This chapter begins by illustrating how Fedecafé avoided the social contradictions of their fully proletarianized labor regime by engaging in collective action efforts with other coffee-exporting countries that de-peripheralized their niche in the international coffee market. While Fedecafé’s early efforts to upgrade up the coffee commodity chain fell flat, the shift in the world hegemonic context and rise of US world hegemony during the postwar decades opened opportunities for collective action efforts among coffee producer-exporter countries that became institutionalized through the International Coffee Agreements (ICA). This geopolitically regulated international coffee market system provided Fedecafé with core-like profits that were essential to the viability of their Pacto Cafetero and therefore to the establishment of a hegemonic regime in Viejo Caldas. This chapter then discusses how the world historical context shifted in the 1980s, with the United States abandoning its support for the ICA system in favor of a deregulated coffee market. It closes with a discussion of how this unraveling of US world hegemony re-peripheralized Colombia’s niche in the international coffee market. This downgrading of Colombia’s niche in the market, combined with the regime’s dependence on fully proletarianized producers, undermined Fedecafé’s hegemony and pushed the region into a series of contemporary crises of labor control.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the main insights of labor regimes scholarship, including its focus on questions of labor control and its use of the neo-Gramscian distinction between consensual and coercive mechanisms of labor control. It then explains the analytic limits of this consent–coercion dichotomy when analyzing labor regime dynamics in peripheral regions of world capitalism. It then develops an ideal-typical framework intended to understand the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist in peripheral locations of the world market, distinguishing “hegemonic” and “despotic” labor regimes from regimes marked by “crises of labor control” or “counter-hegemony.” It then draws from insights from world-systems scholarships on the social precarity of fully proletarianized labor systems and on the core–periphery dynamics of global commodity chains to explain how the convergence of processes of peripheralization and proletarianization, or peripheral proletarianization, has a particularly destabilizing impact on local labor regimes. It ends with a discussion of how both processes of proletarianization and peripheralization are impacted by larger structural and institutional dynamics associated with the rise and decline of US world hegemony.

This chapter begins by comparing the developmental ecologies of bananas and coffee, showing how banana production for export has tended to arise on capital-intensive and fully proletarianized plantations dominated by vertically integrated transnational fruit companies. The spread of proletarianized and peripheralized banana regimes in the early part of the twentieth century generated local labor unrest throughout the banana-producing regions of Latin America, but this unrest was largely quelled by partnerships between authoritarian governments and the banana companies. This partnership unraveled as British world hegemony collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the world banana market was reconstructed under US world hegemony through a process of vertical disintegration that transformed banana transnationals into buyers/distributors and created spaces for the formation of local banana exporters through domestic development initiatives. In Colombia, this process transformed Urabá’s banana zone into a key site of development, but it only permitted entrance into a peripheral niche of the market. Collective action strategies akin to the ICA for coffee failed to generate opportunities for upgrading, pressuring Colombia’s banana planter-exporters to become heavily reliant upon the authoritarian practices of the National Front regime to quell worker unrest and maintain labor control on Urabá’s banana plantations.

This chapter traces the origins of Fedecafé’s hegemonic labor regime in Viejo Caldas. It begins by showing how Colombian coffee producers adapted to a peripheral niche of the world coffee market during the era of British hegemony, with semi-marketized small farmers better able to cope with the volatility of prices in the coffee market than large-scale planters that used various proletarianized labor systems. It then shows how Fedecafé emerged as a parastatal development organization charged with consolidating a profitable export sector based upon smallholding farmers. In doing so, it shows how Fedecafé instituted a regulatory social compact (Pacto Cafetero) that protected farmers from the volatility of the market and thus facilitated their conversion into fully proletarianized (market-dependent) farmers. It ends with a discussion of whether the Pacto Cafetero was effective in generating a hegemonic labor regime in Viejo Caldas into the postwar decades.

This chapter introduces the question of why capitalist development in Colombia has resulted in contradictory outcomes, including endemic political violence and labor repression that exist alongside regular elections, stable economic growth, and deeply entrenched political conservativism across large segments of the country’s working class. To understand these contradictions, it reconceptualizes them as labor regime dynamics that vary significantly across three global commodity-producing regions (coffee, bananas, coca) and across developmental periods of time (pre-developmentalist, developmentalist, neoliberal). It then lays out the conceptual framework and methodological approach of the book, which draws from and extends insights from labor regimes, global commodity chains, world hegemonies, and comparative and world historical sociology. Finally, it provides an overview of the structure of the book and its main findings.

This concluding chapter revisits the main questions driving the book, including how to explain Colombia’s contradictory development trajectory and the stark variation that has arisen across its coffee, banana, and coca labor regimes. It begins by reiterating the need for a labor regimes framework that is attuned to the crisis tendencies of labor regimes that exist at the margins of the global market. It then addresses the question of why we saw such stark variation across rural Colombia during the postwar developmental decades, showing how the establishment of hegemony in Viejo Caldas and despotism in Urabá and the Caguán resulted from a complex interaction of factors operating at the local, national, world-systemic, and interregional scales of analysis. Next, it addresses the temporal question of why these distinct regimes converged toward crises of labor control in the 1980s and 1990s, showing how this process also resulted from a contingent and complex range of factors operating across various scales of analysis. Finally, it summarizes the current conjuncture of crises in Colombia, emphasizing how prior efforts to resolve these crises through economic upgrading has been closed off due to the demise of US world hegemony, leaving de-proletarianization as a more viable solution.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the Colombian state’s efforts to transform the Caguán frontier region of Caquetá into a site of land colonization, settlement, and agrarian development in the 1960s. It demonstrates that these state-directed agrarian development initiatives lacked the political and economic support of Colombian elites, which resulted in the transformation of the region into a site of large-scale cattle ranching under the despotic rule of Colombia’s cattle rancher association, Fedegán. It then shows how the movement of the FARC guerrillas into the region, followed by their involvement in taxing and regulating the region’s emerging coca economy, helped generated a counter-hegemonic coca-producing labor regime that was effective in protecting local migrants from the displacement and marginalization they had experienced under the auspices of Fedegán. It ends with a discussion of the similarities and differences between the FARC’s counter-hegemonic regulatory interventions in the coca regime with Fedecafé’s hegemonic interventions in the coffee regime.

This chapter analyzes how Urabá’s despotic labor regime shifted to a deep crisis of labor control in the 1980s and then returned to despotism in the 1990s. It argues that that shift to crisis was not due to any significant changes to the international banana market, as was the case for Colombia’s coffee regime of Viejo Caldas. Instead, it was caused by the democratization of Colombia’s political system, which opened up new spaces for labor mobilization and worker’s political participation. In Urabá, however, this democratization process undermined Augura authoritative power over the region’s banana plantations and local political offices and therefore threatened to undermine their capacity to adapt to their peripheral niche in the international banana market. By the 1990s, Augura was able to regain control of the banana labor regime facilitating the paramilitarization of the region. I conclude with a discussion of how the rise of paramilitarism in Urabá was not the result of Colombia’s adoption of neoliberal reforms, but was instead a regional solution to peripheralization in the context of political democratization.

This chapter begins by analyzing how the adoption of neoliberal agrarian policies in the 1990s intensified land struggles in the region by generating new waves of displaced migrants who became incorporated into the coca economy of the FARC while also transforming the cattle industry from a domestic meat and hide supplier into an exporter of dairy products for the world market. It shows how FARC control of the region remained strong until the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the region became a geographic focal point of the state’s new neoliberal development strategies. I then demonstrate how and why previous efforts to dislodge the guerrilla threat through US-backed Cold War containment strategies failed, but that the balance of power shifted to the Colombian military in the late 1990s and early 2000s, following a massive influx of US military aid that was appropriated under the aegis of the US War on Drugs and War on Terror. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of the future economic prospects of the region’s cocalero farmers and workers in the absence of FARC protection or a developmental alternative to capitalist accumulation through dispossession.