Colombia

COLOMBIA’S unique formula of government is a controlled democracy planned and administered by a traditional oligarchy. Since 1958, the National Front — a coalition between the longhostile Conservative and Liberal parties for sharing power rather than battling for it — has ruled this violence-wracked country. The coalition helps explain both the dynamics and stagnancy of Colombian society.

President Guillermo Léon Valencia, a Conservative, is Colombia’s second head of state under the bipartisan accord. He follows Liberal Alberto Lleras Camargo. And he will be followed by a Liberal. The alternating of the presidency between the two parties every four years until 1974 is paralleled by the “parity” principle, which allocates equally to the two parties every elective and appointive government office on national, provincial. and municipal levels. Even embassy invitations are sent to Conservatives and Liberals in equal number. Parity and alternation are written into the Constitution and were ratified by popular referendum in 1958.

Almost weekly, what is simply called ”la violencia” reminds Colombians of a principal reason for diis coalition. The death toll from the banditry. blood-revenge, and protection racketeering in many rural areas has decreased to an average of two hundred and fifty men. women, and children a month. But the slaughter had its origins in partisan Conservative-Liberal warfare, beginning with the assassination in April. 1948, of fiery Liberal leader Jorge Gaitán. His death triggered the savage “Bogotazo" — a three-day mob destruction of the capital, Bogotá.

Between 1948 and 1953 — the peak of la violencia — more than 200,000 Colombians lost their lives in civil strife resulting from the incumbent Conservative suppression and Liberal retaliation.

The pitting of family against family and village against village indicated how intertwined party loyalties were with historic feuds and discontents, which over the generations sporadically erupted to lay waste so much life and property.

The seizure of power by General Rojas Pinilla in 1953 diminished hostilities but brought on the woes of a military dictatorship. Four years later, widespread civilian protest culminating in decisive support by the Church and a national general strike ensured Rojas’s downfall and opened the way for the experiment in bipartisan cooperation.

Practical politics

It remains true that most Colombians, whether rich or poor, still declare themselves to be either Conservatives or Liberals. But increasingly, these affiliations rest on inherited allegiances, with little contemporary nourishment except insofar as parity qualifies one for a government job. Fundamental issues used to divide the two parties. Conservatives favored strong Catholic Church influence in secular affairs, centralized government, limited suffrage, and maintenance of class privileges. Liberals generally advocated greater government attention to popular needs within a federalist framework. These questions are still the subject of personal differences, but they have been submerged for practical reasons.

Notwithstanding the emergence of factions within the parties, the tight-knit groups in control are not in disagreement over the aristocratic allocation of economic and political power. They have close family ties, common interests, and understandings with leaders of the Church, press, military. and many labor unions. The oligarchy knows that a resumption of interparty strife would afford opportunities for the growth of radical forces disastrous to Liberals and Conservatives alike. Up to now, the illegal Communist Party has been of little significance, and its frustration is shown in the hit-and-run terroristic activities in the larger cities.

The National Front is pursuing what economists call the trickle-down theory of economic growth in its avowed mission of improving living standards. The orientation of the ambitious Ten-Year Development Plan spanning the sixties is production first, then distribution. Colombians will have to be patient people, for their current annual per capita income of $260, very unevenly distributed among a fast-growing population of 16 million, is expected to reach $560 per capita by 1984, given the attainment of present targets. This projection — not the entire measure of well-being, but an important one — sobers some of the enthusiasm about the prospects for Colombia’s development.

Colombia’s natural resources

To a degree infrequently found in South America, Colombia possesses a combination of natural resources and viable institutions which has made it a favorite of international and United States development agencies over the past decade. Slightly larger than Texas and California combined, it has a variety of climates, topographies, and soils permitting more diversified agricultural industries than exist today, and vastly more productive cattle and forestproducts industries. The eastern plains provide some of the finest pastureland in the world. Land in the Cauca Valley has no superior anywhere for sugar production, and studies have shown that by 1970 export earnings from sugar may exceed those from coffee, now the country’s chief crop. Productive forests cover an area three times the size of New England. These tremendous timber stands provide the basis for important derivative industries waiting to be developed.

Energy resources, so crucial to economic growth, are abundant in the form of cheap hydroelectric power sources, coal, and petroleum. Recently, hydroelectric output and distribution have been expanding rapidly. The remarkable development of air, highway, rail, and water transportation and the installation of modern communications facilities have significantly furthered economic integration of a country deeply divided by numerous mountain ranges. These geographic barriers fostered the growth of semi-isolated urban centers with regional economies. This gave the nation the foundation for a balanced territorial growth. Today Bogotá has over 1,250,000 people, Medellín and Cali over 600,000 each, and there are seven cities with over 100,000 population.

Other factors have impressed analysts of Colombia’s assets for rapid self-sustaining growth. Its entrepreneurial class has displayed considerable initiative toward industrial expansion, now accounting for 18 percent of the national product and meeting domestic needs in a wide assortment of consumer goods. The climate for foreign investment, by way of legislated incentives, free repatriation of capital and profits, and a past devoid of radically disruptive leftist xenophobia and expropriations, is considered excellent.

Industrial improvements

Moreover, there is widespread acceptance of the Alliance for Progress. Colombia was one of the first Latin countries to draw up a comprehensive development plan. A tax reform begun in 1960 is being amplified with emphasis on enforcement. The country receives about 45 percent of its revenues from corporate and income taxes, which is a high proportion for an underdeveloped country. A strongly worded agrarian-reform law was passed in late 1961. It established a semiautonomous agency, INCORA, to implement changes in the agrarian structure, which include dividing large, underutilized estates, colonizing public lands, consolidating tiny, uneconomic plots, and alleviating rural poverty through greater productivity and social justice.

The formation and performance of semiautonomous institutions, which try to combine public accountability with a nonpolitical professionalism, have shown encouraging results. The National Service of Apprenticeship. SENA, financed by a tax on large employers, has trained sixty thousand factory workers since 1957 in its many centers throughout the country. The Territorial Credit Institute, ICT, is engaged in the most ambitious low-cost-housing program in Latin America. Supported by Alliance and other foreign loans, it is pioneering new methods of public and private housing finance and construction that are attracting attention elsewhere on the continent. One of the most successful and efficient integrated public valley authorities in the world, the Corporation of the Cauca Valley (CVC), is making great strides in bringing ample power, irrigation, and agricultural extension services to the land-rich Cauca Valley. Other valley authorities are in various stages of development. Private and public development banks with suitably diffused bases of operations help coordinate the many factors involved in productive investments.

The building of such institutions has been instrumental in making Colombia one of the largest recipients of foreign assistance per capita in the world. In the past thirty months, external loans and grants amounted to $600 million, nearly half provided by the United States. Forty international institutions, foundations, and governments have programs of technical and economic assistance in the country. The Colombian ability to obtain International Monetary Fund and World Bank assistance, as well as to be a testing ground for new initiatives by these bodies, is remarkable. One example is the International Consultative Group, composed of sixteen industrialized nations under World Bank sponsorship. This group is working to bring $200 million of additional foreign investment each year to help assure the success of the Ten-Year Plan.

In the past two years, however, U.S., World Bank, and I.M.F. missions have grown concerned over increasing inflation and worsening government and trade deficits. Inadequate export earnings and pricewage instability are jeopardizing the continuance of foreign loans in the volume required by the domestic economy. Present conditions also do little to induce the nearly billion dollars of private Colombian capital abroad to return home.

The crisis in coffee

The country’s current economic woes are heavily attributed to an inability to compensate for the steady fall in coffee prices. Along with a decrease in the volume exported, prices have declined from seventynine cents per pound in 1954 to about forty cents on the New York market now. This is a serious situation, inasmuch as coffee accounts for about 70 percent of Colombia’s foreign-exchange earnings. A price reduction of just one cent per pound represents an annual loss to Colombia of some $8 million.

The crisis in coffee has made it difficult to sustain the level of capital goods, raw materials, and consumer imports which rose as an incidence of the coffee-boom years in the fifties. A three-year austerity program following Rojas’s ouster drastically curtailed imports, devalued the peso, and cut down on investments. Beginning in 1960 the government eased up, relaxing import and credit controls and expanding public capital outlays. In one sphere the new policy seemed to work. During 1961 and 1962 the gross domestic product rose an average of 5 percent, just under the 5.6 percent target in the Development Plan. But government revenues did not keep up with the plan’s projections, and a balance-of-payments deficit resulted.

Considerable I.M.F. and U.S. supplementary financing was accompanied by strong recommendations for a comprehensive stabilization program that was effected by President Valencia in December,

1962. It included a peso devaluation, higher import duties, restraints on bank credit, and proposed additional taxes which Colombia’s Congress approved in August, 1963. But the devaluation policy was seriously undermined by sharp price and legislated wage increases averaging nearly 25 percent in the first half of

1963. Revenues from new taxes, moreover, will be absorbed mostly by new public payroll increases for the armed forces and national police, effective next year.

Exporting more sugar, bananas, cotton, tobacco, meat, cement, and timber is still a major challenge. Agricultural productivity — essential to the future of the Colombian economy — is impeded by a massive underutilization of land and a lack of enterprise among large landowners.

Conspiracy of silence

Sooner or later, Colombia must face up to the consequences of what is called the National Front’s conspiracy of silence. A number of fundamental issues are deemed not to be objects for public scrutiny.

Pre-eminent among these is the role of the Church — once the basis for so much acrimony between the two parties. Though some maverick young priests are organizing the peasantry for immediate reforms, the Church’s outlook is very conservative. Its political and social influence is felt everywhere, but most particularly in education, whose archaic state is a major bottleneck to developing the country’s human resources. Many educated Colombians believe a thoroughgoing reform of teacher training and curriculum is obstructed by the Church’s power, both in law and tradition, over the entire public and private school system, including the universities. Forty percent of the population is illiterate; a third of all children never attend school at all; and of the remaining two thirds, 80 percent drop out before the fifth grade.

Another institution beyond public debate is the military, a privileged autonomous body content to stay out of politics as long as it receives its desired share of the national budget and the coddling of successive administrations.

Also treated as beyond dispute is the National Front’s acceptance of United States influence in the determination of Colombia’s foreign policy. Criticism of U.S. pressure against Colombia’s having diplomatic or barter-trade relations with Communist countries comes only from fringe groups or from the powerful National Coffee Federation, now desperately trying to find markets in the Communist world.

Also little-questioned by the National Front are the concentration of economic control in a few hands and the monopolistic features of Colombian industry. Observers believe that the country’s growth is hampered by the consequent restriction of equal opportunity and avoidance of the benefits of competition. This economic pattern obstructs freedom of entry into business by the energetic but less wellborn. The future of the present coalition government will depend significantly on whether the National Front’s gradualist approach can accommodate pressures of urban squalor and rural poverty, whose victims are being aroused to a sense of their own strength.