TEDx Talk Transcript
My grandfather woke to pounding on his front door. He knew his late-night visitor from working as the only health care provider in their small town. That man warned him: “Flee for your life!” Townspeople were coming to kill my grandfather, because he was the wrong political party for that partisan town.
This was Colombia in the 1940s, a time known as La Violencia, when the fight between Liberales and Conservadores escalated until more than 200,000 citizens died and the capital, Bogota, burned.
When people share their worries about political discord in this country with me, I often tell this story. Before I knew more about the causes and solutions, these conversations ended at the edge of a cliff. Imagine me at your dinner party talking about national studies with helpful data like…
- – One in four Americans believes violence is either definitely or probably justified against the government, and one in 10 believes it’s justified right now.
- – Or how near 40% of both Democrats and Republicans describes the other side as downright evil, and near 20% as like animals.
- – And while marriages between religious and racial groups has doubled since the 1960s, now less than 10% of Republicans and Democrats are intermarried; the smallest percentage of all these groups.
That last point hits home with me because my grandparents were in a mixed political marriage, and they struggled to find safety for their family as towns in Colombia became partisan-only communities. And they, even having fled for their lives, were the lucky ones. Where guns were not available, there were machetes—not only slicing the throats of adversaries but opening pregnant women to eliminate the growing Liberal or Conservadora inside.
How could it get that bad? How can we avoid the same fate of partisan violence being every day everywhere—eventually knocking on our front door?
Seeking the answers propelled my journey once the silence around my own family’s experiences was finally broken.
Some of you may have seen the Oscar winning animated movie Encanto but not realized it was set in this era. A family, in Colombia, creating a hidden space from the violence. More of you may be familiar with a meme of the truth the family did not want to face: they don’t talk about Bruno, no, no, no… we didn’t talk about La Violencia.
My mother Nubia only started talking about it after 40 years of living in her adopted country of the United States when she began to worry what her own children might experience. La Violencia shaped her earliest memories, but she was only a child. So, she became as fired up as I was to learn the answers to my questions about it.
Together we traveled to different areas of Colombia interviewing some of the last living survivors of La Violencia and their families, academics, and authors. And we researched in their libraries and archives.
And now we want everyone to talk about it because Colombia may be the example of conflict and connection most relevant to our situation here and now. Let’s talk about what we learned
Like my mother, author Victor Prado live through La Violencia as a child, but he said something about it I will never forget: “We were already beguiled of all violence.” The political identities of Colombia and the U.S. are grounded in political violence. Both countries were born of bloody revolutions justified by rights and ideals. And, both countries had formative civil wars, shaped by ideology not started by opposing ethnic or religious groups. Both countries also committed to a winner takes all two-party system of liberals versus conservatives which, overtime, created a cultural story that the beliefs and the needs of each group were so opposed to the other they could only be met when one’s party was in total control.
Now some of you may be thinking, she’s gonna ask me to give up my beliefs and my political speech so we can settle for the lowest common denominator, and all just get along.
No. Open disagreement is vital for democracy. We’re not talking about ending political conflict, we’re talking about tipping points to partisan violence.
What’s left, then, in our common story with Colombia? The very logical conclusion that it’s much harder to attack the government or party leaders than it is to intimidate or even eliminate their voters. Let’s talk about what we heard and read on tipping points which made that nightmare the new normal.
Two of the last living survivors of La Violencia we had the pleasure of speaking with were Concepción Amayo Moreno known as Doña Concha and Señor Hernando Morales. Doña Concha shared some reasons why towns in Colombia became partisan only communities. She inherited her party from her parents. She married a man of the same party. Other people of that party moved there, and they all were having kids. She ended with a twinkle in her eye: “It is true that one of my sisters married into the opposite party and she defected.”
Loyalty and geographic isolation meant that Colombians might rarely interact with someone of the opposite party. Here in America the majority of people polled are still in the same party they grew up around. And landslide counties—where voters cluster that overwhelmingly support the same party—those have jumped 300% in the last three decades.
That means we might not have any positive or even neutral interactions with people outside our own party. So we invent explanations for what thoroughly baffles us about those outsiders. This leads to increased stereotyping. What we’re talking about is prejudice. In this case partisan prejudice.
Señor Morales captured how that prejudice was amplified through partisan radio and newspaper, and politicians vying for national prominence. They delivered hyper partisan content, and the people rewarded them politically and financially. So, they became even more inflammatory and, in turn, the people became even more polarized. Sound familiar?
Partisan prejudice turned into intolerance. Stereotyping turned into dehumanization. As one Colombian scholar put it, political rivalry became orthodoxy versus heresy, and that demanded the annihilation of those in transgression. In small towns, people of the wrong party were forced out. In cities, a partisan faction might surprise you around a blind corner. That is how Señor Morales was beaten unconscious for buying the wrong newspaper.
How is this every day, everywhere brutality of La Violencia finally contained?
Well after the worst had happened, Colombia’s liberal and conservative parties created a 16-year power sharing truce. This transformed their elections and ended the constant dehumanization needed to win at all costs. But, even before then, individual Colombians were making choices against partisan violence.
What I didn’t share at the beginning was that the man who saved the life of my grandfather was a member of the opposite party. My grandfather had saved the life of his spouse during childbirth. In our travels my mother and I heard story after story of conservatives saving liberals and liberals saving conservatives during La Violencia. They recognized the other’s humanity and weren’t going to stand by when people were in danger.
Before the worst happens here, what can we do—tomorrow—to disrupt that path to everyday partisan violence?
Connection. We can access our deep human capacity for connection.
- – Be passionate about beliefs and needs but without partisan purity, so people don’t have to “defect” from their original identity to help solve problems.
- – Distance yourself from the conflict entrepreneurs in media and politics that dehumanize the other side.
- – And find positive interactions with people of the other party by doing things like joining organizations bridging partisan divides.
This doesn’t mean changing your mind or someone else’s. It does mean letting go of our stereotypes and recognizing each individual’s humanity.
Hey, I’m not asking all of us to marry someone of the opposite party like my grandparents… but maybe, like Colombians, we can relearn how to live together.
