Colombia

Colombia is ostensibly a democracy on the US model with a directly elected president and an elected Congress, but the conservative elite continued to ensure its retention of power. Between 1910 and 1930 literacy qualifications for the franchise excluded 90 per cent of the people. The landowners dominated Colombia in the first half of the twentieth century. Coffee became its principal export, while bananas were cultivated by the ubiquitous United Fruit Company. Modest reforms inaugurated by the Liberals in the 1930s made only a small impact. The major consequence of such attempts was to galvanise rightwing reaction supported by the hierarchy of the Church, the wealthy landowners and industrialists. Their declared enemy was one of the leaders of the Liberal left, Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, whose radical proposals in the 1940s of land reform and state intervention in industry were anathema to Colombia’s elite of so-called liberals and conservatives, who shared power. It was this coalition of interests that controlled Colombian politics for a decade after the Second World War, opposing land reform and state intervention.

The discontented masses of workers and landless peasants looked to Gaitan for leadership and change. The government responded with repression. In 1948 Gaitan was assassinated, an event that prompted one of the grimmest chapters in Colombia’s violent history. Workers in Bogota and peasants in the countryside rose against the government, occupying factories and seizing land. Order was restored by the army at the cost of thousands of lives.

After an election had been held in 1950, the conservatives ruled dictatorially alone. Colombian politics now exhibited two characteristics: violent repression and liberal economics. But repression never solved the problem. The geography of the country, with poor communications, mountains, valleys and plateaux isolated from each other, was ideal for Marxist guerrilla groups to operate in. Police terror and anarchy, guerrilla warfare and banditry swept through the countryside. By the mid-1960s more than 200,000 Colombian peasants had been killed.

Violence remained endemic in Colombia. Reforms have been too few and too ineffective to help the million landless peasants. In the cities the harsh economic climate of the 1970s the world over was a further blow to industrial workers. Coffee prices fluctuated but were generally low. The isolated peasantry now turned to a new crop, the growing of coca leaves. As the 1980s drew to a close, guerrillas and drug barons perpetrated a culture of violence unparalleled elsewhere in Latin America. In the early 1990s the Colombian government tried to end the violence by reaching agreements with the drug barons and the guerrillas, and a new more democratic constitution was framed. The violence in the countryside from fighting between the army and Marxist guerrillas and the drug trade drove one and a half million peasants to poverty on the edges of cities. Although weakened, by the end of the Cold War Marxist guerrilla groups had not been eradicated. The US, meanwhile, has been principally concerned to destroy the coca fields, the only source of income for the peasants, with herbicides, and cooperated with the army supplying helicopters. But progress in Colombia has only resulted in driving the growing of coca and the trade to neighbouring Andean countries, Bolivia and Peru. As long as the demand for cocaine in the West produces profit for the traffickers the growing of coca will continue. The cycle of the conflict and low economic growth is condemning the great majority of the people to poverty in the twenty-first century. In the new millennium 40 per cent of the country is in the hands of the guerrillas.