AN ISLAND IN A SEA OF BLOOD: THE UBATÉ VALLEY DURING THE  

COLOMBIAN VIOLENCIA, 1946-58^*

by

Alberto G. Flórez-Malagón

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

This article deals with continuity in the hacienda based local power structure of the Ubaté Valley during the civil war period known in Colombian history as la Violencia (1946-58). Unlike most historical studies concerning rural societies, it neither traces a radical societal shift, nor examines mechanisms of adaptation, resistance and domination that are conducive to transformation. Rather, I use these elements as a framework for explaining social continuity. In short, I will be explaining a process of maintenance, not change. The Ubaté Valley is an appropriate subject for such a study because it enjoyed a degree of stability during the period of la Violencia when many other regions of Colombia experienced social, political and economic chaos, resulting in the deaths of more than 200,000 people.

What interests me here is the means by which potentially conflicting constituencies developed tacit mechanisms for coexistence and the resolution of tensions in the region. The apparent absence of conflict suggests the triumph of local power and its consolidation throughout the history of the Ubaté Valley. Paul Oquist, a pioneering scholar on the subject of the regionalization of "la Violencia," mentions similar cases found on the Atlantic Coast and in the department of Nariño, as well as in the town of Aguadas in the department of Caldas, which constituted islands in a sea of bloody fighting.

Whether or not the specific pattern of response to la Violencia in the Ubaté Valley resembled that of many areas in the Altiplano Cundiboyacense and in other provinces remains to be studied. In the future, the aim would be to propose a more general frame of analysis for places that managed to remain largely unaffected by la Violencia.

What differentiated Ubaté from its neighbors (and what may also have operated to dampen open conflict elsewhere) was the strength and articulation of specific regional powers. I will argue that some local power systems worked relatively independently of national structures and at times even counterbalanced their effects. The experience of the inhabitants of the Ubaté Valley offers an opportunity to explore in detail dynamics which have not been addressed since Oquist's work.

The Ubaté Valley is located in the eastern chain (la Cordillera Oriental) of the Colombian Andes. It is situated in the northeastern part of the departamento of Cundinamarca, only 80 kilometers from Bogotá. The Valley is situated at between 2,500 and 3,500 meters above sea level, and its average temperature, which is 14 degrees centigrade, varies little over the course of the year. It occupies approximately 1,300 square kilometres (140,000 hectares) divided between plains and mountains.

The Ubaté Valley actually consists of a series of small Valleys encircled by mountains, which include ten municipios (see Map I). In some cases I will refer to specific municipios in the Valley. The mountainous area has severe erosion problems. Consequently, the vegetable cover is scarce and the soil depth is thin on the slopes, which are not very fertile. Precipitation is low and irregular (750 millimeters per year). On the Valley floor, in contrast, the soil is fertile and supplied by water from the rivers. However, the flat area is prone to flooding.

The history of the Andean Ubaté Valley was molded by its centrality as an important pre-Columbian center of the Muisca civilization, and later, by its proximity to Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. These circumstances gave rise to a process of territorial appropriation by the Spaniards and their descendants. These groups exploited the limited opportunities of the land market, establishing a hacienda territory that refashioned and transformed the pre-existing Indian world into a relatively racially homogeneous mestizo society. The geographical closeness of the Valley to the capital city and its separation from nearby agricultural and mining centers facilitated the rise of a dairy based hacienda economy in the flat Valley floor that coexisted with a world of small agricultural producers clinging to the steep slopes above.

Map I. The Ubaté Valley

There were other rural producers in the Ubaté Valley, apart from hacienda and peasantry, most notably in the petty coal mines and the small brick factories. Most of the miners, however, were migrants from other departments who were little integrated into local society; they settled almost exclusively in the county of Cucunubá, remaining isolated from the peasant world. Artisanal production, especially the weaving of woolen textiles by women, was the usual complementary activity in peasant-based communities.

The Ubaté Valley was a trans-shipment center for emerald merchants and for agricultural products from other regions, but this inter-regional trade had little impact on local society. Direct trade with complementary agricultural producers such as those in the "tierra caliente" (hot lowlands) was limited because of a problematic road system.

The importation of livestock, the labour demands that Spanish settlers made on the native population in colonial times, and the consolidation of large estates all directly affected the ecology of the Valley. Throughout the twentieth century, the local economy was mainly oriented to milk production and the plains (the hacienda territory) were basically dedicated to pastures. Most agricultural production, meanwhile, was relegated to the less fertile slopes. In the 1950's at least 75.6 % of hacienda land (96,300 hectares) was devoted to pasturage, while only 24.4 % was devoted to food production. The main peasant crop was potatoes, but corn, wheat, barley and kidney beans were also widely cultivated. Other peasant crops included broad beans, spring vetch and vegetables in small quantities. At the time almost 90 % of properties in the region contained fewer than 10 hectares and 87 % of these were smaller than five hectares.

The productivity of peasant farms on the slopes was directly affected by the changing ecology. The low productivity of the mountain-based peasants, particularly in the twentieth century, was a result of indiscriminate deforestation, degradation of the water springs and loss of forest cover and subsequent erosion in the mountainous areas. Throughout the twentieth century, the two big lagoons that supplied water to the Valley slowly dried up. Irrigation channels constructed in the 1920's inhibited the natural circulation of water. This in turn diminished the flow of water to the rivers, and the precarious ecological equilibrium was unsettled. The likelihood of both droughts and floods increased over succeeding decades.

Peasants were the largest group in the area. Small property ownership predominated over tenancy relationships developed mostly in hacienda territory (aparcería, arrendamiento or colonato). At the end of the 1950's, there were 8,941 small peasant-owned farms in contrast to 144 held in rentals, 195 in aparcería and six in colonato. Peonage (temporary wage work), arrendamiento, and aparcería provided the only sources of peasant labour on hacienda lands. The need for such labour was mainly limited to dairy farming. Thus most peasants were engaged in agricultural activities outside of the formal labour market of the haciendas.

The Valley's demographic profile was stable both in numbers and residential patterns for almost a century. There was little growth in the population of the Ubaté Valley between 1938 and 1985 and minimal variation in the size of the rural population (around 58,288 in 1958).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a few families controlled large estates in the Valley. In subsequent decades a growing number of large landlords from the Ubaté region settled in Bogotá and increasingly looked for opportunities in the urban world. Consequently, they used their land mainly as a source of prestige and to finance economic and political activities in the metropolis. This group of absentee hacendados farmed rather inefficiently in comparison with the commercial farmers of other Colombian regions who prospered by tying into export markets.

Because Ubaté Valley hacendados lived close to Bogotá, some tended to get involved in national politics and were able to take advantage of career opportunities in the expanding state bureaucracy. They began to depend more on incomes from the central government and less on profits from their land, and they opted definitively for city-based lives and absentee administration of their estates. The non-productive hacendados also included a few native bogotanos who bought estates for recreational purposes but operated within the same absentee logic as those hacendados whose presence dated from the colonial and independence periods.

Meanwhile, new landowners began gradually to appear in the region. The growth of ownership of medium-sized landholdings (between 350 and 50 hectares) was a significant element in the region's evolution. Especially from the second decade of the twentieth century on, immigrants from nearby regions bought land from traditional landowners who were willing to sell portions of their holdings. The newer group of landlords consolidated their property through clever exploitation of opportunities provided by the gradual withdrawal of absentee owners from land-oriented activities. By the 1930's this new middling group began to take advantage of an increase in Bogotá's demand for dairy products to secure some control over the local economy and politics.

Official documents reveal that the larger properties in lord area (10 % of the Valley properties) were in the hands of only 71 people (approximately 34 families). The value distribution of landed property in the Valley in 1948 is shown in the table below:

Table 1. Distribution of Large Landed Property

SOURCE: Author's calculations based on MCUA, Tax Collection Office. November 14, 1948.

Thus proximity to Bogotá effectuated a peculiar development among the upper classes: during the early twentieth century a division emerged between an absentee landlord sector, tied almost exclusively to life in the capital, and a resident middling group, which assumed social and political leadership in the region. This last group based its local power on the control of local urban institutions and the peasant electorate and profited from its political connections to departmental and national Liberal and Conservative party leaders.

Members of this group insisted on refering to themselves as "peasants" (campesinos); thus stressing their own rural, non-"aristocratic" origins. Some of these landowners say, "Peasants are like us, from the same class. We are all relatives of the dogs." The language of peasant identification helped them to appropriate and manage popular discourses while simultaneously establishing themselves as a upwardly-mobile self made new social group distinct from the old aristocratic landlords. This expression of common identity with the peasants was to become very powerful when landlord-peasant conflicts emerged. Local politicians were able to exploit it to intensify existing divisions among peasants.

As late as the 1930's and 1940's the Ubaté Valley had not experienced the economic modernization which was spreading through other parts of the Colombian economy. Except for an emphasis on the production of milk for urban markets, wage labour, mechanization and profit maximization were lacking. The tendency of new hacendados to retain paternalistic relations and concentrate on livestock and basic milk production through the 1950's created a hacienda stronghold where elites retained economic and political power and where cultural reproduction centered on the large estate. These patterns also may have contributed to the relatively low levels of productive efficiency in the region.

Some small peasants slowly began to process dairy products, especially cheese, but they could not really compete with the haciendas especially because of their difficulties in maintaining substantial herds on impoverished land. The small properties generated less than 4 % of local milk production. Indeed, the local supply of food was still based on peasant labour.

Since the 1920's the region of Ubaté was dominated by a nucleus of medium-size haciendas whose proprietors formed the local political elite. In sharp contrast to many Colombian regions where, beyond the two traditional parties, there existed alternative political forces and important social movements since at least the second half of the nineteenth century, in Ubaté the local political elite identified solely with the Liberal and Conservative parties.

Yet, in this region, no rigid correspondence existed between families and political parties. It has become an axiom in the literature analyzing la Violencia that party hatreds are inherited and inviolable. But, in Ubaté at least, the contrary appears to have been the norm. There, frequent marriages among families with different political affiliations and loyalties were common, especially within the elite group. This pattern of economic and social cohesion among elite families explain the implicit pact that bound together the Liberal and Conservative factions of the regional oligarchy and strengthened the upper class in the region. Thus, family relations, and more widely, the institution of compadrazgo between elites and peasantry (where the most powerful stood as godfathers and godmothers to peasant sons and daughters, establishing close relationships of mutual obligation), defined regional social and political relations more often than partisan criteria.

The hacienda world established control over the peasantry through bonds of paternalism. The direct personal relationships created by paternalism channelled vertical conflicts between the classes; they also generated horizontal conflict among members of the same class.

Asked to characterize the people of the Ubaté Valley, one typical landlord of the zone told me:

This romanticized vision of a docile and friendly peasantry sums up the perceptions and expectations that local elites had of their subordinates in the mid-twentieth century. Like women and children, peasants were to be treated with great benevolence as long as they did not transgress the traditional boundaries of their assigned duties, roles and supposed attributes.

Because of individualized relations between hacendados, political bosses, peasants and peons, popular organizations were not only very weak, but were also denigrated and disregarded by the elites. The few organizations in existence were hardly noticed and had little effect.

When the ideal of the passive peasant and the paternalistic landlord is contrasted to actual behaviour, the limits of such benevolence emerge. As Eugene Genovese notes, "paternalism has little to do with benevolence, kindness and good disposition. It emerges ... from the need to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. It simulates kindness and affection but at the same time stimulates hatred."

The "natural" loyalty and obedience of the peasantry depended to a large extent on the benefits offered by hacendados to peasants. Mutualism was evident. Peasants followed landlords in expectation of public works, scholarships for their offspring, roads in the veredas, electrification, or even attendance and help with the burial of family members. A Conservative hacendada describing the behaviour of a "very Conservative" peasant on election day shed light on these relations:

Peasant families expected elite patronage at times of crisis. The death of a member of a peasant family (especially of those peasants who worked on the estates), loss of harvests due to droughts or floods, and problems with other peasants over land disputes were some of the instances which called for the protective intervention of the powerful. Concrete gestures of benevolence included: providing the coffin or other assistance for a burial and including a monetary allowance to help "ease the family's pain"; lending workers farm tools as well as money; providing water (obviously more abundant in the lower parts of the Valley where it was appropriated by the haciendas) to permit peasant subsistence; sharing grain reserves during droughts; and, most importantly, creating fictive kinship ties through the practice of compadrazgo.

Reciprocal obligations might involve, on the peasants' side, delivery of labour, personal services (especially for domestic chores), and the obligation to vote for the patron's political party. Meanwhile, upper groups' obligations ensured the subsistence and security of peasant families.

Relations between peasants and landlords were governed by a series of informal rules. When someone transgressed the limits, he or she was likely to be "scolded". One hacendada remembers:

A document from the town of Simijaca provides a more dramatic example of a similar transgression. In 1952 hacendada Susana Camacho Ramírez denounced a peasant to the town mayor, saying that while she was in her finca,

Páez, a 26 year old peasant, was Camacho's worker. Immediately after the hacendada denounced the famous urination to the authorities, military mayor Evangelista Murcia, "administering justice on behalf of the Republic, and by the authority bestowed on him by law," ordered Páez confined to jail and confiscated all his possessions. Not content with this, the mayor also jailed the friends who cheered when Paez was urinating and temporarily embargoed all their possessions. The mayor applied the punishment for a year and only changed his mind when the penal judge in Ubaté declared that "the events investigated in this case are not crimes and in consequence any judicial action against these people must end immediately."

Clearly peasants experienced great difficulty in confronting dominant groups directly, and they could not express themselves easily in the presence of the powerful. The "good peasants" were not as good as the landlords wanted to portray them. When as tenants (arrendatarios) they secured more or less permanent settlement in the haciendas or even when they received title to some small property as a reward for a life dedicated to work and loyalty, they did not stop expressing their antagonism through forms of everyday resistance. In many instances, hacienda dogs were poisoned, or cows were killed in the pastures at night, the meat was taken, and the skin left behind. Seeking an explanation, landlords said, "they did it because of bad faith or because of politics. They did it to eat during feasts and laugh at us." In reality, all these acts showed how relationships of loyalty and reciprocity could be fragile, especially when the terms of unequal exchange did not satisfy one of the parties.

Petty theft, another form of everyday resistance when used as a means of "redistributing" goods, became so important in the Valley that some big landowners allocated in their accounting portions of their incomes to anticipated losses through petty robbery. Hiding behind excuses of timidity, peasants rarely denounced thieves; the flow of stolen goods from the haciendas and their granaries to the peasants seemed to undermine the presence of big property owners.

Apart from petty robbery, cross-class tensions were manifested in the tendency of labourers to disappear from work sites, and, in more extreme situations, to migrate out of Ubaté to neighboring regions, principally Bogotá and southern coffee regions like Tolima. Though there was a labour surplus in the Valley rather than a labour scarcity, the independent character of most small peasants made it difficult for hacendados to control workers and keep them in place where they were most needed. When workers were discontented or abused, they simply left. Unfortunately for many of these migrants, city conditions did not always offer an improvement. Many eventually returned to the Valley and to their plots of land, thereby reaffirming their lack of alternatives.

One of the most documented cases of this continuing out-and return- migration concerns peasant women who, from the 1930's on, responded to an appreciable urban demand for domestic service. This migration of young women was created by a market in Bogotá for household labour, serviced by well-known local intermediaries.

Again, as a result of unfavorable city conditions, many of these young women came back to the countryside. As servants, peasant women were commonly forced to give sexual favours and significant numbers returned pregnant. Local señoras who "contracted" women servants in the Valley used all kinds of strategies to counter the demand for domestic service in the city. They spread rumours that "Bogotá is a place of perdition for young women peasants and there they have to clean many floors and they do not get good salaries;" or they simply flattered them with the false promise that "in the houses of the Valley they would be considered as daughters and given sheep and scholarships." Again, the promise of a protected and benevolent universe appeared as an argument to maintain the stability of the labour force, the female labour force in this case. Contrasting the safe, protective hacienda with the dismal and exploitative city, local patrones and patronas attempted to restrict the mobility of peasant women.

Of course, tensions were not exclusively those between landlords, on the one hand, and peasants or peons, on the other. Intra-class conflicts, especially those within subordinated groups, commonly made reference to the discourse of shared morality and solidarity and complained of the violation of such norms.

In reference to female milkers, most of them from peasant families resident on the haciendas, employers' preferences for some of them were usually said to be because "the patrón used them as lovers and for that reason they had advantages." In these cases, peasant women might turn from victims of their patrones into enemies of other peasants by apparently getting easier access to limited resources.

Everyday aggressions among peasants easily turned violent, especially around labour security, subsistence and property rights. The exchange of verbal insults, the first resort, often led to physical aggression and mutual property damages, and sometimes to social ostracism. One judicial document mentions the following situation, related by a hacienda milker:

To her aggressors the woman appeared as a threat to the other milkers' practice of obtaining free milk from the hacienda. The way to confront her was by making strong sexual remarks. Ana María Alonso's work on Chihuahua, Mexico suggests some interesting angles through which the kinds of language contained in the Ubaté judicial records might be interpreted. She maintains that "the use of the language of reproduction shows how the disorder of reproduction of human life is a synecdoche for the reproduction of social life." The frequent reference to bloody infanticide suggests the act of eating babies may have been a metaphor for rejecting the social values shared by the poor. The references to the control and appropriation of babies' bodies in Ubaté appears frequently in cases where some peasants metaphorically attacked female peasants who had violated norms and meanings which regulated social personhood and which endowed identities with social value. Such was the case of this milker who was alleged to side with the hacendada position against her workers. Thus one breaking the order is easily associated with the devil and with infra-social being.

In another case, in Simijaca, Cecilia Páez complained that a neighbor, with whom she had a dispute about land tenure, told others that, "I was fat because I drank the blood of the children I butchered; he told me a lot more but I do not dare to repeat it." With these comments the peasant endeavored to create a form of local ostracism enforced through discourse on sexuality and to obtain the eventual support of neighbours in resolving the conflict.

Whereas the petty theft of grain and animals from the rich was well-received by other peasants and even supported (by complicity), the same kind of activities realized against individuals of the poor peasant group led to rejection and ostracism from the community. This was also the origin of many animosities between individuals and families within peasant society. In a court deposition, one observer commented about two families with bordering land: "they became enemies because they used to steal from each other from the barley and corn fields.. they do not talk to each other and frequently hurt each other, especially in the fields and pastures, and they turned into bad neighbours."

These elements together with the intervention of hacendados are illustrated in the judicial summaries of the 1930's and 1940's devoted to resolving minor transgressions. These judicial records reveal the characteristics of the local paternalist system, which weakened solidarity among the poor while tying individuals to their patrones. The institutional apparatus was employed to invoke both direct sanctions and public humiliation. The use of institutional denunciations was common during la Violencia years, especially those presented to the mayor when a situation required informal or immediate direct personal intervention or those presented to judges in cases when a more formal, and consequently more exemplar, judicial process was required. The latter channel was often used by hacendados to enforce the "respect" of peasants for them. The judicial archives are full of these denunciations. Especially interesting are cases archived under all kinds of minor crimes as defined in the penal codes and departmental Códigos de Policía of the time.

The use of the judicial apparatus was important. It was aimed at the public exposure of any and all transgressors of the established order. The moral order of regional society was recreated in these instances. The denunciations were made with different objectives, depending on the class origins of the offended party. When made by a hacendado, most probably the intention was the control of subordinate practices, and the effects that followed were punitive.

For peasants, public denunciation among equals rarely led to punitive action through official channels but it was a weapon designed to appropriate the moral order and which helped to resolve publicly daily conflicts. In general, exposure to public comments was implacable, and not even the robbery of some chicken or grain among equals could remain unadvertised and frequently became a judicial case. For these reasons, it was not unusual to find denunciations of what might appear to be trivial everyday acts.

Local power was always connected to the national government in Bogotá. In dealing with external issues, local political elites completely identified with the Liberal and Conservative parties' national leadership, but when confronting local matters or interests, they expressed an important degree of autonomy. This apparent contradiction reflected the local tradition of political coexistence. National language and discourse were adapted to local circumstances without altering the "stability" of local practices.

In the Ubaté Valley there was a relatively even Liberal-Conservative balance overall. For the Municipal Council elections in the biggest town of the Valley, in October 9th, 1947 Liberals got 943 votes while Conservatives obtained 805. In the following period in June 5th, 1949, Liberals obtained 1997 votes against 1178 Conservatives.

In this local-national articulation, election periods were most significant. The province of Ubaté, as other localities in Cundinamarca, selected two deputies who formed part of the electoral college electing national Senators. That situation gave Ubaté national political importance and the elites there, despite their local coexistence, felt compelled to rhetorically adopt their party's line in response to almost any national conflict. Thus the political culture of the Ubaté Valley, characterized by a relatively pacific sharing of daily life between the two parties, appeared to take on some of the confrontational tendencies of national leaders. But the adoption of these tendencies was only rhetorical, especially after 1946, as Liberals and Conservatives continued to live together in a very practical and peaceful manner and refused to reproduce in local society the national tendencies of war.

An indicator of this rhetorical mimicry and of the lack of important polarization within the Ubaté Municipal Council (the only locally elected institution, which expressed the bi-partisan spirit of the region) were the official messages sent unanimously and simultaneously by the Council, in an equally apologetic tone, to both national Conservative and Liberal leaders in 1947. Here follows the transcription of some of those messages, the first sent to the Conservative president of the country and the second, to the leader of the Liberal Party:

During the same session the Council sent the following message:

These "contradictory" messages were sent when Conservatives were developing a powerful sectarianism that provoked polarization, generating bloody struggles in other regions of the country especially after the election of president Mariano Ospina in 1946. In Ubaté, local Liberals especially expressed intense sympathies toward populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán who was defeated in those same elections. They sent continuous messages of support to Gaitanista leaders and hung a portrait of Gaitán in the salon of the Municipal Council. However, they always used a tolerant language that attacked neither Conservatism nor other factions of Liberalism.

Rhetoric aside, local topics were of higher priority than national ones. The defense of political traditions in the patria chica was often more important than following central directions. Resistance to central directives thus occurred at critical moments, such as during la Violencia when the Valley was menaced by the potential chaos already enveloping many other regions in Colombia. In the meantime, however, it was desirable to maintain friendly relations with departmental and national leaders, even if these relations were largely maintained through discourse and rarely necessitated action. Even the most dramatic conjunctures at the national level had only a small impact in the region and the few riots detected were rapidly controled.

The assassination of the populist Liberal leader Gaitán, on April 9, 1948 in Bogotá precipitated the largest urban riot in Latin American history -- the Bogotazo. Some researchers maintain that the Violencia in Colombia began with Gaitán's murder, while others say his death set off a critical intensification of the process which had begun when Liberals lost to Conservatives in the national elections of 1946.

In Ubaté, there were echoes of the Gaitán murder. On the very day of the assassination, in the central square of the town of Ubaté, the house of a Conservative family was burned and six months later, on October 21, 1948, the Conservatives, seemingly in revenge, burned several Liberal houses. The riot on October 21, involving no more than 50 people, was more violent than previous disturbances in Ubaté, though it was not a premeditated action (apparently having been sparked by the drunkenness of one person). Despite the seriousness of the incident, the riot had few long-term reverberations.

With the exception of the events on April 9, 1948, when some soldiers arrived to maintain public order, the army had a negligible presence in Ubaté during la Violencia. The soldiers established a military post that was maintained only until October 1948. Although the army was aggressive in its treatment of the population during these months, and especially so against those Liberals who had participated in the riots, no casualties were reported. Liberal representatives even sent a message of "cordial greetings to the dignified and distinguished military leader" who commanded the post, congratulating him for "his brilliant behaviour with the civilian population."

Preventing the spread of conflict appears to have been almost an obsession in the Valley. During this time, the inhabitants of Ubaté looked on with horror at the events in other areas. When remembering their local history, Ubateños from different social classes constantly refer to the pacific character of the zone, even during the worst moments of "la Violencia." Pride in this idea of "peaceful Ubaté" was important because it strengthen the local elites' resistance to the spread of violence "from above," which was characteristic of those years. The self-perception of natives of the pacific nature of political relations, particularly during the more violent years of the period, reached the point where local leaders proposed that Ubaté be designated a neutral zone where victims of violence from other regions could come to live in peace:

To what extent this was an altruist measure or to what effect there were secondary motives behind it is difficult to determine from the extant documents. Besides, informants interviewed do not mention this event. It is probable that this proposal was merely another rhetorical act that was never implemented, perhaps it was a ploy to increase the supply of labour to benefit a hacendado class.

In contrast to other regions in Colombia, Ubaté's local government became a conflict mediator rather than a conflict generator. The delicate equilibrium needed to maintain the government's role as a conflict mediator was possible because parties, institutions and hacendado groups maintained adequate control over subordinate sectors. Local elites managed to cope with external pressures and the presence of new outsiders in the territory, especially the politicized police and officials coming from other regions who intended to incite violence. This led to an adaptative strategy to meet the demands of the national powers while maintaining the environment of control.

Local institutional resistance to national pressures is first observable in letters sent to national political leaders. In these letters, Ubaté's politicians tried to sway the decision-making process whereby officials were chosen to serve in the region, knowing that these officials could play a key role in bringing the violence with them. Preoccupation with external forces that might destabilize the local power structure was permanent. Undesirable officials were pressured by coalitions of Liberals and Conservatives. As a former mayor of Ubaté remembers:

Even with these controls, the police managed to cause several disturbances. The reaction of Valley politicians was decisive. They defended the peace by denouncing the policemen in newspapers, by working institutional channels, or by drawing upon personal relationships with Bogotano political leaders.

While there were efficient local controls which prevented the outbreak of violence, the elites also engaged in important negotiations at the departmental level especially because mayors in the period were all appointed officials. Political leaders, both Liberals and Conservatives, participated in conversations with departmental and even national leaders, convincing them to abstain from implementing practices which might result in open violence. It is important to remember that Ubaté's proximity to Bogotá offered special advantages for this type of negotiation. Examples of these demands made by Conservatives and Liberals together were related as follows:

Once the relative peace of the Valley was secured, local political elites maintained a national stance similar to that of elites from other regions. Local elites expressed Liberal/Conservative hatred but did not act on it. Several letters to the President of Colombia, to the departmental leaders, and to the media were the principal manner of expressing this rhetoric.

In short, local resistance to the centre derived from long-term flexible relationships existing among the local party leaders. Also, the efficient use of Ubaté's proximity to Bogotá permitted rapid and direct negotiations with national political leaders, allowing local leaders to control disturbances generated by external agents. But this resistance was particularly grounded in an underlying paternalist logic, that perceived the war and chaos as major threats to local society. This fear seems to have cemented elite bipartisanship and cohesion. In turn, Bogotá party leaders and state officials feared that social disruption might tear asunder electoral majorities needed to maintain themselves in control. This seems to explain the ability of Ubaté elites to "disobey" and keep at bay mandates promoting violence. Finally, the absence of popular organizations in the Valley was conducive to this isolationist, elite-led project.

One of the main characteristics of the region during the period was the use of multiple opportunities, generated by national events, to consolidate individual positions in the resolution of everyday conflicts. The most interesting example is the use of partisan language adapted to traditional conflicts between members of the community, with the objective of securing one or another individual's interests. This became a more common issue in judicial records of la Violencia years when compared with the same kind of documents in the preceding period.

As Mary Roldán argues, during the Violencia what appeared to be partisan conflict was often just a facade for other kinds of struggles --assertions of local self-determination, socioeconomic conflicts, or bids for accumulation and mobility. She agrees with Carlos Miguel Ortiz that in those tumultuous times, some individuals took advantage of the fluidity of the situation to improve their fortunes, and some popular groups acted on their concerns.

For example, political fights in the region almost always referred to previous differences mainly over honour and landed property. The excuse or justification of quarreling over political affiliation in this region appeared as the cause of the controversy, but the origin and the consequences of the fights were separate from the strictly partisan sphere.

One of the most specific uses of la Violencia discourse occurred when peasants tried to obscure common petty crimes. In a typical case of violation, Edelmira Rodríguez, the victim related that:

Abuses against women in the Valley during la Violencia were numerous and in many cases party affiliation became one of the main excuses, real or not, for the aggression. Even in the realm of intimate relationships, the discourse of political parties appeared as an excuse for domination: during the first week of being taken into her patron's house, a maid was raped by one of the patron's brothers. He kept abusing her continuously until, as she declared later, "I got sick." The first time she was raped, the man, as the girl reported,

In an event documented again and again, almost identically, on October 20, 1950, "a group of peasants came to town shouting 'Long live the Conservative party' and 'Down with those sons of bad bitch Liberals'." As a Liberal peasant who was later beaten declared: "They came into the store and suddenly they attacked me and battered me. They threw me into the water and then I missed my wallet with $300 pesos."

Here, the guise of political affiliation was used to hide the robbery of the money. Moreover, not only to hide it but also to justify an attack and face no punitive action. Only the fact of shouting "Long live...," before committing the robbery, permitted the judges to assert that:

Well-documented in the archives, these cases allow examination of the important role party affiliation played in everyday conflicts in this rural society during the period of la Violencia. The use of partisan language became common, almost as a "smoke screen" to conceal everyday conflicts within and among social classes in the Valley.

The only direct political effect of la Violencia in the Ubaté Valley was the empowerment of Conservative Party leadership and its increased control over the Municipal Council. Especially evident during the presidency of Conservative Laureano Gómez between 1950 and 1953, the Conservative predominance was transitory .

In the 1960's, after la Violencia, similar patterns of local power persisted. It cannot be said that in the Ubaté region peasants gained political ground as a result of what had happened during the 1940's and 1950's. Rather, local elites strengthened their position during la Violencia years: they maintained their dominance in the local dairy economy and politics after they had demonstrated their ability to control local society during the civil war period. The case of Ubaté also shows the need for understanding local relations of power and their potential for off-setting a conflict originating at the national level. Liberal-Conservative identifications become secondary when trying to understand local dynamics.

In studying la Violencia in the Ubaté Valley, we observe the appropriation of state forms in accordance with local interests which continues to be an important fact in contemporary Colombia and surely in many other Latin American societies. Judicial institutions and public offices, in general, mediated local conflicts instead of serving as extensions of central power. Although the central and departmental governments designated judges, mayors, and so on, these functionaries either were local people or, if not, they were rapidly incorporated into the norms and power relations of local society. During la Violencia, the relative autonomy of local government, together with local political parties, was a basic expression of class relations in the Valley. Local networks of power were not new; they did not simply develop in response to la Violencia but were consolidated over a long period of time, as this study suggests.

This "little state," co-terminus with hacienda society, used a rhetoric of coincidence with national politics to negotiate and even impose effective control upon la Violencia. Most scholars say that in Latin America, in general, one finds a strengthening of the state and its gradual penetration of regional and local life during the course of the twentieth century. A superficial view of the region might support this idea. Nevertheless, local representatives of national institutions in Ubaté (judges, mayors, police, etc.) served the interests of local elites until the 1960's. Local paternalistic traditions in politics did not allow new spaces for peasant advances. What can be observed is the permanence of everyday forms of class conflict and the capacity of elites and peasants to understand and individually manipulate the opportunities created by la Violencia. Departmental and, beyond them, national authorities knew that the only way to get anything done was through informal negotiations and accommodations that took local concerns into account.

This study suggests the need to widen analysis of la Violencia and other similar phenomena to include areas characterized by a variety of forms and intensities of conflict. Introducing the specific socioeconomic bases of local power into such analysis and understanding the cultural mediation adopted in local political practices is important. Such considerations lead to a more complex understanding of how the Colombian national state sought to maintain its presence while, in fact, its influence and effects were mediated and often determined by local social actors during times of war.