This chapter considers how, after the nationalization of the oil industry and amid the divisions of the cold war, processes of state formation and popular struggle entered a new phase. The institutional state, rather than a foreign corporation, became the target of discontent, and new social movements demanded the provision of public services, as the capitalist modernization of the countryside propelled the accumulation of wage-insecure workers in the city and the emergence of shantytowns. The “civic strikes” that rocked Barrancabermeja in the 1970s had much in common with earlier labor strikes: both forms of popular protest brought together diverse working...