Colombia: Buying Land, Selling Souls
Gearóid Ó Loingsigh
25 October 2022
Cows graze in a cane field.
The government of Gustavo Petro and Francia Márquez announced that as part of the agrarian reform that they want to carry out they have agreed to buy three million hectares of land. In order to do this, they signed an agreement with the cattle ranchers’ body, Fedegan.
Fedegan is not just any business association. It is the one that publicly acknowledged financing the paramilitaries. It’s the association that opposed any attempt to return stolen land. It’s the association that accused the forcibly displaced who demanded their land back of being thieves and usurpers. At no point should we lose sight of the type of criminal that Fedegan represents.
Of course, sectors of the bourgeoisie celebrated the announcement. The El Tiempo newspaper said it was a key agreement.(1) The cattle ranchers did likewise. And Petro in order to justify it, stated that “An agreement was signed that seems historic to me, as it could make way for agrarian reform in Colombia.”(2)
The reactions to this agreement range from those who say it is a betrayal of the Havana Peace Accord, it is the implementation of the Accord, that it is buying land from those who stole it gunpoint or with a chainsaw in hand. Before we analyse Petro’s proposal, it is important to discount the first of those criticisms.
Petro’s pact with the cattle ranchers is not a violation of the Havana Accord. The Accord is very clear. It says that there will be a land banks with three million hectares and the fund will receive land from various sources, amongst them the expropriation of lands from drug traffickers etc. But in point 1.1.1. it also includes purchases.
Lands acquired or expropriated for reasons of social interest or public utility, acquired to promote access to rural property with the corresponding compensation.(3)The FARC weren’t any more specific than that. In the rush to get down on bended knee they never thought about how the process would be carried out. So, the criticisms that can and should be made of Petro’s and Márquez’s proposal have nothing to do with the Havana Accord, as they are fulfilling it to the letter. Those who believe that the Accord is not being fulfilled have not read it or did not understand it. That simple.
So, what are the problems with the pact with the devil of Fedegan? We should be clear that when Petro and Márquez talk of agrarian reform and that their agrarian reform is that of the Havana Accord, the accord does not use that phrase but rather employs the term Comprehensive Rural Reform. Agrarian reform cannot be done with just three million hectares and neither is it limited to a question of hectares but rather the structure of economic, military and social power in the countryside and Petro and Márquez have just negotiated with the torchbearers of the current power structure in the countryside.
Yes, the Havana Accord always considered the purchase of land, as the FARC went down the easy route of accommodating themselves to the existing powers. Demagogic voices were to be heard, amongst them Petro and Márquez that talked at one point of expropriating the unproductive lands. No talk of that any more, because legally there is no such thing as unproductive lands but rather low rate of production in the commercial sense or land that fulfils ecological or social roles that are not measured in dollars. If a landlord with land that is not being exploited much can be expropriated due to low yields in dollars, the same could happen to land belonging to the black communities, indigenous and also the peasants. It was always absurd to talk in such terms. But it was a populist thing and it sounded very nice to those who don’t want to read and less still think.
What land will they buy? Various commentators have already pointed out that they may be buying land that the Fedegan affiliates obtained illegally during the conflict. It is true, though the agreement signed with Fedegan says that lands “not be called into question by the land restitution institutions, that there is no agrarian process under way, nor protective measures under Law 387 of 1997 [the law that prohibits the sale of lands owned by the displaced].”(4)
Bearing in mind that since 1997 millions of hectares of displaced people’s land have been sold, it is not known how they intend to be sure on this point. If Petro and Márquez had signed a pact with the rice growers or the sugar barons in Valle del Cauca, they might have had fewer problems, though they are no angels either and there would have been problems too. These two sectors occupy the most fertile and productive land in Colombia. But that wouldn’t make sense to Petro and Márquez and they give the game away by themselves.
They were very clear about why they wanted to reach an agreement with Fedegan. On the official page of the Presidency they state:
That land has to have credit, there has to a technological transfer, there have to be mechanisms to sell their produce, there has to a process for regional associative practices that allow us to make the jump to agroindustry (bold is not in the original)(5)That rice growers and sugar barons are already an agroindustry and it doesn’t matter how concentrated the land is in the regions dominated by them, the peasant has nothing to bring to an already existing established agroindustry with a degree of economic “success”. Petro and Márquez propose the old model of Pastrana and Uribe of associative practices between the peasants and big business promoted by the priest De Roux and the World Bank with the aim of establishing agroindustries in new regions of the country.
Neither does agroindustry go against the Havana Accord, in fact it explicitly endorses it as it does with the associative practices for the peasantry with large companies. The accord in point 1.3.3.6 states.
Associative practice: the government will foment and promote associative practices, productive chains and alliances between small-scale, medium sized and large producers as well as processors, traders and exporters with the aim a guaranteeing a competitive scale of production inserted into value added chains that contribute to improving the living conditions of the inhabitants of the countryside in general and in particular the small-scale producers. To that end, it will provide technical, legal and economic aid (credit or financing) to small-scale producers in order to guarantee balanced, sustainable family and associative based economies. (Bold not in the original)(6)So, when we criticise this initiative, we should do so on target. In the past, various politicians who are now part of the government benches, amongst them Iván Cepeda and Alirio Uribe criticised government initiatives to promote agroindustry. Now they are in power and are not going to speak out against it.
We should ask ourselves as to why this initiative is the first one from the government in this area. Law 1148 of 2011, more popularly known as the Land Restitution Law has been a complete failure. Very little land was returned and Fedegan, amongst others, made the displaced fight for every square meter of land in every farm. Even in the cases where the judges acknowledged the right of the displaced people over the farm, we find many cases where land has not been returned to its owners, it continues in the hands of the affiliates of Fedegan or it has disappeared as it has become an open cast mine. Since 2011 550,000 hectares of stolen land has been handed over. Following the Land Restitution Law, Fedegan’s affiliates and others continued to rob land. It is something that has not ceased. And if Petro’s and Márquez’s response is to negotiate with the thieves then the theft will continue. There is no clarity about how many hectares were stolen by Fedegan and others. As Camilo González Posso from the NGO Indepaz commented at the time.
Since the passing of that law a system to falsify the figures has been set up, removing the registration of land abandoned through forced displacement caused by paramilitary groups left over from the demobilization or by groups formed from the residual nuclei and former recidivist paras.
Despite sentences and writs from the Constitutional Court, they continue to refuse to register forced displacements produced by the fumigations and eradication efforts of crops that have been declared to be unlawful…
When the project of the law on land restitution was being discussed we warned in newspaper columns, to the government and commentators that the expression “land theft” was being used to limit the problem of restitution to one of litigation of property or possession and thus ignoring the realm that is the abandonment with the consequent dispossession…
Abandonment is different to theft when it includes the transfer of the property, possession or expectation of titles to a third party who takes advantage of the fact or context of forced displacement to demand rights over a plot or assets.(7)There is no clarity about the stolen or abandoned land. We do not know, in the strictly legal sense, which land was acquired in the midst of the conflict. The pact with Fedegan supposedly excludes plots on which a displaced person has laid claim. But the leaders of the PH know that in any outing to the countryside they are going to find land where the owners opted to remain silent, land already legalised by fair means or foul and land where no one is going to say anything because they want to stay alive. Lafaurie and his scum can show the paperwork on this land, property deeds, purchase-sale contracts and even death certificates. The reforms in the countryside should have started with the stolen land and not a rushed pact with the criminals of Fedegan.
This is not agrarian reform. The pact with Fedegan will not affect the concentration of land in departments such as Cauca, where many farms are just one hectare or less. There companies such as the Irish multinational Smurfits, amongst others, rule the roost. It will only have an impact in those areas where the cattle ranchers are dominant and where they want to sell, not where the government wants to buy and less still where the peasants demand.
Petro and Márquez propose buying land from criminals to kickstart a model for which there is a precedent in Colombia. It is the model of the Zidres (Zones of Rural, Economic and Social Development) and was criticised by many organisations due to the attempt to hand over state lands to large companies, although the CONPES document 3917(8) on the Zidres excludes areas where there was or is likely to be displacements in the future. Even Santos and Duque knew that you have to come out with some nonsense about protecting peasants.
The Zidres sought to promote agribusiness in various parts of the country, just like Petro and Márquez want to do now. In the government’s new plan these projects will be mainly implemented in the north of the country where successive governments of Uribe, Santos and Duque kick-started huge infrastructural projects, amongst them the corrupt projects of Odebrecht. But it will be the Petro and Márquez government that will bring to fruition the dreams of the Colombian bourgeoisie.
Various social organisations have already lent their support to the Petro-Márquez project. In the best of cases, they have opted to remain silent. Others say, that it is what is on offer, that we can’t hope for more. But this is what has always been on offer, in terms of agricultural policy and there is no break with the past, but rather the continuance of the regressive policies of the past, but this time there is no opposition. The opposition of yesteryear is the government benches of today, they buy land and sell their souls to yesterday’s devil, dressed up as today’s angel.
Notes
(1) El Tiempo (09/10/2022) ¿Por qué es clave el acuerdo entre Fedegán y el Gobierno? https://www.eltiempo.com/politica/gobierno/tierra-por-que-es-clave-el-acuerdo-entre-fedegan-y-el-gobierno-708381it
(2) Ibíd.,
(3) FARC y Gobierno Nacional (2016) ACUERDO FINAL PARA LA TERMINACIÓN DEL CONFLICTO Y LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DE UNA PAZ ESTABLE Y DURADERA p.14 punto 1.1.1.
(4) Gobierno Nacional y Fedegan
(2022) ACUERDO PARA LA MATERIALIZACIÓN DE LA PAZ TERRITORIAL
Compra directa de tierras
para la construcción de la Reforma Rural Integral p.4
(5) Presidencia (08/10/2022) Como ‘histórico’ califica el Presidente Petro firma del acuerdo entre Gobierno y ganaderos que permitirá comprar 3 millones de hectáreas de tierras para entregar a campesinos y campesinas del país https://petro.presidencia.gov.co/prensa/Paginas/Como-historico-califica-el-Presidente-Petro-firma-del-acuerdo-entre-Gobie-221008.aspx
(6) FARC y Gobierno Nacional (2016) op. Cit. P. 33 punto 1.3.3.6
(7) González Posso, C. (2013 ) La Verdad en Eel Abandono Forzado y el Despojo de Tierras p.6
(8) CONPES, is the National
Council on Economic and Social Policy charged with drawing up the documents
to implement government plans.