The Communist Youth in Colombia, 1930-1949: between the popular front and the mass front

Abstract

The Colombian Communist Youth (JUCO) is the youth organization of the Colombian Communist Party (PCC), and among its objectives is to organize the youth sectors and form the future leadership of the Party. It is believed that the JUCO, with its current forms and objectives, was founded in 1932, just two years after the creation of the PCC. However, the JUCO did not begin to form until the late 1940s and took its current organizational form throughout the 1950s. But this does not mean that during its early years the PCC did not have some youth organization. Between the 1930s and 1940s several communist youth organizations appeared as predecessors of the JUCO, although the bulk of these were not conceived as an auxiliary organization of the PCC, but mainly to implement the popular front policy. The party leadership maintained an ambiguous position regarding youth work during the first years of the PCC, since within the organization the relationship between youth and working class was not entirely clear, so that the tasks of organizing the proletariat ended up displacing the organizational efforts of the youth. This is understandable if we consider that during this period Colombia was a mostly rural country in which access to education was still restricted to sectors of the social elite. This article proposes a study of the first communist youth organizations in Colombia based on an unpublished documentary collection, which has allowed us to observe early aspects of the history of the PCC such as the debates on its popular front policy and the ways in which it was implemented, or its characterization of Colombian society in a changing period.