Territorial Rule in Colombia and the Transformation of the Llanos Orientales

For more than 30 years, Professor Jane Rausch has been introducing us to a set of data that opens doors to the regional history of the Llanos, a Colombian region once described as the “Lands of the Future” by local politicians (p. viii). These tropical plains are situated in the southeastern part of Colombia, covering one-third of the country, and have been considered as relatively marginal in terms of the attention that they have garnered from historians. Rausch was the first to give a systematic look at the history of the region, and this volume completes the circle that began with her analysis of the region from the 1500s. In this fourth book of the series, the author picks up from where her previous volume left off and advances into the decades from 1946 to 2010.The Llanos case shows the difficulties of advancing modernization in that region, at least up to the start of the years explored by the author. In this latest volume, Rausch describes how the Llanos have increasingly integrated with the rest of the country during a challenging period of economic development, with the presence of transnational actors and with ongoing armed conflict. Following the seminal work by Frederick Jackson Turner and Alistair Hennessy, Rausch has been a pioneer in applying the concept of frontier to territorial transformations in Colombia. But in choosing to look at territorial advances from an institutional perspective, she misses the bottom-up perspectives and the multiplicity of agendas and discourses that circulated and confronted diverse actors in the process of forming this large sector of the country.The bibliography contains mostly the classic books on Colombian history from the 1960s and 1980s, but Rausch does not engage in current debates around the interpretations of the period of La Violencia and the most recent modalities of armed conflict. Missing the strong contributions of the subdiscipline dubbed “violentology” in Colombia, Rausch's book does not give space to deeper dialogue with a literature enriched in the last decades, for example, by analysis of amnesties, the contemporary armed conflict, the “geography of violence,” and the local dynamics of La Violencia.Instead, the book's approach derives from traditional political history, relying on the role of the Conservative and Liberal leadership. Consequently, the narrative centers on the presence of Gaitanismo, the populist movement in the 1940s, and its impact in the Llanos. From there, the author follows the traditional line of analysis: the emphasis on political parties, the role of Liberal guerrillas, the general modalities of armed conflict that remain to this day. Everyday life, culture, horizontal quarrels, gender, and environmental issues are missing from this approach. The indigenous population and its segregation, including the infamous massacres in the 1970s, the role of religious communities, both Catholic and Protestant (including foreign presence, as in the case of the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano), and the efforts of academia (as in the case of the experimental farm Gaviotas) indicate a richer set of national and international actors in the region, at least from the 1970s on. This richness receives no acknowledgment in the book. Even if Rausch describes some geographical and ecological constraints and mentions the important indigenous population, these critical issues are not properly addressed. Rausch could have discussed new perspectives on environmental history, cultural history, and the new social history of livestock in analyzing deeper the importance of cattle raising for this regional history.Nonetheless, the book makes contributions via novel sources that provide new information, and in that sense it is original in spite of its status as a general survey. Some anecdotes hint at a richer level of analysis of, for example, economic functioning and adaptations in the middle of the conflict (pp. 47–49), but these references remain as raw data without further discussion. For the reader unfamiliar with Colombian history, this can be a useful though limited introduction to the history of the Llanos region in recent decades. Hopefully, new historians inspired by Rausch's pioneering work and the archival sources that she has rescued will update the basic analysis developed by her once-unique and innovative contribution.

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