Colombia años 50: Industriales, política y diplomacia

Abstract

This book is a thorough and resourceful contribution for scholars interested in Latin American, and particularly Colombian, economic history. Sáenz offers a detailed, well-supported, and richly documented account of the years from 1950 to 1957, a crucial period in Colombia’s recent history. Beginning with the presidency of Conservative Laureano Gómez and ending with the ousting of Colombia’s only twentieth-century military ruler—Gustavo Rojas Pinilla—the book describes the evolution of the relation-ship between the powerful industrial association ANDI (Asociación Nacional de Empresarios de Colombia) and successive Colombian governments. It highlights key moments in the economic history of that decade, such as the first World Bank exploratory visit (under the leadership of economist Lauchlin Currie) to Latin America and the creation of the national oil company, ECOPETROL. It also emphasizes key issues that have consistently marked not only Colombian but also Latin American political debate, such as the extent and nature of state intervention in the domestic economy. As the author suggests in the epilogue, the book is not only a description of the dealings between a powerful lobbying group and the Colombian state. It also provides a background on how liberalism—political and economic—survived state intervention, partisan confrontation, and institutional breakdown.Sáenz’s rigorous archival work, complemented by a review of newspaper sources and academic literature on the period, allow him to shed light on the influence of business interests on domestic and external policy making, by the virtue of their power to produce, invest, divest, hire, and fire. The book fills an important void in the Latin American literature on business and politics and, like the author’s earlier Ofensiva empresarial: Industriales, politicos y violencia en los años 40 en Colombia (Tercer Mundo Editores / Ediciones Uniandes, 1992), integrates the underexplored perspective of private sector interests and political capacity into our understanding of Colombian economic history. While the focus of the book is the manufacturing agenda of ANDI, Sáenz also pays attention to other sectoral interests. Chapter 9, for example, describes splits within the business community over trade liberalization and the management of the exchange rate, setting retail and coffee interests against industrialists. This helps counterbalance the book’s occasional overemphasis on business autonomy versus, and complete control over, the policy-making process. In fact, business sectors experience varying degrees of success in gaining access to the policy-making process and getting their interests represented. More importantly, business occasionally loses, as demonstrated by the state’s ability to impose taxes. One such example is the controversial fiscal reform during Rojas Pinilla’s rule, which taxed stock dividends. In the end, this measure helped alienate business from Rojas Pinilla’s government and, as Sáenz accurately points out, partially explains the leading role of business in ousting the general. However, had Rojas better withstood the temptation of corruption and negotiated his populist agenda (both of which fueled business discontent), he might well have gotten away with the tax increase. The book will be useful to students of U.S.-Colombia relations, as most of the domestic debates between business and the state described in Sáenz’s book were shaped by U.S. foreign policy mandates. This is neatly reflected in the description of the debate over the transfer of oil exploitation from Tropical Oil to ECOPETROL and in the negotiations over the degree of national ownership of the company. Remarkably, Sáenz manages to illustrate how these debates were shaped by the interaction of commercial and political interests on both sides, providing a needed domestic perspective to the formation of U.S. interests in Latin America.Readers may find that Sáenz’s attention to detail occasionally obscures the thread of his argument. Exhaustive biographical descriptions of major and minor figures, for example—while important from a historiographic perspective—distract from the central points. In addition, Sáenz’s emphasis on the executive as the main source of policy making neglects the role of the legislature in shaping the policy process, even in a presidentialist system such as Colombia. In fact, the legislature provides a crucial space for negotiations and highlights one aspect that an executive focus will fail to grasp: the extent and nature of regional variations and negotiations, which have historically marked Colombian political processes and business-politics relations. Finally, for a book dealing with the 1950s in Colombia, surprisingly little is said about La Violencia, the widespread bipartisan violence that not only cost thousands of lives but also helped spark the mutual understanding among political and economic elites that set the stage for the National Front, which curtailed political competition in exchange for a stable investment environment.Despite these minor flaws, Sáenz’s book represents a milestone in the documentation not only of a key historical period but also of a crucial and understudied social actor and provides a solid foundation for future work.