USAID's Alternative Development Strategy: A Critical Review of Initiatives in Colombia

INTRODUCTION

Since 2000, the United States (U.S.) has devoted approximately 4.7 billion dollars in foreign aid to Colombia (Isacson 2006:1) with the dual aims of resolving Colombia’s internal conflict and of curbing the country’s role in the international drug trade (USAID 2000). Among the more famous elements of Plan Colombia, as the U.S. aid package is known, are the supplies granted to Colombia’s military and the destruction of large coca and poppy fields through aerial fumigation.

Run by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), these alternative development initiatives attempt to provide small-scale farmers with ‘alternative’ economic opportunities, such as cultivation of cocoa, beans, coffee, and fruits or engagement in the rubber and wood industries, as well as with infrastructure that might allow alternative industries to flourish, such as roads connecting the countryside to major market areas. USAID also offers several farmers credit and/or monetary assistance. Overall, the agency’s goal is to provide Colombian peasant families with enough income so that they need not resort to drug cultivation for economic survival. Though on the surface this approach appears positive, USAID’s alternative development strategy is unlikely to benefit Colombian campesinos (farmers) because it fails to take into account the historical political economy of small-scale drug cultivation in Colombia and therefore the economic and socio-political realities of today’s peasant life.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SMALL-SCALE DRUG CULTIVATION

As LeGrand (1986a; 1986b; 2003) and others (e.g., González 2004) have documented, Colombia’s population was once “concentrated” (González 2004) in select areas, but as landlords have confiscated peasants’ properties and as conflict has displaced Colombians from their lands, the country’s campesinos have relocated to increasingly remote regions. With their infertile soils, lack of infrastructure (including lack of roads to markets), and guerrilla leadership, many of these regions have afforded campesinos few economic opportunities other than drug production.

LeGrand writes that in the early 1700s, Spanish settlers populated very little of Colombia’s territory (2003), and even by the 1850s, geographer Agustín Codazzi classified around three-quarters of Colombia as ‘public land’ (cited in LeGrand 1986b:1). According to LeGrand, dispersion to more remote areas indeed began from the 1850s through the early 1900s, as these public regions attracted scores of poor Colombians, but even then, settlers sought to remain connected to Colombia’s economic core: “Most founded homesteads along rivers, roads, and railroads, while those who moved into isolated regions immediately pooled their labor to cut mule paths to the nearest town or waterway” (1986a:33-34).

Though they tilled the public lands, many peasants lacked property rights over their fields, in part because of the expense of guaranteeing such rights (p. 35), and as wealthier landlords sought to increase their own agricultural yields, they seized control of the peasants’ farms, attempting to capture these campesinos as “tenant farmers and wage laborers” (p. 32). Many peasants accepted tenancy status, but their new landlords forced any farmers that resisted to leave their lands, and if these campesinos began to cultivate still other regions, the process of land takeover and peasant displacement generally repeated itself (p. 36). Because large landholders secured the “most desirable land” for themselves (p. 35), they eventually drove those peasants unwilling to become tenants to more remote and less economically advantageous regions.

Though peasant-led protests, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, prompted many peasants to retake land from their landlords and to stop paying their rents (p. 40-41), from 1936 onward, judges once again insisted that many of these peasants cede control to the elite (LeGrand 1986b:157). Furthermore, in 1936 the Colombian government enacted Law 200. Also known as the Land Act, this law did demand that landlords demonstrate themselves to be legal landowners by adducing original titles or colonial deeds – but only for those landlords whose estates peasants had attempted to retake prior to 1935 (p. 149).

If no peasants had yet rebelled against a particular landlord, that landlord had merely to show sales, wills, and court paperwork that documented his control of the land for the past thirty years. In other words, the new law offered many landlords “a legal foundation for their claims” to ownership of the land they had co-opted, and it denied peasants the opportunity to protest their landlords’ ‘claims,’ i.e., to attempt to retake their bosses’ fields, in the future (p. 150). Moreover, the law did nothing to prevent landholders from overtaking more peasant properties (p. 152). Also in the 1930s and 1940s, landowners en masse began to evict their peasant-class tenants, prompting some peasants to become ‘wage laborers,’ others to flock to urban Colombia in search of employment, and others still to delve further into the country’s distant rural regions (p. 161).

From 1948 to 1965, as La Violencia (The Violence) raged within Colombia, the country’s civil conflict exacerbated the problem of peasant displacement. Killing approximately two hundred thousand, displacing around two million, and robbing over one million of property, La Violencia wreaked havoc upon Colombian civilians (Roldán 2004). Again, elites pushed peasants from their lands, this time in part through murder, arson, or threats thereof (LeGrand 1986b:163), and many peasants fled areas of intense warfare either to urban Colombia or to still more remote – and “undeveloped” – regions, such as Caquetá and Putumayo, Carare-Opón (in Santander), and Urabá (p. 164). In particular, campesinos fled to these ‘frontier regions,’ as well as to the jungles, after Colombia’s government bombed peasant strongholds in the Tolima, Huila, and Cauca regions (LeGrand 2003).

Still, elite takeover of peasant lands continued. Under Misael Pastrana, Colombian president from 1970 through 1974, the country’s leaders once again orchestrated the “concentration of landownership” in the hands of the wealthy, and when the campesinos revolted, their landlords attacked them and tightened control (Molano 2000:26). Molano reports that as before, many peasants flocked to Colombia’s urban areas but that others continued to populate Colombia’s hinterlands: “At the same time, there was repression of the peasant movement, expulsion of small tenants from the lands they cultivated and, in general, expansion of commercial agriculture to less populated parts of the country, as well as [peasant] colonization of unused lands. Many of the most popular destinations lay in the … remote areas …” (p. 26). Overall, these elite-led takeovers of the campesinos’ fields were of such a scale, and so devastated peasants’ livelihoods, that Ramírez has labelled them acts of “institutionalized violence” (2004:2, citing Alfredo Molano).