Triangulation

1 hour writing, 6.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing, page count = 138

I’m listening to a chorus of crickets as night falls over Medellín. The apartment is perched on a hillside, and I’m looking out the balcony over the valley in which the city lies. What a different experience from Bogotá. My cousin’s apartment where I’m staying there is similarly removed from the city center, but there it’s silent, while here there’s birdsong in the morning. And the climate really is ideal. I’m grateful to everyone who’s helped make this trip worthwhile so far.

Today I focused on triangulating accounts of public-order disturbances from three different sources for the same time period, the first six months of 1951. This was at the height of La Violencia, and there’s a lot of material to go through. Much of it I’m photographing for later analysis. But from what I’ve started processing, I’m surprised to see that the three sources – army, police, and public-order reports from the state government – don’t have a lot of overlap. And all three point out a number of public-order disturbances across the state. Seems like they each take different approaches to the problem, or that different audiences reach out to them. As I expected, there’s a lot of disagreement between the army and police, but surprisingly, the army is not always the neutral party its more professionalized profile at the time would have led me to believe. This only reinforces my point about the unpredictability of security-force responses fueling the conflict and keeping it local – if even the national forces brought in can prove disloyal to the government, what other recourse is there but to solve local problems with local guns?

In terms of writing, I began incorporating some of my research from last week at the Police Museum into one of the empirical chapters. One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is the exact timing and extent of the nationalization of the police, the process by which the central government took a degree of control over the subnational police away from governors and mayors. Interestingly, Antioquia seems to have come to this process quite late, a good 13 years after it was initially implemented in most states. Since that 13 years later equals 1949, I should be able to trace the impact, if any, of this change through my archival work. I’m getting a good picture of what the police looked like after this change, so I’ll need to go back and examine what it was like before.