Bonus edition

8 hours researching/reading, 1 hour meeting, page count = 138

The archive was open today for a half-day, so I went and continued my scouring of the governor's records from the 1940s and 1950s. One key volume from the early part of the period was missing, so I'll have to see what impact that might have on the comparison of the different periods. But that's the good thing about triangulating sources: gaps in one can be made up for by another.

Thanks to a contact through my cousin, I was able to meet with a Major in the Metropolitan Police who's studied the history of the institution. He had a good source about the evolution of the police in Medellín, and an interesting perspective on the contemporary relationship between the police and elected officials, which will form a useful contrast with the historical period I study. (The big difference, of course, is that governors and mayors are now elected, rather than appointed, as they were back in the day.)

I went to another library in a different part of town to check out a report from the Governor to the Departmental Assembly, i.e., the State Congress, from 1946, and to see if they had other years. I just barely made it to the library before it closed, but I was able to enlist the help of one of the librarians to look for more of them on Monday. The report itself was quite slim, but there was a juicy item in the appendix with a list of municipalities to which police were sent in advance of the presidential election. It's exactly that kind of differential spatial distribution of the police, and its relation to electoral dynamics, that's going to be one of the key datasets that I build.

I also began reading a fascinating book by Francisco Gutierrez Sanin on the Colombian political parties entitled (in Spanish) Gone with the Wind? Fascinating stuff so far. Every page is full of common sense that debunks traditional ideas about the parties. Finally, someone's starting to put together an analytically sophisticated history of the two major political parties. That one hasn't existed up until now is frankly shocking.

Okay, now for real, have a good weekend!