Economics and Reconstruction in Colombia

Many rural areas in Colombia face the double challenge of participating in an increasingly dynamic global economy and of recovering from the country’s 60-year civil war.

Residents are trying to answer the question: How do rural areas fit into an increasingly globalized market for goods and services? Even in remote places such as Encimadas—said to be the area of Colombia that inspired the setting of the animated hit movie Encanto–, people have cell phones and laptops, although the town is seven hours from the nearest big city.

How do they manage to buy these items? I watched an ingenious banana peeling operation near Belém de Umbría, a town in a lush valley on the edge of rolling mountains covered with coffee and banana plants existing in symbiosis. About 15 women sat in a row along a conveyor belt ferrying the yellow-green fruits (think of Lucille Ball and the chocolate candies conveyor belt). The women expertly shucked bananas with specially shaped knives. Whole bananas came along in the middle, and after being shucked, the peel went on the top and the naked fruit on the bottom. The peels and stalks would go to feed livestock, while the cellophane-wrapped bananas were destined for a chip-making factory that would convert them to a sleekly packaged snack resembling Frito’s chips. I could not help but think, “How many bananas equals one iPhone?”

In other rural areas, the mass agricultural jobs requiring large amounts of mostly male labor of times past have dried up. Mechanized sugarcane processing plants—ingenios—have displaced a more labor-intensive model from previous eras in the flat plains around Palmira, an agricultural suburb of Cali. It’s a similar situation in other countries. A Salvadoran mayor in gang-plagued, semi-rural Armenia, a suburb of San Salvador, complained to me that 20-year-old males in his town two decades ago would have been in the sugarcane (caña) fields 10-12 hours a day; today, these young men could subsist on money (which social scientists call “remittances”) sent back by absent fathers in the United States, and Chinese competition had driven away jobs in the old textile factories (only a Fruit of the Loom jock strap operation persisted). Rural Colombians—or Salvadorans—end up migrating to the city to fit into a modern, global economy.

Another major challenge is that Colombia’s rural areas were more affected by the conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and other armed groups than were urban areas. Former president Juan Manuel Santos began his memoir, La batalla por la paz (The Battle for Peace) by pointing out that rural areas were disproportionately affected by the war, and 220,000 mostly rural Colombians had been displaced.

In rural places, I saw signs of a society trying to heal itself. Today isolated Encimadas had not one but two internet servers: one from the local school and one from the mayor’s office. My high school teenager guide watched Tik Tok videos on his cellphone as he took me and extension workers from the local university to see a cross on a nearby hill placed there in homage to those fallen in the conflict. We joked that even though Encimadas had its anti-personnel mine-free designation, we would stick to the path.

Traditionally, people leave rural areas for the city, even absent conflict. Scholars Bryan Roberts, Henry Dietz, Gil Sidlow and Hernando de Soto have extensively documented rural-to-urban migration in Latin America. The few people who come back to rural areas tend to be retirees, as observed by Fred Spier and Karsten Paerregaard in Peru and Robert Bates in Zambia.

But this dynamic is based on a “natural” rate of rural-to-urban migration in which the restless are impelled to seek more stimulation in the city, while a quiescent population self-selects to stay in rural areas. However, Colombians left rural areas at higher-than-normal rates due to the conflict. The mayor of Pradera, a town at the intersection of high mountains and broad plains filled with miles of unending sugarcane, told me that the valley had had more diverse crops before the conflict. Then small farmers seeking to escape violence sold their plots to large sugarcane producing operations and headed for the city. In Encimadas people talked about the “displacement,” when their entire village of about forty families had to evacuate their houses to nearby Samaná as paramilitaries and government forces fought the FARC in their village.

But the pendulum has swung back as some return to rural areas, leading to both a renewed dynamism and challenges reintegrating former rural-to-urban migrants. Samaná represents this change. In a salon, a local NGO displayed portraits of men, children and women killed, kidnapped and forced into military service or disappeared in the conflict. In the conflict, outmanned police had abandoned their posts as hundreds of armed troops from FARC or the paramilitary autodefensas threatened their towns, leading locals to complain that “the state has abandoned us,” a police chief told me.

A city-slicker takes a picture of a war memorial in conflict-affected rural Samaná. Photo by Brian Norris.

But today in Samaná, peace has returned. One doctor told me how medical personnel feared kidnapping in the 1995-2001 period, and a hospital motorcycle had been burned. “But [now] things have changed,” he said, and hospital technicians travel to rural areas unafraid. In Samaná today police patrol the streets regularly and pat down Sunday-morning drunks in the main plaza. An army platoon sometimes walks through town streets or on a nearby rural road with yellow plastic inserts prominently hanging from the chambers of their machine guns showing that they are not ready to fire live ammunition, a policy that strikes a fine balance between, on the one hand, reassuring the population that the state is there to protect them and, on the other hand, distilling potential fear of abusive government use of force.

An ebullient 18-year-old girl came up to me after a Pentecostal service in Samaná and asked questions about the United States with a broad smile. Was it true that we had “satellite phones” that could call anywhere in the world? She told me that she had spent ten years of her life in Bogota because of the violence in Samaná but recently returned for her last year of high school because the town was now safe. Similarly, La Paz (the Peace), César department (state), is an outpost near the Venezuelan border. Until the 2016 Peace Accords with the FARC, César was too unsafe for the Colombian government to have a stable presence. One former mayor in Manaure, a stone’s throw from the Venezuelan border, told me that the local town hall had been bombed by the FARC around the year 2000. But today, peace has come and the town hall is a hive of activity as locals come and go transacting myriad bits of business. The Colombian government has added a new campus from its national university in La Paz. The avant-garde architecture of the facility marks it as new to the area, and the faculty seem to be transplants from Bogotá or other areas of the country, lured to the frontier by salaries high enough to purchase new cars which they drive visitors around in with delight. My hosts drove me past a new settlement of former FARC insurgents—“signers of the peace accords” as they are called—who had put down their arms and are starting the arduous process of reintegrating into Colombian society.

Economic Responses to Globalization and to Healing after Conflict

The peace is welcome, and it has freed rural populations to focus on new and complex challenges, the first of which seems to be the economy.

The government tries to modernize agriculture by putting extension workers with scientific training into rural areas for the dwindling number who continue to labor in agriculture. I rode around with polished, young, college-trained extension workers dispensing technical advice to farmers with sick tilapia (like catfish) and to a trout farmer worried that leaf obstructions would stop the flow of water to his thousands of trout, which can die in as few as six minutes without water flow. The library in the national university in Palmira, an agricultural suburb of Cali, is filled with titles in English such as Breeding and Improvement of Farm Animals (1970) and Developing Farm Woodlands (1954). These Colombians want to modernize the rural agricultural sector of Colombia just like the Smith Lever Act of 1917 helped promote extension programs in the United States.

But the agricultural sector, whatever its configuration, is not large enough to absorb the workforce in rural areas. Today, about 17% of Colombia’s workforce is in agriculture, about 22% in industry, and 61% in services. A trout farm might only employ one family of live-in caretakers and provide money for an absentee owner who lives in the city. The tilapia farm provides income for two relocated extended families from Bogotá. These operations are impressive and elicit the esteem given to a yeoman farmer ethos of self-reliance and hard work. But they can’t provide enough jobs or be appealing to many of Colombia’s nearly seven million rural inhabitants. The highly educated young professionals who toured me around lived in medium-sized cities, drove to rural areas for daytrips to advise farmers and then returned to their city apartments in the evening.  

Tourism seems to be the best hope that many rural Colombians can think of to fit into a global economy. Time and time again, local leaders told me of plans for tourism industries. In Samaná, civic leaders speak of developing a tourism industry around environmental tourism featuring Samaná’s proximity to a national forest and a “tourism of memory,” one that instructs visitors on the conflict the way that a “staff ride” takes military professors and students to old battlegrounds. A statue of a haggard woman carrying an infant sits on a hillside on the edge of town, and a plaque reads, “Resurgence: In homage to the Samaná community, especially the women and children who, because of the armed conflict, suffered the scourge of war.” Urban Colombians, without direct experience of the conflict, and international visitors might satisfy their curiosity about the violence with a weekend trip to Samaná to do a nature hike, eat at a local restaurant, and drop some cash into the local economy. 

Yet it seems to be a stretch to think that tourism can be the fundamental economic model for all of these rural places. Some rural areas, such as Filandia, have a highly developed tourist infrastructure and are near large cities that provide professionals with disposable income and willingness to do a daytrip. But compared to Filandia, Samaná, Pradera, and Beceril seem years behind. There is a great deal of dog shit in the streets of Samaná, to the chagrin of some of its civic boosters, and the town is far from the nearest big city. And how will tourists deal with the cognitive dissonance of imagining the horrors of the civil conflict and then toggling back to enjoying a nice meal on a patio while listening to a band or taking a nature hike to see howler monkeys in the wild? (Atlanta, Georgia, tries, with arguably limited success, to instruct visitors on the somber lessons of the civil rights movement while titillating the same visitors with the Coca Cola museum, a big aquarium, the Olympic park and a Ferris wheel.) One wonders whether places like Samaná will ever catch up to Filandia.

Pensilvania, Colombia, locals told me, was named for the “city” in the United States that represented hope for the people who had arrived there. The economy of Pensilvania, a rural town about five hours driving from the nearest big city, is based on timber, sugarcane, coffee, and local crafts. The town sits in lush green mountains in a tight mountain valley.

A middle-aged man proudly showed me his toy-manufacturing business, a one-room workshop filled with toys made from local wood and painted by the town’s youths. A Chinese-made robotic laser-machine methodically sliced to-be-assembled components from sheets of wood a few feet from us in this cramped but immaculate workshop. His business had been on the brink of closure because the old handmade process was not competitive in a national market. But after a trip to a business expo where he encountered the laser machine, he sold an apartment—“The one thing I had to show for twenty years of work,” he told me with tears in his eyes—to pay for the Chinese machine that would allow him to produce at scale and save his business. This man’s reinvention of his business speaks to one facet of the complex challenges faced by Colombia’s rural areas today.

A toymaker in rural Pensilvania, Colombia, harvests wooden pieces from a Chinese-made laser machine. Photo by Brian Norris.

Brian Norris is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lincoln University-Missouri and is a Fulbright global scholar. He is author of Prison Bureaucracies in the United States, Mexico, India, and Honduras (Lexington Books 2018). Jo, Virginia, and Tabitha, his daughters, and Jessica, his wife, sustain him.