Columbia: The Genocidal Democracy

• Author: Carriagan, Ana

By Javier Giraldo S. J. Common Courage Press. 118 pages. $12.95.

This remarkable little book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in Colombia. In the last two years, Washington and the U.S. media have belatedly woken up to one aspect of Colombian official corruption: the infiltration of drug monies and mafias at the highest levels of government. But the history of an older, more brutal corruption of the rule of law--the state's "dirty war" against its democratic opposition--remains untold.

Javier Giraldo's Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy provides American readers with an all-important context for today's headlines. His book makes available in this country a solidly documented, English-language introduction to the story of the Colombian state's unofficial war against its own citizens.

As told through the filter of Giraldo's personal knowledge of many of the casualties, his book reveals the evolution, the strategy, the methods, and the protagonists of state terrorism. This violence by the state has been responsible for most of the nearly 40,000 civilian deaths or disappearances during the last fifteen years of the "dirty war"--more than all the victims of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile.

A Colombian Jesuit priest, Javier Giraldo is uniquely qualified to document this history. Ten years ago, using the resources of the Commission of Peace and Justice, an umbrella organization representing more than fifty-five Catholic religious orders all over the country, Giraldo initiated a project to assemble, analyze, store, and circulate the casualty lists from the hundreds of fronts of the "dirty war."

Giraldo's data bank offers the only comprehensive record of the assassinations, massacres, and disappearances that have given Colombia one of the worst human-rights records worldwide.

In these "testimonies of death," stored in a special data bank in Bogota, the names of el prominente--senators and congressmen, ministers of state, and presidential candidates--can be found beside the names of thousands of peasants, trade unionists, teachers, grassroots activists, lawyers, human-rights workers, priests and nuns, banana workers, judges, journalists, and janitors who have fallen since the war escalated in 1986.

Numbered among the dead and missing are the leadership and grassroots members of the country's sole left opposition party--the Union Patriotica. Founded by former guerrillas who, in 1984, availed themselves...