This chapter introduces the question of why capitalist development in Colombia has resulted in contradictory outcomes, including endemic political violence and labor repression that exist alongside regular elections, stable economic growth, and deeply entrenched political conservativism across large segments of the country’s working class. To understand these contradictions, it reconceptualizes them as labor regime dynamics that vary significantly across three global commodity-producing regions (coffee, bananas, coca) and across developmental periods of time (pre-developmentalist, developmentalist, neoliberal). It then lays out the conceptual framework and methodological approach of the book, which draws from and extends insights from labor regimes, global commodity chains, world hegemonies, and comparative and world historical sociology. Finally, it provides an overview of the structure of the book and its main findings.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the Colombian state’s efforts to transform the Caguán frontier region of Caquetá into a site of land colonization, settlement, and agrarian development in the 1960s. It demonstrates that these state-directed agrarian development initiatives lacked the political and economic support of Colombian elites, which resulted in the transformation of the region into a site of large-scale cattle ranching under the despotic rule of Colombia’s cattle rancher association, Fedegán. It then shows how the movement of the FARC guerrillas into the region, followed by their involvement in taxing and regulating the region’s emerging coca economy, helped generated a counter-hegemonic coca-producing labor regime that was effective in protecting local migrants from the displacement and marginalization they had experienced under the auspices of Fedegán. It ends with a discussion of the similarities and differences between the FARC’s counter-hegemonic regulatory interventions in the coca regime with Fedecafé’s hegemonic interventions in the coffee regime.

This chapter analyzes how Urabá’s despotic labor regime shifted to a deep crisis of labor control in the 1980s and then returned to despotism in the 1990s. It argues that that shift to crisis was not due to any significant changes to the international banana market, as was the case for Colombia’s coffee regime of Viejo Caldas. Instead, it was caused by the democratization of Colombia’s political system, which opened up new spaces for labor mobilization and worker’s political participation. In Urabá, however, this democratization process undermined Augura authoritative power over the region’s banana plantations and local political offices and therefore threatened to undermine their capacity to adapt to their peripheral niche in the international banana market. By the 1990s, Augura was able to regain control of the banana labor regime facilitating the paramilitarization of the region. I conclude with a discussion of how the rise of paramilitarism in Urabá was not the result of Colombia’s adoption of neoliberal reforms, but was instead a regional solution to peripheralization in the context of political democratization.

This chapter begins by analyzing how the adoption of neoliberal agrarian policies in the 1990s intensified land struggles in the region by generating new waves of displaced migrants who became incorporated into the coca economy of the FARC while also transforming the cattle industry from a domestic meat and hide supplier into an exporter of dairy products for the world market.It shows how FARC control of the region remained strong until the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the region became a geographic focal point of the state’s new neoliberal development strategies. I then demonstrate how and why previous efforts to dislodge the guerrilla threat through US-backed Cold War containment strategies failed, but that the balance of power shifted to the Colombian military in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following a massive influx of US military aid that was appropriated under the aegis of the US War on Drugs and War on Terror.I conclude this chapter with a discussion of the future economic prospects of the region’s cocalero farmers and workers in the absence of FARC protection or a developmental alternative to capitalist accumulation through dispossession.