82
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL CHANGE IN COLOMBIA
Table 4.3 Five decades of disproportional land concentration – capitalist percentages Time period 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
Percentage of owning population 3 4 5.7 2.8 1.8 0.4
Percentage of land 50 66 70 71 53 61
Sources: Ahmad, 2006: 60; Avilés, 2006: 24; Ramírez, 2005: 83; Berry, 1991: 83; WOLA, 1989: 9; Feder, 1971: 244; Smith, 1967: 37; Gerassi, 1965: 154; Fluharty, 1957: 204.
percent of the Colombian population now lives in poverty; however, it is the countryside where the highest rates of poverty are realized, currently hovering at 87 percent (Rojas, 2005: 210; Contraloría General de la República, 2004: 43, 44; UNDP, 2003: 42). In the rural regions of Putumayo and Caquetá rates are even higher, with averages in the 80 percentile since the 1980s (Palacios, 2006: 225). Holmes, Gutierrez de Piñeres, and Curtin (2006: 178), however, claimed that real levels of poverty in Colombia are likely under-represented and income distribution even more skewed than existing data suggests. While these figures are staggering, the levels of absolute poverty42 are difficult to gauge. The rates increased sporadically between the 1960s and 1970s, yet the figures for the 1980s and 1990s seem inconsistent with general rural poverty rates (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2). In 1964, the proportion of urban and rural people living in absolute poverty hovered at 25 percent, while in 1973 it rose to roughly 43 percent in the cities and 68 percent in the countryside (Keen and Haynes, 2000: 534). General rates of rural poverty accelerated with the implementation of neoliberalism, but the 1990s saw the numbers in absolute poverty decrease. In 1986, the percentage of Colombians living in absolute poverty was roughly 18 percent, a figure that then grew to 27 percent in 1991, 31 percent by 1993, and in 1996 a whopping 40 percent (see Avilés, 2006: 90; Chomsky as quoted in Giraldo, 1996: 14). The rises in absolute and general poverty are more in line over the last few years. Neoliberalism has not only cost the rural populace their land and plunged them further into poverty, it has also created huge differences in socioeconomic status across the country (see Table 4.4). The political and economic policies have disproportionately organized the country into clear divisions based on income levels. Stokes (2005: 130) showed that “in 1990 the ratio of income between the poorest and richest ten per cent was 40:1. After a decade of economic restructuring this reached 80:1 in 2000” (see also Avilés, 2006: 24; Coghlan, 2004: 153; Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, 2004; Contraloría General de la República, 2004: 47).43 Analysts such as R. Albert Berry and Francisco E. Thoumi (1988: 64) have characterized this inequitable wealth distribution as the principal cause of Colombia’s sociopolitical and economic ills (that is, poverty, malnutrition, extensive antagonisms between classes, and
