ABSTRACT
The region of Sumapaz, on the Eastern Cordillera, not far from the country's capital of Bogotá, has been the epicenter of peasant organizations, leftist movements, and guerrilla armies since the mid-twentieth century. It has also been a war zone, an area where the state has mobilized its violence through legal and illegal means in various efforts to control popular movements. This chapter examines the period between 1946, when Sumapaz became ground zero of the bipartisan conflict later known as la Violencia, and 1964, when the existing peasant armies began to morph into communist guerrillas. It argues that each attempt at pacification on the part of the state unleashed new forms of violence turning Sumapaz into a laboratory of counterinsurgency and, therefore, a prime setting for the study of the dynamics of war and peace in the country. The chapter uses an anthropological perspective based on original ethnographic work with older generations of Sumapaceños (people from Sumapaz) that pays attention to the historical memories of various cycles of violence in the region and how memory constitutes collective identities.
