ANUC (Colombian Peasant Movement)

Abstract

Abstract To end the Colombian civil war known as La Violencia (1948–1957), the Conservative and Liberal parties agreed in 1958 to reconcile under the National Front, a 16‐year coalition regime based on administrative power‐sharing and presidential alternation (Kline 1980: 71–72). In 1961 Congress passed an Agrarian Reform Law but, bowing to the landowners' interests, the first two governments of the National Front took no serious steps to redistribute land (Tobón 1972). Determined to implement the reform, the next president, Liberal politician Carlos Lleras (1966–1970), promoted legislation granting land rights to tenants and sharecroppers and boosted the capabilities of INCORA, the Institute of Agrarian Reform. In 1967, he also launched an initiative to establish ANUC, the National Peasant Association of Colombia, as a state‐sponsored organization that would promote peasant involvement in the provision of rural services and in the agrarian reform program (Zamosc 1986: 50–54). From the start, it was clear that Lleras expected that, as a peasant force pushing for land redistribution, ANUC would exert the pressure that was needed to overcome the landowners' opposition and facilitate INCORA's work. In the organizational campaign, promoters from the Ministry of Agriculture scoured the countryside instructing peasants about their rights, forming local and regional peasant associations, and grooming promising activists into a national leadership (Zamosc 1986: 54–60). When ANUC's national congress met in 1970, the number of registered members was about one million. The response had been especially strong in the areas of traditional haciendas (large estates), where tenants and sharecroppers wanted land of their own; and in the piedmont forest frontiers, where peasant colonists demanded infrastructure and services (Zamosc 1986: 61–62).