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A Century of Violence in a Red City

Popular Struggle, Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia

Lesley Gill

 

   "Lesley Gill's A Century of Violence in a Red City reads like a nonfiction version of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Compelling in analysis, empathetic in interpretation, Gill's sweeping narrative of political struggle, social solidarity, and public-private repression in the Colombian city of Barrancabermeja is required reading for anyone hoping to understand Latin America's twentieth- and early twenty-first-century history."- Greg Grandin, author of Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman 

 

   "Lesley Gill's extraordinarily original scholarship and use of interviews and firsthand accounts gives a vivid view of Colombia's contemporary scene. Beautifully written, this book makes a very important contribution to the literature on Colombia and on class and social movements throughout Latin America. There is virtually nothing like A Century of Violence in a Red City."- Aviva Chomsky, author of Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class

 

In A Century of Violence in a Red City Lesley Gill provides insights into broad trends of global capitalist development, class disenfranchisement and dispossession, and the decline of progressive politics. Gill traces the rise and fall of the strong labor unions, neighborhood organizations, and working class of Barrancabermeja, Colombia, from their origins in the 1920s to their effective activism for agrarian reforms, labor rights, and social programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Like much of Colombia, Barrancabermeja came to be dominated by alliances of right-wing politicians, drug traffickers, foreign corporations, and paramilitary groups. These alliances reshaped the geography of power and gave rise to a pernicious form of armed neoliberalism. Their violent incursion into Barrancabermeja's civil society beginning in the 1980s decimated the city's social networks, destabilized life for its residents, and destroyed its working-class organizations. As a result, community leaders are now left clinging to the toothless discourse of human rights, which cannot effectively challenge the status quo. In this stark book, Gill captures the grim reality and precarious future of Barrancabermeja and other places ravaged by neoliberalism and violence.

 

Lesley Gill is Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University and the author of The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, also published by Duke University Press.

 

Duke University Press

February 2016 304pp 8 illustrations 9780822360605 PB £19.99 now only £15.99* when you quote CSL416CVRC when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/a-century-of-violence-in-a-red-city