How Colombia's civil wars changed the course of its coffee production

In parts of Antioquia during La Violencia, the coffee harvest was the most dangerous time of year. Twice a year, as seasonal workers arrived to pick, the violence rose with them, because coffee was Colombia's biggest earner and the men behind the killing were after its revenues.

That link between coffee and conflict runs right through Colombia's modern history. For more than a century, each of the country's civil wars has changed where its coffee is grown, who grows it, and how they make a living from it.

The Thousand Days' War and the move west

Coffee first boomed in Colombia at the end of the 19th century. Between 1887 and 1893, the price of Colombian coffee in New York climbed from 10.6 to 18.8 cents a pound, and by 1898 farmers were producing 531,437 bags a year, nearly five times the figure for 1887, according to historian Charles Bergquist's research. Most of that coffee grew on the big estates of the east, in the Santanderes and Cundinamarca.

The boom didn't last. As prices fell again, many specialist coffee farmers went out of business, and in October 1899 Liberals in Santander rose against the Conservative government. The Thousand Days' War that followed was the last and biggest of Colombia's 19th-century civil wars, spreading into Cundinamarca and Tolima as a guerrilla war in which some coffee haciendas were destroyed by fighters on both sides.

By the early 1900s, the coffee haciendas of the east were bankrupt, and coffee was spreading instead through Antioquia, Old Caldas and Tolima. This western frontier was opened up by settlers, and its land ended up shared out relatively equally. Its rise was dramatic: in 1888, these areas grew just 5% of Colombia's coffee, but by 1930 they grew more than 70%. Before long, coffee dominated the whole economy, rising from 8% of Colombia's exports in 1870 to 80% by the 1950s.

La Violencia and the coffee frontier

That coffee wealth would shape the next war too. On 9 April 1948, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, leader of the Liberal Party's left wing, was shot dead in central Bogotá, sparking a largely rural conflict between Liberal and Conservative supporters that Colombians simply call La Violencia, "the violence".

Nobody knows exactly how many people it killed. The figure usually quoted is at least 200,000, but a 2019 study for Colombia's central bank estimated far fewer: at most 57,737 violent deaths between 1949 and 1958, of which around 39,142 had a political cause.

What is becoming clearer is the part coffee played. Economic historian Daniel Sánchez-Ordóñez has found that in the late 1950s the worst of the violence was concentrated on the new coffee frontier, where armed bandit groups could live off a steady stream of coffee wealth. In his analysis, how much coffee an area grew predicted its violence better than political rivalry, land disputes or a weak state. His study hasn't yet been peer reviewed, but it fits with Roldán's earlier finding that violence in Antioquia rose at harvest time.

Strangely, the economy kept growing through all of this. Helped by coffee prices that passed a dollar a pound for the first time in the early 1950s, Colombia's GDP grew by about 5% a year between 1945 and 1955, even as rural families fled the violence for the cities and Bogotá's population passed a million by the end of the decade.

Guerrillas, coca and the 1989 crash

La Violencia eventually faded, but Colombia's conflict didn't end. More than 60 years of armed conflict followed, and at its core it remained a struggle over the countryside: from the start, the armed groups' demands centred on land and agrarian reform.

Southern Tolima, a major coffee area, lived through every chapter. It saw La Violencia in the 1950s, the founding of the FARC guerrilla group, the rise of the paramilitary Bloque Tolima and years of fighting between the FARC, the paramilitaries and the army. In remote areas such as Chaparral, where the state was barely present, armed groups filled the gap, and many women widowed by the conflict took over their families' coffee farms.

Then, in 1989, coffee itself collapsed. When the International Coffee Agreement broke down, prices fell by a third within months, a blow the Washington Post estimated would cut Colombia's export earnings by half a billion dollars a year. In places like Briceño, many farmers ripped up their coffee and planted coca for the first time.

Peace, and the rise of the south

The 2016 peace agreement with the FARC set out to reverse that. It included a voluntary crop substitution programme, known as PNIS, linked to rural reform and new infrastructure, under which some 100,000 families in regions including Nariño, Cauca, Putumayo and Antioquia were to grow cacao, coffee or honey instead of coca. In Briceño, many of the farmers who had abandoned coffee in 1989 went back to it.

Peace hasn't been simple, though. Researchers found the programme was poorly carried out, with the government pursuing eradication and substitution at the same time, even as farmers in some areas showed they preferred coffee to cacao, the crop the agreement favoured. In Cauca, armed groups moved into areas the FARC had left, and many of the community leaders who championed crop substitution were killed. Even so, when coca prices collapsed, some farmers there turned to coffee on their own.

All the while, the map of Colombian coffee has been shifting south. Huila, Cauca and Nariño held 19.3% of Colombia's coffee land in 2002 and 32.7% by 2022, overtaking the traditional coffee axis of Caldas, Risaralda and Quindío, and Huila is now the country's largest coffee-producing department. That shift began long before the peace deal, but Cauca and Nariño are also among the regions where the work of replacing coca has been focused.

So when you see Huila, Cauca, Nariño or Tolima on a bag of Colombian coffee, you're looking at a map that Colombia's wars helped to draw, and at the farmers who kept growing coffee through them.