Colombia has been in the grips of a continuous struggle for over 40 years, thus making the Andean nation home to one of the longest running civil conflicts within the Western Hemisphere. Examined here is the way in which the development theory elaborated by the economist Lauchlin Currie has licensed this conflict, combining as it does an advocacy both of ‘free market’ policies and of the ‘dampening’ of rural opposition to their implementation throughout Colombia. In this combination, it is argued, lies the uniqueness – and perhaps the notoriety – of his monetarist framework. Although monetarists took part in debates about economic development in Latin America that occurred in the 1920s and 1960s (the Kemmerer Mission, ECLA), their views did not gain ascendancy until the 1980s. From the 1950s onwards, however, Currie insisted that ‘accelerated economic development’ required dispossession of the peasantry and the consolidation in the countryside of large capitalist farms. To counter grassroots resistance to this process, the Colombian government has used his theory of ‘dampening’ to justify the war being waged on the rural population. The conclusion examines the contradiction inherent in the latter strategy, and also its implications for theory about the agrarian question.
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