Jane M. Rausch – författare

In the horrific conflict of 1914–1918 known first as “The Great War” and later as World War I, Latin American nations were peripheral players. Only after the U.S. entered the fighting in 1917 did eight of the twenty republics declare war. Five others broke diplomatic relations with Germany, while seven maintained strict neutrality. These diplomatic stances, even those of the two actual belligerents—Brazil and Cuba—did little to tip the balance of victory in favor of the allies, and perhaps that explains why historians have paid scant attention to events in Latin America related to the war. Nevertheless, it is still remarkable that Percy Alvin Martin’s classic account, Latin American and the War, first published in 1925, remains the standard text on the topic.This book attempts to redress this gap by taking a fresh look at developments between 1914 and 1921 in one of the neutral nations—Colombia. This period, which coincides with the presidency of José Vicente Concha (1914–1918) and his successor, Marco Fidel Suárez (1918–1921), is filled with momentous developments not only in foreign policy, when Colombian diplomats pressured by German, British and U.S. propaganda struggled to maintain strict neutrality, but also on the domestic scene as the newly installed Conservative regime faced political and economic crises that sparked numerous and violent protests. Rausch's examination of the administrations of Concha and Suárez supports Martin’s assertion that even those countries neutral in the Great War were not immune from its effects.

Although Villavicencio, the capital of the Department of Meta, is located just 120 miles from Bogotá, the mountains of the eastern Andean Cordillera lies between the two cities. As a result, after its founding in 1842, Villavicencio remained an isolated frontier outpost for more than one hundred years—even though "El Portal de la Llanura" ("the Gateway to the Plains") provided the principal access to Colombia's tropical plains (Llanos), a vast grassy region cut by tributaries connecting with the Meta and Guaviare rivers and eventually the Orinoco. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century governments in Bogotá regarded the Llanos as the "Eastern Lands of Promise," underestimating the geographic and climatic obstacles to their development. From Frontier Town to Metropolis recounts the history of the town and explains how, by the twenty-first century, it became a thriving metropolis with a population nearing three hundred thousand. During the next sixty years, it became the principal urban center of the Llanos despite the continual presence of militant guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers. This book examines the developments that transformed Villavicencio, drawing on data collected about the Colombian Llanos over a period of forty years. Noted researcher Jane M. Rausch offers a detailed treatment of the development of Villavicencio and the Department of Meta as a microcosm of Colombia's eastern frontier. The book incorporates a wealth of research published in Spanish by Colombian scholars in the last twenty years and is the first history of Villavicencio available to English-speaking scholars. It considers the important topics of when a frontier is no longer a frontier and the role played by frontier images in contemporary nationalism.

Although Villavicencio, the capital of the Department of Meta, is located just 120 miles from Bogotá, the mountains of the eastern Andean Cordillera lies between the two cities. As a result, after its founding in 1842, Villavicencio remained an isolated frontier outpost for more than one hundred years—even though "El Portal de la Llanura" ("the Gateway to the Plains") provided the principal access to Colombia's tropical plains (Llanos), a vast grassy region cut by tributaries connecting with the Meta and Guaviare rivers and eventually the Orinoco. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century governments in Bogotá regarded the Llanos as the "Eastern Lands of Promise," underestimating the geographic and climatic obstacles to their development. From Frontier Town to Metropolis recounts the history of the town and explains how, by the twenty-first century, it became a thriving metropolis with a population nearing three hundred thousand. During the next sixty years, it became the principal urban center of the Llanos despite the continual presence of militant guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers. This book examines the developments that transformed Villavicencio, drawing on data collected about the Colombian Llanos over a period of forty years. Noted researcher Jane M. Rausch offers a detailed treatment of the development of Villavicencio and the Department of Meta as a microcosm of Colombia's eastern frontier. The book incorporates a wealth of research published in Spanish by Colombian scholars in the last twenty years and is the first history of Villavicencio available to English-speaking scholars. It considers the important topics of when a frontier is no longer a frontier and the role played by frontier images in contemporary nationalism.

In Where Cultures Meet, editors Weber and Rausch have collected twenty essays that explore how the frontier experience has helped create Latin American national identities and institutions. Using 'frontier' to mean more than 'border,' Weber and Rausch regard frontiers as the geographic zones of interaction between distinct cultures. Each essay in the volume illuminates the recipro-cal influences of the 'pioneer' culture and the 'frontier' culture, as they contend with each other and their physical environment. The transformative power of frontiers gives them special interest for historians and anthropologists. Delving into the frontier experience below the Rio Grande, Where Cultures Meet is an important collection for anyone seeking to understand fully Latin American history and culture.

In his recent thesis, Radio Sutatenza y Accin Cultural Popular (ACPO): Los Medios de Comunicacin para la Educacin del Campesino Colombiano, (Bogot: Universidad de los Andes, 2009) Jos Arturo Rojas Martnez offers a comprehensive summary of the efforts of Radio Sutatenza, the radio network begun in 1947 by padre Jos Joaqun Salcedo, to create escuelas radiofnicas (radio schools) for the purpose of teaching illiterate adult campesinos (peasants) throughout Colombia not only how to read and write, but also how to better their living conditions and those of their communities. Within twenty years, the project which Rojas Martnez describes as the most important radio experiment of the Catholic Church, grew to include more than 20,000 individual radio schools with an enrollment of some 160,000 to 220,000 students. Consolidated within the Catholic Church in 1949 as Accin Cultural Popular (ACPO), the schools were reinforced by a widely read weekly newspaper, El Campesino (1958-1989), and the publication of cartillas (primers) and books to reinforce the lessons provided via the radio. The program reached its height in the 1970s, but by the 1980s, insurmountable problems began to appear. Disagreements between church authorities, competition from commercial radio stations, conflicts between the leftist revolutionaries, and withdrawal of funding by the national government forced the leaders of ACPO to sell the Sutatenza stations to the radio channel CARACOL. By the 1990s the program had disappeared, but not before it had changed the lives of thousands of campesinos throughout Colombia.Because throughout the world educators hailed Radio Sutatenza during the 1950s and 1960s as a unique and practical way to teach illiterate adults, its methods were closely studied and copied by other countries in Latin America and Africa. The published bibliography concerning the institute is immense, yet, as Jos Arturo Rojas concludes, many aspects of ACPO and the Radio Sutatenza experience remain to be investigated. (p.94). One such aspect is the impact the radio schools had on the inhabitants of one Colombian frontier regionthe Llanos Orientales. The Llanos Orientales or eastern tropical plains, are vast grasslands, that stretch eastward from the towering Eastern Andean Cordillera to continue on into Venezuela. Bisected by tree-lined, fast-flowing tributaries that join the Orinoco River, the region comprises 220,000 square miles or 30% of Colombias territory, but until the mid twentieth century, it was largely a lightly-populated frontier, isolated from the Andean heartland by the barrier posed by the mountain range. In addition to the problem of communication (only one unreliable road linked Bogot to the town of Villavicencio, the gateway to the Llanos), the harsh climate (nine months of heavy rain. three months of drought) and the prevalence of endemic tropical diseases deterred most would-be colonists from settling there. Nevertheless, by 1951 the population had reached 115,124 divided among four political entities: the three national territories of the Intendencia del Meta, the Comisaras Especiales of Arauca and Vichada; and Casanare, a province of the Department of Boyac. Since mountains do not necessarily posed insurmountable barriers to radio waves, it seems reasonable to expect that the arrival of Radio Sutatenza helped break down the traditional isolation of the people in the Llanos. The purpose of this book is to test this proposition by analyzing the impact ACPO and Radio Sutatenza had on the inhabitants of the most prosperous of the Llanos territories, the Intendencia del Meta which became the Departamento del Meta in 1959. Chapter One provides a general overview of organization and operation of Radio Sutatenza and ACPO from 1947 to 1974. Chapter Two briefly reviews the history of Meta and discusses the unique conditions that made it receptive to radio-promoted literacy. Chapter Thr

Although they have never made up more than 3% of Colombia's population, individual Germans and German companies have been present in every era of the nation's history. the object of this book is to provide an overview of German involvement in Colombia from the sixteenth century conquest to the ears after World War II in order to demonstrate that their contributions to the nation's development has bee far more significant than their scant numbers suggest.