A product of a symposium held in 1974 under the auspices of the Center for Inter-American Relations, this volume summarizes the principal political and economic developments under Colombia’s National Front regime (1958-74) and evaluates the National Front’s achievement both as a means of developing long-term political stabilization and as a generator of economic and social policy.
The contributors to this volume are for the most part political scientists, sociologists, or economists. With one exception, the essays conform to the conventional modes and rhetoric of American social science. That is, almost all of the essayists, while not uncritical of the Colombian political elite and its policies, maintain an attitude of cool and, on occasion, even Olympian, detachment. The language of analysis is, possibly to excess, that of American social science “objectivity.” This is true even of several essays produced by Colombian contributors, all of whom have been through the mills of North American social science. Most of the authors, while presumably versed in Marxist or dependency analyses, do not appear to be marked adherents of either of these approaches.
Possibly the most interesting interpretive contribution is made by Mauricio Solaún in his introductory and concluding essays. In an introduction that leans heavily on the analytical categories of Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and Richard Morse, and which is by turns brilliant and opaque, Solaún attempts to place the Frente Nacional in the context of Colombian political tradition.
After Solaún’s effort to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the National Front, other, more specific, essays follow. Rodrigo Losada charts the decline of electoral participation in the early noncompetitive years of the National Front, and its reemergence under the challenge of Rojas Pinilla’s ANAPO. Losada emphasizes that electoral non-participation in noncompetitive periods is characteristic of Colombian political history and not peculiar to the National Front. An excellent essay by Gary Hoskin analyzes congressional politics, stressing the separation between politicians in the executive and legislative branches in terms of recruitment, attitudes, behavior, and spheres of power. Robert H. Dix contributes an interesting analysis of ANAPO as a political opposition. J. Mark Ruhl treats the military, Alexander Wilde the Church, and Fernando Cepeda and Christopher Mitchell the impact of foreign-stimulated technocracy. Another first-rate essay by Bruce Bagley and Matthew Edel analyzes the use of Acción Comunal as a device for cooptation, and the contrasting radicalization of the government-initiated peasant union (ANUC).
A section on public policy contains a good general analysis of National Front economic policies by R. Albert Berry (in which some of the most penetrating observations are tucked away in the footnotes). Francisco E. Thoumi presents an interesting treatment of industrial development policies. Eugene Havens, William L. Flinn, and Susana Lastarria-Cornhill offer a class analysis of agrarian reform that is excessively schematic and often in error in its treatment of the nineteenth-century background of this topic, but that is sounder on the post-1958 period. Robert F. Arnove surveys education policy, emphasizing the continuing tendency of the state disproportionately to subsidize the education of the upper sectors. William P. McGreevey, in surveying population policy, suggests that opposing pressures from the Church and from foreign sources created a Colombian standoff, freeing national leaders to pursue the population-control policy that they came to believe was necessary. (One would have liked, either in this essay or that of Wilde, a fuller treatment of the Church’s response to the political elite’s sponsorship of birth control, begun in 1965.)
This book presents a very useful overview of the Frente Nacional and recent Colombian politics in general. Since six years were permitted to elapse between the symposium and the publication of this volume, however, the editors might have turned the delay to advantage by updating the analyses in light of events after 1974.
