Young, Alien, and Totally Violent: Marginal “Kings of the World”

Abstract

When we start looking into Colombian realities, the dearth of strategies for approaching violence conceptually as well as for discussing the problems involved ethically becomes striking. Historians and social critics speak of the peculiarity of the Colombian case in phrases such as: “Organized crime, guerrilla struggle, dirty war, and diffuse social violence […] can be part of a single situation.”¹ Mainstream depictions produced by the media during the past few decades have been delivering shocking images, oversimplifications saturated with the drug lord-violent perpetrators-corrupt society schema.² It looks as though Hollywood provided, during the 1980s and 1990s, efficient narrative and psychological strategies for making the “war on drugs” intelligible as the primary global crusade against the forces of evil, taking Colombia as its main example for illustrating sanitizing strategies as they are applied in the hemisphere.³ Parts of the media industry, together with imperial policies that use fear, coercion, and force, have been patterning a language that demands a war of cleansing and of enforced geopolitical security to be imposed on the “country of violence.” At the same time, writers, artists, and social scientists in Colombia have developed perspectives that shed a different light on the scenarios of conflict in which the local and the transnational, the formal and informal spheres of economy, the drug wars and prerogatives of sovereignty are intertwined in complicated ways.

Colombia—crossroad of global trafficking in drugs, armaments, and female sex workers, with the unresolved conflicts of its national formation. Colombia is not the most violent country on earth, but the country in which the violence and fears of the end of the second millennium most visibly cross twith those of the first.

—Jesús Martín-Barbero