Land Grabbing In Colombia

Ruben Leiva-Montoya EDS201 John-Andrew McNeish 05th of September 2011 Displacement and ‘Land Grabbing’ in Colombia

According to the figures published by UNHCR – ACNUR1 by the end of 2008 Colombia had the biggest number of internal displacements in the world (UNHCR, 2011). Around 4.3 million people were forcefully displaced from more than 6 million hectares. “This humanitarian crisis andsubstantial counter-agrarian reform, which has not stopped nor been reversed despite recent state projects for victims’ reparation, is rooted in the complex dynamics of the country’s history of unequal access to land and its long lasting armed conflict” (Ojeda, 2011). Land grabbing in Colombia is motivated mainly by economic gain, this is the main reason in which illegal armed forces are always fightingto get more and more land titles every day. The main purpose of this essay is to try to prove that Colombian population is not resilient to changes generated by conflict, mainly concerning land grabbing and displacement. Accordingly, the following piece of work will be subdivided in two main parts. On the first one, there will be a short briefing about Colombia’s land grabbing history of almost acentury so that the reader can get a clear picture of the situation. Here it will be unveiled that the country’s population is completely vulnerable to this issue. On the next part, a possible solution will be exposed. A new law just implemented by the Colombian government in which its main purpose is attention, assistance and reparation to victims of internal armed conflict and to return landsto their rightful owners (Law 1448 of 20112). Finally, some brief conclusions of this essay will be set.

1

UNHCR: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In Spanish ACNUR: Alto Comisionado de las

Naciones Unidas para los Refugiados.
2

Law No. 1448 - which dictates measures of attention, assistance and reparations to victims of internal

armed conflict and other provisions[Colombia], Law No. 1448, 10 June 2011, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4df7289d2.html [accessed 1 September 2011]

1

More than a century of Land Grabbing Since the foundation of Colombia the land issue has always been there. The problem of who has right to the land is latent all the time and has been the centre of conflicts for over a hundred years. Access to land in Colombiahas been the axis of armed conflict throughout time. During the second decade of 20th century there were some struggles for land in the central region of the country. Almost 40 years later, around 1960, in those same places where the people had social issues concerning land owners the guerrillas started to appear (Villa, 2006). On the document that states the constitution of FARC guerrillas itonly speaks about agrarian reform. Land also became a strategic spoil for the drug cartels around the 80s, who used them as roads to smuggle, for money laundering and as status symbol. The paramilitaries not only appeared to defend land grabbers from guerrilla’s strikes, [from the late 90s] they also started to take as many land and farms as they liked. The problem is that each new conflict and itscharacters seem to evolve into more extreme and cruel types of violence every time. “In less than three decades (from around 1980 to 2010), narcoparamilitarism triggered an agrarian counter-reform that annulated any effort made by the past governments on this issue”(Codhes, 2008). Inequality in Colombia is higher each time. According to official data, the percentage of land in the hands of majorland owners has doubled and land grabbing has made displacement situation in the country one of the worse humanitarian crises on the planet. In figures, this is dreadful: “farms bigger than 500 hectares were 32% of total rural land in Colombia, today they are around 62% and they belong to only 4% of the total of rural land owners, and on the other side, one of four small farmers were expropriated...