 Book Reviews

survivors articulate and negotiate transitional justice priorities across different spatial
levels to locate agency in local actors.
Yet in spite of this, the book is a wonderful contribution to a more complex under-
standing of the important yet contradictory role that international human rights play
in transitional justice practices. The book is surely important reading not only for
practitioners and scholars working on Peru and South America, but also for readers
who are keen to learn how debates on human rights and transitional justice can be
removed from Western-centred and – I would also say – urban-centred models of
knowledge, because Bueno-Hansen invites us to reflect on the consequences of our
own ways of knowledge production.
International Victimology Institute Tilburg (INTERVICT), MIJKE DE WAARDT
Tilburg University

J. Lat. Amer. Stud.  (). doi:./SX

Lesley Gill, A Century of Violence in a Red City: Popular Struggle,
Counterinsurgency, and Human Rights in Colombia (Durham, NC, and
London: Duke University Press, ), pp. xiv + , £. pb.
A Century of Violence in a Red City is a monumental achievement from one of the
most important anthropologists currently working on Latin America. The book
cuts against the grain of much recent ethnographic work on Latin America, which
has tended to eschew Marxian categories of inquiry over the last few decades, seeing
them as antiquated at best. It offers a historical and processual reconceptualisation
of a set of still-unfashionable concepts – class, capitalism and the state – as well as
their concrete elucidation through fine-grained, multiple determinations and media-
tions in a specific case study. Lesley Gill has produced one of those rare books
whose value is likely to endure for decades and whose universal import extends far
beyond the territorial boundaries of Colombia.
The product of over a decade of painstaking ethnographic fieldwork and digging
through historical archives, this book’s remit covers a century of the violent making
and unmaking of the working class in the Middle Magdalena region of Colombia,
and particularly in the oil town of Barrancabermeja. Gill seeks to explain ‘the compos-
ition and decomposition of working-class power, organisation, and culture’ (pp. –),
with the ‘working class’ understood expansively, to include ‘uprooted peasants, wage
laborers, and unwaged and wage-insecure urban immigrants’ (p. ). Together with
class formation, this book is about contested capital accumulation and state formation,
as well as the ways in which these processes have engendered fierce geographic battles
over territorial space. Tracing a century of capitalist development and popular mobil-
isation, Gill shows how class relations have been continually remade through ‘the peri-
odic dispossession, displacement, and disorganisation of working people and their
institutions’ (p. ), as well as their political resistance ‘over spaces of labor exploit-
ation, capital accumulation, and power’ (p. ).
The book is organised chronologically around three regimes of capital accumula-
tion. The first begins in the s and spans to the s. This era involved the for-
mation of Barrancabermeja as an oil enclave, in which the Tropical Oil Company
(TROCO), a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, was allotted
subsoil rights in what was then a far-reaching tropical forest, and began to cut the
roads and build the infrastructure necessary to start drilling oil. Chapter  documents

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, on 13 Apr 2018 at 16:17:39, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X18000160
 Book Reviews 
this era, focusing on the formation of a militant popular culture of semi-proletaria-
nised peasants, oil workers, and petty merchants, whose struggles eventually helped
to undermine the oil enclave and set the stage for nationalisation. Included here is
a penetrating account of a wave of strikes in the Middle Magdalena in , followed
by a  regional uprising known as the Revolution of the Bolsheviks, and the brief,
ten-day seizure of power in Barrancabermeja – the Barranca Commune – by a revo-
lutionary junta and worker-peasant militias, following the assassination of Jorge
Eliécer Gaitán in .
The second regime of accumulation, surveyed in Chapter , covers the thirty years
between  and . By the late s, in a scene played out elsewhere in Latin
American oil economies, the foreign-owned enclave was replaced by the establishment
of a state-owned oil enterprise. This was part of Colombia’s particular experience
within a wider Latin American turn to nationalism and a political economy of
import substitution industrialisation, in which the public sector expanded and the
state played a more decisive role in coordinating capitalist development. Gill’s pre-
eminent foci here at the national and international levels are the constraints on
working-class power and participation embedded in the project of capitalist modern-
isation of the National front governments (–), and the intensifying political
polarisation of violence during the ‘Cold War crucible’. Translated into the local
idiom of Barrancabermeja, working-class discontent in this period found expression
in a series of militant civic strikes in the s and s, combining oil worker mili-
tancy at the point of production and social-reproductive struggles in the popular
neighbourhoods of the city. Complex interests of dispossessed peasants, unwaged
urban migrants and wage labourers with stratified incomes and diverse quality of
employment were articulated in unsteady political unities, brought together through
moments of heightened conflict with the state and capital.
The third regime of accumulation is captured in Chapters  to . Beginning in the
s and extending to the present, this epoch has been one of neoliberal restructuring
and consolidation, characterised by working-class decomposition, the reconfiguration
of state power and the expansion of paramilitary influence. All of these processes have
together helped set the stage for a renewal of capitalist accumulation under a new
extractive rubric, this time with a concentration in new export commodities, alongside
some classics – oil, gold, African palm, bananas, emeralds and cocaine. Chapter  offers
an extended argument around the role of the narco-bourgeoisie, paramilitaries and
state security forces in tearing down the ‘scaffolding of working-class solidarity’
(p. ) in Barrancabermeja through the execution of extreme violence. Unions were
destroyed and guerrillas expelled from the city. Neoliberal restructuring, in tandem
with the uptick in state and paramilitary terror, economically undermined the old
bases of militant class composition in the city. Paramilitaries took control of
Barrancabermeja.
Chapter  narrows in on the dismantling of the militant trade union,
SINALTRAINAL, which had a base in Barrancabermeja’s Coca-Cola bottling
plant. Through the transformation of Coca-Cola’s production process at the plant
– not least through an intensified subcontracting of labour – as well as paramilitary
terror directed against SINALTRAINAL activists, the union was undermined and
thus so was a central hub in the wider infrastructure of popular solidarity.
Chapter  explores the ways in which the general condition of ‘fragmented sover-
eignty’ in Colombia found expression in Barrancabermeja through paramilitary de
facto rule. An entire state-like infrastructure was established by the paramilitaries,

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, on 13 Apr 2018 at 16:17:39, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X18000160
  Book Reviews
through which working people were incorporated into ‘new forms of labour disci-
pline, rent extraction, and political subjugation through intimidation, predation,
and the erection of armed, clientelistic relationships’ (p. ).
As Chapter  demonstrates, the context of terror and the dismantling of working-
class power in Barrancabermeja explains the ideological and organisational transition
in popular politics over the course of the s, characterised by a shift away from a
politics of class militancy – wedded to eclectic ideologies of socialism, anti-imperialist
nationalism and liberation theology – toward a depoliticised appeal for the protection
of individual human rights. Chapter  then maps the terrain left behind by the wave of
counterinsurgency. Rather than class solidarity, class fragmentation reigns in contem-
porary Barrancabermeja. Individual survival strategies predominate, and competition
between workers is intensified through the downsizing of public employment and
the spread of precarity and insecurity.
A Century of Violence in a Red City is deceptively rich in theoretical insight and
provocation, mainly because Gill wears this acuity so lightly, and grounds theoretical
claims so irrevocably in historical and anthropological detail. In terms of class, for
example, the text subtly counters common caricatures of Marxism as structurally deter-
minist and economically reductionist, drawing fruitfully on the social historian
E. P. Thompson. History, process, temporality, agency, culture and subjectivity are
constituent and fundamental processes of class formation in Gill’s reconstruction of
the composition and decomposition of infrastructures of popular solidarity in
Barrancabermeja’s history. Gill is attentive throughout to dynamics of oppressions
of gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity, suggesting their simultaneous irreducibility
to, and yet deep intertwinement with, social class. The depth of this social-historical
approach to class is matched with a deft handling of heterodox anthropological and
geographical theories of state power.
If this book does not send waves through the interdisciplinary fields of Latin
American urban ethnography, this will say more about the blinkers of mainstream
practice in this area than about any weakness in the book itself.
Queen Mary University of London JEFFERY R. WEBBER

J. Lat. Amer. Stud.  (). doi:./SX

Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, Tell Me Why My Children Died:
Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice (Durham, NC, and
London: Duke University Press, ), pp. xxi + , £., £. pb.
At first blush, Tell Me Why My Children Died appears to belong on the shelf alongside
the growing number of what might be called ‘epidemic mysteries’. In such mysteries,
figures like Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, an anthropologist and public
health doctor, respectively, tend to play the role of ‘disease detectives’. The book
opens by recounting the deaths of two children in the Delta Amacuro state of
Venezuela. These were two of an eventual  victims of an epidemic that indigenous
healers and leaders in the Delta could not explain, and that doctors and epidemiolo-
gists from the Venezuelan health service didn’t seem to want to explain. In a conven-
tional epidemic mystery, this is where the disease detectives swoop in, marshalling
expert medical knowhow and liberal compassion, alleviating the bereaved parents’
misery and shock with a neat, orderly causal explanation.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, on 13 Apr 2018 at 16:17:39, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022216X18000160