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Colombia's pact may not return land to farmers

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published January 28, 2007

SAN ONOFRE, Colombia - Much of the world has seen Colombia's civil conflict as a clash between illegal armies of the left and right, or a battle for control of the global cocaine industry. Tens of thousands have died.

But the real prize is land. Since the early 1990s, right-wing paramilitary groups have seized from peasant farmers an estimated 26,000 square miles - an area larger than West Virginia that comprises about a quarter of the country's arable land, much of it sitting atop oil or minerals.

The government of President Alvaro Uribe is dismantling the paramilitaries and says it will force former militia bosses to surrender ill-gotten holdings. Despite the promises, it is backing policies that mean most farmers will never get their property back.

The winners are Colombia's elite: landowners, politicians and corporations who bankrolled the militias and used them to expand their holdings. The losers are people of humble means killed or forced at gunpoint to give up their land and join the hundreds of thousands displaced by the conflict.

"So what hope can one have?" said Luis Francisco Garcia, evicted from his farm at gunpoint 3 1/2 years ago with his family. "I who had a farm ... have to beg for a plate of food?"

The right-wing paramilitaries first emerged in the 1980s, financed by ranchers to counter extortion and kidnappings by leftist rebel groups, such as the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

As the left was driven back, the paramilitaries quickly evolved into mafias in military fatigues, enriching themselves through cocaine trafficking, theft and extortion in regions, particularly the Caribbean coast, which they came to dominate. Police and military officers turned a blind eye, and often extended an open palm.

Then, in 2002, Uribe was elected, and became a firm U.S. ally on a continent where several countries have turned left in recent years. Uribe cracked down hard on the left-wing guerrillas, while negotiating a peace pact with the paramilitaries in 2003.

More than 31,000 paramilitary fighters have demobilized under that pact, which provides them with $200 monthly stipends and job-search help, as well as reduced sentences for the leaders in exchange for full confessions.

But much of the country's political elite remains indebted to the paramilitary bosses, according to Sen. Gustavo Petro, a key critic of the terms of the demobilization. He says the private armies remain tools of the same power brokers who benefited from the land grab.

"At the heart of this crisis is the relation between political power and land ownership," said U.N. agronomist Dario Fajardo.

The Uribe government's policies appear to be enshrining the land grab into law. A bill that his agriculture minister is championing in Congress would allow someone to gain title to land by proving it has been in his possession for five years. The Colombian Commission of Jurists, a human rights group, says the proposal "maintains, expands and legalizes the control the paramilitaries established in blood and fire over millions of hectares of land."

Even if the government were committed to helping peasants get their land back, the challenge is monumental: Paramilitary leaders have hidden plundered parcels of land behind front men, land registrars have been murdered and records have disappeared in suspicious fires.

[Last modified January 28, 2007, 00:50:07]