Caught in the middle
Colombia is pitting two vulnerable groups against each other. At stake is the Amazon, report Samantha Schmidt and Diana Durán.
Luis Eduardo Tijaro walked down the dirt path to the land where he had invested his life’s savings. He strolled past his cattle, grazing on bright green pasture; by the small wooden house with the papaya tree towering over his wife’s garden; and up to the creek where his 11-year-old son waded.
Their rural community, in Montebello, an isolated corner of the Amazon once controlled by Colombia’s largest rebel group, is at least two hours from the closest town. The family of four arrived here six years ago, on the back of a motorbike, carrying one suitcase.
Theirs was a uniquely Colombian story, a family hit by opposing sides of the country’s conflict: he had been forced from his home by government-backed paramilitaries; she had been displaced by rebel fighters. But when they moved here, the country was on the cusp of peace.
They found a patch of nearly 75 hectares of cheap, rich soil in the Montebello community. They built a home, a farm, a fresh start.
The family had no idea the land was part of a protected reservation for an indigenous community displaced by guerrillas a decade earlier. A community that objected to the farmers’ practice of clearing the rainforest for cattle and crops.
After the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) left the jungle and signed a peace deal with the government, indigenous families launched a legal fight to protect their land.
Now Tijaro and his family fear they will be forced to leave their home yet again. ‘‘We’d have to start over from zero,’’ he says.
Half a decade after Colombia’s historic peace accords, an essential source of stability – land – continues to drive conflict here.
The country’s long-running failure to define who owns what land, and to record the limits of protected areas, has left an opening for desperate farmers such as Tijaro to buy property they’re not supposed to own.
In the peace deal, signed five years ago, the government agreed to distribute land titles, in part to prevent such disputes. But delays in fulfilling that promise are pitting vulnerable populations against each other.
‘‘It’s not up to us or the farmers to resolve this conflict. It is up to the state,’’ said Alexander Bocanegra, an indigenous leader here. ‘‘If not, our territory will be wasted. And if we return, people could die.’’
Restoring land
Land lies at the core of conflict in Colombia. The South American nation has one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world. The top 1 per cent of landowners own nearly 43 per cent of rural land. The small-holding farmers, who produce half of the food consumed in Colombia, own just 4.8 per cent of productive land.
About half of rural parcels in Colombia lack a title, making it difficult for farmers to access loans, invest in land, pass property on to their children or defend territory stolen by armed groups.
Land was a key reason the Farc took up arms in the 1960s, igniting the 52-year civil war. And yet the conflict only made matters worse: about 6.5 million hectares were stolen by armed groups on all sides. Millions of families were forced off their land, creating one of the largest internally displaced populations in the world.
The first point in the accords focuses on land: formalising titles for 7m hectares, creating a fund for landless farmers and setting up a registry to record the ownership and use of all property.
‘‘This would take care of many of the problems we have had for decades in the rural areas,’’ said Juan Manuel Santos, president of Colombia during the peace negotiations. ‘‘It was the easiest and the fastest point in the agenda that we agreed upon with the Farc.’’
But it’s been one of the slowest for the government to implement.
President Ivan Duque said his administration has demonstrated a ‘‘clear commitment’’ to land reform. In an interview with The
he said he aimed to register 50,000 land titles by December, and had created a road map to update records for
50 per cent of Colombia’s land, the ‘‘essence of any rural reforms’’.
But critics doubt he will reach those goals, and say his administration has exaggerated its progress. As of August, only 15 per cent of the national territory had been included in the land registry, according to the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, an official monitor of the peace accord implementation. The peace deal called for the creation of a special agrarian jurisdiction to resolve land conflicts, but congress has not approved the law to establish it.
The Duque administration says it has put more than 1.2m hectares in the land fund. But only 2 per cent has been confirmed to be unoccupied, Colombia’s inspector general’s office reported in August.
The US Agency for International Development has spent at least US$160m to support land formalisation, delivering 11,000 titles so far.
Meanwhile, violence has continued to grow. Farc dissident groups, led by rebels who have rejected the peace deal, and paramilitary groups are terrorising and displacing communities. From January to July, internal displacement rose by 167 per cent over the same