Colombia’s new president needs to tilt his country to the left. It will be easy.
Research beyond rural mobilization efforts is helping this new land-use bankruptcy in Colombia. means of pressuring the government to implement new land policies. However, the backlash of paramilitary teams in collusion with personal landowners erased land occupations from the toolbox of rural movements during the civil war.
Land policies failed and rural citizens fought back
Seeking to deter land conflicts and incipient insurgency, President Alberto Lleras-Camargo created national settlements to replace land policy through the 1961 agrarian law. After that decade, the administration of President Carlos Lleras-Restrepo strengthened these settlements and encouraged peasants to participate in the implementation of new land policies. However, wealthy Colombian landowners and farm animal breeders have worked with coalitions in Congress to derail those efforts and have bribed local officials to prevent implementation.
Disappointed by the damage to land redistribution, ANUC – the largest peasant movement of the time – coordinated a crusade of agrarian professions in the early 1970s. In the north of the Cordoban arm, for example, dozens of peasant families have settled in huts belonging to 30 personal haciendas (or haciendas).
The aim of the peasants to pressure the government to fulfill the promises of land redistribution. Similar episodes occurred across the country. By the end of the year, Colombian officials had recorded 645 professional events. The political and economic elites of the 1970s denounced such “land invasions” as a risk to economic development.
In some cases, rural communities have been granted official titles to occupied land. But elite demands led to a radical shift in land policy, which crystallized into an agreement between the government and elites known as the “Chicoral Pact,” signed in January. 1972: Land policies now in economic expansion on a more equitable distribution of rural assets.
Colombia elections may be the fate of the peace agreement
Importantly, the Chicoral Pact helped legitimize government repression against peasants, indigenous peoples, and Afro-Colombians mobilizing for land rights, while paramilitary teams violently evicted rural communities from newly allocated lands. Unresolved land claims have also exacerbated political conflict, violence and displacement. The findings of Colombia’s Truth Commission, a body created through the 2016 peace agreement, report that local alliances of paramilitary teams, landowning elites and the national army have carried out counter-agrarian efforts, fatal violence against peasant communities.
Is there a political push for land redistribution today?
Echoing the mobilizations of the 1970s, indigenous, peasant and Afro-Colombian movements have seized vast tracts of land in recent months. For example, in Colombia’s northern component of Cesar, peasant movements are questioning ownership of land purchased through corporations after paramilitary forces drove out local farmers in the mid-2000s.
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Similarly, in southwestern Colombia, in Cauca, land occupations have exposed long-standing conflicts between indigenous peoples and the sugarcane industry. In addition to the conflict, tensions have arisen between Afro-Colombians who do not have an easy right to work, and peasant and indigenous communities who mobilize to claim land ownership. These conflicts have their roots in widespread wealth inequality in Cauca, where the Gini land index, a measure of the source of income inequality ranging from 0 (low) to 1 (high), has reached 0. 9.
In recent months, farm animal herders and opposition leaders have responded to land occupations in a way that bears a striking resemblance to the movements of surveillance teams, a reaction that fueled violence against peasant communities in the decades of armed confrontation that ended with the 2016 peace. Will they now locate the other tactical engagement moves?Unlike the 1970s, Colombia today has institutional frameworks to deal with the atrocities of war and is better able to implement redistributive policies, adding land redistribution.
Aware of the interplay of land conflicts and violence, the national government appears to be taking steps to deliver on its promises to end land conflicts and mitigate inequalities. intensify the redistribution of rural land. The government’s plan aims to return land to landless communities through prioritizing negotiation over protest.
Of course, the Petro administration’s plans have drawn some criticism. Some politicians have criticized the government’s willingness to negotiate with sectors that collude with paramilitary groups. Others expressed fear of the accidental consequences of shifting resources to already wealthy landowning elites through land purchases. However, as long as the agreement prioritizes access to land for landless communities and diminishes the dissenting voices of Colombia’s hardline landowners, it can help Colombia’s long-standing inequalities and continue on the path to peace.
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Laura García-Montoya (@LauraGarciaMo) is an Assistant Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and Assistant Professor of Economics at Universidad del Rosario.
Isabel Güiza-Gómez (@IsabelGuiza) is a PhD candidate in Political Science and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.