Tierra y Trabajo en la Colombia Rural

Abstract

The issues relating to the concentration of property and the distribution of land have been a constant throughout Latin America; In countries such as Colombia, the structure of ownership over land has been the cause of long debates for more than nine decades, to the point of being considered not only the origin of the current social and armed conflict, but also the strategic element to solve different problems that affect, substantially, the nation’s life. Violence in Colombia has highlighted the breakdown of institutionality and the strengthening, exponentially, of a territorialization of a "paralegal" order, which undermines the social pact, since the combination of fragmented territory and absent State generates an emptiness that tends to be occupied by forces parallel to the State. Contrary to generalized thinking, the Colombian agrarian conflict has not been limited to a simple land distribution, on the contrary, it has had multiple expressions; One of them was the struggle of day laborers who worked in large coffee producing estates, to achieve improvements in their working conditions. However, it should be noted that the current labor market is dualized among workers belonging to a small group, who, thanks to their medium - high qualification, enjoy stable, well paid jobs, and a social security system, advantages that allow them to continue training and aspire to a job promotion, which ends up translating into an improvement in their life quality. On the other hand, there is a large secondary market of unskilled workers, subject to the conditions imposed by labor demand, often belonging to the vulnerable population group. In order to the above, the agrarian structure in Colombia is developed under a clearly capitalist structure that favors, in addition to other situations, precarious forms of labor use, being one of the most important, due to its magnitude and dynamics, the radical wage labor deregulation through a phenomenon of informality that impacts negatively on the quality of life of rural workers and their families, given that they are prevented from achieving vertical social mobilization, understood as the rise of people from one socioeconomic level to another.