Land distribution in Colombia, Venezuela and Guyana | Chapter 4 of “A Perfect Storm in the Amazon”

The unequal distribution of land in Colombia is the root cause of that nation’s violent history. Multiple policy initiatives spanning decades have failed to resolve the problem. The first agrarian reform law was promulgated in 1936, but it only motivated landowners to protect their assets by converting tenant farmers into contract labour. A backlash to land reform eventually led to a civil war between 1948 and 1958 when the two major political parties battled for power during a period referred to as La Violencia.

Subsequently, a coalition government pursued a renewed effort at agrarian reform with the creation of the Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria (INCORA) in 1961. This initiative established clear criteria for the expropriation of land and instituted mechanisms to indemnify landowners. As in other countries, it had the support of the Alliance for Progress and promoted colonization programmes within the Amazon. This effort also failed and contributed to the formation of the guerilla armies and decades of violent conflict.

A third agrarian reform in 1994 was based on a market-based approach for redistributing land by providing subsidies so peasant farmers could purchase land from large estates. This followed the precepts of the Constitutional reform of 1991 and coincided with the legal decrees in 1995 that recognized the rights of Indigenous and traditional people. INCORA was replaced in 2003 by Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo Rural y Reforma Agraria (INDECORA), which diversified its mission by sponsoring the sustainable development of campesino, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. These initiatives also failed to resolve the long-standing grievances linked to land tenure and rural poverty, a task that was essentially rendered impossible by the violence that consumed the country for another 25 years.

The competition for territory between leftist guerrillas and their equally violent paramilitary competitors has enormously compounded the problem of land tenure. Both sides dispossessed legitimate landowners, either by direct confiscation or forced sale at gunpoint. Land theft created a legacy that plagues the national economy because investors are unwilling to commit resources to a productive enterprise if there is the risk of forfeiture due to illegitimate title. The most conspicuous attribute of this legacy, however, is the massive number of displaced people, estimated at five million in 2020. Small farmers were particularly vulnerable, and the violence greatly aggravated the inequity in the distribution of land. In 2015, civil society organizations estimated that seventy per cent of the country’s small farmers hold only 2.7 % of its arable land while 68 % was controlled by only 0.5 % of all landholders.

This legacy was supposed to be addressed via the Colombian Peace Process. The final agreement is a long and complex document that covers a multitude of complex and thorny issues. The first chapter deals with land, and the first section of that chapter outlines a pathway for providing fair and equitable access to land. Land issues were treated first because unequal access to land sparked the conflict, and fifty years of war magnified that injustice. The agreement goes further, however, because it also recognizes that resolving land-related discord and uncertainty of land tenure is essential for closing the agricultural frontier and conserving the natural patrimony of Colombia. The agreement created a process entitled the Reforma Rural Integral (RRI), which is to be implemented by two institutions: ANT, a clearing-house for all issues related to land tenure, and Agencia de Desarrollo Rural (ADR), which will foster investment and provide technical support.

The RRI has four major components:

1) Provide land to displaced families using land seized from criminals or acquired by purchase.
2) Formalize rural land tenure and grant free land to low-income families via a territorial-based process.
3) Establish an agrarian judicial system to resolve all property disputes.
4) Organize and execute a modern land registry (cadaster).

Resolving land tenure in the Colombian Amazon is essential for the success of the peace process. The region was at the center of the conflict and one of the last bastions of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). During the war, FARC maintained a logistical corridor that spanned three national parks in the foothills of the Andes (Los Picachos, Tinigua, Macarena) and the crown jewel of Colombia’s protected area system in the Amazon lowlands, Serranía de Chiribiqueta. The landscapes surrounding the three montane reserves attracted tens of thousands of peasant farmers who cultivated coca under the auspices of FARC. The government tried to assert control via police action but made no real attempt to control land use in the buffer zones (Distritos de Manejo Integral) that surrounded the four protected areas.

The peace process has stimulated long-suppressed investment in adjacent agricultural landscapes in Meta, Caquetá and Guaviare, which has stimulated a scramble for land across the forest frontier that separates these agrarian landscapes from the wilderness areas of the Colombian Amazon. The area is now riddled with roads where land grabbers collude with ex-combatants who employ settlers to clear forest to establish both coca farms and cattle pastures across an ‘arch of deforestation’ more than 500 kilometers long. The short-term cash flow is being driven by illicit drugs, but the medium-term speculation is now quite clearly focused on land and the rapidly expanding cattle industry.

This dynamic will persist until the central government or regional authorities establish the rule of law and the presence of the administrative state. Until that happens, land grabbers and campesino settlers will continue to appropriate state lands within the last habitat corridor connecting the lowland forests of the Amazon with the montane forests of the Andean Cordillera.

Venezuela and the Guyanas

Historically, agrarian reform was never a major political issue in any of the countries on the Guiana Shield. Because of its oil wealth, the rural poor of Venezuela flocked to the cities to enjoy the benefits of subsidized housing, transport and food. Agrarian reform became a priority only when the government of Hugo Chavez sought to transform the nation via a socialist revolution. A new land tenure regime in 2010 led to the confiscation of several million hectares of private estates. Most of these actions occurred in non-Amazonian regions, and colonization of Amazonian wilderness has never been pursued as a deliberate policy.

Land tenure in Guyana and Suriname reflects their shared colonial history and the legacy of Crown lands, which were transferred to the republican governments upon independence in the 1960s. Agrarian landscapes are restricted to the coastal provinces where tenure is a combination of freeholders and leaseholders on public lands. The former are few in number and include both family farms and plantation estates, while the latter include cooperative societies of small farmers who operate as independent producers. Away from the coast, both governments enjoy a near-monopoly on land tenure, managed via concessionaire systems governing both minerals and timber.

In Guyana, the state owns approximately 73 per cent of the national territory, freeholders control 12 % and Indigenous villages hold communal title to about 15 % of the country, mostly in the interior. In Suriname, the state holds title to more than 95 % of all land, despite demands by Maroon and Indigenous communities for the recognition of their territorial rights. Failure to accede to these requests was one of several causes of a civil war that plagued the nation between 1986 and 1991, which was followed by an extended period of political stagnation that allowed successive governments to ignore their demands – despite multiple rulings by the Inter American Court of Human Rights. In 2016, the government finally made a commitment to resolve all outstanding issues; however, as of January 2022, the final details had yet to be finalized.

“A Perfect Storm in the Amazon” is a book by Timothy Killeen and contains the author’s viewpoints and analysis. The second edition was published by The White Horse in 2021, under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0 license).

Read the other excerpted portions of chapter 4 here:

To read earlier chapters of the book, find Chapter One here, Chapter Two here, and Three is here.