Colombia: La lucha por la tierra en la década del treinta. Génesis de la organización sindical campesina

Conceived in the classroom of Berkeley-trained economist Miguel Urrutia, this monograph by the daughter of assassinated populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán forms a useful chapter in the burgeoning corpus of research on twentieth-century rural Colombia. Gloria Gaitán’s study of agrarian conflict on the great coffee-producing latifundia of western Cundinamarca and eastern Tolima in the early 1930s is liberally sprinkled with documents like the draconian renter’s contract of the Cunday Coffee Company, as well as information drawn from interviews with well-known rural activists such as Juan de la Cruz Varela. Its chronicling of exploited workers and grasping latifundistas makes the work a Latin, pastoral counterpart to the exposés of labor exploitation in incipient industrial societies of North America and western Europe. Ms. Gaitán’s grasp of her material falters only when she tries to make broader areas of Colombian coffee country conform to the materialistic analytic criteria which serve so well in more limited context.