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Agrarian Reform in Colombia Problems of Social Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Ernest A. Duff
Ernest A. Duff*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, Virginia
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Extract

Colombia's current attempt at agrarian reform began in December 1961 with the passage of Law 135, “On Social Agrarian Reform.” The Law has as its central objective a change in land tenure relationships in the densely populated western (or Andean) section of Colombia, where latifundia and minifundia often exist side by side. The Law established the Colombian Agrarian Reform Institute (Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria or INCORA) as a semiautonomous governmental agency to direct the process of reform. In recent months, however, the pace of the reform, which began ten projects during the first six months of 1962, has been slowed considerably due to a multitude of problems, among which the most serious are unswerving opposition to the program by both the large landowners and their allies on the right, the Movimiento Revolutcionario Liberal (MRL and its allies on the left, and inadequate financing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Inter-American Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , January 1966 , pp. 75 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1966

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References

1 A previous attempt at reform in 1936 under the first López administration did not come to grips with the main problems of land tenure and concerted opposition to the law from the large landowners, together with a reaction to López’ Revolución en Marcha, combined to negate the effects of this early attempt at land reform.

2 Article 1, Paragraph 1 and 2 of Law 135 reads:

“Inspired in the principle of the common good and in the necessity of extending to everincreasing sectors of the Colombian rural population the exercise of the natural right to property, harmonizing it, in its conservation and use, with the social interest, this law has the following objective:

“First. To reform the social agrarian structure by means of appropriate procedures, to eliminate and prevent the inequitable concentration of rural property or its anti-economic fractionation, to reconstitute and to grant lands to those who do not have them, with preference to those who conduct directly their own exploitation and incorporate therein their personal labor.”

3 Pseudonym for Enrique Santos Montejo.

4 An attractive but specious argument used by SAC against expropriation of private property in western Colombia.

5 El Tiempo, May 23, 1963.

6 Sangrenegra (Black Blood) was one of the country's most feared bandits. Enrique Peñalosa is the Director of INCORA.

7 El Tiempo, June 2, 1963.

8 Jaime Martinez Cardenas, S. J., “La Reforma Agraria en Colombia,” Revista Javeriana (Bogotá), July 6, 1963, p. 27.

9 See my article “Agrarian Reform in Colombia: Colonization or Parcelization,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, Winter 1964.

10 Laureanista opposition to the passage of the Agrarian Reform Law during 1960- 1961 was attributed more to political pique than to intellectual opposition to agrarian reform.

11 See several of Valencia's speeches in Guillermo León Valencia, Política Económica y Social (Bogotá: Imprenta del Banco de la República, n. d.).

12 In Mexico, Bolivia, and Cuba. Venezuela's reform program, if it continues at its present pace, will soon be the fourth far-reaching reform.

13 Hirschman, Albert O., Journeys Toward Progress (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1963), p. 158.Google Scholar

14 The agrarian reform bill was considered by Congress from November 12, 1960 until its final passage by the Senate on December 13, 1961.

15 Hirschman, Journeys Toward Progress, p. 265.

16 Kenneth H. Parsons, Raymond J. Penn, Philip M. Raup, Land Tenure. Proceedings of the International Conference on Land Tenure and Related Problems in World Agriculture held at Madison, Wisconsin, 1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), p. 484.

17 Organization of American States, Committee of Nine, “Evaluation of the General Economic and Social Development Program of Colombia.” Mimeographed report presented to the Government of Colombia by the ad hoc Committee, July, 1962, p. 83.

18 Colombia, INCORA, Informe de Actividades en 1962 (Bogota: Imprenta Nacional, 1963), p. 101.

19 El Tiempo, June 13, 1963, p. 1.

20 Proper presentation has been one of the major problems for other Colombian governmental and semi-governmental entities asking for loans from the various lending agencies. It would appear that INCORA, with its capable direction and with the assistance of both FAC and USAID personnel, would not be vexed with the problem of improper presentation of loan requests.

21 See Róstow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth (London: The Cambridge university Press, 1963)Google Scholar, Chapter II.

22 Jaime Martínez, “La Reforma Agraria en Colombia,” Revista Javeriaría (Bogota: July, 1962) and various pronouncements by the SAC in El Tiempo during 1963.

23 United Nations, Economic Commission for Latin America, “Analysis and Projections of Economic Development: Colombia” (Bogotá: mimeographed, 1955), p. 188.

24 United Nations, Food and Agriculture Organization, “Long Term FAO T. A. Programs” (Bogota: mimeographed, January, 1962), p. 16.

25 Ibid., p. 38.

26 Ibid., p. 17.

27 UN, ECLA, “Analysis and Projection of Economic Development: Colombia,’ p. 82.

28 ibid., 64.