With the Post-WW2 Marshall Plan safely preserving Western Europe, the emerging economic development circus turned its attention to Colombia and took up residence in Bogota’s luxury hotels. Colombia and all South America must be saved. The experts would give their expert help to help the poor.
They assumed that all poor countries were the same. A plan for Colombia would be as appropriate as plan for Papua New Guinea. This was the new, enlightened colonialism of the West.
Juan Alberdi and Hernan Olozaga were among the earlier (late 1800s) Colombian leaders who helped their beautiful homeland reach middle-income status, exceeding Portugal, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. They had used an organic, bottom-up approach that relied on the local people and their ways. The invading experts considered this irrelevant. In fact, Colombia, they said, was poor and needy.
The development community’s technocrats were confident that their expertise and good intentions could be relied on to help nations (regardless of their presidents, dictators, cultures, or trends) ease poverty, increase literacy and education, and improve health. Noble ideas. Top-down ideas always work.
The Events of April 9, 1948. As William Easterly tells this story, the fatal day saw three very significant events: two were the founding of Western institutions for Latin America and Colombia, and the other was a political assassination which the haughty experts ignored as the ‘riff’ fighting it out with the ‘raff.’
The World Bank President inaugurated the development plan for Colombia, citing a 950-page study that demonstrated that Colombia, far from being a middle-income nation, was in reality beset by shortages of food, clothing, and housing. Colombia was destitute, sick, and ignorant. Upon this ‘blank slate’ of poverty, the good people of the West, supported by the World Bank, would surely fix everything.
▪ On the same day, the Organization of American States was founded in Bogota. This organization, like the World Bank and the development community, was designed to keep Latin America under the benevolent care of the West. George Marshall, of the Marshall Plan, was on hand. A big day.
▪ On the very same day, a lone gunman assassinated Jorge Gaitan, a popular political leader who had built a coalition with conservative President Ospina. His assassination led to La Violencia, which raged for 15 years, taking the lives of 400,000 Colombians and leading to a parade of short-term ‘presidents’. The westerners, occupied with health, housing, and literacy, did not lift a finger to help the troubled nation.
The development community was not interested in local politics. They failed to recognize that those Colombian political players were interested in getting their hands on the World Bank money. In fact, the World Bank liked working with strong and autocratic leaders who could get things done to ‘help the poor.’
Easterly uses words like ‘racist’ and ‘colonial’ to describe these actions. The old, successful leaders were of no interest to the smart architects of the economic development community. They could not imagine that any local experts could emerge with better ideas. What could be more obvious than that the World Bank’s economic development community could impose their fine technocratic ideas on the blank slate of Colombia (Are we in Colombia this week?). These people saw themselves as the good, the right, and the true.
Certainly, they would be effective. Right? They were wrong. Albert Hirschman, a World Bank architect, wrote later confessing their blindness in helping Colombia. They had dismantled what was working well enough, chose to work with autocrats, and treated poor people as pawns in a plan for economic and social engineering. Today we think of Colombia as struggling to emerge from its FARC/drug cartels image.
We may not have thought of the liberal West’s efforts to help the Developing Nations as failing and racist, but this is what misguided benevolence on a global scale looks like, and it was led by the anti-market experts of the Left. Colombia is just one example; Detroit, until recently, is another.
Easterly has devoted his book, The Tyranny of Experts (Basic Books, 2013, Ch 5) to exposing this harmful arrogance. This Perspective summarizes his argument.