Colombia
Right to land and the protection and restitution of properties
One of the root causes of forced displacement in Colombia is the interest of companies, land owners and the government itself in acquiring land and control of natural resources. Following his visit to Colombia in June 2007, the Representative of the Secretary General on the human rights of internally displaced persons said that he:
remains perturbed by unresolved issues, despite what the law says, of land relinquished under duress or acquired and registered in contravention of the law, for instance in cases of communal land. He reminds the Government of Colombia that the question of land and of property is central to the possible return of the IDPs and to finding sustainable solutions for those who no longer wish to return to their places of origin. This is not only true for those who have lived on their land for generations, such as indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, but also for those who had more recently acquired and planted their land as colones.(1)
The standards related to the protection of property of IDPs and to the recovery or restitution of, or compensation for the property are outlined in Guiding Principles 21 and 29.2.
Guiding principle 21
- No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of property and possessions.
- The property and possessions of internally displaced persons shall in all circumstances be protected, in particular, against the following acts:
(a) Pillage;
(b) Direct or indiscriminate attacks or other acts of violence;
(c) Being used to shield military operations or objectives;
(d) Being made the object of reprisal; and
(e) Being destroyed or appropriated as a form of collective punishment. - Property and possessions left behind by internally displaced persons should be protected against destruction and arbitrary and illegal appropriation, occupation or use.
Back to topGuiding principle 29
(…)
- Competent authorities have the duty and responsibility to assist returned and/or resettled internally displaced persons to recover, to the extent possible, their property and possessions which they left behind or were dispossessed of upon their displacement. When recovery of such property and possessions is not possible, competent authorities shall provide or assist these persons in obtaining appropriate compensation or another form of just reparation.
Back to topUDHR Article 17
1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.
On top of the above, there are other problems affecting the indigenous Barí communities and they are directly linked to the armed conflict, which is driving the expropriation of ancestral lands.
We should analyse a bit more what the armed conflict implies for the country's indigenous communities. It has an obvious territorial element - 75% of the country is affected by some sort of armed conflict. It's a fight for the control of rural areas, in which the absence of state institutions has generated a dynamic of increasing human rights abuses, displacements and killings from which the communities have not been able to escape...
Read moreAbuna AnimonaThe guerrillas have the custom of settling in with families in their homes, of staying there. Night would arrive and they would still be there in the homes. The paramilitaries would then pursue them there and a battle would break out. So the paramilitaries would say that the owner of the house was a collaborator, a guerrilla, and that if he didn’t flee, he would be killed and his house burned down. And if he had animals, they would take them away and then use tractors to loot anything of use to them. The crops were left in their possession.
Then they would bring in people to live on the plots. They would take land and, in that way ... They would take possession of everything, of the farm, of everything there. The people who stayed there, the people that they put there, were allies, cachacos brought from the outside. They didn’t grow crops, but began to work, to organize the farm for grazing. They would bring in cattle, bring in all the cattle that they had taken from other places...
Lea másJoséOne of the ways of organising, one of the alternatives for defending our land, was to form community councils, which are the maximum authority for dealing with the government on matters concerning land. The other alternative was the humanitarian zones, because they were places where we could identify ourselves as civilians, places no armed groups were allowed to enter, a place exclusively for civilians from where we could defend our land. On the down side, what struck me was the way in which they wanted to get us out of here, off our land. I mean, the way they wanted to use force to drive off all the peasant farmers living in the area. Why would they do that to us peasant farmers, who've always been here, been the owners of all this land? And who, more than being owners, have a collective title that includes the entire territory? (…)we do know that it all has to do with the major projects that they plan for our region; for example, monocultures of palm for oil, the extraction of arracacho (mocou mocou) from the Lower and Middle Atrato basins, mining in the Careperro hills and the Urra hydroelectric dam...
Read moreLuis AngelWhere there's a landowner or an influential person who's got a certain amount of land that no ordinary person -- that no small or poor salaried worker -- dare approach, because if anyone complains, they end up displaced too. They contract what today are called paramilitaries, organised self-defence groups, to kill one or two people so that the rest get scared. That's what happens. Look at the banana workers, for example, both in Urabá and in Magdalena - they're just poor banana workers, but who owns the plantations? The people controlling the production are influential people, people with money, industrialists, and if anyone complains, they are displaced...
Read moreIsmaelSometimes, I think that I will return in December, but not call, not say anything. The farm is in his name; we didn’t finish paying it off. We still owe money to that man. Before they took my husband away we gave him some money, but not all of it. He sold it to us in 6 million pesos and we still haven’t given it all to him. So the man said that when we finished paying him off, he would give us a compraventa, nothing else, because he doesn’t have those deeds either...
Read moreLeydiToday the government is bringing out the ley de tierras (law of lands), which says that whoever has been in a place for five years has right to that land. And the person, who for reasons of the conflict and the state itself had to abandon the land? You deduce from that that “this didn’t happen because of one group or another. It was the state itself that sponsored the expulsion, that generated the conflict in the zone.” If I understand it well, the law before covered 10 years. So no one could use the land of the displaced population. But what we see now is that the new ley de tierras (law of lands) covers five years. In other words, after being gone from our lands for five years, we lose everything. Let’s review: I’ve been displaced from 1997 to 2006, or nine years, more or less...
Read moreCarlosFirst the army came, behind them the AUC. They were mixed together, mixed .. They arrived and identified themselves: “We are the National Army” and then the other group came: “We are the Self-Defence Forces,” insulting people and mistreating them (…) People ran. They summoned those that remained to say that everyone had to abandon town, that the land was there’s, that we shouldn’t have returned to get in the way, that they had warned us. We had to clear out immediately. If not, they would wipe us all out.
With that we realized that all that aggression against us, against the communities in the basin, had been for land, for our land, to take our land away. Because the land was very fertile, suited for growing many things .. so yes, all that hostility was to get our land...
Read moreJuanWe’re not only talking about the megaprojects in rubber and African palm, but also in the expansion of intensive cattle ranching – which if we do our historical analysis – originates in the Andean region, in all the valleys that have been expropriated from peasant farmers in Magdalena Medio, in the Cauca and Magdalena valleys, on the banks of those two rich rivers. Now it extends to other plains and to the Colombian Amazon (…) Colombia has a history of displacement involving the blood of its people. It’s just that we’re surrounded by so much land, so much wealth, so many levels of topography, that it’s like we didn’t see it. The strategy of 1948 was to depopulate and dispossess the peasant farmers who had the best lands on the banks of the rivers and send them to the slopes of the mountains or to the agricultural frontier, like the Amazon and Orinoco...
Read moreRaúl Because they say it was the coca, but the violence wasn’t because of the coca. Violence happens where there’s oil land. That’s what they want: that’s why they kill people, kill Indians, and take control of the land. Yea, for oil. It’s not the coca, because they consume coca and they can’t finish it off. That’s the thing...
Read moreCacique
(1) Report of the Representative of the Secretary-General on the human rights of internally displaced persons, Walter Kälin, Addendum: Mission to Colombia, A/HRC/4/38/Add.3, 24 January 2007, paragraph. 69.
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