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Land reform Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/world/1558502http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/world/1558502
Sept. 3, 2002, 9:50AM
Land distribution gets stuck in mud
Colombian president vows to speed up seizure of traffickers' holdings.
By JOHN OTIS
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle South America Bureau
ARMERO, Colombia -- Dotted with thorn bushes and infested with biting gnats, this sun-baked ranch sits in Colombia's death valley. Nearby lie the tombstones of Armero, a town swallowed up by a 1985 mudslide that killed 25,000.
But to Rudolfo Guarin, the parched pastureland is pay dirt.
The Colombian government seized the sprawling hacienda from a jailed cocaine trafficker and sold it to down-and-out farmers at fire-sale prices. Guarin wound up with 402 acres, more than he ever dreamed of owning.
As he sipped coffee and boasted of the 40 head of cattle roaming his spread, Guarin smiled and said: "This was a stroke of luck."
Guarin is, indeed, one of the fortunate few. Much of Colombia's farmland remains in the hands of a small number of wealthy landowners, a festering state of affairs that has helped fuel the nation's 38-year civil war.
Now, as part of a dual battle against leftist guerrillas and narcotics traffickers, Colombia's new president, Alvaro Uribe, wants to accelerate the pace of land confiscations.
A law enacted in 1996 gives the state broad powers to bring a measure of justice to the countryside by expropriating the assets of drug kingpins and distributing some of the properties to the poor.
But six years later, few peasants have received plots. And the law, in the words of a recent editorial in the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo, has become "a tragic joke."
Hundreds of targeted farms remain untouchable, because they are located in areas dominated by guerrillas or the outlawed right-wing paramilitary fighters who battle them. In addition, legal snafus have forced the government to hand back many of the seized properties to associates of drug smugglers.
"I think Colombians should be really angry," said Klaus Nyholm, director of the United Nations Drug Control Program in Colombia. "Hundreds of confiscated holdings are being returned to drug traffickers by judges. This is nothing less than scandalous."
Experts agree that reshaping Colombia's split-level rural economy is one of the keys to pacifying the countryside and ending a guerrilla conflict that in recent years has claimed the lives of about 3,500 people annually.
For the majority of peasants, who rent land or work as day laborers, getting ahead requires getting their own fields. Property titles, which can be used as collateral, open the door to bank loans to pay for seeds, fertilizers and tools, said Nelson Rodriguez, director of the government's Agrarian Reform Institute, known as Incora, in central Tolima state.
Once peasants own a dozen or so productive acres and a small stake in the system, the thinking goes, they are less prone to join guerrilla and paramilitary groups.
Every year, the illegal armies recruit thousands of desperate men, women and children in the countryside.
"Creating jobs and rural investment will allow people to work and survive," Rodriguez said. "Right now, the guerrillas are the ones who are handing out jobs."
Colombia ignored its land problems for decades. But in the early 1960s, the government created Incora and began passing out farmland to peasants.
The program was designed, in part, to blunt the appeal of fledgling Marxist rebel groups, which listed land conflicts as one of their justifications for taking up arms.
Over the next two decades, 250,000 poor families received titles to parcels, often public lands on which they had been squatting. But the government rarely touched large private estates, where the most coveted land was located. Thus, there was little change in the existing order.
In the 1980s, Colombia's cocaine boom sparked a land rush, rolling back any progress that had been made. The drug cartels used their fabulous wealth to snap up coffee plantations and cattle ranches in rural areas and office buildings and luxury condominiums in the cities.
By 1995, the cartels had acquired more than 7 million acres of prime agricultural and grazing lands, according to a study by Alejandro Reyes, a former professor at the National University in Bogota. Their spending spree drove up real estate prices and squeezed out many potential buyers.
The guerrillas, in the meantime, became deeply involved in the narcotics trade and put their land-reform rhetoric on the back burner. Today, both the rebels and the paramilitaries earn millions of dollars a year by providing protection to drug traffickers.
"The guerrillas are much more concerned with gaining political and military control of the countryside than with who owns the land," Rodriguez said.
Frequent clashes between the rebels and the paramilitaries have uprooted thousands of hardscrabble peasants, sometimes forcing them to choose sides or flee to the cities.
All these factors have led to a reconcentration of property in the hands of a few, a phenomenon often called "counter land reform."
Colombian economist Hector Mondragon said that in 1984, the nation's 5,000 richest landowners held 32 percent of the most productive acreage. By last year, the figure had jumped to 50 percent.
The 1996 asset-forfeiture law was supposed to help turn the tables. Nyholm, the U.N. official, said the measure "could be a marvelous tool with the potential to bring about true agrarian reform."
But like many offensives in the long-running battle against drug lords, the effort has stalled.
So far, peasants have occupied 186 farms under the statute and an earlier, weaker law targeting narco-lands. But they have gained legal title to just eight after receiving government loans to buy their parcels well below market value.
To many observers, the number of title transfers seems shockingly low, given the fact that the government has provisionally expropriated more than 1,100 farms.
On appeal, Colombian judges have reversed 684 confiscation orders. That's because the properties in question were registered to third parties with either loose or no discernible ties to traffickers. Experts believe many drug lords use such tactics to camouflage their purchases.
"People thought it would be easy to identify the narco-lands. They didn't understand all of the different ways that traffickers can hide their ownership," said Dario Fajardo, an economist at the National University.
Carlos Gaviria, a senator and former magistrate on Colombia's highest court, said traffickers often hire the best lawyers and sometimes bribe and threaten judges.
"The people being prosecuted under this law are simply too rich," Gaviria said.
Even when drug traffickers are dead, cases are not cut and dried. The government has yet to gain legal title to many of Pablo Escobar's properties, even though the Medellin cartel leader was shot dead nine years ago.
When courts do side with the government, their rulings are simply a first step on the long march toward land reform.
Taking physical control of farms and ensuring a safe environment for its new proprietors can be dicey. At the behest of drug dealers, paramilitaries have chased resettled peasants off scores of farms.
"What good is confiscating land if the very next day the people have to leave?" said Ana Maria Puyana, a land expert at Colombia's Environment Ministry. "This is not a legal problem. It's a political problem. The government lacks sovereignty in the countryside."
There is also the problem of Colombia's out-of-date property registry. In more than 100 cases, the government has won the legal right to take over farms but has been unable to locate them.
In Tolima state, Incora technician German Gonzalez has spent two months trying to track down a pair of lots set for confiscation. He's still looking.
During a recent trek into the countryside, Gonzalez tried to persuade a local farmhand named Ariel Mendez to guide him to the proper tillage. But Mendez said he had no clue.
As the two men chatted, Gonzalez pointed out that Mendez was the type that the asset-forfeiture law was designed to help. A father of four, Mendez earns the equivalent of $30 a week but spends every peso on his family. His prospects for having a farm of his own seem to grow more remote by the day.
As he fed a bottle of milk to his infant son, Mendez said: "I heard about that law, but it has made no difference here."
Five days after he took the oath of office last month, President Uribe declared a state of emergency, mainly to deal with the growing guerrilla threat.
He also pledged to use his new emergency powers to crack down on drug traffickers and to expropriate their assets.
"We have to take the properties away from drug traffickers, and we will," Interior and Justice Minister Fernando Londoņo declared last week in testimony before the Colombian Congress.
It's unclear what specific actions the government has in mind, but legal experts have a few suggestions.
Frustrated prosecutors want the state to name a special panel of judges to clear the logjam of expropriation cases. Regular judges, they point out, are swamped with more pressing cases.
Maria Cristina Chirolla, who heads the asset-forfeiture and money-laundering unit of the attorney general's office, wants the 1996 law to be rewritten to place the burden on suspect property owners, requiring them to prove their holdings are legitimate.
To some land experts, a larger concern is that the Uribe government seems more committed to castigating drug traffickers and guerrillas than the complex and messy task of carrying out a vigorous agrarian-reform program.
Instead of demonizing traffickers, said the Environment Ministry's Puyana, authorities could start clamping down on unscrupulous cattle ranchers and agribusinesses. Both have taken advantage of the chaos in the countryside by gobbling up huge chunks of land and sometimes hiring paramilitaries for protection.
Yet, she said, Colombian powerbrokers often overlook the sins of polite society.
"We need a broad range of policies to make the countryside productive," Chirolla said. "One law can't resolve everything."
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This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/world/1558502
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