to revolutionary community-based institution

‘modernization from below’ is evidenced by peasant/rural worker demands for technical assistance, credit, infrastructure and marketing. These demands are associated with raising production and acquiring market shares, obviously associated with modernization, albeit in capitalist form. Today the issue of agrarian reform is not a simple replay of traditional demands of ‘land for the tiller,’ counter posed to capitalist modernization associated with large-scale corporate export farming. It is an alternative modernization strategy built around modern social classes. Peasants/rural workers or at least their cadres/ leaders view land distribution as only the first step in an agrarian reform. Thus the conception of “the peasant” or “landless workers” today is vastly different from past images of atomized subsistence farmers, relying solely on traditional farming know-how and barely aware of markets, alternative cropping, non-traditional marketable crops and resistance to technological innovation. It is precisely the emergence of a different peasantry and rural workers, with modern attitudes and with positive attitudes toward the possibility of significant, even transformative, change, that accounts for the resistance to being displaced or ‘proletarianized’ (more likely joining the urban reserve army of unemployed).

(Petras, 2003: 92–4, italics added)

Numerous historic and contemporary examples are available to demonstrate how an “urban-centric conception of power” is a fallacy. The FARC-EP exemplifies how “rural movements can reverse urban and external flows of influence and exercise hegemony on a national basis” (Petras, 2003: 93). In regions of FARC-EP control a pre-revolutionary dynamism has introduced new forms of development outside metropolitan capital systems (see Richani, 2002a: 66, 71). Through this process, the insurgency’s political and military capacity, has, on multiple occasions and at specific times, demonstrated a domestic and international threat to national capitalist hegemony. From this it can be understood that the FARC-EP’s support and sustained position in the countryside is not a demonstration of pre-modern conditions but rather a clear presentation of the insurgency’s unique political and ideological framework within modernity itself. Again, the FARC-EP attempts to create a “war of position” not by taking centralized power but through an organized ongoing consolidation of newly revolutionized socio-geographical environments across rural Colombia. It is important to demonstrate how this has occurred, so I offer an analysis of one counter-hegemonic strategy where a once state-based mechanism, shaped to co-opt the peasantry and rural populations, was transformed into a pre-revolutionary medium of grassroots power.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF JAC: FROM PACIFYING STATE MECHANISM TO REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNITY-BASED INSTITUTION

The 1950s and 1960s saw a class structure in rural Colombia ripe for political organizing because of the disparities in ownership of capital and land.

Sociologist T. Lynn Smith noted that community-based development projects were:

badly needed in rural society, such as that in Colombia, in which the twoclass system of social stratification has prevailed for centuries, in which the mass of the rural people are either agricultural laborers or at most the owners or renters of very small plots of relatively poor land, in which hoe culture and the still more primitive system of felling and burning are the principal ways of getting products from the soil, and in which the smallest subdivision of government is really an administrative division of the national government and not a unit that by any stretch of the imagination is entitled to be called an entity for local self-government.

(Smith, 1967: 315)

Recognizing the historic and volatile situation of this turbulent period (after la Violencia, the National Front’s political exclusion, the PCC’s involvement in the countryside, and so on), the state attempted to mitigate tensions through a localized development strategy. Juntas Accíon de Comunal (JAC) offered pseudo-self-government across the countryside while distracting attention from leftist politics. Historian Marco Palacios presented a formal description of the JACs’ creation.

The most durable state-directed mobilization initiative of the FN [Frente Nacional] era, the Juntas de Accíon Comunal (Community Action Boards, or JACs), created in 1958, were a Liberal initiative. JACs were organized by rural subdivision or urban neighborhood and were assigned funds by the state for specific development goals such as the construction of schools, clinics, and roads, or the extension of water and sewer lines. In return the communities provided volunteer labor and some funding, although the latter often came from aid organizations.

(Palacios, 2006: 185)

Colombia’s governing structure has long been arranged through a hierarchical lineation. Conversely, Law 14 (1958) appeared to decentralize power through the creation of community action boards that shaped development projects via state funds, private institutions, NGOs, and the rural communities themselves.9 Law 14 required that the JACs:

be made up of local residents of rural and urban neighborhoods, and could be delegated “functions of control and vigilance and a certain intervention” in the management of various public services. Through the boards the government was to permit popular participation in a number of activities, including school construction and repair; health programs and construction of health centers and public restaurants; construction and administration of irrigation and drainage systems; low-cost housing, roads, and bridges; improvement of agriculture; encouragement of sports as well as recreational