You say you want a revolution?

1 hour writing, 5 hours reading / researching, 0.5 hours emailing

Focused today on the period surrounding the outbreak of La Violencia, 1946-48. I'm close to finishing compiling a database of the three elections around that period, in 1945, '46, and '47, based on ministerial reports. (There's a lot of stuff in those.) I'm focusing on my two main comparison states of Santander and Tolima, and it's fascinating how split a state can be even within an overall context of tending to favor one party. It's kind of like the flipside of how Pennsylvania is a swing state because Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are strongly Democratic while the rest of the state - or as my friends who live near Philly refer to it, "Pennsyltucky," is solidly Republican. In this case, the overall states are both Liberal, but a number of towns are very solidly Conservative. Incidentally, I've always found it interesting that the red-blue thing is exactly opposite in Colombia and the U.S. The associations of Liberals with red and Conservatives with blue goes back decades, and I imagine made intuitive sense in the context of the Cold War and struggles over Communism. I guess Democrats should be thankful they're not reflexively considered reds....

Anyway, I read a fascinating account of the first days of La Violencia in the countryside. One of the events that triggered civil war was the assassination of a Liberal populist leader named Gaitan in April 1948. Bogota erupted in riots throughout the night, but by the morning, order had been restored. In the countryside, though, Liberal uprisings lasted a good couple of weeks, with a number of towns - in Santander and Tolima, actually - established "Revolutionary Juntas" and took the tumult as an excuse to settle scores with wealthy Conservative landowners. The "revolution" didn't last, but the conflict in the countryside continued in other forms, with politicized police playing a key role.

One key point emerged from today's reading, about the role of the police in exacerbating conflict. I assumed the tension between the army and the police (at all levels) was one of the primary movers. But in reading more about the April 1948 uprisings in the provinces, it seems that tension among different levels of the police may have also been an important factor in both prolonging conflict and ensuring that it didn't aggregate up into something larger and national. That is, the local police sometimes acted one way, and the state police or national police acted another, contradictory way. So that adds an important wrinkle to the story I'm trying to tell....

Went back to Hallo Berlin for lunch, the food cart that topped New York's list of street-food in Manhattan. (The top five city-wide are all in Jackson Heights, Queens, so an expedition will definitely be forthcoming....) One of the things that makes New York a world-class city is the variety and quality of street food. Construction workers, students, office drones: everyone appreciates a fast, cheap, tasty meal that's something other than fast food or the corner deli. In midtown, you may have two carts on each corner of an intersection. Hot-dog stands are the classic and what you first think of in this category, but other types emerge as you observe: fruit carts, ice-cream carts, pastry-and-coffee breakfast carts (which never have decaf, pet peeve #23), and the true New York classic, the halal mediterranean carts: falafel, gyros, and the iconic chicken-and-rice plate. After New York came out with the top-20 list a couple of months back, I went on a taste test of my own. Conclusion of Part 1 (Midtown): Hallo Berlin is the winner, with Kwik Meal in second. The Fifth Avenue Combo at Hallo Berlin is the killer app: two types of wurst chopped up and served with German home fries, red-wine marinated onions, sauekraut, and two mysterious and delicious sauces from squeeze-bottles, the secret weapon of street-cart cuisine. Today I had kielbasa and apfelwurst (chicken): Y-U-M. The piece de resistance: the surly German guy asking, "to stay or to go?" At a street cart! Well, of course, I'm going to stay. So he puts the finished product on a tiny fold-out wing of the cart, which he's covered in red-and-white-checked contact paper, so it's like a miniature table. The right-hand-side "table" is on the shady side, under the Lufthansa umbrella and a tree, and it's a perfect place to snarf wurst while enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at the expense of those still waiting in line for some Germanic goodness.

Part 2 of the best-of-street-food tour, after Midtown, is the Chinatown expedition, conveniently located near my writing space. Stay tuned....