The Persistence of Violence

Colombian Popular Culture

Toby Miller

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781978817517, 9781978817524
• eBook ISBN: 9781978817531
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

Colombia's headline story, about the peace process with guerrilla and its attendant controversies, does not consider the fundamental contradiction of a nation that spans generosity and violence, warmth and hatred—products of its particular pattern of invasion, dispossession, and enslavement. The Persistence of Violence fills that gap in understanding. Colombia is a place that is two countries in one—the ideal and the real—summed up in the idiomatic expression, not unique to Colombia, but particularly popular there, "Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa" (When you pass a law, you create a loophole). Less cynically, and more poetically, the Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez deemed Colombians capable of both the most noble acts and the most abject ones, in a world where it seems anyone might do anything, from the beautiful to the horrendous. The Persistence of Violence draws on those contradictions and paradoxes to look at how violence—and resistance to it—characterize Colombian popular culture, from football to soap opera to journalism to tourism to the environment.

1 THE ABSENCE AND PRESENCE OF STATE MILITARISM

Violence, Football, Narcos

WITH ALFREDO SABBAGH FAJARDO

Gabo drew on football¹ to lend color and comprehensiveness to his explorations of Colombian life. In Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping), a fictionalized essayistic ethnography of cartel kidnapping, prisoners and their guards connect with one another through their love of the sport, transcending the haze of violence that otherwise characterizes their lives together (García Márquez 1996).

The talent of football has been to capture quite precisely the popular energies of everyday people, notably men, in most of the world. The obvious task for a nation like Colombia, falling apart again and again and in danger of achieving the status of a “failed state” (Helman and Ratner 1992–1993; but see Ross 2013) has been to harness such allegiances and energies toward a national popular. Colombian football has moved from the periphery of that quest to its core and back again, as different forces have tried to harness, pervert, neglect, and resurrect the sport’s role for hegemonic reasons. Narcotraficantes, guerrilla, and the political class have all sought to “own” football for one purpose or another, whether to highlight their power, permit the sport’s relative autonomy from their struggles, or consolidate public support for national institutions. Throughout, the media and spectators have been coeval partners in this trajectory and the players exploited missionaries, sometimes colluding in their own oppression, sometimes resisting it (Soto 2017).

Our contention is that football in Colombia has zigzagged between being a force for normalcy, routine, and pleasure versus violence, inconstancy, and horror. We focus on a time when the globally well-established nexus of militarism and sports was trumped in Colombia by a narco-trafficking formation that used football as an exhibit in its challenge to the very basis of the state. The sport emerged as an attention-getting means of querying the rule of law, problematizing Weber’s definition of sovereignty discussed in the introduction, and stressing the contradictory world of hecha la ley, hecha la trampa.

We ask how football became a symbol of one of the three different para-states seemingly running parts of the country, and what changed when those material circumstances shifted, such that Weber’s maxim came true once more—on prime-time television, through one of the nation’s putative creative industries: sports (Ministerio de Cultura 2014: 28). Prior to that change, we look at the nexus of violence and sport in the ethos of football more generally. The origins of the conflict we describe reside not only in Colombia, but in the very sinews of the game’s history.

When English and French fans alike sang “La Marseillaise” before their countries met in a football match just days after Paris had been assaulted in 2015,² they did so in the presence of the British monarchy, the French presidency, the police, and the military. The event was broadcast on public television and radio (McKenzie 2015). Like the U.S. and Colombian versions mentioned in the introduction, the anthem they shared that night was a notoriously bloodthirsty paean to racism and war: “Qu’un sang impur / Abreuve nos sillons” (Let impure blood / Water our furrows). It is “a pretty nasty song” (Dubois 2013).

That night at Wembley was a manifestation of militarism in its language, hierarchy, conduct, clothing, celebration, and propaganda. The event embodied the persistence of violence in the cultures of these notorious imperial nations and weapons exporters. But the performance was hailed quite differently, as an expression of solidarity, humanness, and caring. It was instantly likened to the tear-jerking sequence in Casablanca (directed by Michael Curtiz in 1942) when Paul Georg Julius Hernreid von Wasel Waldingau, Corinna Mura, and Marie Madeleine Berthe Lebeau lead the crowd singing the French national anthem in opposition to Nazism and collaboration in occupied French imperial territory.³

But Wembley 2015 would satisfy many definitions of militarism meeting football, given the state presence, the lyrical content, the uniformed imagery, the armed environment, the declaration of war, and the stadium setting.⁴ It is telling that in 2001, when Algeria played France in Paris for the first time, “La Marseillaise” was booed by a crowd consisting mainly of postcolonial survivors, and the game was called off following a pitch invasion (Andress 2018). This followed the Front National’s leader calling footballers who refused to sing along with the anthem “fake Frenchmen” (quoted in Dubois 2013).

Nationalism, racism, violence, and militarism are incarnate in football, as we indicate through an engagement with its history and theory. In Colombia, as in many countries, no other cultural practice generates as much media coverage, employment, fandom, or sponsorship. Attention orange economy and hegemonic forces in search of money and a national popular respectively!

Polling data say football is of great interest to 94 percent of the Colombian population, and is played by a third of adolescent girls and 85 percent of the Afrocolombian and indigenous populations (Comisión Nacional de Seguridad, Comodidad y Convivencia en el Fútbol 2014: 13). When researchers asked a group of children to define the country, they replied “un partido de fútbol” (a football game) (quoted in Dávila and Londoño 2005: 135). There is a Colombian expression: “en la mesa no se habla de religión, ni de política, ni de fútbol” (one doesn’t speak of religion, politics, or football over dinner) (quoted in Santos Gómez 2018).

Our focus here is the 1980s and ’90s, an era dominated by putatively progressive guerrilla, putatively unofficial right-wing paramilitares, and putatively populist narcotraficantes/mafiosi. As noted in the introduction, they held sway over rural and urban terrain; ran institutions of civil society; harvested, refined, distributed, and sold recreational drugs; were ruthless and violent kidnappers and executioners; corrupted state officials; and trumpeted inconspicuous battle fatigues and conspicuous consumption, respectively, as signs of legitimacy and triumph. One aspect of everyday life was not entirely shared in their tripartite struggle against each other and the state over who could terrorize the population most—the narcos’ involvement in football. Here we see the emergence of a non-ideological alternative government, unlike classic movements of left and right, and a sign of how popular culture can connect to glamorous criminality.

Football in Colombia has long attracted those interested in hegemonic display—spectacle with a message rather than for its own sake—as well as shady operators seeking dark shadows. It is a flashy means of displaying wealth, power, and sovereignty, but equally a way of obscuring the flow of illicit money behind the sport’s simultaneously folkloric and glamorous status, as the coevally physiocratic property of fans and capitalist property of owners. And there is a great deal to hide—whereas Colombian coffee sells in the United States for four times the cost of production, the profits from cocaine are a hundredfold (Bergman 2018: 27).

The narcos’ non-military violence came to dominate the national game for perhaps two decades. It crowded out the usual propagandistic ties between football and militarism essayed by governments or other actors we have mentioned. When the conjuncture changed twenty years later, because the narcos had ended their showy control of football, the AUC had ceased formal operation, and a peace accord had been signed with the FARC, the military and television governmentalized and commodified football to symbolize a new national unity benignly intertwined with populist capital. The sport’s ties to violence were normalized within the conventional policy and rhetoric of a national popular, founded in alliances between governments and media. Did this mark a break in the persistence of violence?

FOOTBALL/CROWDS/VIOLENCE

George Orwell famously described sports as “war minus the shooting” (1945) even though they shared ties to violence and imperialism. His pithy description came from observing a “goodwill” British tour by the Soviet football club, commando Динáмо Москвá (Dynamo Moscow) (Dmowski 2015).⁵ Orwell feared that such “sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred” because the competitiveness inherent in football symbolizes and stimulates the desire to defeat the other. His colonial and militia experience of football in Burma, India, and Spain was of uncontrolled and passionate derision expressed by one section of a crowd toward another.

Football had evolved from the British middle class pacifying, adopting, and codifying unruly working-class male pastimes. During Britain’s revolution, Quaker radicals looked down on it while workers reveled (Hill 1991: 233, 254). E. P. Thompson took the next phase, of rentier control, to typify the sequestration of public space (1979). Lenin feared that England’s cultivable land was being wasted, “used for sport, for the diversion of the rich” (1964: 281–282). The nineteenth-century British inspector of schools, poet, and critic Matthew Arnold looked on, bemused but resigned, as the Industrial Revolution created “games and sports which occupy the passing generation of boys and young men” in search of “a better and sounder physical type for the future to work with” (2003). The process saw many contradictions, with social elites gradually losing control of football’s “modest subterranean life as a proletarian spectator sport” (Hobsbawm 1998: 63, 65). It spread across the world during that century in close concert with the United Kingdom’s colonial, maritime, military, and commercial interests (Elias 1978; Elias and Dunning 1986; Krauze 1994).

Ambivalence and even contempt for the sport has a long and profound heritage. In Utopia, Thomas More called for football to be banned because it encouraged the poor to invest their money unwisely (2012: 47). Many distinguished authors and critics have concurred, from Borges loathing sports in general for embodying crass popular tastes to Sánchez Ferlosio deriding them as fascist spectacles (Meneses and González 2013) and Ortega y Gasset (1994) complaining that football fans were incapable of encountering a world of wonder with the truly open gaze of the intellectual. Fred Halliday longed for “a time before public discourse was dominated by footballers” (2009), Sherlock Holmes advised that “football does not come within my horizon” (Conan Doyle 1960: 633),⁶ and Queenie Leavis characterized watching it as one of the world’s “substitute or kill-time interests” in comparison with crafts or singing (1939: 209). In Latour’s eyes, fans are mere atoms, with predictably banal collective responses (Latour et al. 2012), while the passage of European football from a public to a private good via profound governmentalization and commodification is clearly a matter of great regret for Galeano (2016) and Yanis Varoufakis (1998: 230) alike.

For many on the cultural left, football is at best a “popular tonic” (Horkheimer 2002: 289–290); at worst, it warrants Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous articulation of “a left-half at football, a black-shirt, a member of the Hitler Youth, and so on” (1979: 164). H. G. Wells drew a homology between football teams and armed divisions (1902: 184). In Marcuse’s words, the game represents a “conspicuous social mobilization of aggressiveness, the militarization of the affluent society. This mobilization goes far beyond the actual draft of manpower … no longer the ‘classical’ heroizing of killing in the national interest, but rather its reduction to the level of natural events and contingencies of daily life” (2009: 195). Luxemburg metaphorized it to describe weakness in the face of state and military domination (2004: 218). For example, the valence of matches between Real Madrid and Barcelona has long been supercharged by the Spanish Civil War, the dictatorship’s support of Madrid and suppression of Català (Catalan), and the rivalries generated by core-periphery relations. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán referred to Barça as “el ejército de un país desarmado” (the army of a disarmed nation) (1987).

Football is said to appeal to base instincts, blinding ordinary people to their real conditions of existence in a mystificatory “collective narcissism” (Burke 2004: 69). Trotsky claimed that working-class revolutionary possibilities were derailed because these “deepest passions … [were] skilfully restrained and suppressed” by cathexis onto football and other pastimes (1925). Badiou m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: The Persistence of Violence
• 1. The Absence and Presence of State Militarism: Violence, Football, Narcos
• 2. Industry Policy and Sex Tourism Meet the Case of the Destroyed Plaque
• 3. “I Myself Had to Remain Silent When They Threatened My Children”: Colombian Journalists Meet Prime-Time Narcos
• 4. Green Passion Afloat: The Magdalena River
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Authors