The Hindu : Land-grab woes

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Thursday, Jan 22, 2004

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Land-grab woes

By Juan Forero

Leaders of the paramilitaries in Colombia, with whom the Government is negotiating demobilisation, are quietly laundering drug money by grabbing huge tracts of land.

IT WAS a breathtakingly beautiful spread, 6,000 acres for cattle and crops on one of southern Colombia's most fertile plains, and the family that owned it had no plans to move. But when, late last year, shadowy men arrived and proposed a sale — and set a bargain-basement price — the owners felt it was an offer they could not refuse, said one of the family members, asking for anonymity.

The buyers, after all, were paramilitary bullies, swaggering, armed members of one of Colombia's right-wing armies, who, along with drug traffickers, have been gobbling up land across Colombia, either by forcing farmers off their plots or using intimidation to prod owners to sell.

"You have to give it up or they will kill you or kidnap you," said an urbane Bogota intellectual, a member of the family that lost the farm. "You take what they offer and that is it. What can you do?"

President Alvaro Uribe's Government, with strong support from the Bush administration, is tackling urgent security problems designed to give the state control of its historically lawless countryside. Talks aimed at disarming right-wing paramilitary squads, an anti-guerrilla movement long involved in drug trafficking, are advancing, and American-financed spraying efforts are hitting coca fields hard. A top commander of the left-wing rebels is under arrest.

But partly as a result of these successes, an older, festering crime at the root of Colombia's 40-year conflict is stepping up — the illegal seizure of Colombia's most fertile land, according to United Nations officials, land experts in the government and human rights groups. Leaders of the 15,000-member paramilitary force, with whom the Government is negotiating demobilisation, are quietly laundering accumulated drug money by taking control of huge tracts, often at the point of a gun. Most of the victims are poor, voiceless farmers but the officials say even some big landowners have lost their prized farms.

The only solution, say diplomats and land use experts, is an aggressive effort to root out corrupt owners, return stolen property to the rightful owners and parcel out untitled land to the landless. Land reform, as it is called, may sound like an outmoded 1960s-era ideal in a country that appears to have land to spare. Colombia, after all, is twice the size of France, and the majority of its 40 million people live in towns and cities.

But Colombia remains a nation rooted in agriculture, with 2 million people displaced by conflict and in need of a place to live. The country has long been destabilised by lawlessness in the countryside, which drives a never-ending stream of impoverished farmers off the land and into the cities, where they live as internal refugees in shantytowns that breed crime and violence.

"The land problem is at the centre of the armed conflict in Colombia," said Jorge Rojas, a leading advocate for refugees. "And the armed conflict is Colombia's principal problem."

The Government's own estimation of who controls Colombia's land is sobering: 40 per cent of the best lands are in the hands of drug traffickers, including paramilitary forces.

Of Colombia's arable land — an area equivalent in size to North Dakota — only about 20 per cent is even used for agriculture. Various studies also show that Colombia's farms are increasingly consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, with 30 per cent of property owners controlling about 95 per cent of the best lands.

And it is not just drug traffickers. Scores of wealthy families control large tracts but produce nothing and employ no one — holding land simply to sell it when the price is high.

It is obvious what Colombia needs to do. It already has a far-reaching asset forfeiture law passed in 1996, and the Government is now in control of a collection of properties equivalent in size to the state of Rhode Island, said Luis Alfonso Plazas, director of the Government's anti-narcotics office. The President has told judges to be swift about seizing illegally obtained properties, and officials insist they will crack down on the paramilitary groups.

"All those lands can be expropriated by the state," Luis Carlos Restrepo, Mr. Uribe's top negotiator with insurgent groups, said in an interview. But experts say that actually resolving this messy, complicated state of affairs will be an uphill battle.

Even determining the legality of a piece of property is often impossible, since drug traffickers and paramilitary groups often register newly purchased properties in the names of third parties. There is little chance that any properties will be found registered in the names of such paramilitary warlords as Carlos Castano, Salvatore Mancuso or Diego Fernando Murillo, three top leaders of the organisation who are said to control wide swaths of territory.

Some leading political analysts believe that progress on land reform will depend on the U.S., which has spent $25 billion on the Andean region in the last 20 years, most of it in Colombia and most in the form of military hardware and military training for the drug war. — New York Times News Service

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