"The research involved in putting this manuscript together is
truly awesome and involves a major synthesis of Colombian
political, economic, urban, and social history which has not been
achieved to date either in Spanish or in English."-- Maurice P.
Brungardt, Loyola University of New Orleans
"Henderson's life-and-times study of Laureano Gomez provides a
cogent analysis of a rapidly modernizing Colombia as well as a
vivid portrait of one of the most powerful 20th-century Latin
American conservative thinkers and politicians."-- Jane M. Rausch,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The life of Laureano Gomez (1889-1965), Colombia's combative
Conservative politician and reviled public figure, serves as the
backdrop for this modern history of one of the hemisphere's least
understood nations. Tracing the complex process of development in
Colombia, James Henderson explores the civil violence that defined
the Gomez era even as the country experienced economic growth
unparalleled in the rest of the Americas.
Gomez was a consummate debater, a spellbinding orator, and an
influential newspaper editor. Early in his career he was a thorn in
the side of Liberals and Conservatives alike, while in later years
he led the Conservative opposition in Congress. He made and unmade
presidents, served as president himself, and all the while figured
prominently in Colombia's transition to modernity.
Henderson gives us the best and worst of Gomez and his
adversaries during this era, a time of alternating political peace
and progress, punctuated by spells of extremist invective and
bloody violence. Thus he shows that much of recent Colombian
history is rooted in developments from the Gomez years.
Few Colombians can speak calmly of Gomez, and many blame him for
the violence that plagued the country from the mid-1940s to the
mid-1960s. Henderson's objective and thorough discussion exposes
the myths and assumptions surrounding Gomez and offers especially
effective analysis of his writings, speeches, congressional
debates, and editorials (as well as his rejoinders, one-liners, and
put-downs, classics in the lexicon of Colombian history). Henderson
also chronicles the titanic political rivalry between Gomez and
Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo, an arch-Liberal, showing how the two men
who began their careers as friends became bitter enemies and
ultimately led Colombia into the fratricidal civil war known as La
Violencia.
This important history of Colombia's political, economic, urban,
and social life will become the definitive study of the nation
during its critical period of modernization.
James D. Henderson, professor of international studies at
Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina, is general
editor of "A Reference Guide to Latin American History." He has
written two other books on 20th-century Colombia, both best-sellers
in their Colombian Spanish-language editions.
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