Colombia's countercultures: Bogota's rock and roll gangs [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

by Adriaan Alsema December 20, 2020

Rock and roll was quickly associated with juvenile delinquency after arriving in Colombia as the music and Hollywood movies inspired youth in Bogota to join gangs.

Before US-born Jimmy Reisback really introduced Colombia’s capital to rock and roll music and the concept of a radio disk-jockey in 1957, American cinema set the scene.

Between 1953 and 1956, “The Wild One,” “The Blackboard Jungle” and “Rebel Without a Cause” introduced Colombia’s urban youth to youthful rebellion, a concept that didn’t exist.

In the United States, music icons like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash were causing a cultural revolution around the time these movies made James Dean and Marlon Brando instant icons.

In Colombia, the movies came before the music, just when the country was slowly emerging from “La Violencia,” an period of extreme violence between liberals and conservatives.

The American movies introduced a generational division between youth that felt disenfranchised by the dull society of their parents.

The suburbs that had emerged in the US in the 1950’s may have been dull and conformist, Colombia was anything but in the aftermath of the partisan war that cost 200,000 lives.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/colombias-countercultures-bogotas-rock-and-roll-rumbles/

~ ~ ~

It's entirely necessary to understand what happened in Colombia during the 1940's when an outstanding progressive Presidential candidate was assassinated publicly, if one's to try to understand Colombia's history at all:

From Wikipedia:

La Violencia (Spanish pronunciation: [la βjoˈlensja], The Violence) was a ten-year civil war in Colombia from 1948 to 1958, between the Colombian Conservative Party and the Colombian Liberal Party, fought mainly in the countryside.[1][2][3]

La Violencia is considered to have begun with the 9 April 1948 assassination of the popular politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a Liberal Party presidential candidate for the election in November 1949.[4] His murder provoked the Bogotazo rioting that lasted for ten hours and killed some 5,000 people.[4] An alternative historiography proposes as the start the Conservatives' return to power following the election of 1946.[4] Rural town police and political leaders encouraged Conservative-supporting peasants to seize the agricultural lands of Liberal-supporting peasants, which provoked peasant-to-peasant violence throughout Colombia.[4]

La Violencia is estimated to have cost the lives of at least 200,000 people, almost 2% of the population of the country at the time.

. . .

La Violencia conflict took place between the Military Forces of Colombia and the National Police of Colombia supported by Colombian Conservative Party paramilitary groups on one side, and paramilitary and guerrilla groups aligned with the Colombian Liberal Party and the Colombian Communist Party on the other side.

The conflict caused millions of people to abandon their homes and property. Media and news services failed to cover events accurately for fear of revenge attacks. The lack of public order and civil authority prevented victims from laying charges against perpetrators. Documented evidence from these years is rare and fragmented.[citation needed]

. . .

La Violencia did not acquire its name simply because of the number of people it affected; it was the manner in which most of the killings, maimings, and dismemberings were done. Certain death and torture techniques became so commonplace that they were given names—for example, picar para tamal, which involved slowly cutting up a living person's body; or bocachiquiar, where hundreds of small punctures were made until the victim slowly bled to death. Former Senior Director of International Economic Affairs for the United States National Security Council and current President of the Institute for Global Economic Growth, Norman A. Bailey describes the atrocities succinctly: "Ingenious forms of quartering and beheading were invented and given such names as the 'corte de mica', 'corte de corbata' (aka Colombian necktie), and so on. Crucifixions and hangings were commonplace, political 'prisoners' were thrown from airplanes in flight, infants were bayoneted, schoolgirls, some as young as eight years old, were raped en masse, unborn infants were removed by crude Caesarian section and replaced by roosters, ears were cut off, scalps removed, and so on."[16] While scholars, historians, and analysts have all debated the source of this era of unrest, they have yet to formulate a widely accepted explanation for why it escalated to the notable level it did.

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Violencia

[bThumbnail images of Colombia during the time of "La Violencia:"
https://tinyurl.com/ybdlknwx

~ ~ ~

One of the mentioned '60's bands, doing a cover of Bill Haley's "Rock around the clock":
"Tutti Frutti" from Colombia, (1964) “Los Danger Twist”

This one is very suspect, and very recent, of course: