Peasant Marginalization

As Colombia's landed elite expanded their agricultural estates throughout the 1970s and 1980s, millions of rural peasants found themselves with nowhere to go. Those who were not absorbed into poorly paid agricultural labor were pushed outward — deep into Colombia's frontier regions, where the land was remote, infertile, and entirely without state support. Others flooded into the rapidly growing urban peripheries of cities like Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali, where they joined a growing underclass living in makeshift settlements with no running water, no employment security, and no political representation. The frontier regions they were pushed into — the Amazon basin, the Pacific lowlands, the Llanos — were not empty. They were ungoverned spaces where the state had never reached, and where armed groups would soon fill the vacuum. The forced displacement of Colombia's peasantry did not just create poverty — it created the precise conditions in which insurgency could take root and grow.