ABSTRACT
The tropical region of Meta in Colombia demonstrates strong continuities between the 1950s “La Violencia” civil war, the 1960s Alliance for Progress Agrarian Reform, and the later rise of guerrilla movements and coca cultivation. Instead of mitigating violence, however, a limited agrarian reform only intensified protracted rural social conflicts, setting the stage for illicit coca. In Cold-war Colombia, modest reformism proved unable to consolidate a stable middle class of farmers. This chapter examines the connection between policy and outcome by first focusing on the political debates and challenges that U.S. diplomats and Colombian elites faced to design the 1960s U.S.-sponsored Alliance for Progress land reform. This agricultural development policy finally crystallized into the state migration program known as “Project Meta N⁰1.” Despite a negligible history in ritual coca, by the 1980s displaced and destitute mestizo peasants began their involvements with illicit coca. Thus this chapter traces the process through which development policies contributed to this specific site becoming a center of drug production.
