The hacendado is a man of progress, which for him is synonymous with unrestricted access to a ‘free’ labour supply, better roads, cheap railways, and free exports. He is Europe-centric. His desire is to impose civilization in the hollows of the Andes, through growing coffee. He was once a capitalist entrepreneur, but he became an ‘oligarch’ – in the Colombian social meaning, not the wider political meaning of the term. He got land and credit, and did business on the bases of trust and honour, business in which family and social relationships and political contacts were often all-important. The family, the politico-social connection, sends out its pioneers. Once the haciendas are founded, the commission agents of foreign houses appear and offer funds at low interest and secure market for the product. If he is a Liberal, he emphasizes his faith in the common cause of international capitalism, rebaptizing his properties with names like Java, Ceilán, Costa Rica, Brasil, Liberia, Arabia, remote countries which had also ascended, or were ascending, through coffee in the scale of a universal civilization.

But the internal structure of the hacienda was far from capitalist. It rested on colonial origins. The coffee hacienda as an economic and social construct, as the concrete expression of relations between the hacendado – urban in his origins and vocation – and the peasant, is the subject of this chapter. The background is a country which at the same time is developing two defining characteristics: it is gradually becoming a monoexporting economy, and outside the coffee sector the latifundio – in cattle, sugar, and bananas – is expanding and consolidating.