Cien

2 hours writing, 2 hours reading

One hundred pages, woo-hoo! Today, I focused on the chapter concerning the military government of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-57), the only time the armed forces ran Colombia during the whole 20th century. Given that the continent-wide average was somewhere upwards of two decades of military government during that same span, that's quite something. So both the absence of military government and its singular presence during the '50s need explaining. There's not a lot written about that time period, actually, and what works do focus on it explicitly tend to have a very slanted point of view, either pro- or anti-military.

In terms of reading, I focused on the period immediately prior to Rojas Pinilla's government, the peak period of the La Violencia civil war, 1948-53, when the countryside erupted in conflict that, while initially partisan in nature - Liberal vs. Conservative - ultimately became more about underlying conflicts over access to the land. Here, there's a lot more written, and the particularly interesting stuff hints at the differences that take place at the local level, how different states and regions experienced the conflict.