Cardona
MPSA 2004
10
respect to the evolution of the two-party system. The second is to address the conditions
under which a forty years’ peace was engineered at the start of the 20
th
century. The third
stage is to consider the breakdown of this truce, and the consequences of the ensuing
period of regime instability for subsequent regime dynamics.
Before beginning, it bears mentioning where such an investigation fits into the
overall evolution of Colombian political historiography. With respect to the 19
th
century,
the literature has produced insightful studies of economic issues (Ocampo 1984, Palacios
1983), the role of the Church in politics (Abel 1987), and regional development (Palacios
1980, Appelbaum 2003), but relatively little in the way of political history. Bergquist’s
landmark study (1978) of the impact of the development of an export economy based on
coffee on partisan politics remains a benchmark, as do Delpar’s (1981) careful
examination of the Liberal Party under federalism and the first 15 years of the
Regeneration and Park’s (1985) study of the dynamics of regionalism under the federal
period. However, almost nothing has been written about the evolution of the Colombian
military, despite its close connections to the emergence of the two-party system and the
proliferation of civil wars in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries.
With regard to the period 1930-1958 and La Violencia, a veritable cottage
industry of “violentólogos,” beginning with Guzmán Campos et al. in 1962 and
continuing with the work of Bergquist et al. (1992, 2001), Sanchez and Meertens (1983),
Gallón Giraldo (1989), Alape (1985), Braun (1985), and Roldán (2002) has sought to
diagnose the root causes of recurring crises of public order, but the organization of the
military has not been prominent in their concern. My research will contribute to this
literature by taking a longer-term historical view that neither reduces recurrent conflict to
Convention