Land and Paramilitarism in the Truth, Justice and Reparation Plan (1)

DARIO FAJARDO MONTAÑO2

In a debate like this one, it is important to put on the table the greatest things that permit us to be consequent with what is happening in the world and with the experiences that we consider useful for building what we believe is our common denominator: a viable country.

The subject of land and, specifically, the concentration of land ownership, is a very old subject. Suffice it to say that the first mission of the World Bank when it came to Colombia in 1950, under the direction of Professor Lauchlin Currie, indicated that, indeed, the concentration of land property was one of the greatest obstacles for the country's development.

One decade of war and violence was necessary, and the presence and pressure of the United States, so that we would have the first law of agrarian reform, Law 135 of 1961. Senator Rafael Pardo, in his last book The History of the Wars indicated that the confusion of the conflicts, with which the Colombians have lived since the wars of independence, has always happened along side political agreements, and that, in addition, it has been necessary for finding an international interlocutor to prop up these processes.

Law 135 was the child of the Alliance for Progress, although the Colombian people, farmers and the war also exerted immense pressure. That law failed and the failure served as the starting point for a campaign of loss of prestige against agrarian reform, reform that has been criticized, and one of the arguments used is that it created poor people of the land. The history is very long; I simply want to show that the law led to the violence of the 1950s, and was the child of external, as well as internal, pressures, but that it was a failure.

In 1994 we had another law of agrarian reform, Law 160. That law was the child of the constitutional reform of 1991, but also of the new economic context and here I want to emphasize something. When we were initiating the process of absorbing the Constitution of 1991, we were also entering a process of economic openness. An openness that began with the government of César Gaviria in particular. That economic opening was going to have terrible costs, as we will now see, and had within it a vision of strategic considerations making agrarian reform necessary. It was going to be different from Law 135 of 1961 because the context had changed, but it was clear that Colombian agriculture would not be competitive in the international market without agrarian reform.

The legislators were conscious that the cost of the concentration of land property for production was excessively expensive. In the 1990s, we had the most important agricultural crisis since the 1920s. The crisis left only 800,000 hectares of productive surface, where once there had been more or less four or five million. We were left with only one-fifth of our productive surface. That was the effect of the economic reform. Clearly, our production was not competitive with land costs and the costs of the excessive credit. Again, the law failed.

Last year, in December 2003, the World Bank concluded a mission in Colombia evaluating land policy. Its report showed that land property was not only dispersed as a result of the crisis, but that the concentration ratio of land ownership was still increasing. The data we have for that time period, according to the Codazzi and Corpoica Geographic Institute denominated zone study of the conflicts of land use in Colombia are: 97% of the proprietors own 24% of the land, while .4% of the proprietors own 61% of the land. According to the World Bank, this gives Colombia a concentration coefficient of .85%, the highest one, ahead of countries like Japan (.38%) and South Korea (.35%). I mention these two countries because in the 1950s Japan, Korea, and Colombia all shared, so to speak, a political scene: countries deeply in conflict or just ending such conflicts. In the case of Japan, after World War II, and in the case of Korea, both were sunk in the aggression used by the United States. In the Japan of the postwar period, General Douglas MacArthur, from the United States Armed Forces, who commanded the occupation forces in the Pacific, gambled on agrarian reform. General MacArthur's agrarian reform in Japan was to cut the roots of Japanese militarism and, at the same time, lay the foundations for true development. We see in Japan that this was effective and deep agrarian reform gave the land to the Japanese farmers. South Korea also speaks to us as well, and here is an example of why: At one time some parliamentary sectors, while not praising South Korea, nevertheless said that the development of South Korea happened due to the deep agrarian reform opening up the market and generating the basis for industrial development.

The latest law of Colombian agrarian reform, and which did not work, according to the World Bank, happened within the framework of the economic opening of the 1990s, an opening that began with a deep reduction in tariffs: a policy of lifting tariffs that had been protecting national production. Agricultural products with tariffs around 34% or 36% were reduced to 11% and initiated the massive influx of imports into Colombia, losing 800,000 hectares of production, more than 300,000 jobs this decade. We entered an import wave, where the country began to replace national production with imports averaging five million tons of food and raw materials annually. The country began to depend on imports for its food security with results that are well known today.

What I want to emphasize is that the agrarian problem is alive, the problem of the concentration of land ownership is alive, its costs are violent and it does not allow us to be competitive. But more serious still, land concentration is continuing to grow. I sometimes ask our gremial leader, faced with the argument that land no longer has value: If the land is not worth anything, why concentrate the ownership? Why not lessen it? The answer is that the value is rooted not in the land for production – and we see that nothing is being produced – but that in our country the land is concentrated to control the people, the land is concentrated to exploit the people and, as some say, to "de-land" the people. Thanks to the process of land ownership concentration, we are seeing the country in the dreadful process of forming an immense army of reservists. This is what seems to be necessary to show others that we can be competitive in the international market. This is my hypothesis.

One week ago I was invited to National Planning to discuss a Conpes document, the Conpes de Miraflores, a very strange thing, a complete Conpes document for the Miraflores municipality. What was it for? Dismantling the municipality of Miraflores and with this, half of the Guaviare. Why? Because these municipalities were declared nonviable, obviously; the investment resources are disappearing, plus the war – we have resources for that, of course – leads to forced displacement, as has happened in the Piedemonte caqueteño, and is in the enormous process of extending the supply of manual labor for that dream, preposterous, that some are raising for the Vichada district: to seed more than 300,000 hectares of African palm and other so-called Amazonian crops. It means a repeat and mummification of the history of the banana region, of the African palm in the Magdalena Medio and the converting of the country into an immense factory of cheap manual labor, thanks to the war.

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(1) The following is the transcript of the speech given by Darío Fajardo at the Public Hearing for Confluencia por la Democracia y contra la guerra, a network of more than 100 social and political Colombian organizations. This hearing was summoned by the Peace Commission of the House of Representatives and took place in the seat of the house on Wednesday, December 1st.

(2) Darío Fajardo is one of the most outstanding investigators into the agrarian problems of Colombia. He is a university professor and is currently an FAO consultant in Colombia.