For more than 30 years, Professor Jane Rausch has been introducing us to a set of data that opens doors to the regional history of the Llanos, a Colombian region once described as the “Lands of the Future” by local politicians (p. viii). These tropical plains are situated in the southeastern part of Colombia, covering one-third of the country, and have been considered as relatively marginal in terms of the attention that they have garnered from historians. Rausch was the first to give a systematic look at the history of the region, and this volume completes the circle that began with her analysis of the region from the 1500s. In this fourth book of the series, the author picks up from where her previous volume left off and advances into the decades from 1946 to 2010.
The Llanos case shows the difficulties of advancing modernization in that region, at least...
