Reviews

Dennis M. Hogan

Greg Grandin’s Americas

In December 1893, the Colombian businessman Santiago Pérez Triana decided to flee Bogotá. He had run afoul of the country’s government, a conservative and increasingly authoritarian dictatorship that called itself the Regeneration. Pérez Triana’s father, a leader of the opposition Liberal Party, had been president before the Regeneration began its decade and a half in power; his public critiques of the regime had made his son an all but official enemy of the state. The risks of fleeing were great enough that when Pérez Triana left, he opted for an unusual escape route: Rather than sail down the Magdalena River, the country’s principal artery, he traveled through the Llanos, the thinly populated inland plains spanning Colombia and Venezuela. From there he fled east along the Meta and Orinoco Rivers until he reached the Venezuelan coast, and freedom.

Pérez Triana recounted the journey in his memoir De Bogotá al Atlántico, which also decried the erosion of Colombian governance and attempted to articulate the principles of a renewed Colombian liberalism. At the close of the 19th century, the country’s national project appeared to be in danger: Civil violence had divided society into armed camps, undermining national institutions and devastating the economy. (Gabriel García Márquez would depict this crisis in One Hundred Years of Solitude, giving armed Colombian liberalism its great fictional avatar in Colonel Aureliano Buendía.) The violence of Spain’s initial imperial conquest also haunts Pérez Triana’s account. “The Spaniards,” he wrote, had used “violence and bloodshed . . . not to civilize, but to despoil the natives; and the right of force, brutal and sanguinary, was the law of the land.” Small wonder that a country born in lawlessness had never been a safe or stable place for commerce, let alone politics.

The story of the 19th century was the story of the region’s attempts to overcome this colonial legacy, in politics, economics, and culture. But by the 1890s, as the United States came to dominate regional affairs, Colombia seemed in danger of passing from one imperial master to another. Though the US had helped the Regeneration government defeat its liberal opponents, it was soon vying for control of the Isthmus of Panama, which was then Colombian territory. Betraying its erstwhile allies in Bogotá, the US backed a group of separatists who saw secession as a way to guarantee an economic future and escape the instability plaguing Colombia. In 1903, the new nation of Panama was born — along with a new territorial zone that, as a US-administered quasi-colony, would become the site of the Panama Canal.

The decision to circumvent the Colombian government, which could seem like a strategic reversal, in fact marked the US’s continued commitment to hemispheric intervention. In 1823, as the wars of independence were drawing to a close, the US had promulgated the Monroe Doctrine, which deemed any European interference in the independent states of the Western Hemisphere to be a “manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” Notionally meant to guarantee hemispheric security against European colonization, the doctrine has in effect served as a license for US intrusion across the region for more than two centuries.