Taking the pulse of population growth.

• Author: Werner, Louis

In Colombia, Profamilia's contributions to family planning and reduction of population growth have made it a leader worlwide

Among South American nations, Colombia has some of the earliest evidence of human settlement--stone flakes from the El Abra rock shelter and a mastodon-butchering site at Tibito, near Bogota, dating back 12,500 and 11,750 years respectively--as well as the continent's most complete colonial population records. It seems only fitting, then, that the country should also be home to Profamilia, the hemisphere's leading private organization concerned with population issues.

In Colombia, where demographic matters are debated in the most open and practical terms, credit for this, as well as for the rapid decline in population growth, the great concern for women's health, and the key role in national development played by family planning services, are due to the efforts of this nonprofit group, the Association for the Well-being of the Colombian Family (Asociacion Pro-Bienestar de la Familia Colombiana), known by its Spanish acronym, Profamilia.

The Colombian population growth rate has been on a roller-coaster ride since before the Spanish conquest. Situated at the far end of the land bridge across which came South America's first human settlers, Colombia was the site of the first significant population centers. But after European arrival, and owing to disease, slavery, and warfare, the area's roughly one hundred native chiefdoms declined rapidly from their total population size at contact, estimated by eminent Colombian historian German Colmenares at as high as 3 million. One of the higher estimates for South America's population in 1492 is 49 million, and double that figure for the Western Hemisphere.

The technical problem of colonial population estimates has been solved in Colombia because of its nearly complete records of tributaries, or native male heads of household obliged to pay tribute to the Crown. By multiplying the number of tributaries by an average household size, the native population can be estimated. Where these records exist in periodic intervals, the drop-off in numbers is staggering.

For example, Tunja Province, some sixty miles northeast of Bogota, is unique in having complete censuses, not just tributary counts, which allows historians to track a precipitous decline in hard numbers. The population in 1564 stood at 168,440, by 1636 fell to 44,691, and in 1755 reached a low of 24,950. Working backwards and assuming a smooth rate of decrease, the population in 1537, the year of Tunja's conquest, would have been near 283,000, meaning the population had dropped by more than 90 percent in just two hundred years.

Evidence of population drop-off is also found in Colombian architecture. Franciscan churchs in the early colonial period had open air chapels to accommodate overflow Indian congregations, but by the end of the sixteenth century they were built smaller and fully enclosed, not because Indians stopped going to church, but rather because their numbers had been so greatly decimated.

The...