Layers

6 hours researching, 1 hour emailing/setting up meetings, page count = 138

I spent a couple of hours putting together two job applications today. Gotta keep those irons in the fire even as I'm cooking up this dissertation. I'm lucky that there are a few foundation positions open now for which I'm a fit. We'll see how it goes.

As far as research, I continued with the triangulation of sources for the first half of 1951 today. There's so much information that I'm mostly taking pictures to analyze it later. Not the most scintillating work, but given the needs of efficiency, it's what works best. There are a number of interesting datasets I could compile from this information: municipal distribution of police forces, municipal distribution of police and army comisiones (special patrols to deal with public-order situations), change in the structure of the police before and after reorganization efforts. Over the weekend, I'll take a crack at analyzing the data further and drawing some conclusions.

In terms of outreach, I heard back from several scholars I'd contacted in the past week, so I spent some time getting back to them to set up appointments. A cousin is helping me set up an interview with a retired police official here in Medellin, which will be important for the state-level picture. There was a LOT of change in the formal structure of the Antioquian police in the '40s and '50s: the question is how much the formal changes really affected the underlying dynamics at the local level.

I love this picture because it shows so many layers of my experience in Medellin (click on it to enlarge). It's taken from the Parque Berrio metro station, which like all the Metro stations I've been in (grand total of 4) is above ground. I always thought the idea of a metro in Bogota was absurd, because how expensive would it be to dig all those tunnels, but duh, what if you built it above ground? Intriguing.Whether Bogota should have a metro is actually one of the main campaign differences in the Bogota mayoral race, which concludes on the 28th. The two leading candidates are Enrique Penalosa, who made the TransMilenio happen, making him my hero, and Samuel Moreno Rojas, the grandson of a military dictator deposed 50 years ago this May. OK, now this is really weird: Rojas Pinilla ran the country from 1953-57, and was deposed because he was trying to refashion himself as a Peron-like populist. Thirteen years later, he ran for President as a civilian on a populist/conservative platform and a third party, and won. Well, until the election was stolen thanks to a convenient power outage at the vote-counting site. Before the outage, Rojas Pinilla was winning; after, his opponent, Misael Pastrana, was winning. Hmmm. As they used to say in the 19th century: quien escruta, elige: the one who counts the votes, elects. Pastrana's son, Andres, was mayor of Bogota and President in the late '90s. No wonder they talk about a clase politica, the same names recur, like a nightmare. Some of Rojas Pinilla's followers were so embittered after his defeat in 1970 that they took to the mountains and formed a guerrilla group, M-19, named after the 19th of April, 1970, the date of the fraud. The M-19 became famous in the 80s when they took hostages in the Palace of Justice, a standoff that ended in tragedy as the Palace went up in flames. (Still hasn't been fixed; it stands on one side of the Plaza Bolivar in Bogota, the figurative center of the nation.) They demobilized in the late 1980s, became a political party, put on a pretty good news program (which I recall having more real-life content than the network news), and eventually got a bunch of seats in the 1991 Constituent Assembly, which produced one of the most multicultural, participatory, and inclusive documents ever to putatively ground a nation's laws. So, to summarize: the only 20th-century military dictator later runs for President as a Colombian Peronist and has the election stolen, leading to the creation of a guerrilla group that after demobilizing, plays a key role in shaping the first new constitution in 100 years, making it super-inclusive. Now his Kennedy School-trained grandson is running for mayor of Bogota as a technocrat with the popular touch. My head hurts just writing it down.

Anyway, the metro station from which the picture is taken is elevated. The striped building in the middle ground is the Palacio de la Cultura Rafael Uribe Uribe, in the basement of which is the archive in which I've been working. Uribe Uribe was an avid proponent of professionalizing the army in the early 20th century. One of my favorite sources from that time is his letters to his sons, both of whom he sent to military college in Santiago, to learn from the Chilean experience of military professionalism. The tone alternates among offhand references to politics (for a time, Rafael was the only Liberal who could manage to get elected to Congress: 1 vs. 65), stern fatherly admonishment, and tender encouragement. Julian Uribe went on to become governor of Antioquia and leader of the state Liberal party. He was exiled during La Violencia.

On the street below, in addition to the foot traffic, are street vendors, some of whom sell individual packs of gum. You can get everything in single servings on the street here, from gum to cigarettes to phone calls. The gum vendors offer their wares for a nickel: "A cien, a cien, a cien." How do I know this? Because the archive windows onto the street are open, and that bleating cry is the constant accompaniment of my days there. In the background of the top picture is a mural of a Botero painting. The archive looks out onto the Plaza Botero, which features a bunch of his statues, like in this other picture (click it to enlarge).

Finally, way in the background of the top picture, barely visible (click it to enlarge), is one of the mountains that form the valley in which Medellin is nestled, and which provide the wonderful views I enjoy from the apartment.

I've updated posts from earlier this week with some pictures, scroll down and check them out!