Day 100 : Book Excerpt : Coffee and Conflict in Colombia

In the closed, stratified Colombian society of the last century, economic resources were monopolized by a small upper class interested in preserving its position and generally unable or unwilling to generate new wealth. The lack of new economic opportunities in a stagnant domestic economy made politics an inordinately important avenue for social mobility. Politics and government provided suitable employment in a culture that encouraged training in the traditional professions and reserved highest prestige for accomplishments in the classical skills of rhetoric and polemics. Government offered opportunities for travel and occasion for enrichment through favors and contracts. Control of government was a prize coveted by new, energetic, ambitious men who sought to improve their social position. Groups of men from all classes of society, bound together by traditional patron-client relationships, disputed for control of government with practically every means at their disposal. Once control was achieved, it was guarded with religious exclusivism.

 Nineteenth-century Colombian politicians and political commentators recognized and deplored this violent competition for public posts and the perquisites of office and often correlated it with the political instability characteristic of the nineteenth century. One observer, Juan Francisco Ortiz, believed that competition for the limited number of public positions contributed in large part to the political disorders of the post-Independence period, and as early as 1833 future Liberal! politicians Lorenzo Maria Lleras and Florentino Gonzalez were denouncing "empleo-mania" in the press. At different times during his long, influential career in Colombian politics, Rafael Nunez linked the lack of economic opportunities outside government to political violence. Nearing the end of his first presidential term, Nunez used harsh language to denounce the "uncompromising materialism" that threatened to make politics a "vile business of plunder," nothing more than "naked commercial speculation." As soon as a new chief executive takes office, Nunez exclaimed, he is besieged by an "army of office seekers" and, unable to satisfy them all with public posts and favors, he must watch them swell the ranks of a new and formidable political opposition."

 The contemporary who most carefully described the link between a stagnant domestic economy and political turmoil was Jose Maria Quijano Wallis, prominent Liberal merchant and politician during the second half of the nineteenth century. Looking back on eighty years of Colombian history from Independence until the end of the War of the Thousand Days, a period marked by seven major civil wars and more than a score of smaller outbreaks of political violence, Quijano Wallis wrote in his memoirs:

The lack of development of our national wealth and the consequent impoverishment of our people, has led the military caudillos, most of the time, to seek their livelihood and personal aggrandizement in the hazards of civil war, or in the intrigue and accommodations of politics. Thus, one can say that in Colombia, the first, if not the only industries of national, popular character, have been civil war and politics.
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Ironically, the consolidation of the Regeneration in 1886 coincided with the beginning of a new export cycle as Colombians responded to the spectacular rise in world coffee prices which occurred in the late 1880's and early 1890's. Coffee had been cultivated in Colombia on a small scale since the start of the nineteenth century. Although world production and consumption of coffee more than doubled between 1820 and 1855, Colombian expansion did not begin until the 1860's, when improved river transportation and a rise in prices stimulated production.' In the early 1870's Colombian coffee exports exceeded 100,000 bags of sixty kilos each annually, reaching a peak in 1874 when 172,420 bags were exported. Coffee exports declined after that year and, although complete statistical evidence is lacking, probably leveled off at less than 100,000 bags annually for most years until the late 1880's. The decline in production reflected falling world coffee prices after 1875. The average price of Colombian coffee on the New York market fell from 20.5 cents per pound in 1875 to 10.1 cents per pound in 1884. Because coffee trees produce their first crop only four or five years after planting, price generally exerts little immediate effect on coffee production. Consequently, when coffee prices rose precipitously after 1887, there was considerable lag until production figures demonstrated the massive increase in coffee cultivation that occurred in Colombia in the late 1880's and early 1890's. The average price of Colombian coffee on the New York market rose from 10.6 cents a pound in 1887 to a peak of 18.8 cents a pound in 1893. Coffee exports tripled during the same period, rising from 110,866 bags in 1887 to 337,726 bags in 1894. By 1898, when all of the trees planted up to 1893 had come into production, exports stood at 531,437 bags. During the mid-1890's coffee accounted for well over half of the value of Colombia's total exports, and for the peak years 1895 and 1896 coffee made up about 70 per cent of the value of total exports.

 Although much of Colombia's mountainous surface would eventually prove to be uniquely suited to the cultivation of coffee, the early period of coffee expansion was largely confined to the northern section of the eastern cordillera of the Colombian Andes in what was then called the State of Santander. The most serious student of the Colombian coffee industry has estimated coffee production (including domestic consumption) in Santander in 1874 at about 100,000 bags, or almost 90 percent of total Colombian production. In 1888 a British consular official estimated Santander's share of the, nation's coffee production at about 55 percent, with the department of Cundinamarca, situated in the southern portion of the eastern cordillera, contributing about half of the remaining 45 percent. The decline in Santander's position resulted from the high cost and complications of international transport and the relatively poor quality of the coffee from Santander. Since coffee growers in most of Santander were deprived of a viable outlet to the Magdalena River, they were forced to ship most of their coffee out via Venezuelan rivers to Lake Maracaibo, where it was finally loaded aboard ocean-going vessels for transport abroadf Venezuelan transit fees, storage costs, and delays seriously reduced the profit margin on Santander coffees, which sometimes sold for as little as half the price per pound of the prime coffees from Cundinamarca.P Much of the expansion in coffee production in the late 1880's and early 1890's took place in the department of Cundinamarca, and in the departments of Antioquia and northern Tolima located in the central cordillera. Transport of coffee to the sea, although difficult in Cundinamarca and Antioquia, was cheaper than in Santander. Both regions had outlets on the Magdalena, and though much coffee reached the river by mule, by the 1890's both Cundinamarca and Antioquia had partially built railroads that cut transportation costs.

~~Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910 -by- Charles W. Bergquist