“Vibrations of the Collective”: The Popular Ideology of Gaitanismo on Colombia’s Atlantic Coast, 1944–1948
T n H E allure of Gaitanismo, the populist political movement led by Colombian politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitain, sometimes seemed otherworldly to contemporary observers. Juan Manuel Valdelamar, an influential labor leader, remarked that in the Colombian department of Bolivar, "all the campesinos have a portrait of Gaitain in their homes, and daily they tend it with a mistica that approaches adoration."' Nevertheless, the quasi-religious reverence Gaitanistas professed for their caudillo found its origins in the gritty substance of Colombian social reality. Gaitanista ideology sprang from its followers' collective understanding of the world and their shared notions of how it ought to be. Colombia's growing cities of the 1940S created ideological niches for alternative ideas about the social and political relations of Colombian society. Studies of Gaitanismo generally focus on Gaitain's home base in and around Bogota, though the movement flourished throughout Colombia.2 After Bogota' it was strongest, and perhaps most radical, on the Atlantic coast and in the Maadalena River Valley. This study deals with Cartaaena,