One Monday in 1988, El Mundo newspaper of Medellín, Colombia, reported, as it did every Monday, on the violent deaths in the city of two million people over the weekend. An article giving an hour-by-hour description of the deaths from Saturday night to Sunday night was remarkable for, among other things, the journalist’s skill in finding different ways to report a murder. “Someone took the life of Luís Alberto López at knife point … Luís Alberto PatiÑo ceased to exist with a bullet in his head … Mario Restrepo turned up dead … An unidentified person killed NÉstor Alvarez with three shots.” In reporting 27 different murders, the author repeated his phrasing only once.
Colombia has always been a violent country, but after the 1948 assassination of Jorge EliÉcer Gaitán, a politician who threatened to break the oligarchy’s stranglehold, hundreds of thousands of people were killed over the next five years. The killings were due to scorched-earth battles between the two major political parties — both parties of the upper classes whose major difference was their names. Violence acquired capital letters and became known as La Violencia.
olitical violence begat other kinds of violence. The killings were worst in the countryside and millions fled to the cities, which became vast settlements of the unmoored, crowds without community — a breeding ground for crime. The judicial system and the police broke down completely during La Violencia. While most of the violence stopped after a military coup and then a pact between the two parties, the government never recovered its legitimacy nor those institutions their strength.
The dark ages returned with the rise of cocaine in the late 1970s. By the late 1980s and early 1990, the leading cause of death in several of Colombia’s major cities was homicide. The most deadly and infamous was Medellín, but this was also true in Cali.
[For more of this story, written by Tina Rosenberg, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...-against-crime/?_r=0]
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