Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia

by Steven Dudley

In Walking Ghosts, Steven Dudley, a journalist who lived in Columbia for five years, expertly chronicles the life and death of the Patriotic Union (UP), the party established by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia's largest guerrilla group. Through stories of the politicians, drug kingpins, revolutionaries, and mercenaries who play key roles in Colombia's civil strife, Dudley maps out the complicated and murderous absurdity that is present-day Colombia, where daily life has devastating 30,000 murders per year, 75 political assassinations per week, 10 kidnappings a day. As the conflict gets bloodier, international pressure and influence Worried about the FARC's strength and its role in the drug trade, the United States has sent close to three billion dollars in aid to help the Colombian government fight the FARC. Steven Dudley seeks to make sense of this complicated conflict by focusing on the stories of key actors in the struggle, from the earliest days to the present. He has seen the civil war up dead bodies; paramilitaries; guerrillas; victims; and survivors. He has witnessed political parties grappling for power by any means necessary, and he's spoken to all sides and asked the difficult questions. Fast-paced and informative, with a new afterword by the author, Walking Ghosts presents a window into a conflict likely to shape the politics of this hemisphere for years to come.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, War, Drugs

314 pages, Hardcover

First published December 29, 2003

About the author

Steven Dudley was born in 1969 in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a place another Oak Park-native, Ernest Hemingway, once remarked had "broad lawns and narrow minds." By the time Dudley was growing up, the Republicans had been replaced by Chicago-based mobsters. One of them, Sam "Mooney" Giancana, had a house on the south side, the same place where he was assassinated in 1975. The area's "Big Tuna," Anthony Accardo, had a house in the town next door. Dudley's brothers played football with Accardo's grandchildren; Accardo attended the games wearing a fur coat with bodyguards in tow. Dudley attended Cornell University, far from the Chicago Mafia, where he studied Latin American history. His fascination with evil governments and mobsters eventually led him to Guatemala and later Colombia where he worked in Human Rights. After doing a Master's in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, he returned to Colombia where he reported for the Washington Post, the Economist, National Public Radio, the BBC and others, and wrote a book, Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (Routledge: 2004) on Colombia's war. He later served as the Miami Herald's Bureau Chief in the Andes, and in 2010, he co-founded InSight Crime, a think tank that investigates organized crime in the Americas. He currently lives in Washington DC where he is co-director of InSight Crime and a fellow at American University's Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. He was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University (2007-2008) and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC (2012-2013). He is also a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and in 2019 he won the Lucas Prize for work-in-progress for his forthcoming book, MS-13: The Making of the World's Most Notorious Gang (HarperCollins: 2020).

Reviews

[Eridani Jara R.]

Posiblemente nunca habría leído un libro como este de no ser porque un profesor de la universidad nos lo pidió, pues la política nunca ha sido un tema del que me guste leer, sin embargo, este es un libro que trata muchos temas, trata sobre la realidad de un determinado momento histórico en la historia colombiana, trata de los infames actos cometidos por numerosos líderes, trata sobre el corazón roto de todo un país y trata sobre la poca libertad existente para expresar una ideología propia.

Me costó mucho darme cuenta de que todas las acciones relatadas en el libro realmente ocurrieron, parecía un libro de ciencia ficción, surrealista incluso, pero no, cada masacre descrita, cada muerte, cada acción de tortura pasó realmente y aquello es muy fuerte de leer, impacta al lector de una forma dolorosa y terrible.
Steven Dudley hizo una investigación increíblemente completa para dar a conocer lo que sucedió con las FARC, con el acuerdo de paz que se había propuesta con el expresidente Betancur, con su partido político y cómo esto, más el narcotráfico, desencadenó tragedias y horrores de magnitudes supremas.

Es un libro que vale totalmente la pena si uno quiere incursionar un poco más en lo que es la historia colombiana, un libro que deja con una sensación impactante y agobiadora, porque es cruento, cada actante mencionado y cada suceso escapa a la imaginación. Es un libro importante, que de alguna forma cambia totalmente la visión y perspectiva que tiene el lector del mundo en general. Sin duda, es una joya muy valiosa.

[Rhuff]

The gist of this book comes across as some think-tank, Langley-inspired swipe at the political left. Overall, author Dudley has done right in laying open the running sores of the Colombian civil war to public view, a generally engrossing - and gross - account of chicanery, cynicism, and atrocity.

That said, I could not give it more than three stars because of its flawed insistence - in my opinion - of blaming the left for its own destruction in Colombia. At one point he writes of the "startling number of dead" the UP "put in the morgue." Yet the Union Patriotica did not torture, kill, or "disappear" these people, nor force the death squads to do so, and therein lays the book's flawed blame-the-victim premise.

By his own admission, Colombia has engaged in political violence against dissidents for decades, and its 1980s death squads were willing to kill virtually anyone they disliked. The UP, then, did not have to be cynically betrayed or manipulated by the FARC guerrilla army to earn this lethal attention - it would have come anyway, regardless of any guerrilla politics behind the scenes. The paramilitaries were out to destroy the left, and even the center, in toto and "on principle." The guerrilla politics upon which Dudley lavishes so much scrutiny were a secondary factor at best, and in no way justify the Colombian military's "analysis" or strategy - which Dudley, in a roundabout way, is seeking to do.

[Juan]

*Walking Ghosts* chronicles the events of the mid- to late 1980s in Colombia, during which a left-wing political movement (the UP, or Patriotic Union) formed and was virtually exterminated by the enemies of the armed guerrilla movement, a coalition of paramilitary groups, drug traffickers, and current and former elements of the military. This moment is often seen as a tragedy, not only because of the people killed, but because the UP is often seen as the FARC and the state giving left electoral contestation a chance; had the experiment continued, so the story goes, the FARC may have given up the armed struggle that had started two decades prior.

The story is obviously more complicated. Many in the FARC saw the UP as a part of “la combinación de todas las formas de lucha” — an idea rooted in Leninism, and one which Dudley awkwardly redefines almost every time he uses it, which is often. Elections were not a substitute for war, but a complement. It’s also not just a story about the UP and the FARC; as Dudley narrates in some of the most interesting parts of the book, the UP in some respects challenged the Colombian Communist Party’s importance within the left. The FARC, too, was only a relatively small player up until around the time of the UP’s arrival (the big dogs were the M-19), something often forgotten in hindsight.

Dudley’s thesis is essentially that the FARC _used_ the UP as a kind of decoy, something to keep the Betancur government busy as the group continued to gain military strength. This strategy is, of course, not uncommon in wars. In Dudley’s account, however energized UP members and their voters might have become, there was never a genuine intention of transitioning to a non-violent political party. The real tragedy is thus that the UP’s martyrdom was in vain.

A less charitable reading is that, in many respects, this is the standard liberal account of the FARC. The group, especially in hindsight, is too unpalatable given its involvement in drug trafficking and kidnappings to be simple freedom fighters; there thus must be a distinction between the “good” people who followed the group and were led astray by the “bad” leadership who got greedy, or lost their way, or whatever. The story is a bit simplistic, and I’m not sure I buy how clear all of this was to anyone at the outset.

Dudley also doesn’t really grapple with the problems that the UP raises, namely, what _should_ a state do when facing a rebel movement that is mobilizing electorally while nonetheless continuing to arm and engage in combat? And how pluralistic was the UP, exactly? Would they be happy to govern as one among many ideological factions in a robust Colombian democracy? Or do their revolutionary ambitions point elsewhere?

This was a worthwhile read. Dudley has some great access to key figures in this history, and it’s fun to see people like Iván Cepeda talked about without any foreknowledge of what they would go on to be.

A final note: I was just blown away by how bad the writing was at parts. The repetition of phrases, redefining concepts, all of this was odd. But there are also these laugh-out-loud moments where Dudley clearly sees — and anticipates that his audience will also see — Colombians as totally exotic and foreign. People’s skin tones are brought up constantly, as if anticipating, “What do these people look like? What race are they?” This other line blew my mind: “Virtually all Colombians are Catholic and spend much of their time fighting over who is the most Catholic.” WTF.

[Matthew]

This book’s central thrust is that the Unión Patriótica would not have been subjected to political genocide had the FARC laid down their weapons and/or distanced themselves from the party. It is fundamentally not true, as the book’s own evidence and interviews make clear. The UP was targeted for extinction by right-wing paramilitaries and the state because they threatened the existing power structures in Colombia. Whether the “threat” of revolutionary social change was based in democracy or insurgency did not matter. Again, the book’s own interviews with paramilitary leaders state this very clearly. This is the main flaw of the book. The book also would have benefitted from in-text citations and a more robust bibliography. This was pretty frustrating to read at times as someone who went into it knowing the story of the UP. That being said, there was some good research that went into this book. I appreciate Steven Dudley’s work at In-Sight Crime so I honestly expected a little more from this. The story of the UP deserves a more comprehensive English language book someday. Cool to see the Ivan Cepeda interview towards the end, as he is currently a top two presidential candidate in the polls. Worth reading as long as it is supplemented with other reading on the topics surrounding it, in my humble opinion.

[Claudia]

This is an intellectually dense book and not beach reading. Political history is not my usual preferred genre but this is a great work. It is extensively researched and it does bring in a personal element. There’s a lot of detail and information, but Dudley does a great job tying it together and keeping the reader straight. I had to chuckle at how many times El Mejicano was referred to by his full name and how often La Combinacion... was written out and summarized.

[Mateo Vargas]

Libro que relata y revela varios hechos que parecen ficción, no me cabe en la cabeza que exista gente egoísta en idólatra, recomendado para entender un poco mejor el complicado conflicto interno de Colombia.

[Nico]

Recommend this book for FARC & UP history, wonderfully told using several journalistic tools and deep research. Things that jump out: 1) The Colombian govt's complicity in killing the leaders and followers of the UP. 2) The FARC's unwillingness (& strategy) to never put down their arms throughout the UP process, while the UP was growing and gaining momentum. 3) The later rupture in the FARC/Communist party about whether or not to use violence and then later on about the actual philosophy of communism/socialism/marxism. In today's peace-process climate, this book will make you question everything that is happening.

[Alex Bibb]

Dudley does a great job recounting the history of the Patriotic Union (UP), the former political party of the FARC. Dudley used firsthand accounts from major players in the FARC, ELN, AUC, UP, and the Colombian Government as well as from his own stint as a human rights observer in the center of the battles to describe the creation and destruction of the UP. And thus by retelling this story, he also gives a pretty good account of modern day Colombia and the what created it.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in Colombia.

[Dan]

A very readable and compelling look at the Unión Patriótica (UP) and Colombian politics. Dudley provides a thorough examination of the UP and its relation to the FARC, the Colombian government, and the paramilitaries, and narrates over 20 years of bloodshed between these actors. Highly recommended for anyone interested in or studying Colombia or looking for more information given the current peace talks between the FARC and the Colombian government.

[Janice]

Somewhat annoying narrative voice, but provides amazing exclusive interviews with Colombians on all sides of the conflict, and gives an excellent feel for what it was like during the genocide of the UP party. A must-read for people interested in understanding the Colombian conflict.

[Mike]

This is probably the most intriguing book on Colombia that I've read so far. Relates the sad reality of the FARC and how the government will stop at no means to silence political voices of dissent. There are no heroes in this story.........recommended

[David A-S]

Dudley traces the story of the UP political party in Colombia. In the meantime, he puts a face on the history and politics in the present. It is a lot to hold in one little brain, including a lot of horror. But ya learn something.

[Bill]

A good account of Columbia's complex political landscape.

[Kelly]

The best book I have found on the reasons behind the violence in the 90s in Colombia -FARC vs. Communist Party vs. Paramilitaries.

[Devon]

this was a well written and evocative retelling of Colombia's dark experience with the left's various attempts to integrate- or not- with the government. A tragic story that was compellingly told.

[David Gifford]

Fills in many gaps as I learn more about the 50 year civil conflict.

[Bobby]

Well-done, easy to read, and a great overview of the UP. A little too sympathetic of the Colombian Left in spots, but certainly more even-handed than 99% of things I read on Colombia.