here the authors main contention is that the more the US government has backed the Colombian Armed Forces and Police against insurgencies, the more powerful the right-wing parastate has become (p. 5). But is that really the case? is that going to be the outcome? At the time of the writing of this review, with the parapolitical scandal at the centre of national politics, that pessimistic conclusion does not look quite so inevitable: wait and see. The book is marred by a great many errors: the statistics are wild, impressionistic, contradictory, sometimes unbelievable, sometimes plain wrong; the Liberal Republic was not the Liberal Pause; Marroqun lost Panama, not Marco Fidel Suarez; Quintn Lame was on the Conservative side in the Mil Das war, not the Liberal; Daro Echanda was not assassinated in 1949, his brother was killed; Lpez Michelsen was not the last president of the Frente Nacional; Luis Carlos Galn was not intimidated into taking campaign money from Escobar. Those are mistakes of fact. To call Escobar Leftleaning is an error of judgement: that particular Robin Hood was in his essential politics less Left-leaning than the Sheriff of Nottingham. Malcolm Deas St Antonys College, Oxford

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