Devil's on the Loose: Evil Hour in Colombia

Told not only from a viewpoint that places Colombia's politically excluded on equal footing with those who are represented by the two-party system, Evil Hour in Colombia also acknowledges the role skin tone plays more than any other Colombian history I have read. It spares no side, either, not only noting the various guerrilla organizations failure to reach out to the indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations, but documenting their biases against these groups in their organizing. Despite these instances, however, Hylton makes no bones that most of the racist and anti-indigenous sentiment stems from the ruling parties and the elites they represent. Consequently, so have most of the attacks against those groups.

The text draws a clear line from the colonialist assumptions and practices of Colombia in colonial times to the Colombia of today. The rapaciousness of the light-skinned invader is replaced by today's paramilitaries and the Colombian Army. The Spanish invader is now the Pentagon and its School of the Americas counterinsurgency training center in Fort Benning, Georgia. The land is still owned by a very few, only now the primary sources of their riches are drugs, oil, and flowers. (According to CIP Online, the wealthiest ten percent control 60. 9 percent of the income, the poorest ten percent control 1.1 percent). In earlier days it was coffee, whose price was also somewhat controlled by the demands of the north and whose riches were reaped by the corporations of the north and their cohorts among the latifundia inside Colombia.

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