Roaring Free Enterprise

Gaitan has made little headway in one part of Colombia--the country's roaring industrial frontier and rich coffee-growing uplands.

Colombia, says a local wag, appears to have suffered a stroke: all its activity is confined to its left side; the right is paralyzed. About 80% of the country's coffee, the bulk of its industry and gold mining, and Buenaventura, now Colombia's No. 1 port, are all west of the Magdalena River. The keys to the western development are the states of Antioquia and Caldas (see map), where in less than a century coffee bushes have sprouted from the wilderness, and factories from the coffee bushes.

Medellin (pronounced Medday-heen) and its tributary towns of the Aburra Valley are the seat of the three major Colombian textile concerns--Coltejer, Fabricate, and Tejicondor. The Medellin tobacco industry is a monopoly. In Medellin, far from the Magdalena, a new skyscraper is going up to house the Antioquian company that dominates Magdalena River shipping. Most of Colombia's investments in gold, all in oil and steel, the bulk of the coffee trade have their homes in Medellin.

Wealthy from Lava. In Colombia's heartland, enterprise is the key word. Unlike most of South America, Antioquia has never been feudal. Topography was against a feudal land economy. Poor but independent peasants scratched for a living in the pinched valleys and on the mountainsides.

But with the advent of coffee in the second half of the 19th Century, the rich decomposed lava of the mountainsides suddenly sprouted wealth. The enormous Antioquian families (20 children were not unusual) began spilling along the Cauca River and the valleys of the Cordillera Central. The department of Caldas, colonized a few decades ago, produces more coffee than any other department today. The Antioquian peasant transplanted his democratic land system wherever he went: Caldas coffee farms are even smaller than those of southern Antioquia; the owners' families themselves pick the crop. Like the U.S., Colombia thus had a homesteading frontier. Social pressures had an escape; the free peasantry of the Cauca Valley counterbalanced the backward feudal areas around Bogota. To this free frontier is due the sensational increase in coffee production (1913-14, 600,000 sacks exported; 1944-45, 5,500,000).

Colombian Chicago. Even today, Antioquia and Caldas send several thousand emigrants a year into the Valle del Cauca. The Vallenses themselves prefer the valleys and leave the slopes to the immigrants from the north. To the southeast, Antioquian peasants are settling the virgin mountainsides of Tolima. In the north, they have overflowed into Choco and Bolivar, and control much of Bolivar's cattle industry. Of the 3,000,000 Colombians of Antioquian descent, only 1,300,000 live in Antioquia.

Medellin is the Chicago of this Colombian frontier. Like last-century Chicago, it is all vulgarity and bustle. In violent juxtaposition, there is every conceivable type of architecture, from a smattering of colonial through 19th Century brick churches to curvaceous, glass-walled, ten-story skyscrapers--most of it in muscular bad taste. But the most characteristic structure in Medellin is a half-finished factory. Some 250 large factories already function in Medellin and the adjacent towns of Itagui, Bello, Envigado and Copacabana, but industrialization goes on. The municipal power system provides the cheapest electricity in South America, and is stepping up the supply with a second huge hydro development. The well-paved streets contrast sharply with Bogota's slovenliness. Illiteracy in Antioquia is relatively low.

'Housemaids, Invest! In Bogota, money is usually invested in real estate. But in Antioquia, industrial joint stock companies have achieved a fabulous development. Even the housemaids follow the stockmarket. The biggest investor in the Cia. Colombiana de Tabaco, the country's No. 2 enterprise, owns no more than 3% of the stock. When a new hotel or steel plant is launched, the stock issue is subscribed practically overnight. It is as though every Antioquian peso were motorized to rush into the breach at the first opportunity.

Antioquenos are colonizing Colombia's cities as well as its mountainsides. Penniless paisas (Antioqueno peasants) arrive in Barranquilla or Bogota, marry a rich man's daughter (if possible), set up as peddlers or petty merchants in any case. In one generation, by shrewd trading, they end up as merchant princes or industrialists. A sizable part of Bogota's industries and banks are controlled by Medellinenses.

The capitalists are also enlightened. Many are a jump ahead of the workers in thinking up better conditions for labor. The Coltejer Co., for example, gives a free house to workers who have been 25 years on its payroll. Fabricate has built a comfortable residence for the peasant girls who work at its factory. It has also founded a savings society through which its workers may purchase shares on the installment plan (20 centavos weekly) in a cooperative enterprise that sells merchandise to the staff at reduced prices and pays dividends of about 12%.

Say the Medellinenses: "In a generation we will have skimmed the cream of economic opportunities in Colombia. After that we will recreate the Gran Colombia (Simon Bolivar's old dream of a united Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador), which the stupid Bogotanos have tried patching together again with flowery speeches and poetry, but which can be sutured only with trade and industry. And then undoubtedly we will draw in Peru, before inquiring into possibilities further south. Half a continent will not be too much elbow room for us." Argentines might be annoyed to know it, but Medellinenses do not take too seriously President Juan Peron's dream of dominating South America economically.

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