Holy War in a Clash of Civilisations and Control over Colombia’s Identity

Holy War in a Clash of Civilisations and Control over Colombia’s Identity.

For many European and North American observers, the ideas-ology of Eurocentric portion of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru are quite familiar and part of the debate over existing worldviews of both conservative and liberal political poles. Christianity as a moral guidepost is one example. Other examples include the debate over the father-led family known as patriarchy, or anxiety over the humanistic correctness of more extreme variations of gender orientation versus sexual orientation, or the government organised affirming of indigenous and ethnic/religious rights in comparison to the majority population, environmental control by human society, the tolerance of protests and demonstrations that unintentionally/intentionally cause physical damage or denials of commerce. In North America and Europe, these issues are often a matter of degree, rather than alternative existence of something completely different. In Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, the worldview debates of these topics normatively revolve around degrees of tolerance, acceptance, and exception under a Judeo-Christian-Islamic rule of law that is well understood after 3,000 years, 2,000 years, and 1,400 years, respectively. In Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, the worldview debates are between constructed egocentric (individual agency) European civilisation as a basis for collective identity and inherited sociocentric (collectivist) Pre-Columbian civilisation that has been subservient and overshadowed for the past half-millennia. The difference between them is far greater than Europe and North America understands. The graphic image in figure 14 offers a contrast in symbolic objects of sociocultural realities that Colombia’s middle mestizo segment will ultimately decide over the course of the next half century. In the meantime, we can expect increasing attempts by the

Eurocentric community that currently has control over the levers of economic and social control to resist losing cultural, economic, and narrative space to the indigenous half of Colombia. Each of these constellations of identity worldview in figure 24 have powerful holds over their constituents and exerts psychosocial and emotional pulls on the 50% of Colombia’s mestizo centre. The leadership of both constellations were

historically criollo (white European) given the elevated status of Colombia’s post-colonial Caucasian society, but the bulk of the follower base of each world view was divided along racial and cultural lines. VP Marquez’ election marks a turn towards a change of political leadership that will continue in conflict, albeit with the labels being political rather than what they are – psychosocial in nature. These two constellations are politically labelled as conservative, fascist, authoritarian, and colonial for the European and liberal, socialist, communist, and alien for the indigenous. The labels were and are wildly imperfect and mostly suited the ongoing internal sociopolitical struggles for power amongst and within the various

competing factions of white, Europeans and for the competing factions of mestizo which constitute the balance of electoral power in the middle. Each side, Eurocentric and Indigenous-centric, will work to build and expand political support from the mestizo middle most likely to align with them. The lightest skinned mestizo’s will be induced to align with the European part and the darkest skinned towards their indigenous side. Those criollos and light skinned mestizos who cross ethnic lines to support the ‘liberal’ indigenous side are branded as cultural traitors and subject to threats and intimidation and ultimately, violence. The Eurocentric conservative part of Colombia’s electorate is far less socially organised than its liberal-indigenous centric part. The latter has always had to care for itself as the state mostly ignored it. The former on the other hand, normatively depended on the national government to uphold its values and social goals that included an exaltation of Christianity, social patriarchy, political identification of “Hispanic” as whiteness, and a fatherly type of hierarchical authoritarianism. National governance prior to the Petro & Marquez administration supported the Eurocentric population’s violent rejection of secularism, homosexuality, indigeneity, blackness, and liberalism as destabilisers of national cohesion. The relationship that Eurocentric administrations in Colombia historically maintained with its non-European populations reflect how Latin America’s decolonization unfolded, and the nature of its relationships with its former Spanish colonizer. The Colombian state of government and Eurocentric elite has often been referred to as a Centaur State, which Stanford University

Sociologist Loic Wacquant describes as one which is organised to serve the interests of the upper classes. Colombia’s powerful business families such as the Castano family, founded different paramilitary organizations to protect their business interests from the FARC-EP, ELN, and M19 leftist

guerrilla organisations that would attempt to bleed the Colombian economy for sustainment and growth. Some families and businesses found it convenient to try to merge indigenous worldviews that frustrated modern economic extraction and expansion as leftist communist and part of the FARC-EP agenda. This made tens of thousands of innocent indigenous and mestizo campesinos a target of the business’ private militias and added forced land seizures and resale to their growing portfolio of services to the business family corporations. Militia organiser and leader, Miguel Arroyave, was one such leader who was bankrolled by the business class families to build and lead armed groups to supplant the regular military forces but focus entirely on protecting their business interests that the state had not been able to achieve. Arroyave used this mythical moniker to name his militia for hire in 1997, calling it the Bloque Centauros of the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). His organisation quickly grew to a 5,000-strong private militia active in the sparsely populated grasslands of eastern Colombia. He was also a powerful figure within the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an umbrella organization bringing together right-wing paramilitary groups from all over the country. Reputationally within the Colombian Army (COLAR), he was well known for

being a ruthless fighter against guerrilla groups, and for being able to evict these rebel groups and take control of their territories, often at the expense of the campesinos and to the financial advantage of the Eurocentric business families bankrolling his organisation. The Bloque Centauros was one of many paramilitary organizations created to fight against the left-wing guerrilla armies which controlled large parts of rural Colombia since the 1960s, protecting Colombia’s growing economy. Many of these organisations were based in the capital of Bogota and enjoyed a cordial, even collaborative relationship with the COLAR. Throughout the past half century or more, militias such as the Bloque Centauros helped the conservative ‘Centaur State’ to discipline and regulate the lower classes and prevent the formation of counter Eurocentric majorities. Loic Wacquant’s intention in coining this term was

as an analogy using the Centaur mythical creature with the head of a man and the body of a horse to illustrate a malformed state structure: a democratically elected liberal state at the top which cares for the Eurocentric population segments and a colonial system employing “punitive paternalism” to maintain control over the non-Eurocentric majority. The Colombian Centaur state was crafted in the 1950s and 1960s through a combination of macroeconomic stability and a counter-insurgent administration which produced a sort of schizophrenic nation. The Eurocentric minority, experience a social and political reality completely alien to poor and marginalized populations who are historically excluded from the benefits of sustained economic growth and mistreated as potential insurgents. To secure itself and keep the non-Eurocentric population segments docile, symbolic and physical violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and state repression became necessary everyday weapons. Paradoxically at once democratic and authoritarian, instead of resolving social conflicts, the Centaur state reproduces them.

Regardless of the historical judgement of former presidents Alvarez Uribe and Manuel Santos, they did, in collaboration with the USA’s Plan Colombia, help dismantle the Centaur State which led to the collapse of the FARC-EP. They, combined with President Uribe’s Accion Social policy leads who helped us resolve land Vivienda (title) for thousands of campesino families in southern, western and eastern rural Colombia, eventually broke the back of the FARC’s recruitment capacity. The reality of Colombia’s version of this Centaur State is that, unlike other uses of this analogy in Europe, the two parts of Colombia’s Centaur, upper and lower, did not reflect simple socioeconomic class differences. The Eurocentric pole of Colombian socioeconomic and cultural life is not simply opposite that of its indigenous led opposition. Instead, the latter represents and entirely different

socioeconomic and cultural trajectory with vastly differing national objectives and standards of internal success, one that is distinctly not like Europe. In Ecuador and Peru, where the size of the indigenous populations relative to the size of the Eurocentric populations is much greater, coming revolution will likely be extraordinary, with terraforming of art, architecture, language, economy, social structure, and a revamping of national narratives. Colombia’s population segments are more balanced, and the likely outcome will see some degree of merger between its European and pre-Columbian indigenous heritage. Regardless of the degrees of these trajectories of change, any changes to historical narrative and national identity will be accompanied by pain – psychological, sociological, and violence.