State,experts,and rural development in Colombia,1930–50. A local genealogy of international community development

Abstract

This article argues that the efforts made by the Colombian state to promote rural development, beginning in the 1930s, provided valuable knowledge, experiences, and methodologies that were fundamental for the global deployment of community development after World War II. This specific international development technique was based on small-scale, horizontal, and participatory strategies to raise the living standards of poor populations and was widely used by bilateral and multilateral technical assistance agencies during the 1950s and 1960s. The article first explores two pilot projects designed by local experts to jointly intervene in the health, agricultural practices, and social organization of rural communities through participatory and applied educational strategies. Then, the article follows the institutional trajectories (local and international) of some of these experts and their influence on two specific agencies for technical assistance in the fields of health, agriculture, and education in the early 1950s: the Institute of Inter-American Affairs and UNESCO. The community programs carried out by these agencies must then be seen as the result of multiple transnational trajectories of development. These trajectories, however, take seriously the historical agency of Latin American states and their experts.

Introduction

During the 1950s, the flagship program of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was “Fundamental Education,” which in turn was presented as the agency’s main contribution to the United Nations’ (UN’s) Expanded Program of Technical Assistance, created in 1949. This comprehensive program for raising the living standards of poor people (especially in rural areas) “not only brought science firmly into the domain of culture, and engaged culture in the name of the challenges of social justice that were the UN’s brief,” as historian Glenda Sluga has argued, but “it also anticipated the UN’s gradual deployment of the phenomenon known as Technical Assistance, which became, in turn, development.” ¹ More specifically, fundamental education was the immediate predecessor of “community development,” an approach based on small-scale, horizontal, and participatory strategies that sought to impact on the living conditions of village communities. ² Since the early 1950s, the UN’s Economic and Social Council had been gathering information on this type of initiative in different countries in an attempt to develop a general definition of community development for their own programs in this area. They generally understood it as “the organization of comprehensive programs for social progress based on local self-help and effort, assisted from outside but firmly resting on the existing and emerging felt needs of the local community.” The comprehensive nature of this definition was based on the importance of coordinating services such as “social welfare, health protection, education, agricultural improvement, small industry development, housing, local government, cooperatives, etc.” ³

The UN recognized at that time that the underlying principles of community development “are not new, but have evolved simultaneously through practical experience in various substantive fields, such as public health, agricultural extension, cooperatives, home economics, basic education, social work, etc.” in many different countries. ⁴ However, the historiography of this approach to international development tends to assume that it originated primarily from British colonial experiences from the late nineteenth century onwards, American and European social welfare experiences in the 1930s, and the new American imperialism that emerged after the Second World War. ⁵ In addition to these experiences and their associated geopolitical interests (decolonization, expanding global markets, anti-communism), in this article I argue that the efforts of Latin American states to promote rural economic development and social welfare in the 1930s also contributed valuable knowledge, experience, and methodologies that were fundamental to the global implementation of community development following the Second World War. ⁶

Historians of U.S. international relations and late British colonialism have paid attention to community development as a kind of “low modernist” aid scheme for the so-called Third World (whether in colonial or postcolonial settings). ⁷ By following the origins, rationale, and implementation of community development, some of these scholars point out that development thinking and foreign policy formulation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, were not only structured by modernization theory as a coherent and all-encompassing ideology, but by a complex set of ideas and experiences developed in previous decades. ⁸ From British colonial officers and Anglo-American protestant missionaries working in Africa and Asia since the late nineteenth century, to American anthropologist, rural sociologists, and urban planners working on projects especially related to the New Deal of the 1930s, these experts produced – the argument goes on – a specific type of development knowledge that would structure important technical assistance projects for rural uplift in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in Asia and Africa. Furthermore, it has been argued that during the 1960s, community development would become one of the main strategies of the Peace Corps and of some counterinsurgency projects in Latin America and other “underdeveloped” regions. ⁹

These studies have complicated the dominant narratives of international development in the Cold War context (at least in the late 1940s and 1950s), which tend to portray development interventions as inherently authoritarian, top-down, large-scale, technocratic and indifferent to local realities. ¹⁰ They tend, however, to replicate diffusionist models of science (in this case community development knowledge and technologies). This is not to say that historians and other social scientists have not explored how this type of development was negotiated, appropriated, transformed, and resisted in the specific places of application by the various local actors involved (politicians, officials, and intervened population). ¹¹ However, its creation, testing, and internationalization continue to be portrayed as the exclusive result of experts, experiences, and resources from the Global North and their economic and political interests.

On the other hand, historians of science interested in the Cold War and international development have paid attention to the roll of Western science and technology as instruments of both “national security” and “global diplomacy.” ¹² While the first aspect has been studied, particularly around the atomic bomb and other military technologies, the second one has explored how diverse scientific and technical experts engaged with diplomatic affairs, even displacing diplomats in the daily activities of foreign policy. Certainly, and unlike historians of international relations, in these approaches science and technological systems are no longer seen as a black box or simply a tool of metropolitan politics. ¹³ The diffusionist models of science have been widely problematized in favor of views that explore the situated processes of the production, circulation, appropriation, and negotiation of scientific knowledge and technological systems, as well as the way in which networks of experts are established and the efforts they make to build their authority and their links with the state and society. ¹⁴ However, big science and technologies have tended to dominate historical analyses of the transnational entanglements between science, Cold War, and development, leaving aside the kind of (small) knowledge and technologies related to projects such as community development. ¹⁵

For the case of Latin American historiography in the fields of agriculture and health, the Green Revolution and disease eradication campaigns are good examples of the tendency of historians to focus on big science and high modernism technical assistance schemes in the context of the Cold War. ¹⁶ This is a trend that also assumes a clear rupture with previous strategies to address health and agricultural problems during the interwar period, which are usually portrayed as having a more national character, and a less vertical and technocratic orientation. ¹⁷ The emphasis placed by historians on campaigns led by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate tropical diseases and on the high-yielding, disease-resistant seeds research programs funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) has perhaps made us lose sight of the possibility that more social, horizontal, and integrated approaches and campaigns to health and agrarian problems could have coexisted, even in the context of the (early) Cold War and the growing U.S. hegemony in the region. ¹⁸

This article builds on all this literature on the history of international development and on the history of health and agriculture in Latin America, while adding new approaches and interpretations. On the one hand, it shares the argument that, during the 1930s, Latin American states implemented economic and social development programs that attempted to adopt a more comprehensive and less hierarchical approach. In fact, I would argue that the Colombian government deployed a series of pilot projects that attempted to address health, agricultural, and cooperative issues simultaneously through participatory and applied educational strategies. These strategies aimed to facilitate effective learning through practical experience and empower the target audience to take the necessary actions to improve their lives and productivity themselves. The designers of these projects therefore hoped that the farmers would become agents of social change in their communities, replicating the actions initially carried out or promoted by the state. At the same time, the government took advantage of the pilot projects to train the technicians needed to expand the programs. All these issues were intended to raise rural living standards and promote rural development by a state apparatus with scarce economic and human resources (especially well-trained grassroots workers) and with difficulties having an effective presence in many regions of the country.

On the other hand, I argue that these types of community-based techniques for rural development, which can be framed as part of the rise of the welfare and developmental states in the Americas, did not disappear or were simply replaced by more vertical and technocratic approaches in the context of the Cold War and the growing interference of the United States in agricultural and health issues in the region. ¹⁹ On the contrary, I argue that the network of experts and field workers involved in such local rural development projects, as well as the experiences gained from putting them into operation, interacted with various international technical assistance programs in health, agriculture, and education, helping to co-produce what in the 1950s became known as “community development.”

I explore two specific programs implemented by the Colombian government between the 1930s and 1940s: The Health Centers and the School Vacation Colonies. Both programs began as pilot projects to test different community-based strategies. Then, I will follow the institutional trajectories of some of the local experts who actively participated in these programs and their influence on two specific agencies for international technical cooperation in the early 1950s: the Institute of Inter-American Affairs and UNESCO. ²⁰ The community programs carried out by these agencies must then be seen as the result of multiple transnational trajectories of development. These trajectories, however, take seriously the historical agency of early postcolonial states and their experts. ²¹

The state, rural development, and the idea of comprehensive services for peasants

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Colombian governments tried to modernize the state apparatus and increase its capacity for intervention, with the aim of promoting economic development and social welfare in the country. Thanks to the rise in international coffee prices and the compensation paid by the United States for Panama’s secession, the state had greater financial resources available for operation and expansion. During the 1920s, the country’s financial system was modernized and state investment in transport infrastructure increased substantially. ²² At the same time, social mobilization by students, workers, and peasants was growing, and these groups were demanding better living conditions. Several state initiatives were therefore created to address these demands. ²³ The Interparliamentary Commission on Social Affairs and Agricultural Development, created in 1923, paid special attention to supporting the Department of Agriculture (established in 1913) in strengthening its agricultural research and extension programs. ²⁴ In 1923, the state also created the General Labor Office and the Comptroller General of the Republic. The former was responsible for managing and monitoring the working conditions of urban and rural employees, including issues such as wages, accidents, housing, hygiene, and health. ²⁵ The latter was responsible for centralizing national statistics, conducting censuses, and making estimates of food production and consumption. From the 1930s onwards, this institution also began to conduct surveys on the standard of living of urban and rural populations, including their nutritional status. ²⁶

When the Liberal Party came to power in 1930, this type of state intervention increased, with rural development becoming a key priority. The Great Economic Crisis of 1929 clearly demonstrated Colombian agriculture’s inability to meet domestic food demand, resulting in the increased importation of products that could be grown locally. Initially, the government’s strategy to optimize the production of staple foods and achieve self-sufficiency focused on fiscal measures. ²⁷ In the early 1930s, it increased tariffs to protect the local production of staple foods and supported the allocation of agricultural loans by establishing the Agricultural, Industrial and Mining Credit Fund. ²⁸ During Alfonso López Pumarejo’s first term in office (1934–8), these measures were expanded and diversified, drawing on the initiatives and experiences of other governments in the region to promote rural development and wellbeing.

The American New Deal, and in particular Roosevelt’s efforts to improve the economy and living conditions in rural and southern regions of the country, as well as Lázaro Cárdenas’ agrarian revolution in Mexico, were important references for López Pumarejo. ²⁹ Just before the beginning of his first presidential term, López Pumarejo visited Mexico and did not hesitate to assure, at a lunch offered in Xochimilco, that

[O]f all the things I have seen and heard during my stay in Mexico, without a doubt the most useful thing for me has been the direct contact, so comforting, with the vigorous spirit of the Mexican Revolution, which I assure you I will try to extend to Colombia within the program I hope to carry out in my homeland during my government. ³⁰

Certainly, the agrarian reform inspired by the Mexican revolutionary spirit failed in López Pumarejo’s “Revolución en marcha,” which is not to say that there was no attempt to implement a whole series of state projects to intervene in various aspects of Colombian agriculture and rural life.

In fact, the political pressure exerted by powerful landlords meant that the structural issue of land tenure in Colombia could not be addressed. Although Law 200 of 1936 aimed to “resolve the most rancorous issues between large landowners and colonos and service tenants,” its practical scope was very limited. ³¹ However, as was the case with Mexico and the United States, the Colombian state sent experts and field workers across the country “seeking to transform farming, rural culture, and country people’s relationship with the land.” ³²

López Pumarejo’s Minister of Agriculture, Guillermo Londoño Mejía, stressed in 1935 that the state should “improve the living conditions of the peasants, either to rationalize their work, or the indispensable conditions for their subsistence” and thus promote the “development of our agriculture.” ³³ For that purpose, Londoño Mejía considered that it was essential to improve rural schools and convert them into “true peasant education institutes, where they can enjoy adequate food and housing,” as well as to support agricultural extension and higher education in agriculture and veterinary science. ³⁴ He also pointed out that it was necessary to carry out an “intense rural health campaign,” which would also serve to “strengthen the bonds of union between the government and the peasant classes by offering them equal opportunities for welfare as to those enjoyed by the inhabitants of the cities.” ³⁵ With regard to the problem that most farmers had very few resources to improve their agricultural production, Londoño Mejía proposed implementing a “cooperative system” for food production and consumption. Cooperativism would also serve to overcome the “individualistic approach” that Londoño considered common among peasants. ³⁶

Thus, the liberal government’s efforts to promote rural development encompassed more than just fiscal and infrastructure measures. Particular attention was given to transforming the lives and behavior of peasants. While the intention to create a modern peasantry with democratic and communal values, improved living conditions, and efficient agricultural practices was laudable, it was marred in some cases by the social reformers’ and state experts’ paternalistic attitudes, as well as their racialized and gendered views. ³⁷ The day-to-day functioning of this type of social intervention program also faced various contingencies, a lack of material and human resources, and local bureaucratic obstacles. ³⁸ However, it was precisely these circumstances that prompted the development of innovative strategies for managing social intervention projects and engaging local communities. Ultimately, this helped lay the groundwork locally for a series of techniques that would become characteristic of international community development in the 1950s.

Two state pilot projects related to rural development are notable examples of this type of innovative strategy for social intervention. The Health Center of Pereira and the Vacation School Colony of Usaquén both sought to optimize scarce resources by providing services that addressed educational, social organization, health, and agricultural issues simultaneously. These experimental projects were intended to test this type of comprehensive service, with the aim of replicating it elsewhere, as well as providing practical training for the state officials who would later manage it. Additionally, the projects’ administrative management aimed to overcome past experiences of local mismanagement and a lack of coordination between the central government and regional and municipal governments.

The health centers program

During López Pumarejo’s first term in office, the national health system was expanded, and strategies for addressing health issues were reviewed. In the early twentieth century, health campaigns tended to focus on specific diseases and their biological causes. However, as in other countries in the region, Colombia experienced a “first wave of social medicine” in the 1930s. ³⁹ This approach was characterized by the search for an “integrative causal framework that stressed the social, economic, and political causes of health problems, in tension with reductionist and increasingly prominent ‘biomedical’ frameworks,” as well as by questioning “the model of liberal medicine and calling for the state to take a strong role in developing and regulating health systems to serve the collective needs of national populations.” ⁴⁰

A key part of the reorganization of the national health system – which adopted a more social and effective approach – was the establishment of health centers in urban and rural areas. These centers were intended to coordinate a range of preventive and curative services, overcoming the previous model of campaigns focused on the treatment of specific diseases. It was also hoped that the central government would have greater control over their operation by establishing contracts with the regional governments and municipalities that required them, rather than simply granting monetary aid. The idea was to optimize scarce economic and personnel resources by concentrating on multiple tasks in a small group of health professionals. ⁴¹

This type of health center had already been adopted by health systems in other countries, and the RF played an important role in promoting them in Latin America. As historian Anne-Emanuelle Birn has noticed, “these principles of health organization were not unique to the Rockefeller Foundation but shared by the public health community in the United States and, to a certain extent, by countries that, like the Soviet Union, were seeking to augment rural health coverage in the 1920s.” ⁴² Although the RF had previously promoted a monocausal approach to disease in Colombia, the local implementation of health centers reflected a more comprehensive approach. As in other countries in the region, this was the result of negotiations and mutual learning between RF officials and local health and rural development experts. ⁴³

The Colombian authorities decided to start the program of health centers with a pilot project situated in Pereira, a small city located in an important agricultural region (especially for coffee). Economic help and expert advice were given by the RF, but after a year of operations the RF withdrew and the subsequent health centers were financed entirely with national, departmental, and municipal resources. Physician Arturo Campo Posada, an advocate of social medicine, was appointed by the government as director of this pilot project in 1934. Rather than focusing on curing specific diseases, the project aimed to provide comprehensive preventive healthcare and rural development services. The director of the National Department of Hygiene explained the project to him as follows:

The government wants to make a fundamental administrative change in the country’s health system. Together with the representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, we believe that an integrated health care system should be developed with a preventive-assistance character. This system should oversee vaccinations, health education and nutrition, rural development for increasing food production, soil sanitation and ambulatory care of the sick. For this purpose, we will set up sanitary units in the cities and, in the villages and rural areas, rural commissions. ⁴⁴

Later, in 1936, Campo Posada was appointed as director of the entire program, known as the National Program of Sanitary Units and Rural Commissions. The former were permanent facilities offering services in cities and towns, while the latter consisted of mobile teams that traveled to remote and sparsely populated rural areas. ⁴⁵ As director, his first task was to travel to Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean to analyze and compare their healthcare systems with Colombia’s. Mexico received particular attention due to the similarity of the economic and social conditions of their working classes and their shared goal of providing comprehensive healthcare services. ⁴⁶

By the end of the decade, the Colombian program was portrayed as a “unitary system” comprising “small sanitary organizations of multipurpose action,” addressing issues such as soil and housing sanitation, disease treatment and minor surgical procedures, the integration of maternal and child protection services (milk distribution, prenuptial and prenatal clinics, home birth assistance services, child welfare follow-up clinics), school hygiene, health and nutrition education and propaganda, and social work services. All these characteristics of health centers were presented as the answer to the challenges posed by a national territory characterized by a great diversity of climates, great extension, and low population density; and whose diseases and “economic-social problems” were therefore very varied. Furthermore, the central government’s establishment of contracts with regional governments and municipalities for the financial management of health centers ensured more effective and “harmonious” administration. This, it was argued, prevented money from being “spent capriciously” and avoided “duplication of services in the same locality.” ⁴⁷

In addition to the comprehensive services mentioned above, some health centers in small towns began to manage the school meal program launched by the central government in 1936. ⁴⁸ The aim of combining these two programs was to support the nutritional aspect of food assistance for schoolchildren and, more broadly, to reinforce the government’s goal of promoting rural development and increasing food production. Indeed, the school meal program was designed not only to provide food assistance, but also to improve living standards and transform rural life in an effective and economical way. The idea was that much of the food served in the canteens would be produced by the students themselves in so-called “school gardens.” The program designers hoped that, in this way, a large number of children would simultaneously improve their diet and learn about nutrition, modern agriculture, collective work, and cooperativism. They also hoped that the children would pass on what they had learned to their parents and the local community.

Darío Echandía, the Minister of Education who implemented the program, was very specific about the multiple objectives that were expected to be achieved. Speaking before the national congress, he assured them that the combination of the school canteen and garden “satisfactorily solve[d] several essential problems in Colombian life: The services provided promotes the physiological restoration of children and balances the proletarian economy; it promotes agricultural studies and familiarizes children with the land and its economic use; it modifies awareness of the value of work and the convenience of collective effort.” Additionally, the program would allow schoolchildren to “gain a practical understanding of how a production cooperative (collectively farmed plots) and a consumption cooperative (the school canteen itself) are organized and managed.” Thus, they could “understand the problems that regulate production and consumption (relations between the garden and the canteen), compare and appreciate the results of intensive and technical work (school garden) with the results of the primitive and empirical methods of the parental crop plot, which they will end up modifying with their new knowledge.” ⁴⁹

The Vacation School Colonies program

Alongside the implementation of the school meals, the central government launched another “multipurpose” program, largely intended as a laboratory to test and combine the goals of health centers and school meals in a single space. This was the Vacation School Colonies (VSC) program, which began operating as a pilot project in 1937 in the town of Usaquén, close to Bogotá, under the control and supervision of the central authorities. As with the health centers, the VSC’s administrative organization shared the program’s costs among the central, departmental, and municipal governments while maintaining a unified and integrated operating criterion.

The origins of VSCs date back to the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, where they were created as a space for active education in a rural environment for children from urban areas. These types of colonies quickly caught the interest of educators and physicians in Latin America, who began to sponsor them locally. Generally speaking, the VSCs in Latin America have been portrayed by historiography as institutions that offered “therapeutic treatment” for “weak” children during their school vacations, as well as active pedagogical experience through excursions and outdoor classes. ⁵⁰ However, the actual organization and operation of the VSCs in Colombia embodied a broader project within the state’s efforts to promote rural development and welfare.

In fact, the design of the Usaquén pilot colony differed from similar projects in other countries in the region in several ways. Firstly, the colony’s focus was on bringing together children from rural areas and small towns rather than from cities. Furthermore, its main objective was not only to improve children’s health and combat diseases such as tuberculosis. Particular attention was paid to instilling a “peasant culture” in the children, including a love of the countryside, community values, and modern agricultural practices. Although the Colombian government initially hired German and Spanish experts to advise on the project, it ultimately drew on the experience of privately created local colonies and the expertise of local rural education specialists. ⁵¹ Norberto Solano, the director of the pilot colony, was one of these experts and was responsible for giving the project a community-based rural development approach.

Prior to his appointment as director of the project, Solano had worked on school meal programs in his native region of Boyacá and advised the government on the creation of rural normal schools in 1934. ⁵² Solano believed that rural teachers needed to have a deep understanding of their students’ rural context in order to offer practical solutions to their agricultural problems. ⁵³ He defended the idea that it was necessary to implement an “elementary agricultural education” to teach peasant children “love of nature,” awaken their “awareness of rural social formation,” and instill in them values of “cooperation and collective action.” To improve the rural living conditions and create “close and strong bonds of solidarity between peasant groups,” Solano argued that a rural culture must be instilled to change the “actions, feelings, and thoughts of this social class.” ⁵⁴

As director of the pilot VSC in Usaquén, Solano attempted to implement these ideas. The colony took in boys and girls (separately) aged between eleven and fourteen from rural areas for a period of 3 months. As well as providing health services for the children (the colony had a full-time general practitioner and a nurse), the pilot colony placed great importance on agricultural education and rural culture. On the grounds of the colony, Solano had several stables built for different animals (chickens, milking cows, pigs, rabbits, goats, and pigeons), organized a vegetable garden, and prepared several fields for growing wheat, potatoes, and pastures. He also managed to obtain the support of the Granja Experimental de la Picota (a national institution for agricultural research and extension, near Bogotá) to supply animals and seeds and to advise them on modern farming techniques. Thanks to these facilities and technologies, the children were able to learn practical farming skills and reinforce their rural culture. Through their communal efforts, they were also able to contribute effectively to the colony’s functioning by selling some of the food they produced and using the rest to feed themselves. ⁵⁵

A key part of the VSC program was encouraging visiting children to share what they had learned and experienced during their time in the colony with their local relatives. Before leaving, the children completed a survey about what they had learned and their expectations for the future. When asked which colony activity they had enjoyed the most and which they would like to replicate at home, many of them indicated that they had enjoyed agricultural work and wanted to start home gardens. ⁵⁶ The aim was therefore to encourage rural adolescents to become agents of social change in their local communities. This strategy provided an effective and cost-efficient way to increase the state’s presence in rural Colombia, complementing the health center and school meal programs. Rather than building and staffing facilities in many locations, adolescents from many regions could be brought together in a single, well-equipped location to receive a comprehensive education and services relating to health, agriculture, and social organization. This was particularly relevant in rural areas, where secondary education was practically nonexistent (peasant children only received primary education until the age of nine). ⁵⁷

In this sense, the colony followed the same strategy as the school meals program in order to promote cooperativism and social change. It also served as a laboratory in which to observe how this strategy worked in practice and to implement improvements. One year after the pilot colony began operating, the school meal program had grown significantly and introduced a new element called “nutritional cooperatives.” Parents of schoolchildren and the children themselves would voluntarily contribute to the program by working on their own plots of land. The aim was to supplement the school meals and sell the surplus produce. The money raised was used to purchase meat, eggs, and sugar for the school canteen – foods that were uncommon in the children’s diets. ⁵⁸ In the 1940s, the “proper” functioning of the canteen, the school garden, and the nutritional cooperative – managed by the students themselves, albeit under teacher guidance – was presented as a mechanism that allowed students “not to receive food rations as a humiliation to their personality, but rather to give them or their parents the opportunity to contribute foodstuffs resulting from their farming work.” ⁵⁹

Pilot projects as training centers

Offering all these kinds of services required field workers with a variety of skills and knowledge, at a time when formal training for technical staff was still in its infancy. In Colombia, social work, health inspection, and agricultural extension were only just becoming institutionalized technical careers in the 1930s, and demand for them began to increase as rural development programs took hold. In the 1940s, there were around 200 health centers in Colombia, employing 300 physicians, 150 dentists, 300 social workers, and 600 health inspectors. ⁶⁰ For their part, fourteen colonies had been created, three supported entirely by the nation and eleven with additional aid from the departments and municipalities where they operated. ⁶¹ The largest colonies included in their permanent staff a director (educator), a physician, a dentist, a nurse, an administrator, two agricultural extensionists, a cook, and a delegate teacher (who accompanied the group of children arriving at the colony from a specific region). ⁶²

As a strategy to deal with this shortage of personnel, the pilot projects in Pereira and Usaquén took advantage of their own facilities and activities to train these types of grassroots workers. Although in the early 1930s a school for sanitary inspectors had been created in Bogotá with the help of the RF, it had ceased to function in 1935. ⁶³ Thus, the center in Pereira attempted to train its own health inspectors. This initial experience also laid the foundations for training social workers, a profession that did not exist in Colombia at the time. When Campo Posada was appointed director of the entire program of health centers in 1936, he drew up a detailed curriculum for “social visitors,” with the intention that the program itself would train the social workers it needed. ⁶⁴ This training was one of the precursors to the social work career that would begin in Colombia at the end of that decade. ⁶⁵

As the health center program expanded, it became evident that there was a lack of suitable health personnel to work in the program. Thus, in 1946, the National Director of Hygiene initiated steps for the creation of the Higher School of Hygiene and requested financial assistance from the RF. The justification given by its director, Jorge Bejarano, to the representatives of the RF was precisely that most of the personnel employed in the health centers lacked training in public health. At that time, it was decided that the health centers of Ibagué and La Dorada would be the places where the students at the new school would do their field work and practical training. ⁶⁶

For its part, the VSC of Usaquén was conceived as a kind of “rural normal school,” where teachers’ training in agricultural subjects and applied methodologies could be complemented. In its beginnings, this colony received sixth-year students from the Women’s Pedagogical Institute of Bogotá to do their internships there. The idea was also to train the teachers from the regions who accompanied the children they received. ⁶⁷ Solano’s experience as its director was central to the creation of new state programs on rural education over the next decade. In the early 1940s, he was appointed director of the agricultural vocational school in Duitama, his hometown, and later director of the Ministry of Education’s Department of Technical Education. There, he led the development of new programs for agricultural vocational education and education for rural women. ⁶⁸

Local origins of international community development

The network of experts and field workers involved in these local rural development projects, as well as the experiences gained from putting them into operation, interacted with various international technical assistance programs in health, agriculture, and education, helping to co-produce what in the 1950s became known as “community development.”

Both the specialized agencies of the United Nations (WHO, Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], and UNESCO) and the bilateral agreements between the United States and Latin American countries for technical cooperation in these areas took advantage of, and learned from, local experiences that sought to make efficient and ingenious use of the scarce human and material resources available.

Against the backdrop of World War II and growing concerns in the United States about the spread of Nazism in the Americas, the U.S. government established the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. This office administered the so-called “Servicios,” which involved joint planning and implementation of technical cooperation programs in health, agriculture, and education with countries in the region. This was a broad bilateral program, with resources and experts contributed by the United States and Latin American countries. ⁶⁹ Once the war was over, the servicios would be the core of the Point Four Program in Latin America. ⁷⁰ This program was officially launched by President H. Truman in 1949 with the intention of turning technical assistance into an international development policy in the context of the Cold War and the fight against the spread of communism. ⁷¹

In the Colombian case, three servicios were created: the Inter-American Cooperative Public Health Service (SCISP), in 1943; the Colombian American Agricultural Technical Service (STACA), in 1953; and the Colombian American Cooperative Education Service (SCECA), in 1958. ⁷² Clearly, these servicios did not reach a local context where there were no experts or programs in these fields already in place. In the case of health, for example, SCISP supported issues that were already priorities for the Ministry of Health. In addition to supporting the creation of the National Institute of Nutrition (in 1947) and deploying nutrition and health education programs in several regions, as well as campaigns against goiter, yaws, and malaria, the SCISP in Colombia took a special interest in health centers. After the first 10 years of work, it had built the facilities of four of them, directly operated two (called “model health centers” in the municipality of La Dorada in Caldas and in the Ricaurte neighborhood in Bogotá), and had collaborated in the operation of thirty other existing ones. ⁷³

Although the rhetoric of official U.S. reports presented them as something new and unique to international technical cooperation, the organization of these health centers did not differ greatly from what had originally been proposed for the Sanitary Units and Rural Commissions program a decade earlier:

The health center is the physical structure from which personal and environmental health services are made available to the people of a given community or area and is the focal point for the administration of these services. Significant advances in the development of health centers in Latin America have been made since the inauguration of the cooperative programs. The physician, the nurse, the statistician, the health educator, the social worker, the nutritionist and laboratory technician have all made their contributions. The health center idea has been so convincingly demonstrated that Latin American health administrators have quite generally accepted it. ⁷⁴

However, this same report – an extensive evaluation on the functioning of cooperative health programs throughout Latin America carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1952 – largely based its recommendations for future improvements on the ways in which some of these centers had been organized locally. This organization was founded on the same principles that had characterized the pilot projects developed by Colombian experts a decade earlier: to provide comprehensive health, education, and agricultural services, and to actively involve the communities receiving them. Indeed, the report noted that some of the local health centers provided “broader services than the traditional curative and preventive health services.” As an example, the 1952 report pointed to a center in Chile that had incorporated among its staff a representative of the Department of Agriculture, which conducted home garden programs and youth agricultural and home economics clubs to inculcate “the concepts of scientific farming and home making.” It appeared, the report continued, that “the interest of the people in the health program was greatly enhanced by the consideration and attention given by the health center to these auxiliary operations.” It was also emphasized that this concept of “community centers” had great merit and should be kept in mind for future programs. ⁷⁵

During the 1950s, the servicios in Latin America were administered by the Foreign Operations Administration (1953–5) and subsequently by the International Cooperation Administration (1955–61). In 1959, the latter agency categorized the “techniques of technical cooperation – how to approach problems of disease, illiteracy, and poverty and how to introduce simple skills and practices” – under the concept of “aided self-help.” ⁷⁶ Among this type of aid, the agency noted that for village dwellers it was particularly appropriate to “develop a grassroots program known as community development, which includes education, agriculture, and health, with organizational work in local government, the development of cooperatives, housing, and general village improvement.” ⁷⁷ The agency also stressed that the servicios initially developed in Latin America had played an important role in extending its technical cooperation foreign policy to other parts of the world:

In Latin America it was discovered that the best approach to joint projects was to set up a servicio, a special joint agency receiving financial support from both the United States and the host country and administered by personnel from both nations. . . . A servicio usually has charge of activities in only one particular field—health, education, agriculture, industry—so there may be several servicios in any particular country. In other areas of the world a variety of methods have been followed. Some joint agencies closely resemble the servicios. ⁷⁸

The assertion that servicios had been “discovered” in Latin America can be interpreted as meaning not only that the United States had launched technical cooperation projects in that region for the first time, but also that its experts had drawn on the knowledge and strategies of Latin American experts with extensive experience of designing and implementing state rural development projects in challenging conditions. For example, Norberto Solano, who directed the VSC in Usaquén in the late 1930s, had become an expert in peasant education with valuable experience both nationally and internationally. In addition to his appointment as Director of the Technical Education Department at the Colombian Ministry of Education in the 1940s, he was also one of the local advisers to the group of international experts sent by the World Bank to Colombia in 1949 to “formulate a development program designed to raise the standard of living of the Colombian people.” ⁷⁹ From this position, he undoubtedly influenced the way in which the agricultural servicio was designed and implemented in Colombia in 1953.

Indeed, the World Bank mission to Colombia (the first one sent to Latin America), led by Canadian economist and key architect of the American New Deal Lauchlin Currie, recognized the “invaluable” “help given us by the technical staff furnished both by the Colombian Government and the Banco de la Republica.” ⁸⁰ Among these technicians were experts such as Héctor Abad Gómez, a social doctor and promoter of health centers, and the educator Solano. ⁸¹ Thus, in addition to Currie’s experience in designing the New Deal and his interest in promoting social welfare, it is clear that the mission drew on local experience in the fields of education, health, and agriculture for its recommendations. It was therefore not surprising that when the Vice-President of the World Bank read the report, he reacted by saying, “Damn it, Lauch, we can’t go messing around with education and health. We’re a bank!” ⁸²

Although the local context of political instability and violence in the 1950s significantly slowed down the expansion and consolidation of many of the recommendations in Currie’s report, it was certainly a catalyst for the creation in 1953 of the bilateral agreement for U.S. technical cooperation in the field of agriculture, the aforementioned Colombian American Agricultural Technical Service (STACA). This servicio began its operations in Colombia with a pilot project focusing on rural education and agricultural extension in Boyacá, Solano’s home region. ⁸³ The similarities between this project and those Solano had directed were evident. It was a participatory educational project for rural adolescents and adults (both men and women), aiming to teach them modern agricultural and hygiene practices, home economics, and how to improve their homes and plots of land. ⁸⁴ A central element of the project was the creation of 4-H clubs (Head–Heart–Hands–Health) for adolescents. These clubs, which included community gardens, were intended to promote “learning by doing,” “fostering a collaborative spirit,” “awakening and nurturing a love of rural life and nature,” and encouraging “volunteer leadership” in rural communities. ⁸⁵ The project also aimed to provide training in agricultural extension and social work for local officials, with the intention of then replicating the program in other regions of the country. ⁸⁶

The approaches and strategies of bilateral technical cooperation services in health, agriculture, and education were very similar to the “Fundamental Education” and “Community Development” programs promoted by the United Nations’ specialized agencies in the 1950s. In effect, these programs aimed to implement small-scale projects that required the active involvement of local communities, the development of demonstrative actions, and the encouragement of participants to replicate what they had learned in their immediate environment. These initial projects were also intended to train local technical personnel, enabling the programs to be expanded at a later stage. ⁸⁷ As with Servicios, it is possible to establish links between the design of these multilateral programs and the knowledge and experience of several Latin American experts who have worked on developing health, education, and agricultural systems in their own countries. UNESCO’s Fundamental Education Program is an excellent example of these connections.

From its inception, this agency has had a clear mandate for international cooperation and for building global networks of experts for the design and implementation of its programs. ⁸⁸ In 1950, the agency stated that it was “particularly well equipped to deal with the complicated problems of education in the under-developed areas because it has, during the last five years, developed techniques for what has come to be known as fundamental education.” ⁸⁹ This experience had begun in 1946, when UNESCO’s secretariat asked experts from across the world to help prepare the basic document that would be presented at the agency’s first General Conference to launch its Fundamental Education program. Among these experts were renowned educators Agustín Nieto Caballero of Colombia and Elena Torres of Mexico. ⁹⁰ During the 1930s, Nieto Caballero was one of the advocates in the Ministry of Education for the Vacation School Colony pilot project to become a national policy. ⁹¹ For her part, Torres had been actively involved in a similar rural development project in Mexico called “Cultural Missions,” which aimed to raise living standards among peasants and indigenous communities by offering educational, health, and agricultural services, including food production cooperatives. ⁹²

The Cultural Missions program was first launched in Mexico by the Minister of Public Education, José Vasconcelos, in the early 1920s. One of Vasconcelos’ main collaborators and continuator of his educational policies was Jaime Torres Bodet, who would be appointed in 1949 as director general of UNESCO. For him, Fundamental Education was the central technique to deploy international technical assistance from a “human” approach, which should be “closely linked with a corresponding effort to guide peoples towards and active and intelligent participation in the shaping on their own destiny as they themselves see it.” ⁹³

Torres Bodet also believed in an “Integral Pan-Americanism,” a “system which, respecting the personality of each country, its culture, its laws and customs, establishes political solidarity in a well-drawn juridical structure and raises economic solidarity on the desire for each community to realize itself and progress rapidly.” ⁹⁴ One of his key allies for this Pan-Americanism was Colombian educator Guillermo Nannetti, member of the Executive Board of UNESCO and Director of the Division of Education of the Organization of American States (OAS). He was a strong advocate of the valuable knowledge and experiences that Latin American experts could offer to the educational aspects of international technical assistance. As he stressed in 1950, “the organization of American States is in reality a great institute of Fundamental Education which has sixty years of constructive experience. . . . all these [Inter-American agencies] have been forerunners in one vast campaign of technical assistance in the cardinal fields of Fundamental Education.” ⁹⁵

In the early 1940s, Nannetti was Colombia’s Minister of Education. There, he strongly supported rural education programs such as vacation school colonies, agricultural vocational schools, and home economics schools for rural women. ⁹⁶ These were programs in which the educator Solano played a key role, as we have seen. In an important sense, the idea that Latin American states had in fact been “forerunners” of international community development was not mere institutional rhetoric, but the materialization of a series of valuable experiences that had attempted to inculcate in a practical and participatory way issues of agriculture, health, and social organization to young and adult peasants.

Conclusions

The Colombian rural development pilot projects of the 1930s studied in this paper expand our understanding of the role played by Latin American states and their networks of experts in designing and deploying international development programs and techniques. While certainly fraught with problems and failures, and susceptible to multiple criticisms, these projects attempted integral, participatory, and situated approaches to the problems they were trying to solve. Although the real intentions of the designers of these types of projects for rural development are difficult to ascertain, the characteristics of their implementation and operation reflect strategies and techniques that would become characteristic of international community development programs in the following decades. The idea of developing pilot projects before rolling out broader, more ambitious programs, and using these projects to train the necessary personnel, is a clear example of this. Even if only to optimize scarce resources, these pilot projects sought to intervene in various aspects of rural life jointly and coordinately, while encouraging the active participation of their target audiences to enhance and multiply the changes they wanted to bring about. By attempting to empower local communities to promote and manage the actions necessary to improve their own living conditions, a central strategy of international community development was taking shape: “helping others to help themselves.” ⁹⁷

The experiences gained by local experts designing and implementing such rural development programs provided valuable methodologies for the international agencies that in the 1950s would engage in technical cooperation in health, agriculture, and education. These Latin American experts and their regional networks managed to integrate effectively into the institutional architecture for international development created after the Second World War. At least in the early 1950s, their expertise and local experience seemed to be quite relevant to the programs that these institutions were beginning to design and implement. However, the traditional historical narratives of international development tend to assume an apparent passivity and lack of valuable experience on the part of recipient countries (and their networks of experts) and a totalizing and seamless power scheme in the processes of conception and implementation of development models in the Global South by the Global North.

These works on international development tend to base their historical material on the central archives of the international institutions involved and on their official reports. This leads to a reproduction of a rhetoric of novelty, which tells us more about the efforts to legitimize these organizations’ services in recipient countries than it does about a supposed local institutional and scientific vacuum. Perhaps the same totalizing idea of the “Third World” (or Global South, as we would call it today) and the Anglo-Saxon predominance of connecting the Cold War with the processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia tends to make invisible the fact that at the beginning of the Cold War, most Latin American states had been in the making for more than a century and that, however unsuccessful they may have been, at least since the 1930s they had made efforts to build a bureaucratic apparatus of intervention for economic development and the welfare state. Without taking into account these institutional trajectories and networks of local experts, as well as the day-to-day functioning of the policies and programs deployed – and the agency of the field workers involved – it is impossible to advance more symmetrical, connected, and complex narratives of health, agriculture, education, technical cooperation and international relations, without, of course, ignoring the unequal power relations involved.