Prominence and Community Impact of the ANUC in Quinchía, Risaralda (1967-1980)

Abstract

The National Farmer Association (ANUC, by its acronym in Spanish) in Quinchía, Risaralda, was pivotal for the subsistence farmer struggles in western Colombia between 1967 and 1980. However, this significance is neither highlighted nor valued in traditional academic analyses, which focus more on understanding its organisational events in the Colombian Caribbean. This regional history study traces the prominence and crisis of the ANUC’s organisational trajectory in this municipality, drawing on accounts from pioneers of this organisational experience in the Quinchía area. The analysis utilises regional press from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the ANUC database from CINEP. It demonstrates that the ANUC’s trajectory in the Risaralda context is connected with associative energies from the village level, linked with the liberal legacies of its inhabitants and cooperative farmer ideologies, which later entered into crisis due to clientelistic practices, political dogmatisms, and pacification policies.