Cardona
MPSA 2004
8
which armed rebels have sufficient concentration to credibly threaten the overthrow of
the existing regime. Oquist’s (1980) classic characterization La Violencia is that is
represents a “partial collapse of the state.” What this argument suggests is that with a
different configuration of the armed forces, the result might have been a “complete”
collapse of the state.
On the other hand, the type of coup to which the regime succumbed in 1953 and
1957 was an extremely limited one. Both episodes occurred with broad consensus from
the traditional parties: the first sought to overcome the darkest period of partisan strife
under La Violencia, while the second reclaimed the regime from a military leader, Gral.
Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who sought to resist the resumption of party-based government.
What the Colombian experience suggests, therefore, is that decentralized public forces
represent an intermediate, not entirely satisfactory solution to the problem of
constitutional governance, in that they neither forestall coup nor foreclose revolution, but
rather generate a form of hybrid vulnerability in which coup and revolution are
alternately possible under extreme circumstances. To see how these dynamics play out in
practice, let us turn to a consideration of the specific case.
Understanding the Interplay of Constitutional Governance and Public Forces: The
Case of Colombia, 1930-1958
We have seen that Latin American republics faced a fundamental dilemma in the
decades after independence. The struggle to ensure stable rules of constitutional
governance led to bloody civil wars, frequent rewriting of constitutions, and widespread
electoral fraud. One aspect of the solution that these republics devised to this dilemma, in
Convention