Diplomatic intrigue

4.5 hours reading/researching

Luckily, the dilation that they do at the eye doctor's only lasts a few hours, so I'm back up to speed today. Didn't get to writing today, but I went through some municipal-level electoral data to shore up my subnational comparison. I took a look today at the state of Tolima, and studied the population distribution of partisan voting patterns using the wonderful atlas of Colombian electoral geography that I began working with last month. For the period immediately leading up to La Violencia, the state was pretty solidly Liberal, which is important for my comparison. About 58% of the population lived in towns where the Liberals were electorally dominant, another 14% lived in Conservative-dominated towns, and the remaining 28% lived in towns that were competitive, with about half of those skewing Liberal. Overall, 74% of the population lived in towns that were pretty comfortably in the hands of Liberals. It's important to establish this profile so I can compare it to another state (I'm thinking Santander) where the electoral landscape was more competitive. This will allow me to see how the level of electoral competition affects the impact of security forces on the types of armed challenges the regime to which the regime is susceptible.

The other thread I followed today was to read one of the few studies of the military regime of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-57), the only military dictatorship of the 20th century in Colombia. Compared to most of the rest of Latin America, that's pretty distinctive, and part of what led me on this path of research in the first place. Rojas Pinilla also made some significant reforms to the police, so his government is an important episode for me to consider.

One of the really interesting things in this book was to see the use the authors made of diplomatic correspondence. There's a fascinating appendix to the book in which the Colombian ambassador to the U.S. describes in literally day-by-day detail his negotiations to have the U.S. government give Colombia free military equipment as recognition for Colombia having sent troops - the only Latin American country to do so, by the way - to help the American side in the Korean War. I don't know if he ultimately succeeded, but the way he describes a series of increasingly confrontational meetings over the course of 18 months, and the window his account provides into the nuts and bolts of diplomacy in the '50s, was fascinating. Lots of informal conversations with U.S. officials at cocktail parties, after dinners, and even at a pool party. There's a comical visual for you. It reminds me to look at diplomatic sources, including on the U.S. side, to get more insight, particularly into periods that are politically sensitive in Colombia.

I'm taking off tomorrow for the Fourth. Enjoy the fireworks, and I'll be back on Thursday!