ABSTRACT
Conceived in part as a modernizing project, the 1971 Pan-American Games proved anticlimactic. As such, they resonate weakly in the historical memory of the host city, Cali. 1 Colombian planners hoped the games would signal the end of a violent past, and mark Colombia’s entry into an imagined club of modern nations. Th ey were to have capped a decade of economic progress, cultural opening and relative political stability across Colombia in the aft ermath of a long, brutal civil war – La violencia – which had ended a decade earlier. Instead, the games closed a decade of anticipatory but incomplete modernity. Within a few years, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had launched a massive, decade-long assault on central government authority. Violent paramilitary forces emerged to counter FARC. Cocaine would quickly become Colombia’s most valuable commercial export, managed by two deadly cartels, one of which was based in Cali. 2
In the late 1960s, games planners touted Cali as a powerful industrial centre, linking a vision of modernity through heavy industry to international Cold War-era notions of progress. A new curvilinear gymnasium with a synthetic, elastic roof replicated 1960s cutting edge architecture and design by Buckminster Fuller and other mid-century modernists. Th e games were to function as a showcase for and refl ect the best of progressive, European and US-inspired Cold War Latin American urban planning. Other examples of that foreign-infl uenced modernity in Latin America include the planned Venezuelan city of Ciudad Guyana 3 and the modernist ‘Schools-without-walls’ designs for schools and classrooms in 1950s and 1960s Argentina, and 1980s Brazil. 4 Cali games organizers projected modernity in technological effi ciencies that included the installation of new Omega timing devices in the state of the art swimming facility; in the scheduling of a new, free municipal rail service; and in widely advertised sponsorship arrangements with US and other foreign fi rms. Th e Colombian subsidiary of a US automaker, Chrysler Colmotores, loaned the organizing committee 70 vehicles. Th e Singer Sewing Machine Company donated 40 freezers, 70 televisions, and 16 sewing machines, while Olivetti Colombiana S.A. loaned organizers dozens of typewriters.
