Colombia
Colombia is ostensibly a democracy on the US
model with a directly elected president and an
elected Congress, but the conservative elite con-
tinued to ensure its retention of power. Between
1910 and 1930 literacy qualifications for the fran-
chise excluded 90 per cent of the people. The
landowners dominated Colombia in the first half
of the twentieth century. Coffee became its prin-
cipal 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 conse-
quence of such attempts was to galvanise right-
wing reaction supported by the hierarchy of the
Church, the wealthy landowners and industrial-
ists. Their declared enemy was one of the leaders
of the Liberal left, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, 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 conser-
vatives, 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 land-
less peasants looked to Gaitán for leadership and
change. The government responded with repres-
sion. In 1948 Gaitán was assassinated, an event
that prompted one of the grimmest chapters in
Colombia’s violent history. Workers in Bogotá
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 peas-
ants 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 reach-
ing agreements with the drug barons and the
guerrillas, and a new more democratic constitu-
tion 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 princi-
pally concerned to destroy the coca fields, the
only source of income for the peasants, with
herbicides, and cooperated with the army supply-
ing 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 traf-
fickers 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.PeruThe vast Andes mountain range divides the coastal
strip of western South America from the rest of
the continent. The highlands of the western coast
from Ecuador to Peru and Chile are populated
mainly by Indians, whose way of life has changed
little over the centuries. In complete contrast, in
the cities on the coast, Santiago, Valparaiso and
Lima, Western traditions and a twentieth-century
way of life prevail.