Colombia: the Living Graveyard

Steven Dudley, "Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia" (Routledge, 2003).

Overall, author Dudley has done right in laying open the running sores of the Colombian civil war to public view, a generally engrossing - and gross - account of chicanery, cynicism, and atrocity.

That said, I do criticise his flawed - in my view - insistence on blaming the left for its own destruction in Colombia. At one point he writes of the "startling number of dead" the UP "put in the morgue." Yet the Union Patriotica did not torture, kill, or "disappear" these people, nor force the death squads to do so, and therein lays the book's mistaken premise.

By his own admission, Colombia has engaged in political violence against dissidents for decades, and its 1980s death squads were willing to kill virtually anyone they disliked. The UP, then, did not have to be cynically betrayed or manipulated by the FARC to earn this lethal attention - it would have come anyway, regardless of any guerrilla politics behind the scenes. The paramilitaries were out to destroy the left, and the center; the guerrilla politics upon which Dudley lavishes so much scrutiny were a secondary factor at best, and in no way confirm the Colombian military's "analysis" or strategy.