A reading for “20 de Julio”

El día que le pegamos a Llorente by Carlos Vidales (Spanish). The moral of the story being that revolution against tyranny sometimes requires a useful idiot.

Antonio Nariño

Antonio Nariño was a wealthy merchant, amateur scientist, and intellectual whose library was one of the largest in the colony of New Granada. His sanctuary, which was never completed, was to contain a bust of Benjamin Franklin with the inscription:

Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis (He snatched the lightning from the skies, and the scepter from the tyrant’s hand).

After translating and publishing the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1793, Nariño would spend two thirds of his remaining life in jail for his revolutionary activities against the Spanish Crown.

source:

D. Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia, University of California Press, p. 32.

Historical Footnote 2

British Admiral Edward Vernon tried taking Cartagena de Indias during the 1742 War of Jenkin’s Ear. Vernon failed to take the heavily fortified city from the Spanish, but a British colonist in his fleet, Lawrence Washington, would name his estate in the Virginia colony after him.

In 1815, Spanish General Pablo Morillo retook the city from New Granadian rebels after a 106-day siege, during which the rebels in Cartagena formally declared themselves part of the British Empire, a gesture which was “politely declined” by British officials in the Caribbean.

source:
D. Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia, University of California Press, p. 45.

Historical Footnote 1

Mariano Ospina Rodriguez, while president of Colombia (1857-1861) quietly asked Washington to consider annexing Colombia to the US.

Reference:
Daivd Bushnell, The Making Of Modern Colombia, University of California Press, p. 119.

Setting the Stage for Dirty War

According to the UNHCR, Colombia has three million internally displaced refugees. Forced displacement of large populations is a tactic that comes right out of US Army counter-insurgency field manuals from the Cold War.

“Using a pseudo-insurgent force, the govemment generates incidents among the population. These incidents are used to indicate to the people the need for government-sponsored population control for protection of the villagers. By doing this the government establishes their representatives in the areas to enable destruction of the insurgent force and carrying out longer—range objectives.”

U.S. Army Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines for Area Commanders, An Analysis of Criteria. Department of the Army Pamphlet no. 550-100 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, January 1966).

“A final variation on the remote area concept, adapted from the experience of the European colonial powers, was the designation of certain areas as “forbidden zones or no—go areas.92 These were to incorporate elements of counterorganization and to serve as theaters for unrestricted unconventional warfare. McCuen defines the concept as involving the clearance of an area of civilians, systematic population control to prevent their return, and the subsequent deployment of mobile counterguerrilla forces with “complete freedom of action”; without having “to worry about killing or wounding innocent people… [government forces] can destroy anything that moves.”

McCuen, The Art of Counter-Revolutionary War, p. 238.

http://www.statecraft.org/chapter10.html#F24

see also

http://www.statecraft.org/index.html

Por un país al alcance de los niños

Uno de mis favoritos escritos de Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

http://www.fnpi.org/biblioteca/textos/biblioteca-porunpais.asp