Land Reform: The 500 -Year Plan
Publisher: The Bogota Post
Author(s): Mike Mackenna
Date: 2016
Topics: Conflict Causes, Land
Countries: Colombia
Colombia holds the dubious international distinction of being one of the countries with the most internal refugees in the world. The exact ranking might change depending on which list you look at, but Colombia is somewhere in the top five, along with Sudan, Syria and Iraq. At the end of last year, an Amnesty International report put the number of people who’ve been forcibly displaced at 6 million people, and said that at least 8 million hectares of land (14% of the country’s total territory) have been abandoned or forcibly expropriated as a result of the conflict.
President Juan Manuel Santos took an important step towards addressing this crisis when he passed the Land Restitution Act in 2011, promising to provide legal avenues to allow those displaced to return to their homes. The current pace of restitution will mean that everyone should be back on their land by about the year 2511, according to Senate president and Santos ally Armando Benedetti.
No, you didn’t misread that. A political heavyweight in Santos’s own party said that it will take 500 years to get everyone back on their land if restitution continues at its current speed. Benedetti’s estimate might even be generous: another organisation studying land restitution in Colombia has said it could take thousands of years if the current pace doesn’t pick up.
Why is it taking so long? Obviously there are inherent difficulties in the process. Simply given the sheer number of people involved, it will take time to restore them to their land. It would be impossible to erase the legacy of war, malignant neglect and brutal abuse of the countryside in two presidential terms, even for the most effective president. And while the Land Restitution Act is a huge step forward, the administration has a long way to go, which makes an overwhelmingly challenging process almost impossible.
The Amnesty report says, “A lack of political will and institutional capacity, including poor intra-institutional coordination, and a lack of state presence in the most vulnerable communities have been largely to blame.”