Un dique en aguas turbulentas. Identidades políticas, populismo y violencia en la Colombia de Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, 1928-1948

This work examines the identity configuration of liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1898-1948) and his followers, taking as an analytical axis their conceptions of revolution, party unity, the people, and political violence during the first half of the twentieth century in Colombia. For this purpose, it analyzes the discursivity of this leader and his supporters from the mid-1920s until his assassination in April 1948. Exploring this discursivity provides evidence of the struggles and plots of meaning that shaped Gaitanism as a sociohistorical process, allowing us to inscribe it within contemporary studies on the populist phenomenon. By showing the principal tensions of Gaitanism in terms of pretending and encouraging a radical transformation of Colombian society and, at the same time, maintaining the traditional partisan forms and electoral mechanisms to achieve this objective, the study discusses the way in which historiographic and sociological studies have often understood Gaitan and his movement, especially by characterizing them as being between the antithetical poles of rupture and continuity with respect to the political and social order in force. Likewise, it employs tools from political theory and the sociology of political identities to shed new light on the Gaitanist phenomenon, mainly by questioning its supposed direct or causal relationship with the political violence of the mid-twentieth century. Thus, as part of Latin American populisms, Gaitanism is characterized here as a political process that established a conflictive relationship with its opponents but did not revolve around the physical elimination of its adversaries.