Forgotten Peace Reform, Violence, and the Making of Contemporary Colombia [Paperback]

Forgotten Peaceexamines Colombian society’s attempt to move beyond the Western Hemisphere’s worst mid-century conflict and shows how that effort molded notions of belonging and understandings of the past. Robert A. Karl reconstructs encounters between government officials, rural peoples, provincial elites, and urban intellectuals during a crucial conjuncture that saw reformist optimism transform into alienation. In addition to offering a sweeping reinterpretation of Colombian history—including the most detailed account of the origins of the FARC insurgency in any language—Karl provides a Colombian vantage on global processes of democratic transition, development, and memory formation in the 1950s and 1960s. Broad in scope,Forgotten Peacechallenges contemporary theories of violence in Latin America.

Robert A. Karlis Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Peace and Violence in Colombian History
1. Messenger of a New Colombia
2. Encounters with Violence, 1957–1958
3. The Making of the Creole Peace, 1958–1960
4. Peace and Violence, 1959–1960
5. Reformist Paths, 1960–1964
6. Books and Bandits, 1962–1964
7. Confrontation, 1963–1966
Epilogue: The Making of “La Violencia”

A Note on Citations, Institutional Abbreviations, and Archives
Notes
Bibliography
Index

“The remarkable strength of this book is its lucid, intelligent, artful narratives. Chapter after chapter, Karl takes scattered local and national actors and creates a stunningly integrated and compelling story about what he conceives of as the rise and fall of an effort at forging a national peace in Colombia during the complex period of 1957 to 1964. This is historical storytelling at its best.”—Paul Gootenberg, Stony Brook Unl��