Reddit reviews Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy

It is a term universally used - by politicians, Human Rights groups, media, governments etc. to describe what happened in Colombia. Government and paramilitaries did not ethnically cleanse, in the sense that it was a race of people they were getting rid of, rather they "socially cleansed", meaning they were getting rid of a class- anyone who is a peasant and forcing them off the land with violence.

There's a wikipedia entry for social cleansing in Colombia

Here is a Human Rights Watch Report that uses the term.

And here's an Amnesty article using "social cleansing".

Here's a book produced by Human Rights Watch using the term.

Here's a New York Times article using the term.

It's also ubiquitous in academia, with many of the best-selling books on Colombia using the term- for instance "Colombia: a Genocidal Democracy" by Javier Giraldo, or "Violence and Crime in Latin America" by Gema Santamaria. Or what about "Colombia: Essays in Conflict, Devleopment and Peace" by Andres Solimano. And here you can read a good peer-reviewed article by Elizabeth Schwartz which uses the term in the title.

I have to say I'm pretty surprised that was questioned. Have you never heard the term "limpieza social" before? Have you never wondered why there are millions of people living in shanty towns in your country? They were forced off the land at gunpoint in the 80s and 90s.