Violence and the political economy of rural land use

6On the one hand, formation of the Marxist guerillas of the 1960s must be understood in the context of landless peasants settling the Amazonian agrarian frontier and, on the other, the conflicts that pitted peasant organizations against the great landowners in areas imprinted by the hacienda, the great landed estate. Thus, the origins of the FARC guerillas were rooted in the displacement of peasant families fleeing violence in the Andean mountains. [10] Moreover, in some areas of the country, such as Córdoba Department, [11] other resistance movements were tied to the State’s repression of peasant mobilizations or its reneging on promises of public support for small farmsteads.

7The standing up of paramilitary groups, described by their sponsors as a reaction to the Communist insurrection, was also intrinsic to the conflicts in the countrysides. In quite a few areas, the landed elites resorted to them to counter the threat of upheavals in an extremely inegalitarian rural society. [12] During the 1970s, confronted by a flare-up of land disputes, [13] notably stamped by a spreading strategy of the peasant movements occupying private plots, the big landowners responded by setting up militias. Some were manned by local bandits released by the police in exchange for their services. [14]

8These groups were deployed to repress the peasant movements, tarred by the great landowners as the civilian arms of the uprising. They also intervened in labor conflicts on the big plantations by assassinating union leaders and members. This happened, for example, in the agro-industrial areas of Uraba [15] or Magdalena [16] in the Caribbean hinterland. Their role in the political economy of rural land use, however, extended well beyond those activities to the tsunami of land grabbing that washed over areas they controlled. This phenomenon, identified by sociologists and geographers in the mid-1990s, [17] stemmed, among others, from the close involvement of many of the paramilitary groups’ sponsors in drug trafficking. This sideline led them to prize land as a key resource for money laundering. Furthermore, land grabbing most often meant violence. The paramilitaries employed physical threats to force the peasants off their lands or to sell out at below-market prices. For this, the former relied on their “social capital”, [18] a web of alliances that eased their access to various economic spheres – legal as well as illegal – and their entrée to politics.

9Some businessmen made common cause with the paramilitaries in their enterprise of violent territorial colonization, [19] using their connections in public institutions mainly to acquire title deeds. The knack of paramilitary leaders for forging alliances in these circles stemmed not only from their territorial footprints but also shared social origins in the rural bourgeoisie, a group that had for a long time accumulated political power and cornered the local economies.

10These forms of land grabbing thus tied into local historical circumstance, the relationships between paramilitary groups and landed elites, conflicts between peasant movements and the great landowners, but also the local infiltration of public institutions. This calls for a case study to explore the political mechanisms at work in land grabbing.

Paramilitaries and land grabbing

11In Magdalena Department, the paramilitary groups had been around for a long time. In the early 1980s, the armed militias, originally focused on protecting drug production and trafficking – starting with marijuana and graduating to cocaine – added counterinsurgency to their “portfolios”. In the mid-1990s, a new actor made its presence felt in the region: the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). This armed group harbored the ambition of becoming a national “confederacy” of paramilitaries. It would indeed grow to dominate the homegrown paramilitaries.

12When it came to ties between the paramilitaries and the local political and entrepreneurial circles, these, too, had been of long standing. In every election, Hernán Giraldo, one of the major local paramilitary figures, brokered the support of the population under his control to the region’s political kingpins. The area he held sway over, surrounding the department capital of Santa Marta, was an important election asset in the horse-trading with the town’s political elite. The relationships nurtured in the department’s north, with its agro-industrial economy, were also typical of the paramilitary social capital. The headlong development of banana cultivation starting in the early 1990s resulted in a massive influx of farm laborers. They brought with them unions that the landlords painted as communists and insurgents. The paramilitaries immediately pivoted to carrying out a violent repression. Union leaders and militants were murdered one after the other. In a single year, 1992, paramilitaries killed 54 persons in the towns of Ciénaga, Fundación, and Aracataca, all three immersed in the banana economy. [20]

13The AUC’s arrival on the scene meant intensified strategies for gaining political influence. The paramilitaries put up their own slates of candidates in the elections for mayors and governor as well as town and departmental councils. Most of their political allies were seasoned incumbents. Being allied with these luminaries helped the paramilitaries get their allies seated in Parliament. There they could influence the legislative debates, nominations to head the executive agencies, and public investment in local projects. This takeover resulted in the grabbing of large swaths of land. The official statistics counted 294,664 persons displaced in Magdalena from 2000 to 2008. [21] As broken down by sociologists and demographers, [22] over 42% of the displaced were peasants working their own land, but only slightly more than half of them (59.2%) held title to their parcels. Those lacking title deeds were most exposed to forms of violent land grabbing, with threats being enough to make them leave. The stubborn cases called for more refined tactics. So, for example, a sale could be forced, if need be, by “killing the owner to buy from the widow”, an oft-quoted phrase during my interviews throughout Colombia. Many sales were at below-market prices and often paid for with checks that bounced. In any event, once the owner was out of the way, nothing prevented the land grabber from forging a bill of sale with an assist from venal notaries. [23]

14Even when violence alone was enough to engineer a land grab, these ill-gotten resources had to be turned into official, legally recognized properties that could be sold, eventually to become part of the globalized agro-industrial sector. Thus, all these actors had a need for legal recognition in the prevailing economic and institutional environment. As in any other criminal market, the very profitability of their activities made it necessary to launder the proceeds.

15An example of violent acts blending with bureaucratic tactics will serve to throw this picture into sharper relief. [24] In the early 1990s, the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform (INCORA) distributed land located in the town of Chivolo to peasant families. One of the recipient groups, composed of 37 families, consequently received the lands of an old hacienda called El Encanto that INCORA had repurchased. In 1996, paramilitary groups showed up in the area. The murders started in October that year. The threats became more and more blatant, until one day a teacher, Roberto Barrios, was executed in full view of the local residents who had been herded together and forced to watch. The murder’s staging, designed to terrorize, set off a massive displacement of families toward the urban area of Chivolo. When several peasants tried to return to their land in the ensuing months, two of their number were killed. Fear put an end to any further attempts at collective action.

16Now it was INCORA’s turn again. In October, it issued an administrative decree asserting that the lands allotted by the agrarian reform program in 1991 had been abandoned by the allottees and therefore had to be turned over to new beneficiaries. It emerged in the criminal investigations that followed, that the lands were allocated to cadres of the paramilitary organization and their farmer allies. Some of them acted as straw men for Jorge Cuarenta, the paramilitary commander for the area. In fact, the political allies of the paramilitary controlled the nominations to all the authorities linked to land ownership: not just the notaries, but also key positions in INCORA and its successor INCODER (Colombian Institute for Rural Development).

17Magdalena was not alone in having these kinds of setups. As internal investigations begun in INCODER in 2011 showed, very similar configurations were employed throughout the country. [25] Academic studies confirmed the scale of the phenomenon entangling violence, bureaucratic criminality and economic tactics. [26]

Toward pacification ?

18The demobilization of paramilitary groups between 2003 and 2006 and the juridical investigations into their political alliances upset the status quo. [27] The extradition of a large contingent of paramilitary leaders, the fragmenting of the armed groups, and jailing of elected officials loosened the hold that had let these groups dominate local politics. Not that this meant these networks disappeared entirely: some politicians even continued to control their electoral apparatus from prison. The same held for the paramilitaries: some bands never laid down their weapons, or they took them up again right after pocketing their demobilization subsidies. When I visited Santa Marta for the first time in 2009, it was patently obvious how entrenched these armed groups were in the daily life of the working class neighborhoods and in the countryside. In the former, they controlled or taxed the formal and informal economy; in the latter, they intimidated the peasants trying to return to their lands. The human rights organizations to this day critique the futility of the government’s assuring the violently displaced that the security situation had jelled to where they could return to the countryside but then doing nothing to protect them against being threatened or killed when they did. The situation of these past few years therefore does not reflect a clean break in the exercise of power. What is new, however, is that land grabbing has emerged as a key political issue.

19This is not the place for putting the entire process under a microscope. I will confine myself instead to highlighting several emerging approaches. The first concerns the juridical domain. Since 1997, the Constitutional Court has tightened its control over measures aimed at the displaced with a system for monitoring and controlling governmental policies. [28] In addition, numerous judicial investigations conducted in the aftermath of paramilitary demobilizations shed light on how they employed violence in accumulating great expanses of land. [29] The international development cooperation agencies also engaged with the issue. [30] They criticized the insufficient resources devoted to implementing a moratorium on land sales, a way of protecting the holdings of the displaced in the most contentious areas. [31] The problem was also addressed by organizations of victims, the inheritors of Colombia’s long tradition of lawful mobilization. [32]

20Soon after his election in 2010, President Juan Manuel Santos made some of these demands part of his agenda. His decision was affected by the cycles of confrontation and negotiations with the guerilla organizations. Santos presented himself as a passionate advocate for the “post-conflict”: after demobilizing the paramilitaries he turned to making peace especially with FARC, the primary rebel group. Fostering an agrarian policy geared both to reparations for victims and to developing the countryside thus demonstrated his government’s intent of dealing with the “structural causes” of the conflict.

21The initiation of official negotiations with FARC in Havana in September 2012, after months of secret talks, in part resulted from the new agrarian policy, with land restitution a key element in it. Inaugurated in 2011, it aimed to identify the victims of violent displacement who had lost control over, enjoyment of and/or ownership of their land. It opened the way for restituting parcels to the dispossessed or other forms of financial relief.

22These past five years therefore have seen the incremental integration of land policies – both those covering land ownership and mobility of rural populations – in the post-conflict agenda. Pursuing a policy of restitution nevertheless raised several political problems. Implementing it takes trustworthy institutions, expertise in land markets and rural communities, and a stronger presence of the State in the country. Absent these conditions, the process would be a cruel mockery, because institutions like INCODER or the notarial profession were deeply complicit in the land grabbing process.

Violence and land grabbing

24The level of violence may have diminished, but physical coercion did not disappear from land conflicts. It ranged from armed intimidation to outright murder. This finds a ready explanation in the fact that the paramilitary circles reorganized into new, violent enterprises. While they were more fragmented than in the past, their links to the actors of the agro-industrial economy were as tight as ever. Data on homicides linked to claims for restitutions are sparse and unreliable. For example, Colombia’s Defensoria del Pueblo, a kind of ombudsman’s office responsible for implementing human rights policies, tallied 71 such crimes between 2006 and 2011 for the entire country, while the nation’s attorney general (Fiscal general de la Nación) in 2013 confirmed a total of 56 since 2000 (Fiscal general de la Nación). [33] It is not surprising that: the numbers are of dubious quality: they were supplied by the police – the same police that could put down “crime of passion” as cause of death for a prospective beneficiary of restitution who had been beheaded and showed signs of torture. [34]

25Revisiting the data on land grabbing cases cited earlier here will help pin down the nexus between rightful claims and threats. Starting in 2007, several families in the community of El Encanto tried to return to their lands. Their initiative had the support of ILSA (Latin American Institute for Society and Alternative Laws) a human rights NGO with the mission of reuniting families subjected to forced displacement and promoting their collective action. The State did not support the Encanto families’ right to return. This was four years before the vote on the land restitution law and the issue was not yet on the public agenda. Any attempt to mobilize the victims of the paramilitaries was viewed with suspicion by the government of the time. When the peasants arrived on their former parcels, they found the land fenced off and used for grazing cattle and growing precious woods. The mobilization of the El Encanto peasants, joined by neighboring communities that had gone through similar experiences, resulted in the repeal of the acts that had conveyed the property to the new owners. The initial decisions were handed down in in 2010; in 2011, the Supreme Court ordered the rescission of 36 title deeds.

26Diverse actors linked to paramilitary circles reacted to this peasant mobilization. The telephoned threats did not cease, and gangs of armed men harassed the peasants even in their homes. No murders were committed, perhaps because of the political visibility of the case. The modus operandi of those behind the threats revealed the persistence of the cycles of violence. Among them were Omar Montero, alias Codazzi, a former paramilitary cadre; Augusto Castro, businessman and brother of a former parliamentary representative sentenced for his paramilitary links; and Saul Severini, a rancher suspected by the authorities of having played a key role in the paramilitary’s financial system. Today still, the peasants receive frequent threats: Augusto Castro, arrested and jailed in 2012 for associating with criminals and taking part in violent displacements, was given house arrest in January 2016, leaving the peasants fearful of the local influence he is still capable of wielding under these circumstances.

27If the intensity of armed violence has diminished, it is also because it has left its imprint on the territories. Refashioned by land grabbing, they are now given over to agro-industrial uses which have erased any trace of peasant agriculture. The goods held in common that supported economic survival of the populations have disappeared. The new methods of production monopolize natural resources – especially water. The infrastructure, such as roads and highways, has been privatized and now the peasant plots are surrounded by the plantation.

28Montes de Maria, also located in the Caribbean plains, offers a case study of the brutal manner in which the pacification of the territory converged with land grabbing. This area saw especially elevated levels of violence, with 13 homicides recorded between 2006 and 2013 and numerous sexual assaults intended obviously to intimidate. Even as this physical violence played out, economic and geographic changes were taking place that spelled more expulsions. [35]

29The Montes de Maria area had been among the priority zones for pacification as far back as 2002. A massive security force had been deployed there, wielding exceptional powers for a time under the prevailing state of emergency. Operations stretching over years succeeded in marginalizing the FARC, which nevertheless remained capable of mounting isolated pinpoint attacks in the area. The most visible effect, however, was on the level of economic activity. Starting in 2008, entrepreneurs arrived looking to acquire land. They bought up the land of peasants displaced from the region at very low prices – roughly 60 US dollars an acre for the first few deals. The buyers managed to obtain, probably from government sources, detailed information on the peasants: where they lived – most having ended up in the slums around the city of Cartagena – how much they owed on their parcels – bank loans and unpaid land taxes – that scotched any hope for the peasants ever working them again. [36] These transfers had to navigate administrative obstacles. A national directive designed to protect holdings of the displaced had put a hold on selling farms, but this ban could be lifted with the approval of local authorities. The connections of the entrepreneurs with the administrators appear to have played a role in removing these obstacles. The ILSA NGO inventoried the methods used to get around the moratorium: decisions dated after the bill of sale, using limited companies to avoid stating the buyer’s name – which, once again, showed the eagerness with which the authorities collaborated.

30Once the enterprises were set up, they permanently transformed the area’s agricultural landscape with cultivation of diverse agro-industrial products – cotton, palm oil, precious wood. [37] Also implemented were agricultural contractual schemes that partnered enterprises and peasants, with the unintended consequence of peasants bearing the bulk of the risk, as abundantly documented in the literature. [38] Promised jobs never materialized, since agro-industrial farming requires much fewer manual labor inputs than does peasant agriculture. All these changes, highlighted by researchers surveying very different terrains, [39] thus ended up making agro-industrial operations the only feasible farming method and rendered peasant agriculture impracticable.

Novel accumulations

31Perpetuating the consequences of violence for the country is not the sole feature of this new political economy of land use. Another is the arrival on the scene of new actors that reinforce the prior dynamics of accumulation but whose traits are more compatible with the post-conflict discourse. Thus, we see massive investments by major Colombian and foreign agro-industrial enterprises in the territories of the new “agrarian frontier” ready to be capitalized on thanks to pacification. A last example will help flesh out these dynamics.

32In the Orinoco plains, southeast of Bogota, officials of the Ministry of Agriculture, politicians, and the big producers calculated that an estimated ten million acres were ripe for large-scale investments. A veritable land rush ensued in the mid-2000’s. Entrepreneurs could see their way clear to setting up operations there in view of the stabilizing security situation. They initiated large scale projects; Cargill acquired nearly 130,000 acres and announced plans for eventually exploiting more than 220,000 acres, even though the American multinational only started utilizing a fraction of the acreage it had acquired. Other foreign groups set up operations, like Brazil’s Monica, or Poligrow, with Hispano-Italian ownership. The Chinese government even declared itself ready to acquire 1,000,000 acres there. However, this scale cannot solely be explained by the globalization of land. [40] For one, this was because all the Colombian agro-industrial giants would from now on be there, along with the recently launched agricultural subsidiaries of industrial conglomerates. For another, in parallel with these acquisitions, lesser buyers proliferated, albeit with much less publicity. The media frenzy about the large-scale purchases resulted in drawing small and mid-sized investors primarily interested in speculation. No quantitative sources exist for this, but residents of the areas around the major town, Villavivencio, reported the arrival of hordes of foreign buyers in the region. [41] I was able to confirm this as factual with departmental agriculture officials. It was most noticeable in the dizzying rise in land prices by multiples of ten in areas that some of my contacts lived in. How such large swaths of land could be acquired is explained by the unique way in which the territory was settled. [42] In the Andean foothills, the population practiced small-scale family farming; in the rest of the region, huge expanses of plains were given over to very extensive cattle raising operations. The low population density and the immensity of the agrarian frontier that lay before the settlers arriving on the plain as late as the mid-20^th century resulted in a population of ranchers occupying gargantuan territories (exceeding 12,000 acres). Their boundaries were mostly determined by how many head of cattle they ran and the use of cattle drives in which they sought to avoid overgrazing and to adapt to the seasonal rainfall cycle. [43] The public authorities had a say in producing such a dream geography, making this region into the last agrarian frontier and, in the name of geographic and technical considerations, legitimizing the primacy of the agro-industries. Here, too, the convergence between economic practices and better security is borne out. It was in the mid-2000s, beginning with the redeployment of military forces along the – scarce – main highways and around the oil fields that the region’s agro-industrial potentials were rediscovered. From 2004 on, the Ministry of Agriculture, headed at the time by a former executive of the agro-industrial employer’s association, commissioned a series of studies on the biochemical properties of Orinoco soils. [44] They identified a technical problem: the soils studied were acidic and high in aluminum. It was therefore necessary to treat them before intensive agricultural use would be feasible. The chemical treatments had already been pioneered in Brazil. Teams of Colombian researchers and officials of the Ministry of Agriculture then visited Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. In the same era, initiatives taken by the Presidency turned Orinoco into one of the most attractive Colombian territories for enterprises intending to set up operations there – especially foreign ones. This “territorial marketing” policy not only extolled the region’s security but also provided exceptional financial incentives.

33From then on, the agro-industrial model dominated the discourse of the governing and the substance of public policies. By doing so, it excluded two populations: the local livestock farmers who, despite controlling extensive acreages, largely lacked political representation and were regarded as backward and inefficient by the Ministry of Agriculture, as well as the landless peasants and victims of violent displacements whom the state had promised plots of land in the course of negotiations with FARC especially. The government’s political opposition lobbied for setting the Orinoco aside as a land reserve for vulnerable populations. However, the ministry asserted that the soil characteristics required investments as high as 1,700 US dollars per acre, [45] while the almost total lack of infrastructure closed off any perspective of commercialization by small or medium-sized operations. Given those circumstances, invariably only the big enterprises seemed equipped to deal with these economic realities.

34It followed that all the measures supposedly protecting or promoting peasant agriculture were inoperative here. That they were dead letters in effect is illustrated by the example of the provisions for land titling. Establishing title to property is viewed, in accordance with “best practices” promoted by international organizations, as a means of securing ownership of small land holdings. In the Orinoco, a policy of land titling was thus launched, especially in the foothill areas dominated by small family properties. However, no moratorium impeded resale of lands whose ownership had been formalized. Moreover, land titling lacked technical and financial support. In the seller’s market that existed, the most rational option for many beneficiaries seemed to be reselling their lands as soon as they received a title deed. While there is no data that would allow quantifying this effect, my observation of social practices showed that it was fairly widespread. Thus, in Villavicencio, there were land brokers specializing in these types of buy-outs. They would approach the peasants even when these had yet to receive their title document or had not even initiated the process for obtaining it. These specialists would handle the administrative paperwork and, if needed, bring in topographers and lawyers.

35In parallel with these economic transformations, the agro-industrial circles demanded reforms to the regulations governing land purchases and allocations. The government heeded this: after a legislative process rendered tortuous by the mobilization of the leftist opposition’s representatives, it obtained passage of a law bearing on the ZIDRES project. ZIDRES is the Spanish acronym for “Areas of Interest for Rural, Economic, and Social Development”. In essence, the law lifted most national restrictions on land use and on concluding operating leases with landowners, including the beneficiaries of the land restitution policy.

36Violence, particularly by the paramilitary groups, profoundly shaped the agrarian capitalism in the Colombian countryside. It sharpened inequality in a system already characterized by the huge land concentrations in the hands of the big landowners. Yet, the demobilization of paramilitary groups did not marginalize violence. Rather, it produced hybrid situations reinforced by official institutions and involving violent forms of exercising power. [46] We see this configuration in the case of Magdalena and of Montes de Maria, where the processes of land accumulation continued.

37Beyond armed actors maintaining their grip on the territories where their word once was law, there prevailed more complex forms for replicating the inequities that stemmed from the war. While peasant agriculture was marginalized by the reconfiguration by violence of some territories, and the Colombian state opted for agro-industries as the best model for benefiting from the pacification of politics, land accumulation and its “marketization” persisted. The way this was done seemed, at first sight, more acceptable both socially and politically. But the consequences wreaked on the rural territories by violence persisted well beyond the period of armed confrontation and formed part of the post-conflict baggage. [47] If the capitalist market could only be created under duress, it proves once again how violent accumulation and the reproduction of capital for a longer term go hand in hand. [48]