by Forrest Hylton (Author), Gonzalo Sanchez (Contributor), Gonzalo Sanchez (Contributor)
Colombia is the least understood of Latin American countries. Its human tragedy, which features terrifying levels of kidnapping, homicide and extortion, is generally ignored or exploited. In this urgent new work, Forrest Hylton, who has extensive first-hand experience of living and working in Colombia, explores its history of 150 years of political conflict, characterized by radical-popular mobilization and reactionary repression. He shows how patterns of political conflict after 1848, and especially after 1948, explain the war currently destroying Colombian lives, property, communities and territory. Evil Hour in Colombia also traces how Colombia's coffee capitalism gave way to the cattle and cocaine republic of the 1980s, and how land, wealth and power have been steadily accumulated by the light-skinned top of the social pyramid through a brutal combination of terror, expropriation and economic depression.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 174
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 06 Sep 2006
ISBN 10: 1844675513
ISBN 13: 9781844675517
A corrective to those servants of empire who would have us believe that the main threat facing Latin America today is left-wing populism, Forrest Hylton's Evil Hour in Colombia describes in alarming detail the real danger to the region: the spread of paramilitarism, which in Colombia has grown beyond its rural death-squads roots to graft itself into the highest branches of government, crime, and society. This book is an exacting portrait of the face of American 'hard power' in the Andes, a must read for anyone interested in what awaits the rest of the world if Washington's power remains unchecked. --Greg Grandin