Received: 2 August 2018 Revised: 3 December 2018 Accepted: 7 December 2018

DOI: 10.1111/joac.12303

SPECIAL ISSUE

The winding paths of peripheral proletarianization:

Local labour, world hegemonies, and crisis in rural
Colombia
Phillip A. Hough

Department of Sociology, Florida Atlantic

University, Boca Raton, Florida, USA
Correspondence
Phillip A. Hough, Department of Sociology,
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton,
Florida, USA.
Email: phough2@fau.edu
Abstract
This paper analyses the spatial and temporal patterning of
Colombia's rural coffee, banana, and coca‐producing labour
regimes. The violent labour repression and endemic crises
of labour control characterizing these regimes challenge
the market despotism paradigm that predominates in schol-
arly analysis of 21st century labour and agrarian struggles.
Instead, I draw from early and later writings of Giovanni
Arrighi and his collaborators to develop a new labour regime
framework that is sensitive to the experiences of capitalist
development in “hostile environments” (i.e., peripheral mar-
ket conditions) and “hostile times” (periods of world hege-
monic decline). In doing so, I highlight the deep social
contradictions—crises, violence, and labour militancy—that
result from processes of peripheral proletarianization and
the ways that these contradictions were mitigated and/or
exacerbated by the rise of U.S. global hegemony, Colombian
developmental policy, and local agrarian struggle.

KEYWORDS

Colombia, labour regimes, peripheralization, proletarianization, world

hegemonies

1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N

The past few decades have seen a rise in scholarly attention to the conditions of workers across the global economy.
The movement of capital and production to new geographies marked by cheaper labour and raw materials, lower
taxes, and less regulatory obstacles weakens the bargaining power of workers and labour‐friendly states, leading
to a global race to the bottom in wages and working conditions. Several scholars have argued that these changes

506 © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/joac J Agrar Change. 2019;19:506–527.
HOUGH 507

are driving the rise of market despotism as an increasingly predominant labour regime (Burawoy, 2003; Webster,
Lambert, & Bezuidenhout, 2008).
This attention to market despotism as the essential feature of 21st century capitalism, however, overlooks two
important counter‐tendencies—tendencies that appear in capitalism's peripheral back alleys and side streets rather
than on its global superhighways. The first is the continuing, if not increasing, salience of extra‐economic forms of
labour control, including the systematic deployment of labour violence, state repression, policing, paramilitarism,
and the like.1 Here, labour control often rests upon the visible hand of the state rather than the invisible hand of
the market. This violent reality was clarified in a series of recent reports by the International Labour Organization
(2009, 2017), which found that “forced labour arrangements” are the veritable “underbelly of globalization,” affecting
some 24.9 million people in “virtually all countries and all kinds of economies.”2 The second counter‐tendency is the
chronic breakdown of capitalist production and systems of labour control, and in some cases, the emergence of alter-
native (illegal and informal) class, state, and market formations that exist outside of the effective authority of the
state. Analyses of mafias and gangs, warlord economies, illegal and informal markets, and the like are avoided by
the many labour scholars whose understanding of labour and labour movement is rooted in the experiences of indus-
trial workers in core centres of the world system (Rose, 1997).3 However, these alternative social formations are
indeed everyday realities of workers and working‐class communities in the peripheries of historical capitalism and
should therefore be analysed as part of any labour regime.
In this article, I argue that labour scholars need to extend their analysis beyond the confines of market despotism
to make sense of the broad range of labour regime experiences of capitalist development in hostile environments (i.e.,
peripheral locations of the world economy) and in hostile times (i.e., the contemporary era of world‐systemic chaos).
To do so, I draw from early and later writings of Giovanni Arrighi. Following Arrighi's early writings with Fortunata
Piselli (1987), I highlight the deep social contradictions—crises, violence, and labour militancy—that result from pro-
cesses of peripheral proletarianization. Proletarianization is understood in its most general sense as a class formation
rooted in the dependence of workers and/or commodity producers on income from the market to meet their
reproduction needs.4 Core‐periphery dynamics, in turn, are understood as locations within the uneven distribution
of wealth and competition in a specific market rather than as types of production activities. Peripheral niches are
the most competitive and least profitable (Arrighi & Piselli, 1987, p. 687). Situating labour regimes spatially within
the core‐periphery structures of the world capitalist market, I believe, clarifies why and how some local political
economies become hostile to capitalist production and labour control.5
Giovanni Arrighi's (Arrighi, 2007; Arrighi, 2010; Arrighi & Silver, 1999) later writings on world hegemonic
transitions, in turn, helps situate local labour regimes temporally within the arc of rising and falling world hegemonies.

1
Kevin Bales et al. (2009, p. vii) estimates that “there are at least twenty‐seven million slaves alive today … more than at any point in
history and as many as were seized from Africa in 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade.”
2
The ILO (2017) defines forced labour as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and
for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily. It implies the use of deception or coercion, either by the state and public
agencies, or by private individuals and enterprises, to force people to enter work or service against their will, to work in conditions
they did not accept and to prevent them from leaving the job by using any form of punishment or threat of penalty.” For a critical
analysis of the ILO's forced labour campaign, see Lerche (2007).
3
Notable exceptions include Bourgois (1996), Dinler (2016), Heyman (1999), Reno (1998), and Volkov (2002).
4
Scholars have debated the applicability of the concept of proletarianization to rural class formations (Bernstein, 2010). I adopt
Arrighi and Piselli's (1987) broad definition of proletarianization to draw attention to the ways that capitalist development produces
various market‐dependent class formations, including the prototypical industrial wage workers as well as commodity‐producing
farmers, migrant workers, and even semi‐proletarianized households. For a critique of narrow uses of proletarianization, see Bergquist
(1986) and Rose (1997).
5
This spatialization of labour regimes within the core‐periphery hierarchy of wealth differs from other labour scholars who situate
them within global production networks and supply chains (Anner, 2015; Baglioni, 2018; Pattenden, 2016; Smith, Barbu, Campling,
Harrison, & Richardson, 2018).
508 HOUGH

For Arrighi and his collaborators (Arrighi & Silver, 1999, p. 21–36), world hegemony is a situation in which “a domi-
nant state leads the system of states in a desired direction and, in doing so, is widely perceived as pursuing a general
interest.” Periods of world hegemony arise through the systemic reorganization of the institutions of world capitalism
and the emulation of the dominant state by other states, both of which foster the stabilization of the world market
and the systemic expansion of production and trade. World hegemonic unravelling occurs when interstate rivalries and
inter‐enterprise competition intensify in ways that challenge rather than bolster the world hegemonic power. As
capital accumulation shifts from production and trade to finance, extant hegemonic social compacts begin to unravel
and system‐wide social conflicts surface until extant hegemonic institutions are abandoned altogether, giving rise to a
period of systemic chaos. Delineating the connections between local labour regime dynamics and U.S. hegemonic
efforts to (re)stabilize and expand world capitalism in the decades after World War II is useful for two reasons. First,
it helps us understand the initial economic and political impetus that leads to local processes of peripheral proletarian-
ization: the idea that global commodity production for the world market can become a viable mechanism of capital
accumulation, economic growth, and development. Second, it also draws attention to the critical role of U.S.
hegemonic institutions in local efforts to contain, repress, and/or ameliorate the social contradictions of peripheral
proletarianization.
I develop this argument through a comparative and world historical analysis of local labour regime dynamics in a
hostile environment—rural Colombia—from the heyday of U.S. world hegemony in the post‐war decades into more
hostile times—the contemporary era of U.S. world hegemonic unravelling and world‐systemic chaos.6 Colombia is
certainly one of the most hostile places in the world. According to the United Nation's refugee agency's Global Report
(2017, p. 83), 7.7 million people have been internally displaced since the 1980s. The majority of the displaced are
rural inhabitants forced to flee decades long armed conflict between leftist guerrilla groups and military and paramil-
itary forces.7 And although the Colombian government signed a peace accord with the country's most formidable
leftist insurgency group (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC]) in 2016, Colombia remains one of
the most dangerous places for labour activists. A recent Global Rights Index report, for example, found Colombia
to be “the country with the highest number of [trade unionist] murders of any country. Over 2,500 unionists have
been murdered in the past 20 years, more than in the rest of the world combined” (ITUC, 2016, p. 31).
But it is not only its hostility that makes rural Colombia a useful case study of the contradictions of peripheral
proletarianization. Rural Colombia is also home to a broad range of labour regime types, including the hegemonic
and despotic regimes analysed by traditional labour scholars, as well as labour regimes marked by chronic crises of
labour control, the breakdown of capitalist systems of production, and the rise of alternative social formations. To
capture this broad range of regime dynamics, I analyse the historical paths to peripheral proletarianization in three
global commodity‐producing subregions of rural Colombia: the banana region of Urabá, the coffee region of Viejo
Caldas, and the frontier region of Caquetá (see Figure 1).
When U.S. world hegemony peaked in the decades following the Second World War, Colombia's coffee and
banana sectors consolidated into key sites of national development and economic growth rooted in fully proletarian-
ized labour systems. Yet each regime diverged sharply in terms of their predominant mechanism of labour control.
Colombia's banana region of Urabá became the focal point of labour repression and emblematic of a form of despotic
class domination without hegemony. The banana sector's union has been Colombia's “most targeted union” with “the

6
The precise contours of U.S. hegemony are debatable (see Starrs, 2013 and Panitch & Gindin, 2013). I follow Arrighi's (2010, p. 379)
idea that U.S. hegemony arose through the creation of the United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions spread through the adop-
tion of Fordist and Developmentalist social compacts by other states and was enforced by U.S. military might. U.S. hegemony began
to unravel in the late 1970s and early 1980s when it lost its dominance of world production and trade and states across the globe
began to roll back their post‐war social compacts. In the 1980s and 1990s, the United States sustained its economic power despite
increasing interstate competition by dominating global finance (the U.S. “belle époque”). While Arrighi suggests that we entered the
era of systemic chaos with the failure of the Iraq War in the early 2000s, his passing in 2009 preceded the election of U.S. President
Trump on an explicit “America‐first” platform meant to dismantle the institutional architecture of the post‐war era.
7
For a survey of this very large literature on Colombia's protracted armed conflict, see Bergquist, Peñaranda, and Sánchez (1992,
2001) and Jaramillo (2014).
HOUGH 509

FIGURE 1 Local labour regimes in Colombia

highest murder rate” of any group of workers in the country (ENS, 2009, p. 24–25). The coffee region of Viejo Caldas,
in contrast, developed into one of the world's few stable “middle class peasantries.” Colombia's coffee‐producing
farmers (cafeteros) experienced unprecedented social mobility and relative immunity from the protracted armed con-
flict and violence that affected other regions (Rettberg, 2010). Finally, the frontier region of Caquetá played a critical
role in the development trajectories in Colombia's coffee and banana regions, first as a safety valve for surplus labour
510 HOUGH

that helped stabilize the country's political system and later as key site of coca production under the counter‐
hegemonic control of the FARC. The varied paths of proletarianization and peripheralization experienced by these
local labour regimes provide us with a useful understanding of the efficacy of global markets as modalities of
development in the age of U.S. hegemonic decline.
I lay out this argument in four parts. First, I discuss the centrality of market despotism as the predominant
framework used by scholars of labour and globalization and introduce a new labour regime framework that is more
sensitive to the experiences of capitalist development in “hostile environments” and in “hostile times.” Second, I trace
the paths to peripheral proletarianization in Colombia's coffee and banana industries, highlighting the determining
(albeit contrasting) impact of U.S. world hegemonic actions on each local labour regime. Third, I analyse Colombia's
frontier region as it develops from a site of cattle ranching into a site of coca production under the counter‐
hegemonic protection of the FARC guerrillas. I conclude with a discussion of the need to rethink conceptions of
development rooted in full proletarianization.8

2 | L O C A L L A B O U R RE G I M E S I N H O S T I L E E N V I R O N M E N T S A N D H O S TI L E
TI MES

Analysing capitalist trajectories over time and space necessitates clarification of what I mean by “local labour regime
dynamics.” Like Michael Burawoy's (1983, p. 587) concept of a “factory regime,” as well as more recent conceptions
of “labour control regimes” (Anner, 2015; Baglioni, 2018; Jonas, 1996; Pattenden, 2016), the patterns of commodity
production and capitalist development in each of the three rural subregions I analyse are not strictly economic phe-
nomena. They are neither simply “labour processes” in which human labour transforms raw materials into finished
products nor mere “employment relations” that describe workplace authority structures, production arrangements,
and compensation systems. Instead, they are modalities of social class reproduction and labour control that bring
together human labour, capital, and the state through the transformation of the natural environment into a finished
commodity for the market. They are “local” because they entail the articulation of a spatially anchored segment of the
world's population into global circuits of commodity production and exchange. They are “labour” regimes because
this articulation occurs through a labour process that simultaneously produces a commodity and reproduces a social
class whose livelihood depends on this production. They are “regimes” because the subjection of livelihoods to sys-
tems of commodity production tied to the whips and whims of the market is an inherently precarious, contradictory,
and socially disruptive process that requires political‐institutional strategies of labour control and class domination to
ensure the continued extraction of surplus labour and the expanded reproduction of capital. Like any regime of social
domination, the mechanisms of social control used to create workers and commodities are by no means guaranteed.
Rather, they are projects that are institutionalized, contested, and sometimes even subverted.
Perhaps the earliest formulation of capitalist labour regimes can be traced back to the writings of Karl Marx
(1976 [1867]), whose descriptions of the “satanic mills” of English industrial factory life became emblematic of the
forms of coercion that result from full proletarianization and capitalist labour markets. This belief in the despotism
of capitalist development, however, changed in the early 20th century when labour unions and parties won
significant concessions from capital and the state. Antonio Gramsci's insights into the emergence of hegemony as
the dominant labour regime of advanced capitalist centres became particularly important to subsequent generations
of labour analysts (Burawoy, 2003). By the 1970s, the neo‐Gramscian coercion‐consent dichotomy found its way into
the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974), who theorized a spatial structuring of consent in core and coercion in
peripheral zones of the world capitalist system. In fact, it was precisely this hypothesis that spawned the debates
in which Arrighi and Piselli (1987) later engaged through their analysis of local variation in capitalist development
in Calabria, Italy. Concepts of hegemony also found their way into Michael Burawoy's (1979, 1985) comparative

8
Data for this paper were collected during various rounds of fieldwork in Caldas, Urabá, Caquetá, in addition to the capital, Bogotá
(2003–2004, 2009, 2012, and 2015).
HOUGH 511

ethnographic analyses of factory regimes. Here, rather than focus on variation over space, Burawoy's primary focus
was on large‐scale changes in national labour regimes over time. For Burawoy, despotism was the predominant fac-
tory regime type during the laissez faire era of the 19th century, hegemony the predominant type during the heyday
of Fordist‐welfarist regimes of the mid‐20th century, and “hegemonic despotism” the emergent type in the present
era of globalization, when social protections of workers are rolled back under threat of capital mobility.
Burawoy's analysis of hegemonic despotism as the prototypical labour regime type in the age of globalization has
influenced recent labour regime scholarship (Anner, 2015; Webster et al., 2008). This work argues that deepening
processes of global economic integration undermine established labour rights and protection, as segments of the
world's workforce are pitted against one another for access to limited workplace opportunities. To be sure, debates
have arisen about the specific mechanisms and proximate causes impelling this race to the bottom. Factors empha-
sized include the globalization of the labour market (Robinson, 2004; Ross, 2004) or the globalization of commodity
markets (Gereffi & Korzeniewicz, 1994); the diminishing power of states to harness and regulate mobile capital
(Markoff, 1996; Smith, 2008; Tilly, 1995); and the rise of a “neoliberal” ideology based on the self‐regulating market
(Block & Somers, 2014; Webster et al., 2008). Despite these differences, they share the idea that the market itself is
the primary mechanism that forces workers to acquiesce to increasingly despotic labour regimes.
However, this focus on market despotism overlooks counter‐tendencies of capitalist development that challenge
some of the assumptions about the predominance of the market as the primary weapon of capital. First, the coercion‐
consent dichotomy adopted by labour regime scholars (both the Wallerstein and Burawoyan variants) tends to over-
emphasize the stability of capitalism, markets, and labour regimes. Although the durability of regimes may have been
safe to assume during the post‐war decades, the viability of the global market as a mechanism of capital accumula-
tion, let alone class reproduction and development, cannot be assumed a priori. Instead, the institutional viability of
markets must be analysed empirically, particularly during eras of world hegemonic unravelling and systemic chaos
(Arrighi & Silver, 1999). Second, and relatedly, the market is but one of a number of mechanisms shaping labour
regimes, including national and international regulatory institutions (Anner, 2015; Block & Somers, 2014; Pattenden,
2016; Smith et al., 2018), local histories of class, state, and market formation (Lee, 2007), capitalist strategies of
spatial control (Jonas, 1996; Kelly, 2002), patterns of labour migration and market segmentation (Baglioni, 2018;
Ness, 2016), and world‐systemic processes (Silver, 2003).
To capture the range of labour regime dynamics in hostile environments and hostile times, I reconceptualize
labour regime types along two dimensions: (a) mechanisms of labour control and (b) capitalist control of the labour
process. The former distinguishes whether or not capitalists have come to rely heavily upon what Marx (1976
[1867], p. 899) described as “direct extra‐economic force” (state and para‐state forms of labour repression and
violence) to control labour and the labour process of a given commodity or, instead, if the labour process occurs
through what Marx described as the everyday “silent compulsions of economic relations.” The latter describes the
extent to which these mechanisms of labour control—violent or not—are indeed effective in maintaining capitalist
control of workers and the labour process. These distinctions can be seen in ideal‐typical forms in Table 1.
The ideal type displayed in box (1) consists of a situation in which the reproduction of the local regime does not
rely upon “extra‐economic” violence as a principal mechanism of labour control. Instead, systems of commodity pro-
duction run largely through the everyday “silent compulsion” of the market. Drawing upon Gramscian nomenclature, I
describe this type of labour regime as “hegemonic,” or a situation of “hegemony,” to emphasize the acquiescence of
commodity‐producing farmers and workers to the demands of the labour process for the commodities produced. The

TABLE 1 Labour regime ideal types

Key mechanism of labour control
“Silent compulsion of economic relations” “Extra‐economic force”

Capitalist control of Effective 1. “Hegemony” 2. “Despotism”

labour process Ineffective 3. “Counter‐Hegemony” 4. “Crisis of Control”
512 HOUGH

labour regime in box (2) is the ideal‐typical opposite. Here, we see a situation in which state and/or para‐state actors
employ violent forms of labour repression, which are often effective in establishing capitalist control over the labour
process. I call this ideal type of labour regime “coercive domination” or simply “despotism.”9
Boxes (3) and (4) differ from boxes (1) and (2) in that they indicate a situation in which capitalists have lost their
capacity to control the conditions of commodity production that constitute the labour process. Box (3) refers to a
situation in which the local population establishes a livelihood (modality of class reproduction) outside the effective
control of the state. Under these conditions, levels of violent labour repression would be low, given the fact that the
state does not exercise significant influence over the local population. I call this ideal‐type “counter‐hegemony” to
highlight the ability of the local population to establish an alternative political economy. Finally, box (4) consists of
a situation in which the local population contests its articulation into the labour regime and vies for control over
the labour process or the fruits of commodity production, despite efforts by capital and the state to deploy violence
to retain control over their labour. I call this ideal type a “crisis of control.”
Adopting this broadened ideal‐typical conceptual framework clarifies the empirical patterning of Colombia's
coffee, bananas, and frontier labour regimes across time and space (depicted in Table 2). During the era of U.S.
hegemony, capitalists maintained control of producers across the three labour regimes. Yet the primary mechanisms
of labour control varied, with hegemony predominating in Viejo Caldas and despotism predominating in Urabá and
Caquetá. Each of these regimes gave way to crises of labour control as U.S. hegemony began to unravel in the
1980s and 1990s. Caldas and Urabá transformed into regimes marked by waves of labour unrest, whereas Caquetá
developed into a counter‐hegemonic regime under the protection of the FARC guerrillas.

3 | DIVERGENT PATHS TO PERIPHERAL PROLETARIANIZATION IN RURAL

CO LO MBIA

3.1 | Coffee: From hegemony to crises of control

From its origins in the mid‐19th century into the 1930s, Colombia's niche in the coffee market was peripheral: Prices
were highly volatile and profits accrued primarily to importing firms and financiers rather than producers (Talbot,
2004). Yet, until the 1920s, Colombian coffee production did not rely upon fully proletarianized labour systems. In
fact, during this period that predated U.S. world hegemony, Colombia's coffee sector developed two distinct
structures of production: semi‐proletarianized labour arrangements on large coffee estates and peasant‐based small-
holders who produced coffee alongside subsistence agricultural goods.10 Semi‐proletarianization on the estates
protected owners from the chronic volatility of prices but resulted in little capitalization and meagre profits (Palacios,
1980). Consequently, the bulk of coffee production arose on small‐ and medium‐sized farms spread out diffusely
across the mountainous slopes of the frontier lands that became Viejo Caldas.11 The income smallholders generated
through coffee production was often quite low given the poor quality of the beans they produced and their structural
vulnerability to merchants who monopolized local purchases and transportation routes. Yet they too avoided the

9
Similarly, Mark Anner (2015) developed a typology of “regimes of labour control” that distinguishes “state control” and “employer
repression” from Burawoy's “market despotism.” State control of labour exists in authoritarian states that curtail worker organization
and collective action, whereas employer repression exists when employers use or threaten to use violence against workers. My con-
cept of despotism includes elements of both state and employer control, as the use of violence can be deployed directly by private
forces working for employers or indirectly by states whose actions facilitate capitalist control.
10
Coffee production arose on haciendas in the 1850s and expanded significantly in the 1860s and 1870s following legislation that
privatized public land (baldíos) and stimulated frontier colonization (Bergquist, 1986; Palacios, 1980, ch. 8).
11
The number of hectares dedicated to coffee production in Viejo Caldas grew from a scant 23 ha in 1861 to 38,037 in 1915 and
79,500 by 1933. By 1925, the region's 40,174 coffee farms (fincas) were producing 58.1% of all coffee produced in Colombia. Some
90.8% of these fincas were small farms under 5 ha (small farms) and 8.5% were medium‐sized farms between 4.1 and 16.5 ha
(Vallecilla Gordillo, 2001, pp. 142, 146, 164–165)
HOUGH 513

TABLE 2 Local labour regime trajectories over time and space

risks of the coffee market by retaining control of the land and of their labour, which provided them an “exit option” of
converting their fields to pasture or cultivating other crops when coffee prices dropped (Bair & Hough, 2013).
A boom in coffee prices in the 1910s and 1920s greatly expanded Colombian coffee production as masses of
migrant families colonized the frontiers of Viejo Caldas. The strength and duration of the boom also convinced estate
owners to further capitalize their coffee plantations by adopting more proletarianized labour systems. The bust of the
Great Depression, however, brought the contradictions of full proletarianization to the foreground, as bankrupt
estate owners attempted to squeeze their workers to meet the drop in prices. Rather than acquiesce to these
demands, estate workers engaged in a wave of mass occupations and worker strikes. The Colombian government
responded to the unrest by passing legislation that bought out bankrupt estate owners and redistributed lands
(Bergquist, 1986). It also granted official parastatal status to the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia
(Fedecafé, est. 1927), an association of coffee financiers, marketers, and exporters that was charged with the
responsibility of developing and expanding the sector based upon the smallholder structure of production. Fedecafé's
initiatives over the coming decades were designed to increase coffee yields and quality by vertically integrating the
sector, rationalizing production systems, and protecting producers from market volatility. To do so, Fedecafé needed
to transform the country's coffee‐producing frontier settlers into a class of fully marketized (i.e., proletarianized)
“cafetero” farmers that invested their land and labour to meet the demands of the market.12
Fedecafé used its government mandate to establish a quasi‐monopoly over the purchase of locally grown coffee
by building a system of purchasing points, storage houses and husking facilities, and a transport fleet. It increased the
value of exports by instituting a “guaranteed purchase” policy for all beans that met national quality standards
(London, 1995, p. 5–6). It also established a National Coffee Fund (FNC, est. 1940) that collected export taxes on

12
Although Colombia's cafeteros did not lose access to the means of production (i.e., their land), I describe them as fully proletarian-
ized because they progressively converted the entirety of their land away from subsistence production (which provided them with an
“exit option” when coffee prices fell) to rationalized coffee farms in which control of the labour process (what is produced and how it
is produced) was determined by Fedecafé and its extension agents.
514 HOUGH

coffee that financed various domestic regulatory institutions. Foremost, among these was a “price floor” policy that
buffered cafeteros from drops in international coffee market prices by pegging prices above production costs.
Fedecafé also established a system of agricultural extensions connected to a scientific institute (Cenicafé, est.
1950). Cenicafé scientists developed new rationalized production systems and technical solutions to problems such
as coffee pests and fungi, irrigation, and soil quality deterioration, whereas extension agents communicated these
ideas back to cafeteros. Finally, Fedecafé created the Banco Cafetero (est. 1950) to provide cafeteros with loans to
increase coffee yields as well as to finance local infrastructural projects and public services (roads, bridges, schools,
and hospitals).
Under Fedecafé's initiatives, Colombia's cafeteros transformed their fields into veritable coffee‐producing
factories aimed at maximizing productivity and efficiency. Fields previously dedicated to subsistence agriculture were
converted to coffee, older fields that used traditional shade‐grown coffee trees were progressively replaced by more
productive coffee varieties, and new modernized coffee fields were established.13 As productivity increased, cafetero
farmers became increasingly reliant upon purchases of new agrotechnologies (fertilizers, depulping machines, and
pesticides) and began hiring seasonal workers during harvest periods (Ortiz, 1999). During this period, Viejo Caldas
saw an almost fivefold increase in coffee production from the 1930s to the 1980s.14 Nationally, the coffee sector
grew to include some 560,000 cafetero families, over 90% of whom produced high‐quality Arabica beans for export
on small‐ and medium‐sized farms of less than 15 ha (Robledo, 1998).
It was the convergence of Fedecafé's domestic initiatives with its ability to take advantage of geopolitical oppor-
tunities afforded by the rise of U.S. world hegemony, however, that explains how Fedecafé was able to avoid the
problems of peripheral proletarianization. This began during the Second World War. To curtail the threat of Axis
influence in Latin America,15 the United States proposed an “Inter‐American Coffee Agreement” (IACA) that set
import quotas and regulated prices on coffee coming into the U.S. market (Bates, 1997, p. 90–92).16 The IACA
guaranteed Colombia a large market share and favourable coffee prices for its exports, conditions that diminished
the worst excesses of peripheralization. Although the IACA was disbanded after the war, the post‐war boom of
the 1950s kept international coffee prices high, which again helped Fedecafé sustain its regulatory domestic initia-
tives (Hough, 2007). The tide turned in Fedecafé's favour once again in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution.
Fearing further rural radicalization in Latin America, the Kennedy Administration supported the creation of the
International Coffee Organization (est. 1961) and signed onto a new regulatory agreement (International Coffee
Agreement [ICA]) as part of its “Alliance for Progress” initiatives. The ICA established politically negotiated market
quotas and price floors that would be re‐ratified periodically (Talbot, 2004).
Just as Fedecafé's domestic regulatory initiatives reduced the risks of coffee production for Colombia's cafetero
farmers, the ICA's international regulations offset the risks of peripheralization by pushing costs onto importers,
roasters, and consumers in importing countries. Essentially, the IACA and ICAs helped Colombia's coffee sector
“move up” the world coffee market from a peripheral niche to one that resembled the profits and labour regime
dynamics of niches in core centres of the world economy. Like autoworkers during the heyday of Fordism,
Colombia's cafeteros developed what Christopher London (1995) described as “coffee consciousness” wherein cof-
fee production was imbued with patriotic and moral fervour, and cafeteros extolled as motors of modernization

13
In Viejo Caldas, coffee‐producing areas more than doubled, from 95,800 ha in 1932 to 227,300 by 1980/1981 (Junguito Bonnet &
Pizano Salazar, 1993, p. 55). By 1970, nearly 25% of coffee farms used new technologies developed by Cenicafé, promoted by exten-
sion agents, and sold at Fedecafé's local cooperatives (Vallecilla Gordillo, 2001, p. 153). By 1989/1990, this number tripled to 75%
(Junguito Bonnet & Pizano Salazar, 1993, p. 84–85).
14
Coffee production in Viejo Caldas increased from 65,264 tons produced in 1932 to 165,786 tons by 1970 and 323,958 tons by
1980 (Vallecilla Gordillo, 2002, p. 179).
15
Brazil's Vargas Government (1930–1945) flirted with the idea of joining the Axis Powers during the war (Bates, 1997).
This idea was based on Brazil's valorization initiatives (1906, 1917) that “artificially” raised prices by withholding coffee from the
16

market (Talbot, 2004).

HOUGH 515

and national development. Viejo Caldas became a solid stronghold of electoral support for the country's traditional
political establishment.
The causal significance of U.S. hegemony for Fedecafé's success is evident from the series of social crises that
followed the U.S. abrogation of the ICA in 1989, the subsequent deregulation of the market, and the re‐
peripheralization of Colombia's market niche.17 The average real price of coffee declined by over 40% by 1993. Since
then, the overall International Coffee Organization composite price has remained nearly 20% lower than it was during
the ICA regime (Fridell, 2014). Perhaps more devastating, however, has been the extreme pricing volatility that
returned once the ICA pricing system was removed.18 After 1989, the boom and bust cycle of the coffee market
made it difficult to predict whether and when to sell beans, often leading to sale prices that were significantly lower
than production costs (Fridell, 2014).
In Colombia, re‐peripheralization undermined Fedecafé's local initiatives. Over the 1990s, Fedecafé was forced
to cut its FNC export taxes and use its accumulated reserves to subsidize growers for their losses. The appearance
and sudden expansion of a coffee berry borer worm (la broca) deepened the Fund's troubles. Fedecafé was forced
to lower its price floors to growers and cut back on its services, sustaining its remaining commitments to cafeteros
by selling its interests in the Banco Cafetero and its transportation fleet. In 2001, Fedecafé abandoned the prevailing
price floor mechanism altogether.19 This opened the domestic market to increasing competition from foreign trans-
national conglomerates20 and further diminished FNC revenues by some 80% (Robledo, 1998, p. 101–102).
Re‐peripheralization was most devastating for cafeteros because they had become entirely dependent upon the
sale of coffee to the market to meet their reproduction needs. Facing bankruptcy, the country's cafeteros turned to a
number of different solutions. Some took on new rounds of high‐interest loans from private banks. Some sold their
farms and abandoned the countryside, which led to a concentration in land ownership (Robledo, 1998, p. 71) and a
rise of slums in regional cities (Ramírez et al., 2002, p. 41). Others stayed in the countryside to work on the newly
established coffee plantations in the region. Still others became coca farmers, either by migrating to established
coca‐producing regions or by planting their coffee fields with coca under the protection of narco‐trafficking mafias
or guerrilla insurgency groups (Rettberg, 2010; Smith, 2003). Most indicative of the crisis of control, however, has
been the emergence of militant cafetero protests aimed at forcing Fedecafé and the Colombian state to uphold their
“mandate” to protect the livelihood of the country's coffee farmers. In the 1990s, a group of cafeteros called the
Unidad Cafetera Nacional organized a series of mass street mobilizations and national civic strikes that succeeded
in forcing the FNC to forgive 25% of cafetero debts and finance the costs of new worm‐resistant coffee varieties
(Robledo, 1999). More recently, a group called Dignidad Cafetera (Dignity for Coffee Farmers Producers) has arisen
to once again force Fedecafé and the Colombian government to maintain their commitments to protect the country's
cafeteros. Their militancy forced the Colombian government to forgive loans, offer new lines of credit, and reinstate
price floors following the price crash of 2012–2013 (Bair & Hough, 2013).
Colombia's coffee sector now fluctuates between periods of high prices and relative social stability and periods
of low prices marked by mass cafetero unrest. Each cycle deepens the social contradictions that arise from peripheral
proletarianization. Still wedded to full proletarianization, Fedecafé has invested heavily in the development of new
production techniques to increase yields and capture value.21 Each of these initiatives requires heavy financing, thus
deepening the dependence of cafeteros upon the coffee market to meet their livelihood needs. During boom periods,

17
See Akiyama, Baffes, Larson, and Varangis (2001), Bates (1997), and Talbot (2004) for analyses of the geopolitics of the ICA.
18
The volatility of coffee prices is due to the long time lag between the time of planting and cultivation (some 3–5 years) and the
sensitivity of coffee harvest to blight, weather, and other ecological factors. It has been exacerbated by the financialization of coffee
trading (Bargawi & Newman, 2017; Fridell, 2014; Newman, 2009; Talbot, 2004).
19
Fedecafé now uses a price floor mechanism that pegs local to global market prices rather than to the costs of living (Giovanucci,
2002; Hough, 2007).
20
Transnational shares of domestic purchases jumped from 8% in 1989 to over 50% by the early 2000s (Talbot, 2004, p. 128).
21
These measures include the development of new geographically specific “single‐origins” coffees (marketed like wines), organic and
fair‐trade quality standards, and the like.
516 HOUGH

profits are made, debts repaid, and livelihood demands satisfied. However, when the coffee market drops, the
country's cafeteros take to the streets.
Each new round of social protests has expanded the power and reach of Colombia's cafetero social movement
activity. The bust of 2012–2013, for example, occurred during a period of intense social unrest in other regions of
the country (Guerrero Guevara, 2014). Land occupations by indigenous groups and landless migrants; roadblocks
by rice, potato, dairy, and cane sugar farmers frustrated by free trade; labour strikes by mining and transport workers,
teachers, and healthcare workers; student protests against privatization; and civic groups marching for peace all con-
verged into a broadly anti‐neoliberal politics that resonated with Dignidad Cafetera's struggles for social protection
from the market. Out of these struggles emerged a national agrarian movement federation, Dignidad Agropecuaria
(Dignity for Agricultural Producers), that expanded the Dignidad Cafetera model to farmers and workers of other agri-
cultural sectors (Hough, 2015). Since then, solidarity actions have mounted increasing pressure on the Colombian
government to reverse its support for neoliberal policies and to protect the viability of rural communities through
agrarian reform measures.

3.2 | Bananas: Despotism and crisis under peripheral proletarianization

Colombia's coffee regime avoided the pitfalls of peripheral proletarianization throughout the post‐war decades
because U.S. world hegemonic initiatives via the ICA facilitated Fedecafé's efforts to fully proletarianize production
while protecting cafeteros from the vicissitudes of peripheralization. The unravelling of the ICA, in turn, re‐
peripheralized the regime, propelling it towards chronic crises of control. In this section, we see that Colombia's
banana regime remained subject to peripheral proletarianization across the world hegemonic cycle, forcing the sec-
tor's capitalist plantation owners to keep production costs low through various mechanisms of labour repression.
Banana production first emerged in Colombia in 1899 in the alluvial lowlands of Cienagá, a rural municipality
located in the coastal inlet between the cities of Barranquilla and Santa Marta. The region quickly transformed into
an enclave zone of fully proletarianized workers and large plantations vertically integrated under the control of the
United Fruit Company (UFC). Conditions on the plantations were despotic, with banana worker actions routinely
put down by the UFC security forces and the Colombian military (Chapman, 2007). The deep social contradictions
of the enclave erupted in 1928 when a mass strike was violently repressed. The massacre tarnished the UFC's image
and led to UFC disinvestment from the region shortly thereafter (LeGrand, 1998).22 UFC's experiment with periph-
eral proletarianization in Santa Marta, however, was not an isolated incident. Rather, UFC activities throughout Latin
America and the Caribbean resulted in a hemispheric wave of labour unrest and violence that took off in the 1930s
and culminated in the years following the Cuban Revolution. The UFC (and later other banana transnational compa-
nies) responded by vertically disintegrating their transnational banana supply chains, selling off plantation holdings,
and moving into the marketing and retail end of the banana market. The U.S. State Department actively supported
such moves, as domestically controlled banana production was regarded as an opportunity to promote national
development and thus to retain geopolitical and economic influence in Latin America (Bucheli, 2005).
The opening of new opportunities in banana production, coupled with the success of the coffee industry under
Fedecafé and the ICA, convinced the Colombian government to invest heavily in the establishment of a new banana
export zone in the Gulf of Urabá region of the Caribbean coast. Local investors received state subsidies, development
assistance from U.S. Agency for International Development, and World Bank loans to purchase land and plantation
equipment, finance local transportation infrastructure, and recruit labour.23 By the early 1970s, Urabá's newly
established planters and exporters developed a trade organization, Augura (Banana Growers Association of Colom-
bia), to transform the sector into an engine of growth and development akin to what Fedecafé had achieved for

22
The massacre also undermined the legitimacy of the Conservative regime, leading to a victory for the Liberal‐reformist Enrique
Olaya Herrera in the 1930 presidential election.
23
See Botero Herrera (1990) for an analysis of the demographic characteristics of Urabá's banana workers.
HOUGH 517

coffee producers (Botero Herrera, 1990, pp. 100–101). However, the opportunities for local development under U.S.
hegemony varied starkly between the two sectors. The ICA facilitated Fedecafé's success in the sense that major pro-
ducer countries like Colombia were protected from the competitive dynamics typically associated with
peripheralization. The vertical disintegration of the transnational banana companies, in contrast, facilitated Augura's
movement into an unregulated banana market that did not provide producers with a similar degree of protection.
Consequently, Augura had to find ways to keep production costs low and resist worker demands for better wages
and working conditions.24
Augura's strategies took two forms. First, it began lobbying the Colombian government to establish alliances with
other Latin American banana producers to try to restructure the world banana market along the lines that the ICA
regulated coffee. In 1974, Colombia, along with Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama, created the Union
of Banana Exporting Countries (UBEC) to increase taxation on banana transnational corporations operating in their
territories, modify the tax and land concessions previously granted to them, and manipulate exports in order to
raise international market prices (Bucheli, 2003, p. 108). The United States signed onto the UBEC on the condition
that U.S. importers could purchase non‐UBEC bananas.25 And because UBEC countries sourced less than half the
banana market, any effort by the UBEC to withhold bananas to “artificially” raise prices was subverted by increases
in exports by Asia Pacific–Caribbean countries (FAO, 1986, pp. 3, 68). Consequently, the UBEC's successes remained
limited to the movement of new domestic banana capitalists into the production end of the market, essentially
completing the process of vertical disintegration that had begun a decade earlier in Colombia. Perhaps ironically,
by the late 1970s, it became clear that the UBEC actually deteriorated the situation for Colombia's banana producers,
whose already competitive market niche was worsened by the entrance of new Latin America and Caribbean banana
producers into the market (Hough, 2012).
The closing of opportunities to move up to a more profitable niche of the banana market left Augura with a sec-
ond strategy: keep production costs low through repression. Here, Augura came to rely heavily on the exclusionary
and authoritarian tendencies of Colombia's National Front regime (1958–1974). The National Front was a power‐
sharing agreement between the traditional Liberal and Conservative Parties that had dominated Colombian politics
since the 19th century. The National Front formally excluded non‐traditional “third” parties from running for office,
rotated executive positions by party affiliation, and appointed local office holders by national party bosses. Under the
National Front, Urabá's workers lacked access to political officials who might have represented their interests.26
Moreover, efforts to organize workers on banana plantations were met with strong anti‐unionization tactics such
as discriminatory firing and hiring, bribery, the use of subcontracted labour, arbitrary detentions, and threats of
violence.27
By the early 1970s, various guerrilla insurgency groups began to move into the region, acting as sources of pro-
tection for unionization efforts in the banana sector. The National Front responded by declaring a “state of emer-
gency,” increasing its military presence locally, and soliciting military aid from the United States to retain control of
the region (Carroll, 2011, pp. 62, 66). Because these efforts resonated with U.S. geopolitical efforts to curtail Com-
munist radicalization, the National Front became one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid and a key ally of
the United States in Latin America (Livingstone, 2004).

24
By 1979, some 80% of workers lived directly in work camps located on the plantations they worked at. Only 6.6% of these camps
had access to running water, 33% contained latrines, and 50% had no electricity (Carroll, 2000, pp. 147, 155–156, 167).
25
The other half of the market was already politically regulated under the Asia Pacific–Caribbean agreement that connected former
colonies to the European consumer market (Raynolds, 2005, pp. 30, 38–39).
26
Urabá's population was largely Afro‐Colombian and/or mulattos, whereas departmental positions were monopolized by
White/mestizos. For an analysis of the racial politics of exclusion in the region, see Wade (1995).
27
Although other unions emerged in Urabá at this time, the only one to survive this period was Sindejornaleros (affiliated with the
Revolutionary and Independent Workers Party), though it remained marginal in its efforts to unionize plantations. By the close of
the 1970s, roughly 46% of Urabá's plantations obtained formal labour agreements, but only 11% were actually negotiated between
workers and employers (Botero Herrera, 1990, pp. 156–58; Carroll, 2000, pp. 152–153).
518 HOUGH

Augura continued to rely upon the authoritarian security measures established under the National Front
throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, despite the formal termination of the National Front's power‐sharing
agreement in 1974. These provisions of state coercion, however, were retracted when President Belisario Betancur
(1982–1986) initiated peace talks and democratization reforms intended to end the armed conflict, decentralize state
power, and promote greater political inclusion. In 1982, Betancur granted official and unconditional amnesty for
political prisoners and armed insurgents, paving the way for peace talks with guerrilla groups by 1984.28 During
the remainder of his tenure and into that of his predecessor, Virgilio Barco (1986–1990), a series of democratization
reforms were enacted, including the legalization of opposition parties, the direct election of local and regional exec-
utives and legislators (mayors, governors, and assembly members), and the establishment of a constitutional assembly
that resulted in the writing of a new national constitution in 1991 (Chernick, 2008).
These measures had a direct and immediate impact on Augura's ability to maintain control of Urabá's workers in
two key ways. First, it opened opportunities for Urabá's workers to gain access to political power.29 Although the
peace negotiations broke down by 1987, guerrilla efforts supporting the open organization of Urabá's banana
workers had already left its dent. The FARC and EPL guerrilla groups that operated in the region established their
own national political parties, and their candidates won important local political positions.30 This power was used
to create redistributive measures such as a plantation tax (Carroll, 2011, pp. 68–81). Second, because the Colombian
military could not be formally deployed to repress banana worker radicalism, workers openly organized the planta-
tions, leading to a surge in the ranks of Urabá's unions reaching 60% of the workforce by 1985.31 As union density
deepened, strike activity on the plantations increased, with the number of labour strikes jumping from virtually nil in
the mid‐1970s to an average of 12 per year by the late 1980s. Such labour militancy was effective in winning a num-
ber of key concessions that improved the lives of workers.32
Augura and its political allies were determined to reverse these gains, however, Jaime Henrique Gallo, the
region's local Liberal Party leader, stated that democratization was “a strategy against the economic system in which
we live” and that “a clear‐cut class struggle … has been unleashed against us in the zone” (Carroll, 2000, pp. 183, 185).
He responded by calling for a twofold strategy. First, despite the continuation of peace talks, he lobbied the state to
enhance its military presence in the region, making it the “most heavily militarized region of the country” in terms of
troops for square kilometre. Second, he advocated the paramilitarization of the region. Shortly thereafter, the Peasant
Self‐Defence Group of Cordoba and Urabá, a group financed by a powerful coalition of local elites, including mem-
bers of Augura, the Liberal Party, and drug traffickers (who laundered drug money through cattle ranching efforts),
established “bases” throughout the region. With the active, though covert, support of regional military forces, the
Peasant Self‐Defence Group of Cordoba and Urabá began engaging in terrorist violence against banana worker
unionists, Patriotic Union party activists, and others believed to be associated with Urabá's political Left (Ramírez
Tobón, 1997, pp. 127–134).33

28
The Betancur Administration engaged in separate peace talks with FARC, National Popular Army (EPL), and 19th of April Move-
ment (M‐19).
29
Peace negotiations with the FARC lasted between 1984 and 1987 and with the EPL between 1984 and 1985.
30
By 1988, the FARC's Patriotic Union Party organized a coalition with the EPL's Popular Front Party, winning the mayoral election of
Urabá's largest municipality of Apartadó by 1988 as well as municipal positions elsewhere in the region (Carroll, 2000, p. 183, 204).
31
Between 1984 and 1986, Sintagro's membership jumped from 300 to roughly 9,000 workers. Sintrabanano's membership increased
from 100 to roughly 4,000 (Carroll, 2000, p. 177).
32
These include an 8‐hr workday, the establishment of two labour courts to oversee and mitigate labour violations, an increase in real
wages from an estimated average of $3,700–3,800 Colombian pesos/month in 1978 to an average of $7,700 per month (Botero Her-
rera, 1990).
33
By 1990, three leftist presidential candidates had been assassinated. The Patriotic Union party of the FARC was particularly vulner-
able as an estimated 525 militants were killed during this time (Dudley, 2004, p. 130). Gonzalo Sánchez notes that “their entire party
…was decimated between 1989 and 1992” (Sánchez, 2001, p. 6).
HOUGH 519

The contradictions of Urabá's regime intensified in the late 1980s and early 1990s. On the one hand, the region's
banana workers grew in strength, as its various unions consolidated to form Sintrainagro in 1989. Sintrainagro was
able to force Augura to finance a “peace fund” that would assist the reinsertion of demobilized guerrillas and to sign
onto a “social pact” for the region that formally acknowledged Augura's responsibility for addressing the “basic needs”
of the local population (Rivera Zapata, 2004). On the other hand, President Gaviria (1990–1994) became frustrated
with subsequent rounds of peace talks with guerrilla groups, eventually instituting a re‐militarization of the region
and a “Decree of Internal Commotion” that granted the military greater freedom to carry out counter‐insurgency
operations. In effect, this granted a green light to the Colombian military to operate alongside local paramilitary forces
and to interpret the enemy of the state in broad terms that included labour and human rights activists.
By 1997, the region's paramilitaries had grown into a well‐financed and powerful national paramilitary army of
roughly 4,000 combatants, known as the United Self‐Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Through actions frequently
coordinated with the Colombian military forces, the AUC engaged in a brutal campaign of terror composed of
targeted killings, death threats, torture, forced displacement, and massacres of unarmed civilians who the AUC
claimed were guerrilla sympathizers (Romero, 2003). By the close of the decade, AUC's actions in Urabá effectively
purged both the EPL dissident faction and the FARC from the region (Carroll, 2011, pp. 90–93). As AUC repression
intensified, Sintraingro's militancy declined precipitously.34 By 2004, the AUC had not only rid the area of leftist guer-
rillas and effectively quelled labour unrest, but it had also forced some 60,000 people from their homes, killing,
maiming, and torturing approximately 4,000 people, over 400 of whom died in some 62 mass slaughters (Cohen,
2014; De los Ángeles Reyes, 2015). Paramilitarism, rather than state repression, became Augura's de facto solution
to the crisis of labour control that was unleashed by the democratization of Colombia's political system.
Since the early 2000s, Urabá has experienced new rounds of labour militancy and violent repression. Sintrainagro
has developed a cooperative relation with Augura, agreeing to no‐strike policies, formally renouncing guerrilla insur-
gency, distancing itself from Colombia's more militant unions, and limiting its demands to bread and butter issues. The
bulk of its activity is dedicated to the development of transnational labour organizing around the adoption of core
labour standards. Augura, in turn, has struggled to change its global and national image, especially following a series
of lawsuits that drew attention to AUC contracts with banana exporting firms, including a Chiquita Brands affiliate. It
has become an active partner in local social development initiatives aiming to depoliticize the labour‐capital conflicts
of the past (Chomsky, 2007, pp. 207–217). The AUC paramilitary group formally demobilized in 2007. However, new
and smaller localized paramilitary groups such as the Black Eagles (́A guilas Negras) have arisen in its place, perpetuat-
ing the perpetuation of violence used against local labour and human rights activists (HRW, 2010).

3.3 | Caquetá: From despotism to FARC counter‐hegemony

In both of the regions discussed thus far, the United States played a critical role in shaping the labour regime: In Viejo
Caldas, U.S. support of the ICA underwrote the development of a hegemonic labour regime centred on a class of
smallholding cafeteros. In Urabá, after efforts to regulate the world banana market along the lines of coffee failed,
U.S. military support to Colombia's National Front regime that helped strengthen the despotic labour control regime
that Augura sought to realize in the banana region. Yet the contradictions of peripheral proletarianization need not
result in crises of labour control. Instead, they may result in the creation of alternative social formations that exist
outside of the control of capital and the state. In Caquetá's frontier, state efforts to transform rural migrants into qui-
escent commodity producers became subverted, leading first to the rise of a despotic cattle regime and later to the
establishment of a coca regime under the counter‐hegemonic protection of the FARC guerrillas.
During the post‐war decades, the department of Caquetá remained a sparsely populated tropical frontier zone
lying largely beyond the effective control of the state. The first major wave of colonization arose following the

34
The number of labour protests per year in the Urabá banana region declined from a peak 3‐year average of 14 incidents per year in
1989/1990 to two incidents per year by 1999/2000 (Hough, 2007, p. 125).
520 HOUGH

outbreak of a low‐intensity civil war known as La Violencia (1948–1957), a conflict that led to the displacement of
roughly 800,000 rural Colombians. To avoid rural radicalization, particularly in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution,
the National Front created a number of rural development initiatives (including land titling, credit, technical assis-
tance, and marketing boards) to help pacify the countryside by creating local farms that would subsidize the larger
national industrialization effort.35 Caquetá became one of the key testing grounds for these new initiatives.36 How-
ever, because no limits were established on how much public land could be titled to any one individual, the system
became corrupted by large‐scale cattle‐ranching elites who obtained formal titles to massive amounts of land in the
region (Marsh, 1983).
By the early 1960s, Caquetá developed into a cattle ranching zone that further marginalized frontier migrants.
Local cattle ranchers used their political influence within the Liberal Party to monopolize local executive, judicial,
and legislative posts, assuring that the state would ignore the violent and often illegal displacement of migrants,
and rule consistently in favour of landed interests when legal disputes arose. They also established the Colombian
Cattle Ranchers Federation (Fedegán, est. 1963), a lobbying organization that argued that the production of low‐cost
meat and hides subsidized urban labour costs and therefore bolstered national development (Delgado Guzmán,
1987).
Under Fedegán, Caquetá's cattle regime expanded southwards from the outskirts of the departmental capital,
Florencia, into the tropical jungle regions of the Caguán River Basin through a cyclical process of “dispossession with-
out proletarianization” (Hough, 2011a). Once dispossessed of their land, the region's migrants would carve out new
subsistence plots further into the frontier, only to be forcibly displaced once again by cattle ranchers who converted
their subsistence farms into new grazing grounds (Mantilla Cardenas, 2000). By the early 1970s, these cycles of dis-
possession triggered a series of land invasions and other rural protests demanding national agrarian reforms. Instead,
the National Front responded by constructing a new regional military base to contain unrest. The militarization of the
region, in addition to the fragmented nature of the agrarian movement, resulted in the fizzling out of the movement
by the mid‐1970s.37 In its place emerged a number of guerrilla insurgency groups that used remote areas of frontier
as cover from the state (Molano, 1994).
The shift from a despotic cattle regime into a counter‐hegemonic coca regime can be traced back to the late
1970s, when the region's frontier migrants began supplementing their subsistence crops with the cultivation of coca.
At first, coca production was strongly forbidden by the FARC guerrillas who had operated in the region since the
early 1970s. They feared that involvement in the drug trade would compromise their politics and force them to col-
lude with the urban narco‐traffickers (Richani, 2002, pp. 74–76). Despite FARC opposition, the local population cul-
tivated coca alongside subsistence crops, and some even became involved in the processing of coca into a coca paste
to sell to transport merchants working for narco‐trafficking groups. Given the highly marginalized nature of the
region, coca‐producing farmers (cocaleros) were vulnerable in the market to these merchants, who typically set prices
for coca paste quite low. However, the illegal status of cocaine, coupled with growing demand, kept prices for coca
and coca paste high enough for the rewards of cultivation to outweighing the risks (Ramírez, 2011). By the early
1980s, the FARC changed its policy. Instead of forbidding coca production in the regions under its territorial control,
the FARC began to promote, regulate, and tax the local coca market. These initiatives consolidated a counter‐
hegemonic coca regime that lasted for the next quarter century.
The FARC developed into an alternative state‐like organization that regulated the coca economy much like any
other parastatal organization. The FARC instituted a system of regulatory oversight and taxation of all sales between

35
“Agrarian Social Reform Law 135” (1961) established a set of rural development agencies including the Colombian Institute for
Agrarian Reform to title lands and provided technical assistance, the Agrarian Bank (Caja Agraria) to provide subsidized loans, and
the National Agricultural Marketing Board to provide market outlets to rural inhabitants (Zamosc, 1986).
36
Rural development offices were established in Florencia, and a World Bank‐financed project, the Caquetá Colonization Project (est.
1962), was created to formalize land titles and provide credit, technical assistance, and market outlets to the region's migrants.
37
See Zamosc (1986) for a detailed analysis of the rise and fall of the National Association of Peasant Users. For analysis of its influ-
ence in Caquetá, see Carroll (2000, 2011).
HOUGH 521

cocalero producers and merchants working for the narco‐traffickers. This tied its revenues to the growth of the sec-
tor, creating a virtuous circle in which increased revenues were used to finance organizational growth and the build‐
up the FARC's war‐making capacities. This, in turn, strengthened its local state‐making activities and ability to legit-
imately protect local cocaleros from encroachment from cattle ranchers and the state. FARC leaders used this legit-
imacy to assume local juridical functions, arbitrating land, water, and other local territorial disputes among cocaleros.
It also began regulating the local coca economy in ways that resembled Fedecafé's hegemonic labour regime in cof-
fee.38 The FARC established a “price floor” system that guaranteed a price to coca producers that would cover their
basic needs. It also guaranteed a “living wage” to any migrant labourers seeking seasonal employment in the region.
This living wage arrangement enabled new migrants to save up the money needed to purchase land and establish
new coca farms. Finally, because the FARC's organizational strength was coupled to the coca sector at large, it also
invested heavily in local infrastructure projects such as local schools, medical centres, and even entertainment
centres.
From the early 1980s until the close of the decade, the FARC effectively protected cocaleros and integrated
them into a counter‐hegemonic coca regime. Incidents of political violence against local inhabitants, perpetrated by
either the FARC or by state and/or paramilitary forces, remained low (Hough, 2011a). This relative political stability,
in addition to the promise of economic mobility through coca production, brought a flood of new migrants to the
region. Between 1985 and 1999, Caquetá's population jumped from some 287,000 to 395,000, 70% of whom
migrated to remote FARC‐controlled regions where they established coca farms or worked temporarily as harvesters
(raspadores) on the plots of existing coca producers until they could purchase their own land (Mantilla Cardenas,
2000). The acreage of coca production in the region increased from 8,600 ha in 1991 to a historic high of
39,400 ha by 1998 (Ramírez, 2011, pp. 62–63). As the local coca economy grew, so did the FARC's revenue base,
which was then used to invest in further war‐ and state‐making activities. Though precise numbers are difficult to
obtain, one study found that FARC earnings from coca during this time was as high as US$400 million per year
(Bagley, 2005). This type of revenue facilitated the FARC's growth from under 10 “fronts” of 100–300 regular sol-
diers in 1978 to nearly 70 fronts by 1996, some 18,000 active fighters (Echandía Castillo, 1999).39
The establishment of a counter‐hegemonic regime in the Caguán region of Caquetá resulted from the FARC's
capacity to accrue “core‐like” wealth in the coca market and reinvest it in the local coca economy. The illegal status
of cocaine in the world market, of course, “artificially” raised its value to any actors willing to take on the risks of the
illegal trade (Bourgois, 1996; Volkov, 2002). However, success of the FARC's coca regime was also due to the semi‐
proletarianized nature of its producers, who produced coca to supplement their incomes rather than to purchase their
subsistence goods (Hough, 2010). The unravelling of FARC counter‐hegemony that occurred in the early 2000s,
therefore, did not result from any significant changes in the FARC's involvement in the coca market. Rather, it
occurred following the intense militarization and paramilitarization of the region that occurred under Colombia's
President Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010). Under Uribe, the state intensified the war against the FARC, transforming it
from a low‐intensity “containment strategy” to an all‐out “annihilation strategy,” with the Caguán as the focal point
of the war. These efforts have been financed in large part by the United States, who redefined the FARC as a “ter-
rorist group” and stepped up military aid through the “War on drugs” and “War on terror” initiatives. By the end of
Uribe's administration, the FARC had suffered a series of major military defeats and paramilitary massacres that
decapitated its leadership and reduced its ranks from a high of 18,000 regular soldiers in 1998 to some 6,000 by
2006 (Gutiérrez Sanín, 2008). The militarization of the region, in combination with the shift in the AUC's activities
from places like Urabá to the Caguán, played a significant role in undermining FARC hegemony in the region, who
struggled to retain control of the region and its coca economy without deploying its own coercive apparatus against

38
See Hough (2010) for a comparison of the “hegemonic projects” of Fedecafé and the FARC.
39
Over this period, the FARC was not only able to protect the region's migrants from local cattle ranchers. They also pushed
expanded the coca sector back upwards into cattle‐ranching territories (Hough, 2011a).
522 HOUGH

local inhabitants (Hough, 2011a). It was in the context that it agreed to engage in a new round of peace talks with
Uribe's successor, Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018), which led to formal demobilization in 2016.40
It is still not clear what impact the peace process will have on local conditions in Caquetá.41 Despite the imple-
mentation of the new coca eradication and rural development initiatives, coca production in the Caquetá has actually
increased by 20% since 2016 (UNODC, 2018). Moreover, the institutional vacuum left by the FARC is being filled by
new armed groups, including right‐wing paramilitary groups (bandas criminals) and dissident former guerrillas who
have not undertaken the regulatory initiatives that the FARC had done to protect cocaleros prior to the peace talks
(InSight Crime, 2018). Finally, there seems to be some strong evidence that cattle production is expanding into the
region once again (Bermúdez Lievano, 2017). As long as the cattle industry continues to expel rather than absorb
rural labour, it seems unlikely that it can supplement coca production with a hegemonic alternative.

4 | R E T H I N K I N G P R O L E T A R I A N I Z A T I O N I N H O S TI L E E N V I R O N M E N T S
AND HOSTILE TIMES

I began with a critique of theories of market despotism and a call for a new labour regime analysis attuned to the
dynamics of capitalism in hostile environments and hostile times. The market despotism framework is limited for a
number of reasons. First, it overemphasizes the role of the market as a mechanism of labour control. In the three
regions discussed here, capital became highly reliant upon other agents, including Colombian state and parastatal
development agencies, local paramilitary forces, and U.S. military and development aid, to maintain control of labour
and adapt to conditions in the world market. Second, the hegemony‐despotism dichotomy of the market despotism
framework overdetermines capital's capacity to effectively control labour. In rural Colombia, processes of capitalist
development also engender sustained resistance and alternative social formations.
This article finds capitalist development to be quite volatile and crisis prone, especially when it occurs in periph-
eral locations of the world market and when its workforce is fully proletarianized. It is here that Arrighi and Piselli's
analysis is most useful. Full proletarianization does not necessarily pose a problem to capital, workers, or states in
core locations of the world market because profits can be reinvested in stabilizing the livelihoods of workers without
threatening the further accumulation of capital. Interestingly, the viability of commodity production in peripheral
locations of the world market also need not threaten capitalist profits as long as the workers in this niche are
semi‐proletarianized, offsetting at least some of the costs of social class reproduction. It is when market niches are
peripheral and workers fully proletarianized that the struggle over the redistribution of local wealth becomes partic-
ularly volatile and potentially destabilizing, not only for workers but also for capital and states alike.
Processes of full proletarianization, of course, do not proceed on their own volition. As we saw from this paper,
full proletarianization in rural Colombia arose in the context of U.S. world hegemony. The United States engaged in
various actions that helped reconstruct, stabilize, and expand the world market in ways that convinced peripheral
state actors that commodity production for the market could be a viable and promising modality of development,
economic growth, and social reproduction. This was evident from the convergence of Fedecafé's initiatives in the
coffee market with U.S. participation in the ICAs. Fedecafé's ability to take advantage of the opportunities provided
by the ICA to create a hegemonic labour regime locally, in turn, figured strongly in the National Front's support for
Augura's initiatives in Urabá and Fedegán's initiatives in Caquetá. Most interesting about these promises of develop-
ment through banana and cattle production, however, was that the state continued to support Augura and Fedegán

40
The FARC agreed to demobilize in exchange for promises of government protection, the establishment of a political party to
become involved in the legal political process, alternative rural development, and military reform.
41
For a discussion of the impact of the 2016 accords on future prospects for peace, land rights, and restitution in Colombia, see
Cramer and Wood (2017) and LeGrand, van Isschot, and Riaño‐Alcalá (2017).
HOUGH 523

despite the fact that their labour regimes were rooted in systems of capital accumulation that created poverty and
marginalization rather than development.
This reality is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it shows that labour repression in Colombia did not derive from
the actions of capitalists alone. Rather, it stemmed from the convergence of the interests of peripheral capitalists
with the developmental logic of the state, which was itself shaped by U.S. hegemonic initiatives. Second, the ability
of the Colombian state to deploy violence as a strategy of labour control was itself dependent upon the persistence
of U.S. military aid. However, U.S. hegemony was not entirely despotic in form. It also took on the form of “disguised
aid” via the ICAs, support for the vertical disintegration of the banana market, and the provision of rural development
aid. What threads the coercive and consensual sides of U.S. hegemony together in Colombia was the desire for mar-
ket stability and labour control.
Positioning Colombia's local labour regimes within the arc of U.S. world hegemony also highlights how the con-
temporary dynamics of labour regimes are shaped by their contingent histories of class, state, and market formation.
For example, the shift from hegemony to periodic crises of labour control in Colombia's coffee sector is not due to
the deregulation of the coffee market writ large (i.e., globalization) but to the fact that the deregulation of the market
undermined Fedecafé's ability to maintain its promises to protect the social viability of market‐dependent cafetero
farmers. With each round of boom and bust, the country's cafeteros engage in social protest activity that forces
Fedecafé (and the state) to forgive debts incurred and provide new loans, subsidies, and services to produce
higher‐valued coffees; that is, to make their market dependence viable once again. With few exceptions, the Dignidad
Cafetera movement has yet to reimagine new politics of class reproduction that are less dependent upon coffee pro-
duction for the market (Bair & Hough, 2013; Hough, 2015).
Finally, this paper provides some evidence that the world market in the era of U.S. hegemonic decline is more
volatile and less reliable as a mode of local social reproduction and development. Yet developmental politics remain
rooted in notions that social welfare and stability occur as the by‐product of capitalist forms of economic growth. The
fact that policymakers retain this notion provides some clarity as to why governments like Colombia's are prone to
deploy security forces to repress labour rather than facilitate worker empowerment and control over labour pro-
cesses. Although the cases examined here may be suggestive of a larger trend in the global economy, the ability to
control labour through violence also appears to require increasingly heavy doses of militarization and
paramilitarization during the increasingly “hostile times” of unravelling U.S. hegemony. In other words, this study
points to the need for new forms of developmental politics and class formations that are less rather than more
dependent upon the market as the primary mechanism of reproduction. As Arrighi and his colleagues (Arrighi,
Aschoff, & Scully, 2010, p. 436) pointed out in a paper written in the final years of his life, “strategies to improve
the welfare of the majority of the population should be put front and centre, both as a key prerequisite for successful
capitalist development and as a desirable end in itself.”

ORCID

Phillip A. Hough https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9457-1167

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How to cite this article: Hough PA. The winding paths of peripheral proletarianization: Local labour, world
hegemonies, and crisis in rural Colombia. J Agrar Change. 2019;19:506–527. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12303