Evil Hour in Colombia - Paperback

by Forrest Hylton (Author), Gonzalo Sanchez (Prologue by)

Colombia is the least understood of Latin American countries. Its human tragedy, which features terrifying levels of kidnapping, homicide and extortion, is generally ignored or exploited. In this urgent new work Forrest Hylton, who has extensive first-hand experience of living and working in Colombia, explores its history of 150 years of political conflict, characterized by radical-popular mobilization and reactionary repression.

Evil Hour in Colombia shows how patterns of political conflict, from the mid-nineteenth century to today's guerilla narco-traffickers and paramilitaries, explain the wear currently destroying Colombian lives, property, communities and territory. In doing so, it traces how Colombia's "coffee capitalism" gave way to the cattle and cocaine republic of the 1980s, and how land, wealth and power have been steadily accumulated by the light-skinned top of the social pyramid through a brutal combination of terror, expropriation and economic depression.

Author Biography

Forrest Hylton is a researcher in history at New York University. He is an editor of and contributor to Ya es otro tiempo el presente: Cuatro momentos de insurgencia indígena, 2nd edition, and the co-author, with Sinclair Thomson, of Revolutionary Horizons: Popular Struggle in Bolivia.