Colombia and World War I: The Experience of a Neutral Latin American Nation during the Great War and Its Aftermath, 1914–1921

Abstract

The cataclysm of World War I reverberated outward from the struggle among Europe's empires into many other regions of the world. Countries far from the military fronts experienced political, economic, social, and environmental entanglements and consequences. The centennial years of the conflagration are an appropriate time for studying the ways in which events in Europe and North America penetrated the ongoing flow of Latin American history. Jane Rausch's study of Colombia, a somewhat precariously neutral Latin American country, is an important contribution to that subject.Rausch is an acknowledged authority on Colombia and the frontier regions of the capitalist era around Latin America. In this book she describes the political, economic, and social life of Colombia on three concentric scales: the transatlantic turmoil, Colombia's decisive turn toward the United States, and the domestic imperatives of the war and immediate postwar years through 1921. The timing of events depended on both military operations in Europe and diplomatic trends in the Americas. Great Britain's naval blockade of Germany in 1915 and German submarine warfare in response in 1916 effectively cut off Latin America's export markets to Europe. The United States stepped opportunistically into the economic and political breach, diverting a large portion of those exports to American markets.This brought Latin America into the orbit of the military powers' strategic plans for long-term control of natural resources critical for military security. Around Latin America and the Caribbean, the war years intensified the export economies' dependence on industrialized countries' capital and markets. Brazilian and Argentine beef exports to Britain rose, Mexican oil flowed northward, Chilean nitrates and copper went to meet the war's needs, and even Cuban grain and sugar exports spiked upward. Compounding this development, beginning in 1914 the war shook the global financial system to its foundations. In Colombia the conflict brought intense economic distress and persistent budget crises. This set the stage for President Marco Fidel Suárez's controversial welcoming of foreign capital and northern markets in the immediate aftermath of the armistice, dubbed the Dance of the Millions.This study shows in new detail the Colombian elite's perspective on the process by which the United States took the opportunity of wartime conditions across the Atlantic and on its waters to consolidate its hegemony around the hemisphere, and Colombia's initiative in this opportunity to expand its exports to the United States. Immediately before the war, 40 percent of the country's exports went to Europe and 50 percent to the United States; afterward, only 15 percent went to Europe and almost three-quarters went to the United States. The extraction of platinum expanded suddenly; by the end of the war Colombia became the world's largest producer of this critical metal. Rising banana exports gave the United Fruit Company increased power to coerce events in the banana belt. North America's craving for caffeine guaranteed Colombia second place in the world's coffee production. And major petroleum companies accelerated their pursuit of Colombia's oil reserves. (Rausch's other studies show the huge impact of large oil discoveries in the Llanos—but only beginning in the 1980s.)Rausch's conclusions about the postwar legacies of those years begin with a reminder that though there was no military conflict in Colombia, the global situation did reach across its borders in the form of 30,000 deaths from influenza. More broadly, the diplomatic front brought Colombia an increase of hemispheric solidarity, including the potential of the Pan-American Union as an arena for pursuing national interests. This was a complementary route to dealing with the politically controversial American hegemony. American interest in Colombia's natural resources, especially its petroleum potential, brought a belated congressional ratification of the Thomson-Urrutia Treaty in 1921, which finally resolved Colombia's loss of Panama and stabilized its relations with the northern colossus.Domestically, the national elite's collaboration with North American corporate interests brought sudden riches for the few, but rising consumer prices in wartime intensified the polarization between rich and poor in years of untrammeled capitalist development. This led to a new surge of social, ethnic, and regional violence, culminating in the bloody United Fruit Company strike in 1928. Social tensions thus remained unresolved throughout the country's later years.Rausch's account is fluently written, and it includes several apt cartoons from the war years. It adds an important national dimension to the growing literature on Latin America in those years in the setting of global events.