This year marks three decades of the issuance of the 1991 Constitution. In this article we explore the immediate and immediate historical antecedents that led to the issuance of one of the most revolutionary constitutions in Latin America, while determining its philosophical significance. We argue that the letter remains an “unfinished utopia” even today.
In his book Peripheral Modernities (2020), the philosopher Adolfo Chaparro maintains the following: “the 1991 Constitution is an unexpected response to the strong pressure of social, student and opinion movements, in the expectation of creating conditions to help solve, among other things, the conditions of misery and exclusion of the majority of the population, the causes of the armed conflict and the generalized corruption in the political and institutional sphere, accentuated by the increasing influence of drug trafficking during the 1980s ”. In other words, the 91 letter can be seen as the attempt to solve the multiple types of violence that the country had been going through at least since the second half of the 20th century and as a refounding of the nation with a view to a new future. This explains its symbolic value as a founding myth for the creation of a new social order in Colombia.
Indeed, the violence unleashed in Colombia in 1948 with the assassination of the caudillo Jorge Eliécer Gaitán is considered the watershed in the recent history of the country. The truth is that this violence is not a starting point, but is already part of the counter-reform of the conservative party in the face of the achievements of the liberal government of Alfonso López Pumarejo and its social tint. The truth is that by 1947, as Salomón Kalmanovitz shows in his book Economy and Nation . A brief history of Colombia (1988), “the conservatives began to exercise a strategy of violence in Boyacá, the Santanderes and Nariño, which was aimed at obtaining hegemony in the elections … of the same year”, in such a way that the murder of Gaitán only deepens an underground conflict that had been unfolding in the bowels of our troubled history. The result: the bipartisan violence fueled by the two traditional parties from their comfortable urban offices and the correlative bleeding in the fields and in the towns where liberals and conservatives, defending their hereditary party affiliation, murdered each other. In short, it was the concrete materialization of what the philosopher Estanislao Zuleta would later call “the feast of war.”
We suggest you read: Explain this country to me, mom
The mid-century violence generated desolation and death: while it was functional to the dispossession and accumulation of land in the country, it generated population displacements, gave rise to proto-paramilitarism in Colombia in the hands of the conservative government (and its ally historical, the church), with the so-called “birds”, led to the formation of the liberal guerrillas of the Llano where Guadalupe Salcedo stood out; and, since 1953, it caused the rise to power of General Rojas Pinillas with his “civil dictatorship.” As is known, Rojas was promoted thanks to a bipartisan agreement that feared the plans for a proto-fascist constitution of the ultra-conservative Laureano Gómez. Here was fulfilled, once again, what the brilliant sociologist Fernando Guillén Martínez called, in his book Political power in Colombia (1979), “the associative structure of the two parties”, which when they saw their free competition threatened by a third party by power, they created cycles of “violence, alliance, progress.” It was the same tactic against Gaitán and it was the one they used later, in 1956, with the bipartisan agreement that gave rise to the National Front, when they decided to overthrow Rojas Pinilla (who they began to see as a danger to their interests) to divide up half the bureaucratic power and alternate the presidency of the country.
The National Front not only did not return the country to democracy (as they euphemistically argued), nor did it solve the violence in the countryside, but also generated other violence, such as that of the bandits (“Chispas”, “El Capitán Venganza”, “Desquite ”,“ Sangre-negra ”, etc.), which, as in previous years, unleashed revenge and barbarism, as shown by Gonzalo Sánchez and Donny Meertens in their investigation Bandoleros, gamonales y campesinos (1983). In those years the violence of the country took macabre forms. Monsignor Germán Guzmán, co-author together with Eduardo Umaña Luna and Orlando Fals Borda of the famous book Violence in Colombia from 1961 said: “mutilated limbs, tongues and eyes gouged out. Entrails open to barbera and machete, severed heads, skinned feet and faces; crucified men, women and children, stolen material goods. Hell on earth ”.
Well, the marriage between liberals and conservatives, their monopoly of power with the concomitant political exclusion and social inequality, the postponed Agrarian Reform, the internal displacement caused by violence; along with geopolitics traversed by the influence of the Soviet Union and its Marxist-Leninist revolutionary past, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, American paranoia with its red terror and its developmental policies (Alliance for Progress) and military advice for this continent (School of the Americas), will become the immediate causes of the emergence of the FARC in 1964 and the ELN in 1965. To these guerrillas will be added the appearance of the M-19 in 1970 when Misael Pastrana Borrero allegedly steals the elections to Rojas Pinilla and his movement La ANAPO. Hence, the conflict in Colombia has clear social and political causes, no matter how much the oligarchic power of the “manorial Republic” (as Antonio García called it) tries to rewrite history and refound the past.
The scenario for the 1970s, when the National Front ends, is not the best. The depoliticization of the parties, their interim struggle to keep public positions in bureaucratic parity, the delay in the legislative agenda due to lack of absolute majorities in congress, little progress in the social agenda, etc. margin of some achievements of the Lleras Restrepo and López Michelsen governments (institutional modernization of the State, interventionism, constitutional reform, fight against inflation, etc.), led to the outbreak of the social crisis and the famous popular strike of 1977, so well studied by Professor Ricardo Sánchez Ángel in his book Strike! Struggles of the working class in Colombia 1975-1977, published in 2009.
By the end of the 1970s, the FARC guerrillas had already entered the drug trafficking business. In fact, in the López Michelsen government there was already trafficking in marijuana and coca leaf, which infused resources into the national economy along with the good international price of coffee. However, the population displacement that La Violencia had generated continued to produce its effects: the displaced and also those who sought to survive colonized large territories, such as the foothills of the plains, and cultivated bread and coca leaves. , as Alfredo Molano showed.
In a state that failed in the exercise of territorial sovereignty, and in the monopoly of the legitimate use of arms and violence, as Max Weber said, the guerrillas filled those institutional voids and became the only available authority, which did not it only imparted the so-called “guerrilla justice” (Exemplary, Retaliatory and for the Local Power) in its areas, as Mario Aguilera Peña showed in his investigations, while at the same time it financed and enriched itself through the so-called “grammage”. This strengthening of the FARC, the illicit economy, and the spectacular attacks by the M-19 (such as Operation Blue Whale or the theft of 5,000,000 weapons from the army in the North Canton in 1978), laid the foundations for the authoritarian and mediocre government of Julius Caesar. Turbay Ayala ( Disturbed, Ay, Ala !, the philosopher Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot told him) and his Legal Statute for State Security (or Security Statute) . This Statute, a kind of pre-Democratic Security, generated persecution of social sectors, trade unionists, the left, disappearances, torture, illegal detentions, trial of civilians by the military, in short, violation of Human Rights, during its validity.
You might be interested in reading: Being Colombian or the attraction of frustration
By the eighties the M-19 and its urban cells, headed by Jaime Bateman, had become a phenomenon of public opinion, the Embassy of the Dominican Republic was taken over, and then, in 1985, the Palace of Justice. Meanwhile, the FARC overflowing with optimism planned, in 1982, to seize power by arms in eight years and double its Fronts (from 24 to 48 according to Juan Manuel Santos in his book The Battle for Peace ), at the same time as they went from the defensive to the military offensive. On the other hand, drug trafficking had generated relations with the guerrillas, and later, it would go on to confront them with the so-called MAS (Death to Kidnappers) when the M-19 kidnapped a daughter of the Ochoa from the Medellín Cartel. In this regard, the researcher Andrés López Restrepo says: “This, the first of the paramilitary groups linked to drug trafficking, very soon went from assassinating members of the M-19 to killing leaders of left-wing parties.” Drug trafficking, as is known, was not only the source of financing for the guerrillas, but also for paramilitarism. It permeated politics (as in the case of Pablo Escobar who came to Congress) and social life; It also generated what the Commission for Studies on Violence (led by Gonzalo Sánchez) called sicarization , with which there was a “devaluation of life and the conversion of death into a regular source of pecuniary income.” The Cartel ruled and the hit man killed for money, regardless of political or ideological distinctions. He only did the “laps” required by “the employer.”
In this context there is the Peace process in the government of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986). In the midst of a society that was advancing towards social anomie, Betancur decided to carry out a peace process with the M-19 guerrillas, the FARC-EP (since 1982) and the Popular Liberation Army, EPL, which emerged in 1967 as an armed wing. of the Communist Party of Colombia Marxist-Leninist-PCC, ML, which, in turn, had distanced itself from the Stalinism of the Colombian Communist Party (PCC, historically excluded from Colombian politics), as Darío Villamizar narrates in his book Las guerrillas en Colombia of 2017.
That peace process collapsed with the M-19 due to the aforementioned takeover of the Palace of Justice in 1985 where magistrates, visitors, and employees of the building died, causing disappearances and the burning of the files that the justice had against drug traffickers who now- Due to the activation of the extradition with the United States, the response that Belisario gave to the assassination of his minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in 1984 – he had a frontal war against the State and its apparatus of Justice. From that moment, drug trafficking (with its Cartels and its Extraditables, who preferred a grave in Colombia to a jail in the United States) assassinated journalists (Guillermo Cano in 1986, director of this medium), presidential candidates (Luis Carlos Galán del Nuevo Liberalism in 1989), they blew up an Avianca plane with explosives in 1989 (where 107 occupants died) and attacked the defunct Administrative Department of Security (DAS) that same year. Drug trafficking, car bombs, hit men and terror were the daily bread in Colombia.
However, from the Peace process with Betancur the Patriotic Union (UP) emerged in 1985, a party in which some amnestied members of the FARC and different sectors of the left were active. This party participated in the first popular election of mayors in 1988, obtaining favorable results, but they were systematically assassinated, in a clear political genocide, where, according to disputed figures, more than 5,000 militants died. The entry of the UP into the electoral space alerted local and regional political caciques, who, in many cases, allied themselves with the growing paramilitaries to sweep away the left, whom they considered the political arm of the FARC. This policy of extermination, with the impassivity of the State, led to the assassinations of Jaime Pardo Leal (in 1987) and Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa (in 1990) and became a clear precedent of the fate that demobilized and reinserted people could face. The extermination of the UP discouraged, in practice, the political negotiations with the FARC and the ELN in the four-year period of Virgilio Barco (1986-1990), years in which the country became totally unviable and where social and political violence broke out. became part of everyday life.
This social and political climate, described in broad strokes, is what generates a social movement in favor of a new constituent, just as the M-19 had proposed in the peace negotiation it did with the Barco Vargas government. To this guerrilla would be added, later, the demobilization of the Quintin Lame Movement, a large part of the EPL (which still has militants today), and “the Revolutionary Workers Party, PTR, and the Socialist Renewal Current, a dissidence of the ELN ”, as Santos says in his aforementioned book. However, this social movement, where students, some professors from private universities, and the opinion of the media, including El Espectador, played a decisive role, made possible the inclusion of a “Seventh Ballot” in the elections of 1990 where the Yes triumphed in favor of the convocation of a National Constituent Assembly, with 72 members in total and of diverse composition, which, between February and July 1991, drew up the new political charter.
What philosophical significance does the 1991 constitution have? From philosophy and political theory several answers can be offered. In the first place, if the concepts have semantic and pragmatic potential as the German philosopher Reinhart Koselleck said, it is clear that the concept of social contract was redefined and gave rise to diverse social practices. The social contract, based on popular sovereignty (Rousseau), the product of a consensus of rational and free individuals, served as the basis, origin and legitimation of all political authority, of all institutions. This popular sovereignty creates, dismisses and institutes a new social order, an open future that seeks to overcome the historical determinations responsible for the failure of the State and society, while the other powers are derivatives, potestas, crystallizations of that power of the political community if We say it with Enrique Dussel.
In the second place, although it is true that with the letter of 91 the ghost of fetishism reappeared because of what Hernando Valencia Villa has called, in his book Battle letters. A critique of Colombian constitutionalism (1987), the “normative reformism”, where it is believed that the constitutional or legal change of its own changes the reality, without a doubt the constitution was the product of the social, ethnic and cultural pluralism of a diverse nation; that is to say, of a consensus that was reached as a result of the dispute between different views of society in the Assembly and that, based on deliberation, in the most classical liberal Habermasian sense, allowed fundamental agreements on the legal-political reorganization of society. . In this way, liberal and social visions came together in the letter. This made possible the adoption of the Social State of Law, secular, guaranteeing fundamental, social, economic and collective rights, beyond the mere formal declarations of the authoritarian and confessional State of the old letter of 1886, where, it is worth saying in passing , the “state of siege”, which is assumed exceptional, became “normal” for 105 years.
We suggest you read: More changes in the Duque cabinet: Angélica Mayolo will be the new Minister of Culture
The expansion of the tools to defend rights (guardianship, group and popular actions, etc.), and the mechanisms for citizen participation (popular consultation, open council, legislative initiative), the “democratic expansion” as Rodrigo Uprimny and Mauricio García Villegas, the supremacy of the constitution over the law, the creation of the Constitutional Court as guardian and interpreter of the letter, the historical recognition of the existence of social inequalities and the inclusion of ethnic minorities (indigenous and Afro-descendant) – despite liberal multiculturalism – are great advances in constitutional engineering. In these new institutions converged from the old contributions of Marxist philosophy (justice and equality), liberal (first generation rights), formal equality and affirmative actions (J. Rawls), to multiculturalism in the Kymlicka style.
In legal practice, the letter made the philosophy of law, the discussions on constitutional and legal hermeneutics, the judicial precedent, the activism of the judges, and the citizen appropriation of mechanisms such as guardianship fashionable. In short, society became more aware that a constitution is not only a certain structure of the State (organic part), but that it contains a political philosophy, a vision of society or a certain social utopia. From this last point of view, the letter – with its doctrinal ambiguities, since it declared a social State of Law in the midst of the neoliberal policies established by the government of César Gaviria – is a horizon that must continue to illuminate the action of public officials, the aims of the institutions and the value aspirations of society.
