Colombia

needs a true democratic structure that represents the interests and needs of its people, the current problem is not the state itself but the laws that are made and the persons who have made them; laws made to benefit a select few .… The state vocalizes or expresses that it is in the community and that it is actively working for, providing education, health care, development and progress for the people, but in reality, if you look in our and other communities [laughingly scoffs], anyone can see that the government does nothing for our people. Social services [scoffs again], social services have never been offered in our community. The state is non-existent in providing any social services to the vast majority of people in our department. The only service [holds up his fingers to symbolize quotation marks] that the Uribe government provides to our community is repression and violence through the state’s battalions and the paramilitary. The only service provided is that which keeps the current rulers in power.

Again, some may come to the defense of the Colombian state and capitalists by arguing that inequality, malnourishment, or poverty are not related to issues of class exploitation and land monopolization, but are rather consequences of Colombia being a developing nation, which has an insufficient volume of accessible domestic or regional natural recourses to sustain the rural population effectively. This has, however, been countered by those who have taken the time to research this issue. It has been shown that the conditions are a direct result of the concentration of landholdings by the dominant class, as peasants are unable to access goods that can materially sustain their existence. There is no lack of resources but rather an increase in centralized ownership (Deere and León de Leal, 1982). At present, Colombia finds itself in an inequitable political economy, the throngs of civil war, and a ruling class that subscribes to a development model of neoliberal economics – as supported by the United States. Within such an environment there remains a small group of very wealthy landowners and capitalists who, as illustrated through Law 135, have the ability to directly influence governmental policy and economic conditions. This chapter therefore moves to an analysis that examines how, in many ways, the past looks very much like the present. The difference, however, is that unlike the poor conditions of earlier decades, today rural populations have responded to inequity through unconventional methods.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COCA IN RURAL COLOMBIA

For over a century, the country of Colombia has been described as an incredibly wealthy country due to its numerous natural resources and impressive commodity-based export potential (Beals, 1974: 115; Currie, 1950). Recognized as one of the world’s few “mega-diverse” countries, Colombia has global ecological relevance due to its significant variety of plants, flora, and fauna. It

has even been claimed that the country contains “a high percentage of all species existing on the planet” (Dieppa, 2007: 203–4). Former US attorney-general Ramsey Clark demonstrated the extensive surplus of primary resources available throughout the Andean nation. He illustrated how Colombia has more than enough resources to meet the social needs of the country’s constituency.

The nation’s productivity is enormous. Colombia has 26 million head of cattle, 60% more in proportion to its population than the United States, a chicken for every pot and abundant fish. Annually, Colombia grows 180 pounds of plantains for every man, women and child; 130 pounds of potatoes; 110 pounds of bananas and 90 pounds of rice and 50 pounds of corn. Colombia produces 830,000 tons of the best coffee in the world and 32 million tons of sugar cane a year …. It extracts close to 200 million barrels of oil a year with new fields awaiting development and 24 million tons of coal, the largest coal deposits in South America. More than 700,000 troy ounces of gold are mined annually and more than 6 million carats of emeralds are mined, half the world production.

(Clark, 2003: 24)

In the midst of this surplus, consumption levels remain devastatingly skewed and malnourishment is rampant throughout rural Colombia. Murillo and Avirama (2004: 38) acknowledged that “notwithstanding the relative stability and wealth of the country, one cannot erase the fact that the majority of Colombians are poor,” with the second “most inequitable distribution of wealth in the Western Hemisphere” (see also Escobar, 2004: 19; Rochlin, 2003: 100). Former political counselor to the Canadian Embassy in Bogotá, Nicholas Coghlan clarified how:

considerable wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than in most of Latin America. Much is actually centered on just four prominent industrial groups, headed by ‘Los cacaos’ (the big cheese) .… This inequitable distribution of wealth (translated in rural Colombia into inequitable land distribution) continues to fuel both the guerrilla insurgency and the paramilitary response to it by large landowners.

(Coghlan, 2004: 153–4)

This inequitable income distribution is easily shown in the fact that throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Colombia consistently had a Gini coefficient of 0.57 (Berry and Urrutia, 1976: 40–1; Díaz-Alejandro, 1976: 5). Coghlan (2004: 153; see also Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, 2004; Rochlin, 2003: 100) noted that the country of Colombia “has one of the highest Gini coefficients on the continent.” It has been documented that of selected countries throughout Central and South America, Colombia consistently had the highest Gini coefficients during the 1980s and 1990s combined (Korzeniewicz and Smith, 2000: 10–11; see also Ramírez, 2005: 83). In 1997, Colombia had the second highest rate of economic inequality in