Colombia,from failing state to a second independence: The politics and the price

Abstract

Amid social and political conditions that could well lead to Colombia being described in the terms of a failed state, the country’s electorate chose Álvaro Uribe as its thirty-ninth president in 2002, and again in 2006, preferring to keep in office a man who seemed to be putting the country together again, rather than respecting the constitutional prohibition against consecutive presidential terms. Though his presidency was marked by scandals and irregularities – most notably, the falsos positivos (false positives: young, poor Colombian civilians, assassinated in cold blood by the zealous armed forces and listed as guerrilla kills) – Uribe enjoyed approval ratings previously unknown in Colombian history. He is in fact credited with giving Colombia its ‘second independence’, and his leaving office was, for many, tragic. Here, I present an explanation for this paradox, analysing an aspect of Uribe’s discourse for the way it contributed to producing a shared national sentiment by articulating a social imaginary with limited possibilities for making sense of Colombia. Drawing on Geertz, Durkheim and Brubaker and the concepts of hegemony and identification, I elucidate the effectiveness of Uribe’s discourse of the nation in a context of a long experience of frustration and decadence, and show why and how so many Colombians could, at least for a time, give their overwhelming support to a regime wherein murder was authorized, unacknowledged as anything more significant than the price to be paid for that second independence.