A Theory of Accelerating Rural Violence: Lauchlin Currie's Role in Underdeveloping Colombia

Abstract

Colombia has been in the grips of a continuous struggle for over 40 years, thus making the Andean nation home to one of the longest running civil conflicts within the Western Hemisphere. Examined here is the way in which the development theory elaborated by the economist Lauchlin Currie has licensed this conflict, combining as it does an advocacy both of ‘free market’ policies and of the ‘dampening’ of rural opposition to their implementation throughout Colombia. In this combination, it is argued, lies the uniqueness – and perhaps the notoriety – of his monetarist framework. Although monetarists took part in debates about economic development in Latin America that occurred in the 1920s and 1960s (the Kemmerer Mission, ECLA), their views did not gain ascendancy until the 1980s. From the 1950s onwards, however, Currie insisted that ‘accelerated economic development’ required dispossession of the peasantry and the consolidation in the countryside of large capitalist farms. To counter grassroots resistance to this process, the Colombian government has used his theory of ‘dampening’ to justify the war being waged on the rural population. The conclusion examines the contradiction inherent in the latter strategy, and also its implications for theory about the agrarian question.

Notes

James J. Brittain is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Huge thanks to Tom Brass, for insightful suggestions and also for an excellent job of editing.

In 1823 President James Monroe of the United States warned the old European powers off any further attempts at intervention in the Americas. This doctrine, which has been an important component of US foreign policy ever since, amounts to the less elegant (but more accurate) injunction aimed at the rest of the world to ‘keep out of our back yard’. It has been invoked repeatedly by the US, not least during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Any semantic parallel between ‘economic adviser’ and the infamous ‘military adviser’ as deployed by the US throughout the so-called Third World is, of course, entirely accidental and completely without significance. Every category of development ‘expert’ visiting Latin America from the US has always been viewed with suspicion by those on the political left, and not without reason. Perhaps the most notorious case was that of Dan Mitrione who was executed by the Tupamaros guerrillas in Uruguay during 1970. This episode was depicted in the film State of Siege (1970), directed by Costa-Gavras.

Among the US academics who have had policies named for them are Walt Rostow (the stages of ‘economic take-off’) and Henry Kissinger (the Kissinger Doctrine). The latter was, strictly speaking, a politician in his own right, but – and this is a relevant consideration here – he always presented himself in the public domain as first and foremost an academic and intellectual (‘Doctor Kissinger’). Although some might add to this list the name of Milton Friedman [1981], he has nevertheless had to settle for shared glory, his neo-liberal economic theory being seen by many in Latin America merely as an emanation from the Economics Department at the University of Chicago (the ‘Chicago School’).

In addition to an enhanced personal reputation, the importance to academics of material rewards (Nobel prizes, national/international titles/offices, university promotions) for participating in this process of testing development theory – and validating thereby indirect political intervention in other national contexts – should not be overlooked. That academics are not slow to deploy the first person singular when recounting both the history of development studies and also their impact on economic development generally is evident, for example, from the contributions to Meier and Seers [1984] and Hutton and Giddens [2000]. One searches these generally self-satisfied – and thus largely uncritical – assessments in vain for any sign of a mea culpa where the impact on peasants and agricultural labourers of development strategy is concerned.

However, as the case of Project Camelot [ Horowitz, 1967] underscores, the dividing line between academic research and military intervention has in reality always been a thin one. Under the guise of politically disinterested social science investigation conducted in rural Chile during the mid-1960s, Project Camelot was actually an attempt by the US Defence Department to gauge the extent of potential grassroots opposition to US military intervention in a foreign country so as to protect US business interests there.

Hence the observation by Drake [1989: 67] that, although the fiscal reforms advocated by the second Kemmerer mission to Colombia in 1930–31 were essentially those required by foreign bankers, ‘coming from Kemmerer instead of just the [US] bankers, these reforms appeared “scientifically” sound and less insulting to national pride.’

Sometimes referred to as ‘The Currie Report’, the ‘Currie Mission’, or the ‘Currie Plan’ [ Henderson, 2001: 330–333; Dix, 1967:196n.46; Fluharty, 1956: 22, 124, 204–5].

This argument can be traced in part to the fact that Currie was directly involved in the creation of the New Deal in the United States. However, he denied that he was a Keynesian, maintaining that he was nothing more than a proponent of wartime fiscal measures [ Keyserling, Nathan and Currie, 1972: 139].

Details about the Kemmerer mission to Colombia during the 1920s are based on the relevant section about this in the excellent study by Drake [1989: 30–75].

On this point, see Drake [1989: 33, 37, 56, 69].

In 1923 Colombia was the only Latin American nation on the gold standard [ Drake, 1989: 39]. This meant that henceforth the exchange rate was stabilized in terms of gold, a fiscal procedure which facilitated transactions with other nations on the gold standard – notably the United States – but at a price. Hence a balance of payments crisis that resulted in an outflow of gold to creditor nations and/or banks necessarily led to a contraction in the money supply, a consequence of which was deflationary cutbacks in state expenditure on wages and producer credit. In short, the price of such stability was a rise in unemployment and a decline in economic growth. The gold standard as shibboleth of laissez-faire policy was the target of Keynesian political economy [ Keynes, 1923]. Colombia left the gold standard in 1931 [ Drake, 1989: 73].

See Drake [1989: 57]. Investment by the Colombian government in railways, for example, not only generated profits for American companies involved in this process and facilitated the import of goods from the United States, but also enabled rural workers to migrate in search of higher wages. Landowners in Colombia complained that increased competition for ‘their’ workers had led to higher labour costs.

Hence the view [ Drake, 1989: 43] that ‘some critics drew the lesson that the central bank's short-term lending policies better suited the industrialized United States than underdeveloped Colombia’.

One important result of the increased debt to the United States was that American oil interests gained a favourable foothold in Colombia [ Drake, 1989: 65–6]. More generally, the ‘Great Depression, and the new economic directions taken as a result, rendered many of Kemmerer's innovations undesirable or unworkable’ [ Drake, 1989: 73].

On the connection between this process of reverse migration and rural discontent, see Pearce [1990: 39] and Fluharty [1957: 31–2] who notes about the Kemmerer proposals that ‘the benefits did not filter down to the masses. In many respects, the splurging in public expenditures was [from their viewpoint] counter-productive.’

La Violencia, which lasted from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, was an earlier phase of the ongoing civil war in Colombia, in which some 300,000 of the population were killed, mainly in rural areas. For an account of this struggle, see Sánchez and Meertens [2001], and for its impact on women see Tocancipá-Falla [2001].

Hence the recognition at the 1961 Punta del Este Conference of the necessity for a feasibility study of the relation between land reform and agricultural development, an initiative which led to the analyses by the Inter-American Committee for Agricultural Development (CIDA).

On the details of the structuralist economic development strategy for Latin America, see the extremely useful analyses by Goodman and Redclift [1981] and Kay [1989]. The inequality of the tenure system in Latin America prior to the ‘development decade’ of the 1960s was highlighted by the CIDA studies [ Barraclough, 1973] of agrarian holdings in seven national contexts (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Peru). In these countries, large rural estates accounted for on an average over three-quarters of all agricultural land.

The centrality of land reform to the structuralist argument is evident from what Kaldor [ Baer and Kerstenetsky, 1964: 386] identified as the two solutions to the problem of underdevelopment in Latin America. These, he stated, were as follows: ‘first, to have a radical reform, or a comprehensive reform, in personal income taxation or in progressive taxation generally, and secondly, to have a radical reform in the taxation of land. A lot of property owned is in land, and if the ownership of land could be effectively taxed an important incentive for improving the situation in agriculture would be created.’

In words that today would be unimaginable in the mouth of a bourgeois economist, Nicholas Kaldor maintained that the object of reform of any kind [ Baer and Kerstenetsky, 1964: 486] was ‘to achieve a better and more rational use of resources of the countries of Latin America [which] far more than other countries of the free world, have a tremendous dead burden to carry in the form of maintaining the “idle rich”.’ He continued in much the same idiom: ‘I think there is plenty of evidence that the proportion of gross national product taken up by the consumption of property owners in a typical Latin American country is two or three times as high as it is in a country like the United States or the United Kingdom. This means that the added burden of maintaining the “idle rich” is comparatively greater to the poor Latin American countries than the whole burden of military expenditures is to the United States.’

Agricultural un- or under-employment was an important factor leading to the 1959 Cuban revolution.

An otherwise excellent analysis by Clairmonte [1960] of the role of free market philosophy in development theory somewhat prematurely announced the demise of economic liberalism.

The conference papers were published in a collection edited by Baer and Kerstenetsky [1964].

In the light of economic ‘shock’ policy applied in Chile ten years later, the subsequent observation by Harberger [ Baer and Kerstenetsky, 1964: 325–6] is of equal significance: ‘If the money supply is held constant in the face of rising wages it is likely that the level of output will be reduced and the rate of unemployment increased. If the monetary authorities are sufficiently stonyhearted, and refuse to increase the money supply even in the face of substantial unemployment, it is likely that ultimately the rate of unemployment would be reduced again, either through wages being forced down or through rises in productivity, which gradually produce a situation in which the economy can attain full employment at a given wage level. But either of these processes of adjustment is likely to be slow and painful’ (emphasis added).

This facet of the monetarist framework was, unsurprisingly, one that remained un- or understated at this conjuncture. Whilst advocates of this kind of economic ‘solution’ remained understandably reticent about it, opponents were not slow to point out the obvious political implications of monetarist theory. Thus, for example, Kaldor [ Baer and Kerstenetsky, 1964: 499–500] asked the following question of those present at the Rio conference: ‘I would like to remind [one monetarist] that another of his colleagues made a monetary stabilization many years earlier, and I am referring to Dr. Salazar, who is also a professor of political economy… Dr. Salazar's monetary stabilization was followed by 30 years of hard currency, stable prices, and a completely stagnating economy. I would like to ask [the monetarist] if he was ever in a position, in a sort of an imaginary world, an imaginary Brazil, where there was a presidential election in which he had to choose between electing President Kubitschek or Dr. Salazar – where would he put his vote?’ Dr. António de Oliveira Salazar was dictator of Portugal from 1932 until 1968, and belongs to the same European fascist tradition as Franco, Mussolini and Hitler [ Gallagher, 1990].

Among those who have recognized this is Murray [2002].

The theory was published in the mid-1960s as a developmental model ‘being tested’ in Colombia [ Currie, 1966].

Currie was even quoted as saying ‘The wealth is here – let's get at it’ [ Gunther, 1966: 461; see also Randall, 1992: 198].

Like Kemmerer before him, Currie [1971: 886] sought to promote this model of development in other underdeveloped countries. If it proved successful in Colombia, Currie argued, then it could be applied to other contexts in the so-called Third World where a similar agrarian structure combined underutilized labour and land resources. In short, according to Currie [1971: 894] this development model would provide ‘the initial means of raising effective demand for agricultural goods and thus provides both the necessary stimulus to mechanisation and increased productivity and better jobs for redundant or lowly paid agricultural labour’.

Currie did not foresee the environmental impact of this economic model, not least because he regarded consumption as positive and resource underutilization as negative. In contrast to ECLA, he viewed peasant family farming as an inefficient use of labour and land, his conclusion on this point being that ‘between man-power and tractor-power, between a mule and a jet, between a sickle and a combine’ technology was always best [ Currie, 1971: 887, 889]. In this connection, it is important to note that Palacios [1980: 312, n23] has questioned the very high annual demographic growth rate – some 11% – attributed by Currie to peasant family farms growing coffee. Because his methods were faulty, Currie overestimated the peasantry, and consequently imagined there to be a much higher quantity of labour-power available in the countryside. It was no wonder, therefore, that he arrived at the equally problematic conclusion that much of this ‘underutilized’ resource could easily be redeployed to the urban sector, there to find (non-existent) jobs.

It should be emphasized that the main difficulty in the countryside was the presence there not of peasant smallholders but of large landholders (many of whom were politicians). At this conjuncture peasant family farms were established in small rural communities that had hitherto reproduced themselves in terms of social, economic, and political self-sufficiency [ Petras and Zeitlin, 1968: 176, 335; Osterling, 1989: 294]. Like Currie, however, many large landowners and political parties within Colombia saw this not only as an ‘underutilization’ of fertile land but also – and perhaps more importantly – as a possible alternative organizational model that might at some future point constitute a threat to the state and capital. In 1964 over 54% of the Colombian population lived and worked in the countryside [ Weil et al., 1970].

It is ironic indeed that, having initially been an enthusiastic supporter of unrestrained migration to towns and cities, in a subsequent book Currie [1976] recognized the existence of problems arising from mass urbanization in Bogotá, arguing that these needed to be rectified.

Demographic data project that an estimated 77% of the population of Colombia – or some 32 million people – will be living in urban conurbations by the end of 2005 [ United Nations Human Settlement Programme, 2004]. The majority of the inhabitants of the national capital, Bogotá, live in poverty [Brittain, 2004b; Murillo, 2004: 38; Leech, 2002b: 10].

Thus inhabitants of the poorer areas of Bogotá live in makeshift shacks that are typical of slum dwellings throughout the so-called Third World. The city has an unemployment rate of over 65% [ CISLAC, 2000].

Hence the observation by Gramsci [1971: 42] that ‘the son of a city worker suffers less when he goes to work in a factory than does a peasant's child or a young peasant already formed by country life’. For data on the displacement of the rural population from the Colombian countryside over the past two decades, see Brittain [2004b: 125].

Currie also failed to understand that peasants forced off their land would not necessarily migrate to towns and cities. Rather than pursuing the latter option, therefore, many dispossessed rural inhabitants who fled regions where military or paramilitary violence was endemic went on to colonize other rural locations, such as the Amazon forests of Colombia [Leech, 2002a; Richani, 2002].

One kind of criminal activity that has begun to expand in these urban areas is drug production, narco-trafficking, kidnappings, and sicarios – young men who drive motorcycles and will abduct and/or kill people for very low sums of money [ Betancourt, 2002: 3; see also Giraldo, 1996]. In this connection, it should be noted that some observers [ de Soto, 1989, 2000; Hart, 2000] regard ‘informal sector’ activity as a ‘natural’ form of employment for the poor in the so-called Third World, or even as ‘empowering’. For a critique of such views, see Overton [2001].

Currie [1967: 59; 1971: 886] did not perceive the monopolization of land by a small number of large proprietors as a problem. This is in a sense unsurprising, since in the 1960s he was himself one of the largest landowners and cattle ranchers in Colombia [ Currie, 1966: ix].

As virtually every academic economist over the past two centuries has pointed out, there is absolutely no reason why capital should automatically be invested by its owners in its national economy of origin. To assume that this will happen – and then make it the central plank of a development strategy based on deregulation (i.e., the absence of state taxation/investment, in other words) – is very naïve indeed.

Today Colombia remains economically dependent on the agricultural sector and its natural resources. Commodities such as beef, oil, flowers and coffee are still the primary sources of national revenue.

These were the very areas that Currie [1967: 15] wanted the Colombian government to concentrate the programmes of peasant displacement. See also the map in Gott [1973: 282].

The term ‘independent republics’ was coined by two members of the Colombian political establishment – Victor Mosquera Chaux, a member of the Liberal Party, and Alvaro Gómez Hurtado, a member of the Conservative Party. This is interesting in itself, for these two ‘opposing’ politicians came together in order to present as a threat a few hundred peasants dispersed throughout the four regions in question [ Osterling, 1989: 295]. A year after the displacement programme had been put into effect, the then Minister of War Alberto Ruiz Novoa made the following observation: ‘it seems that this battle is not waged by the people of Cauca, but by some landowners of this department who want to take over the rich lands that peasants of Riochiquito now farm, for which they [the landowners] do not hesitate to urge the army to enter the region with “blood and fire”’ [cited by FARC-EP, 2000: 22–3].

In 2003 the paramilitary and/or security forces were responsible for roughly 95% of all human rights violations throughout the country [ Gareau, 2004: 214; Brittain, forthcoming].

If not even the third largest (legal) export crop – coffee – can provide a peasant farmer with an adequate subsistence income, then there is little or no chance that less remunerative crops – such as yucca, maize or bananas – will do this [ Richani, 2002: 71; Kirk, 2003: 264]. In 1955 coffee accounted for 84% of the income generated by Colombian exports [ Mandel, 1968: 460]. By the year 2000, however, coffee accounted for 13.4% of Colombian GDP and 13.5% of Colombian exports due to the fact that cheaper varieties had flooded the global market. The price of Colombian coffee is now US$0.10/lb above the average global price for this agricultural commodity [ Ramirez-Vallejo, 2003].

At the US$/peso exchange rate for 2003/2004, 3,000–5,000 pesos would amount to no more than US$1.50.

The three main guerrilla groups in Colombia are the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC), the National Army of Liberation (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or ELN), and the Movement of the 19^th of April (Movimiento 19 de Abril, or M-19).

This coercive strategy does not directly combat the insurgency itself, but rather targets and/or attacks those who support the guerrillas. This military tactic, of depriving guerrillas of a base in the surrounding countryside, is a very old one, developed by the British more than a century ago to undermine Boer resistance in South Africa. It structured counterinsurgency operations conducted both by the British colonizers against rural communists in Malaya and by the United States against the Vietcong in Vietnam. Significantly, in all these contexts, at different conjunctures, it was a strategy that failed.

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Notes on contributors

James J Brittain

James J. Brittain is a lecturer in Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. Huge thanks to Tom Brass, for insightful suggestions and also for an excellent job of editing.