The State and the Shantytown: Comparing Informal Urban Settlement Policies in 20th-Century Mexico and Colombia

While Mexico underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization in the mid- to late-twentieth century, the federal government adopted ad-hoc measures that legalized some squatter communities by expropriating land from both private and communal village owners. In addition to the expropriations, the state implemented a longer-term strategy to create a corporatist organization for squatters that could oversee the regularization of their exisiting communities and the creation of new developments for future waves of settlement. Conditions for the rise of squatter communities in Colombia in the same period partially reflected those in Mexico, although there rural violence combined with industrialization to drive millions of peoples from the countryside and into urban areas. Once congregated on the fringes of cities, Colombia’s internal refugees employed strategies similar to those used by Mexican squatters as both groups carried out “land invasions” and then replicated patterns of communal organization that had formerly structured their home villages. Moreover, Colombian squatters, like those in Mexico, frequently battled to hold their turf, and if the initial “invasion” proved successful and they succeeded to occupy the land against an owner’s or a municipality’s wishes, they could then expect a regimen of harassment from police and/or paramilitary forces to dislodge them.

This research paper assesses documents produced by the Mexican Secretariat of Social Development and the Colombian Ministry of Urban and Territorial Housing during the period 1958-1982 to yield a comparative understanding of those nations’ objectives in the development of highly marginalized urban areas and the political incorporation of their inhabitants. Ultimately, this analysis exposes how the Mexican and Colombian states’ distinct responses to the urban settlement crises, similarly or divergently attempted to institutionalize relations with the marginal urban poor, and how these tacks were successful or unsuccessful in those nations’ missions to turn squatters into reliable sources of political support.