1 hour writing, 3 hours reading/researching
Wow, there is a lot of material at the NY Public Library on the state of Santander in Colombia. I'll need some time to cull through the 62 records I saved and figure out what will most help me get oriented to the region's history for the subnational comparison part of my analysis. I'm lucky that there's already an excellent regional history of La Violencia in Tolima, one of the other comparison states, to guide me in telling that part of the story. I'm unsure about the third state - whether I need it, first of all, and whether to do Atlantico or Bolivar if I do. Turns out Atlantico, where Barranquilla is, was significantly better off than most of the rest of the country in the late 1930s, for when I have census information. If I want to hold socioeconomic level constant, I should probably go with Bolivar (or Magdalena). We'll see. I'll go back to the NYPL tomorrow to dig around more in the census figures.
Continued writing about the trends in the military-government database, which I've started to expand to incorporate number and type of armed challenges. It's difficult to document and code failed challenges, especially failed armed uprisings, so part of today's writing was about planting a flag in the sand and defining terms. Now I have to go get the information, we'll see how that goes.
Read more in an anthology of police reform in the Americas, focusing on the chapters in Colombia. The more I read, the more I'm convinced that the state and local level is where the story really needs to be told; the National Police isn't as central as I may have originally thought. We'll see.
The movie last night was great. It's set in Washington DC from the late 60s to the early 80s, and there are several great moments that really capture the emotional feel of a particular time, rather than just the clothes or the hairstyles. Talk to Me opens on Friday and is definitely worth checking out.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
1 hour writing, 3 hours researching
Finished with my database of military governments since 1910. I was surprised to see that Argentina and Chile, which I've been thinking of as contrast cases to Colombia, are actually closer to average in the number of years of military government they've experienced in the last century. It's three countries that stand out as having suffered the longest under military rule: Paraguay, El Salvador, and Honduras. Those three contrast with the three at the other end of the spectrum: Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The beginnings of some interesting comparisons....
However, first I need to balance out this measure with another one: number and type of armed challenges. This is in truth closer to what I'm trying to measure, but also harder to conceptualize and measure. I'll need to think about how to weigh duration of a military government against frequency and type of armed challenge. This will speak to the whole issue of "stability": am I interested in the stability of a regime - in which case long-lasting military dictatorships like Paraguay's look awfully stable - or in the stability of constitutional governance, that is, the degree to which the constitution - and not guns - decides who holds office. I'm definitely inclined more toward the latter; the types of threats that interest me are those to the principle that the constitution governs who has power, whether those threats be armed challenge from society (insurrection) or from the state (coup).
Cathy and I are going this evening to see a preview of a new movie, Talk to Me, starring one of our favorite actors, Don Cheadle. He was in the Ocean's Eleven movies and was Oscar-nominated for Hotel Rwanda, but it's as Buck Swope in Boogie Nights that he forever captured our hearts. Another character shows him a card trick, and he asks, "Does it scare you dealing with all the evil forces? "Evil? No, it's an illusion." "Yeah, it's confusing!" He'll be there for Q&A, and I hope he gets a question about that role....
Finished with my database of military governments since 1910. I was surprised to see that Argentina and Chile, which I've been thinking of as contrast cases to Colombia, are actually closer to average in the number of years of military government they've experienced in the last century. It's three countries that stand out as having suffered the longest under military rule: Paraguay, El Salvador, and Honduras. Those three contrast with the three at the other end of the spectrum: Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. The beginnings of some interesting comparisons....
However, first I need to balance out this measure with another one: number and type of armed challenges. This is in truth closer to what I'm trying to measure, but also harder to conceptualize and measure. I'll need to think about how to weigh duration of a military government against frequency and type of armed challenge. This will speak to the whole issue of "stability": am I interested in the stability of a regime - in which case long-lasting military dictatorships like Paraguay's look awfully stable - or in the stability of constitutional governance, that is, the degree to which the constitution - and not guns - decides who holds office. I'm definitely inclined more toward the latter; the types of threats that interest me are those to the principle that the constitution governs who has power, whether those threats be armed challenge from society (insurrection) or from the state (coup).
Cathy and I are going this evening to see a preview of a new movie, Talk to Me, starring one of our favorite actors, Don Cheadle. He was in the Ocean's Eleven movies and was Oscar-nominated for Hotel Rwanda, but it's as Buck Swope in Boogie Nights that he forever captured our hearts. Another character shows him a card trick, and he asks, "Does it scare you dealing with all the evil forces? "Evil? No, it's an illusion." "Yeah, it's confusing!" He'll be there for Q&A, and I hope he gets a question about that role....
Monday, July 9, 2007
When is a Minister not just a Minister?
6 hours researching/reading
This week's blog monitor is Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, in New York. Laura is a Queens chick who is devoted to understanding and strengthening early literacy experiences of bilingual students. She's starting her 9th (!!) year as a teacher and curriculum coach at the Cypress Hills Community School, the only school in NYC to have a shared directorship between a principal and a parent. Welcome Laura, thanks, and happy birthday! Laura will start monitoring tomorrow.
Worked on expanding my database of military governments in Latin America from 1945 back to 1910. Got about halfway through, and will aim to finish tomorrow. Also picked up math again after a couple of weeks of not doing it while at the library. Turns out my department is now teaching a math for political science course, so I downloaded the syllabus, which will help tremendously in guiding my self-directed efforts.
I also did some reading about the Chilean Carabineros, one of two national police agencies in that country. Chile is in many ways my "opposite case" of Colombia, with highly militarized security forces and susceptible to coups. So I was interested to learn that the Carabineros were actually under the Ministry of the Interior, as opposed to the Ministry of Defense, between 1925 and 1973. It was only under Pinochet that they moved to Defense. I'll want to look more into who had effective control over them at the local level. This confirms my suspicion that Ministry affiliation, while part of the story, is not where the action is. There's not a lot of variation in this regard; most countries appear to have put the police under the Interior pretty early on (which in Latin America means not the environment portfolio, like in the U.S., but a sort of catch-all political portfolio; in Chile, for example, there's no formal Vice President, but when the President is out of the country, the Interior Minister becomes Vice President and exercises a kind of minding-the-store authority). The real question is who controls them at the state and local level, which I continue to investigate.
Tomorrow I'll aim to wrap up the military-government database, analyze trends, and start writing up what I find and its implications for my case study of Colombia.
This week's blog monitor is Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, in New York. Laura is a Queens chick who is devoted to understanding and strengthening early literacy experiences of bilingual students. She's starting her 9th (!!) year as a teacher and curriculum coach at the Cypress Hills Community School, the only school in NYC to have a shared directorship between a principal and a parent. Welcome Laura, thanks, and happy birthday! Laura will start monitoring tomorrow.
Worked on expanding my database of military governments in Latin America from 1945 back to 1910. Got about halfway through, and will aim to finish tomorrow. Also picked up math again after a couple of weeks of not doing it while at the library. Turns out my department is now teaching a math for political science course, so I downloaded the syllabus, which will help tremendously in guiding my self-directed efforts.
I also did some reading about the Chilean Carabineros, one of two national police agencies in that country. Chile is in many ways my "opposite case" of Colombia, with highly militarized security forces and susceptible to coups. So I was interested to learn that the Carabineros were actually under the Ministry of the Interior, as opposed to the Ministry of Defense, between 1925 and 1973. It was only under Pinochet that they moved to Defense. I'll want to look more into who had effective control over them at the local level. This confirms my suspicion that Ministry affiliation, while part of the story, is not where the action is. There's not a lot of variation in this regard; most countries appear to have put the police under the Interior pretty early on (which in Latin America means not the environment portfolio, like in the U.S., but a sort of catch-all political portfolio; in Chile, for example, there's no formal Vice President, but when the President is out of the country, the Interior Minister becomes Vice President and exercises a kind of minding-the-store authority). The real question is who controls them at the state and local level, which I continue to investigate.
Tomorrow I'll aim to wrap up the military-government database, analyze trends, and start writing up what I find and its implications for my case study of Colombia.
Friday, July 6, 2007
4 hours researching/reading
Bit of a ho-hum day. Went back to micro-level data, continuing to gather information at the town level from the 1938 census. It's slow going, and there's not a lot of variation - they're small, rural, poor towns. One or two are standing out, but I'm not seeing the pattern yet.
Read parts of an excellent study on the very negative impact of militarization on development called Militarization, Democracy, and Development. It's quite inspirational as a role model, combining cross-national statistical analysis with detailed case studies. One of the case studies, and there are some mentions I'll need to follow up on about a Honduran military dictator in the 1960s making changes to the police upon assuming power - which is exactly what Rojas Pinilla did in Colombia in the 1950s. The other case study, Costa Rica, remains one I need to get more into, as a country where the army was abolished in 1948, with very positive outcomes over the following six decades. I need to figure out how this case fits into my framework; I think it's very hard to essentially cut through the Gordian knot of having either to create a strong army and militarized police that can maintain order - but then may want to take over the government - or to create a less strong army and a politicized police that aren't a threat to take over, but aren't very good at quelling armed rebellion from below. It's worth my thinking more about how Costa Rica got out of this problem....
Thanks to Dan Faltz for monitoring this week. Next up is Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, in New York. Laura's mother is Colombian, and she was a Fulbright in Bogota at the same time as me, so I'll really need to be on my game next week as far as Colombian history.
Have a great weekend!
Bit of a ho-hum day. Went back to micro-level data, continuing to gather information at the town level from the 1938 census. It's slow going, and there's not a lot of variation - they're small, rural, poor towns. One or two are standing out, but I'm not seeing the pattern yet.
Read parts of an excellent study on the very negative impact of militarization on development called Militarization, Democracy, and Development. It's quite inspirational as a role model, combining cross-national statistical analysis with detailed case studies. One of the case studies, and there are some mentions I'll need to follow up on about a Honduran military dictator in the 1960s making changes to the police upon assuming power - which is exactly what Rojas Pinilla did in Colombia in the 1950s. The other case study, Costa Rica, remains one I need to get more into, as a country where the army was abolished in 1948, with very positive outcomes over the following six decades. I need to figure out how this case fits into my framework; I think it's very hard to essentially cut through the Gordian knot of having either to create a strong army and militarized police that can maintain order - but then may want to take over the government - or to create a less strong army and a politicized police that aren't a threat to take over, but aren't very good at quelling armed rebellion from below. It's worth my thinking more about how Costa Rica got out of this problem....
Thanks to Dan Faltz for monitoring this week. Next up is Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, in New York. Laura's mother is Colombian, and she was a Fulbright in Bogota at the same time as me, so I'll really need to be on my game next week as far as Colombian history.
Have a great weekend!
Thursday, July 5, 2007
From micro to macro
7 hours researching/reading
Having been immersed in micro-level data on electoral patterns at the town level in the state of Tolima, I must have been looking for a change of perspective, because I gravitated today toward a very different type of data: patterns of military government in Latin America since World War II. (Thank you Wikipedia, y gracias Wikipedia en espaniol.) Quite illuminating. My argument hinges on the exception to the rule: Colombia bucks the trend of Latin American countries being chronically susceptible to military dictatorships. I want to say that this is part of its own trend rather than being an outlier to another trend. So I need to situate Colombia in the context of other Latin American republics in the same time period. This is helpful in identifying potentially similar cases. The obvious ones were always Mexico and Costa Rica, but I was interested to see that Ecuador has less experience with military government than I'd expected.
Tomorrow, I'm going to extend the timeline back to 1910 to see if the postwar trends hold. All this will help frame the chapter on "Colombia in comparative perspective."
Also went through some recent reading, extracting the most relevant points that I'd highlighted. One potentially important idea that emerged from an edited collection on the Latin American military called Rank and Privilege was the role of the frontier in nation-building, and its impact on/connection to security forces. Money quote:
I guess I need to watch some Westerns about cattle rustling....
Having been immersed in micro-level data on electoral patterns at the town level in the state of Tolima, I must have been looking for a change of perspective, because I gravitated today toward a very different type of data: patterns of military government in Latin America since World War II. (Thank you Wikipedia, y gracias Wikipedia en espaniol.) Quite illuminating. My argument hinges on the exception to the rule: Colombia bucks the trend of Latin American countries being chronically susceptible to military dictatorships. I want to say that this is part of its own trend rather than being an outlier to another trend. So I need to situate Colombia in the context of other Latin American republics in the same time period. This is helpful in identifying potentially similar cases. The obvious ones were always Mexico and Costa Rica, but I was interested to see that Ecuador has less experience with military government than I'd expected.
Tomorrow, I'm going to extend the timeline back to 1910 to see if the postwar trends hold. All this will help frame the chapter on "Colombia in comparative perspective."
Also went through some recent reading, extracting the most relevant points that I'd highlighted. One potentially important idea that emerged from an edited collection on the Latin American military called Rank and Privilege was the role of the frontier in nation-building, and its impact on/connection to security forces. Money quote:
Is that what happened in the U.S., too? A big part of the story in Colombia during La Violencia is about life on the frontier; it's the areas that are most sparsely settled, where peasants have recently established themselves on land long in the nominal possession of large landowners and are fighting for the right to stay, that you see the violence evolve from politically motivated to economically based. That shift is a key part of the story that Mary Roldan tells in Blood and Fire. What Rodriguez suggests here is that the frontier story goes back to the 19th century, and that it had a critical role in the growth and development of the security forces."[In countries] such as Argentina and Chile, campaigns against indigenous groups stimulated the modernization of the army and enhanced the stature of the institution" (p. xiv).
I guess I need to watch some Westerns about cattle rustling....
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Diplomatic intrigue
4.5 hours reading/researching
Luckily, the dilation that they do at the eye doctor's only lasts a few hours, so I'm back up to speed today. Didn't get to writing today, but I went through some municipal-level electoral data to shore up my subnational comparison. I took a look today at the state of Tolima, and studied the population distribution of partisan voting patterns using the wonderful atlas of Colombian electoral geography that I began working with last month. For the period immediately leading up to La Violencia, the state was pretty solidly Liberal, which is important for my comparison. About 58% of the population lived in towns where the Liberals were electorally dominant, another 14% lived in Conservative-dominated towns, and the remaining 28% lived in towns that were competitive, with about half of those skewing Liberal. Overall, 74% of the population lived in towns that were pretty comfortably in the hands of Liberals. It's important to establish this profile so I can compare it to another state (I'm thinking Santander) where the electoral landscape was more competitive. This will allow me to see how the level of electoral competition affects the impact of security forces on the types of armed challenges the regime to which the regime is susceptible.
The other thread I followed today was to read one of the few studies of the military regime of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-57), the only military dictatorship of the 20th century in Colombia. Compared to most of the rest of Latin America, that's pretty distinctive, and part of what led me on this path of research in the first place. Rojas Pinilla also made some significant reforms to the police, so his government is an important episode for me to consider.
One of the really interesting things in this book was to see the use the authors made of diplomatic correspondence. There's a fascinating appendix to the book in which the Colombian ambassador to the U.S. describes in literally day-by-day detail his negotiations to have the U.S. government give Colombia free military equipment as recognition for Colombia having sent troops - the only Latin American country to do so, by the way - to help the American side in the Korean War. I don't know if he ultimately succeeded, but the way he describes a series of increasingly confrontational meetings over the course of 18 months, and the window his account provides into the nuts and bolts of diplomacy in the '50s, was fascinating. Lots of informal conversations with U.S. officials at cocktail parties, after dinners, and even at a pool party. There's a comical visual for you. It reminds me to look at diplomatic sources, including on the U.S. side, to get more insight, particularly into periods that are politically sensitive in Colombia.
I'm taking off tomorrow for the Fourth. Enjoy the fireworks, and I'll be back on Thursday!
Luckily, the dilation that they do at the eye doctor's only lasts a few hours, so I'm back up to speed today. Didn't get to writing today, but I went through some municipal-level electoral data to shore up my subnational comparison. I took a look today at the state of Tolima, and studied the population distribution of partisan voting patterns using the wonderful atlas of Colombian electoral geography that I began working with last month. For the period immediately leading up to La Violencia, the state was pretty solidly Liberal, which is important for my comparison. About 58% of the population lived in towns where the Liberals were electorally dominant, another 14% lived in Conservative-dominated towns, and the remaining 28% lived in towns that were competitive, with about half of those skewing Liberal. Overall, 74% of the population lived in towns that were pretty comfortably in the hands of Liberals. It's important to establish this profile so I can compare it to another state (I'm thinking Santander) where the electoral landscape was more competitive. This will allow me to see how the level of electoral competition affects the impact of security forces on the types of armed challenges the regime to which the regime is susceptible.
The other thread I followed today was to read one of the few studies of the military regime of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-57), the only military dictatorship of the 20th century in Colombia. Compared to most of the rest of Latin America, that's pretty distinctive, and part of what led me on this path of research in the first place. Rojas Pinilla also made some significant reforms to the police, so his government is an important episode for me to consider.
One of the really interesting things in this book was to see the use the authors made of diplomatic correspondence. There's a fascinating appendix to the book in which the Colombian ambassador to the U.S. describes in literally day-by-day detail his negotiations to have the U.S. government give Colombia free military equipment as recognition for Colombia having sent troops - the only Latin American country to do so, by the way - to help the American side in the Korean War. I don't know if he ultimately succeeded, but the way he describes a series of increasingly confrontational meetings over the course of 18 months, and the window his account provides into the nuts and bolts of diplomacy in the '50s, was fascinating. Lots of informal conversations with U.S. officials at cocktail parties, after dinners, and even at a pool party. There's a comical visual for you. It reminds me to look at diplomatic sources, including on the U.S. side, to get more insight, particularly into periods that are politically sensitive in Colombia.
I'm taking off tomorrow for the Fourth. Enjoy the fireworks, and I'll be back on Thursday!
Monday, July 2, 2007
My eyes!
4 hours reading
Happy July! Please welcome new blog monitor Dan Faltz, in Los Angeles. Dan is a friend from my San Francisco days who's in film school at USC. His excellent short Lucky Man has been featured in festivals across the country, including one in New York last month, at which Cathy and I were lucky enough (ha, ha) to catch it. Definitely a name to watch! Welcome, Dan.
I had an eye appointment this afternoon, and they dilated my eyes, so I've been out of commission pretty much since then. Today, I read two interesting analyses of Colombian regional history by young American historians, Nancy Appelbaum and James Sanders. I audited a course on race, region, and nation that Nancy taught at Berkeley, at a time when there was a real critical mass of top-flight historical work coming out about Colombia's regions between 1850 and 1950. Blood and Fire, about Antioquia, which I've written about glowingly in this space, is of that group, and came out in 2002, followed the next year by Nancy's Muddied Waters, about a town in the coffee-growing region that subverts usual understandings of regional identity and brings to the fore the racially coded ways in which regions have been defined in Colombia. (I love that the name of the town, Riosucio, literally means "dirty river," allowing for the great and thematically appropriate title.)
Finally, in 2004, James Sanders's Contentious Republicans documented a rich popular-democratic tradition in the southern Cauca region during the second half of the nineteenth century, as elite Liberals made alliances with lower-class (or "popular") blacks and mulattos to contend for regional and national power. Sanders complicates our picture of nineteenth-century electoral contention and civil warmaking in Colombia, adding race and class perspectives that help us see in new ways and understand that complicated time more clearly. For my purposes, there's some good stuff in there about the connection between the state-level army and the incipient political parties. That'll be useful for my chapter on the time leading up to the institutional design of the army and police that are central for my analysis.
Tomorrow I'll be back up to speed and ready to write more.
Happy July! Please welcome new blog monitor Dan Faltz, in Los Angeles. Dan is a friend from my San Francisco days who's in film school at USC. His excellent short Lucky Man has been featured in festivals across the country, including one in New York last month, at which Cathy and I were lucky enough (ha, ha) to catch it. Definitely a name to watch! Welcome, Dan.
I had an eye appointment this afternoon, and they dilated my eyes, so I've been out of commission pretty much since then. Today, I read two interesting analyses of Colombian regional history by young American historians, Nancy Appelbaum and James Sanders. I audited a course on race, region, and nation that Nancy taught at Berkeley, at a time when there was a real critical mass of top-flight historical work coming out about Colombia's regions between 1850 and 1950. Blood and Fire, about Antioquia, which I've written about glowingly in this space, is of that group, and came out in 2002, followed the next year by Nancy's Muddied Waters, about a town in the coffee-growing region that subverts usual understandings of regional identity and brings to the fore the racially coded ways in which regions have been defined in Colombia. (I love that the name of the town, Riosucio, literally means "dirty river," allowing for the great and thematically appropriate title.)
Finally, in 2004, James Sanders's Contentious Republicans documented a rich popular-democratic tradition in the southern Cauca region during the second half of the nineteenth century, as elite Liberals made alliances with lower-class (or "popular") blacks and mulattos to contend for regional and national power. Sanders complicates our picture of nineteenth-century electoral contention and civil warmaking in Colombia, adding race and class perspectives that help us see in new ways and understand that complicated time more clearly. For my purposes, there's some good stuff in there about the connection between the state-level army and the incipient political parties. That'll be useful for my chapter on the time leading up to the institutional design of the army and police that are central for my analysis.
Tomorrow I'll be back up to speed and ready to write more.
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