By Rodrigo Uprimny, EL ESPECTADOR
“Borrar al Campesino”, Opinion, El Espectador, September 13, 2026
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
This week the Minister of Agriculture, Indalecio Dangond, told the Congress that the administration plans to call the campesinos “small businesses of the countryside” because the word “campesino” seems to them “deprecatory”. I hereby point out six reasons why this attempt to erase the campesinos is intolerable. I’m essentially agreeing here with the thinking of the researchers Javier Revello, Marta Saade, and Carlos Quesada of La Silla Vacía, Carlos Duarte on X, and Francisco Gutiérrez at this newspaper.
First, because the word campesino is not deprecatory. Several DANE surveys show that more than 25% of Colombians more than 15 years old (more than 11 million people) identify themselves as campesinos. If it were such a deprecatory word, why would so many people adhere to that identity voluntarily? The disdain for being campesino seems to be with the Minister and not with the word.
Second, for its statistical implications. In 2018, the main campesino organizations, with the support of Dejusticia, filed a civil rights action so that the reality of being campesino would be incorporated in the DANE’s measurements. The slogan of the initiative was: “So that the campesinos will have to be counted”. The Supreme Court agreed in its Decision STP2028-2018 and ended the statistical invisibility of the campesinos, but that might return: If the campesinos now cannot be named, how will the DANE measure their situation?
Third, because it’s legally unacceptable. Article 64 of the Constitution explicitly recognizes the campesinos as people with rights, with special constitutional protection and orders that there be a budget tracking system, a technical instrument to measure the government’s fiscal efforts to assure the campesinos’ rights. For its part, in 2018 the United Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Campesinos where it recognizes them as people with rights. How then could the administration eliminate a word, a concept, and a budget tracking system, that has explicit legal foundation?
Fourth, because it’s a conceptual error. The Constitution, the United Nations Declaration, and a concept elaborated for the ICANH (Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History) by experts on the subject all agree that campesinos are legal persons with rights that have multiple dimensions: productive, territorial, environmental, cultural, and organizational. The administration is trying to ignore the quality of campesinos as people with these rights and the multidimensional richness of their world, and reduce the to a unit of production defined by its size: small business.
Fifth, because it’s an injustice in terms of memory: the Commission Investigating the Truth demonstrated that the campesinos were the principal victims of our armed conflict. Erasing that word is trying erase the massive victimization suffered by the campesinos.
Sixth, because of its political impact: erasing the campesinos from the language is ignoring that they are persons with rights who merit special protection in agrarian policy. The risk (or the purpose?) would be putting an end to agrarian reform, which is provided for in the Peace Agreement and was promoted by the previous administration. We would be returning to the anti-campesino prejudice that was part of agricultural policy. So it’s not casual that the Minister’s declaration coincides with the administration’s communication policy as revealed by La Silla Vacía, which orders administration officials to abstain from speaking, not only about “campesinos”, but also about “agrarian reform”.
We could be going back to the injustice of the Chicoral Pact of 1972, which blocked agrarian reform and revived the armed conflict.