Latin America

by Hannah Stone
9 Aug 2016

The power of Colombia’s elites is founded upon one of the most unequal divisions of land in the world. As of the early 21st century, one percent of landowners own more than half the country’s agricultural land.1 Under Spanish rule, Colombia’s agriculture was organized on the hacienda system, in which “landless peasants” worked, often as sharecroppers or indentured labor, for the landowners. The fight for land redistribution began with the struggle for independence and continues to this day.

This is one part of a multipart series concerning elites and organized crime in Colombia. Read the full report (PDF). See other parts of the series here.

Bolstered by a relatively stable economy, Colombia’s elites have been able to repeatedly block attempts to redistribute land or carry out significant political reform. The country largely avoided the military coups and economic crises that beset its neighbors in the 20th century, but this very stability helped store up a legacy of social problems that remain unresolved. Colombia is, “the only Latin American country in which the traditional parties and elites neutralized all political reform efforts,” Francisco Thoumi argues. “There were never reforms that challenged the power structure and weakened its control over society.”2

Land and Trade – Colombia’s Elites
The landowning elite of the 19th century used its land to develop agriculture and cattle ranching businesses. For the first half of the century, the economy remained small, isolated and undeveloped, with a low level of exports, dominated by gold. The development of the tobacco and then coffee export industries from 1850 helped create a merchant class. The associated export booms disproportionately benefited the economic elites — both landowners and commercial middlemen. While much of Colombia’s coffee was grown on small farms, the industry was run by a wealthy elite of distributors who controlled the sale and export of the crop.3 The coffee boom of the 1910s to 1930s was also the motor for the country’s industrialization. Centered on the city of Medellín, it catapulted the city’s merchant-industrialists “to national pre-eminence.”4

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Since independence, the local landowners and ranchers have often maintained private armies and successfully resisted attempts to centralize control and increase taxation. As Nazih Richani puts it, “large landowners, cattle ranchers and the agribusiness elite conspired to resist the growth of state power.”9 As a result, the tax base has remained weak — Colombia had South America’s second smallest tax revenue per capita into the 1990s.

Liberals and Conservatives
Power was administered in these isolated regions through two dominant political parties — the Liberals and the Conservatives. Both represented the interests of the elite. Broadly speaking, Conservatives defended the Church and were closer to the landowning class, while Liberals favored a secular state and were closer to the commercial class.

More:
https://insightcrime.org/investigations/colombia-elites-and-organized-crime-introduction/