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(History repeating itself?)
The drive to intensify capitalist agriculture to satisfy the American
marketplace coincided with a general collapse of the world economy. From
1885 to 1930, the Colombian government was controlled by the
Conservative Party, which despite its founding principles, staked out a
typically liberal development program. This involved strengthening the
state, extension of the transportation and communications systems into
the countryside, encouragement of foreign investment, etc. The Great
Depression manifested itself in Colombia through a drop in export
earnings. As unemployment in the advanced capitalist countries grew,
coffee became less affordable.
A general sense of helplessness led to a Liberal Party victory in 1934,
as the new president López Pumarejo called for a "revolution on the
march," a Colombian version of the New Deal. The trade unions provided
Pumarejo with one of his main bases of support, while the Communist
Party served as his most trusted lieutenant within the union movement.
Support for the Pumarejo government turned out to be disastrous for the
labor movement as it relied on him to solve their problems rather than
using their own independent power. Real wages fell between 1935 and 1950
and social expenditures were virtually stagnant in the same period. This
was a "New Deal" without teeth.
It was in the countryside, however, where resistance to the Liberal
government was mounted most sharply. Peasants, especially in the eastern
part of the country, sought to grow coffee on their own plots in order
to take advantage of the continuing external demand for the stimulant.
In many cases they occupied the land of large haciendas and pressed for
ownership. The Liberal government tried to co-opt the squatters movement
and bring it under control, just as the PRI in Mexico had done with the
followers of Zapata. To some extent, this policy paid off as a layer of
the peasantry won title to land and became less militant.
However, just like in the United States, a section of the bourgeoisie
regarded Liberal Party reformism as Bolshevik and began to organize a
counter-revolution. One of the main props of the Conservative Party's
right wing assault was the Catholic Church, which viewed the "revolution
on the march" as a threat to its influence on uneducated and insecure
peasants. After 1935, paramilitary associations cropped up with the
support of bishops and businessmen. Conservative Party intellectuals
openly identified with Spain's Franco at this point and Laureano Gómez
in particular promoted the concept of 'hispanidad,' a Colombian version
of Falangist thought.
The concrete social and economic goal of the Catholic-Conservative axis
was to break the back of the agrarian revolt, which they saw the
Liberals as temporizing with. In particular they wanted to abolish Law
200, which gave landless peasants the right to occupy and own land.
These differences continued to divide the two parties, even after the
end of the depression and WWII, as the lingering effects of the 1930s
downturn combined with the structural imbalances of the Colombian
countryside served to maintain class tensions. Poverty and unequal land
distribution simply could not be resolved within the Colombian two party
system, although electoral politics did provide a medium for the
voiceless to raise their concerns.
As the Conservatives pushed relentlessly from the right, the Liberals
began to cave in. Upon taking office in 1945, Alberto Lleras Camargo,
Pumarejo's Liberal successor, immediately appointed three Conservatives
to his cabinet as a concession. As the 1946 elections approached, the
Liberal Party split into two factions. One, advocating compromise with
the right-wing, was led by Gabriel Turbay. The other was led by Jorge
Eliécer Gaitán, a populist who openly called for resistance to the
bourgeoisie and a deepening of the agrarian revolt. He was hostile to
the trade unions which he saw as a bureaucratic apparatus dominated by
the Communist Party in bed with right-wing Liberals. The statements of
the Communist Party of Colombia left no doubt as to their loyalties. In
their newspaper, they declared in 1937: "Our post is at the side of the
reformist government of López [Pumarejo] . . . Today we are not
subversives. The only subversives are the falangist Conservatives. We
Communists aspire to become the champions of order and peace."
Despite the CP's fondest hopes, order and peace were impossible. When
Gaitán's wing of the party won control of the Colombian congress in
1947, working class strikes and protests broke out in the
