Land grabbing, legal contention and institutional change in Colombia

Abstract

The entanglement of violence and legal institutions in Colombia has led some scholars to argue that this country is characterized by a ‘law without state’, or that the law has a mere ‘symbolic function’. This would explain an apparent paradox: high-intensity violence has been accompanied by the preservation of legal institutions and a common belief in their social importance. Yet the mobilization of the legal repertoire against violent land grabbing by peasant movements shows their belief in the legitimacy of legal institutions. Instead of measuring the efficiency of these actions, this paper will analyse the interaction between local orders and national legal institutions. This study argues that legal arenas have served to address land conflict, in a context of egregious violence. With their own dynamics and rules, they have not completely disrupted the logics of violent dispossession, yet they have defined land not only as an object of business transactions but also as an issue of human rights and collective identities.

Keywords:

• land grabbing
• collective action
• law
• institutional change

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as Jun Borras and Yves-Pol Hémonin, for their valuable comments and for the time and patience they devoted to the early versions of this manuscript. I also owe much gratitude to the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) network, which provided me with extremely helpful support within the Small Grants Programme.

Notes

¹This process of discharge is remarkably well described by López-Alves (2003) and Roldan (2002).

²The Colombian Pacific Lowlands region has been studied by Escobar (2008); he apprehends the Colombian government policies in this region as determined by both the neoliberal agenda, that led to the development of agribusiness, and the multicultural paradigm that allowed the emergence of black and indigenous social movements.

³The collaboration between paramilitary groups and the military in the Urabá region was included in a criminal investigation against General Rito Alejo del Río, convicted in 2012 for the murder of a peasant during these joint operations. The description of the 1996–1997 armed operations is based on the Del Río trial.

⁴The United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) was a confederation of paramilitary militias, strongly linked to large landowners, narcotraffickers and local politicians. Negotiations held between the government and the AUC representatives between 2003 and 2005 led to the formal demobilization of these groups. Most of its leaders were extradited to the United States for drug traffic charges. An undetermined share of the medium-level commanders and the rank-and-file created new armed groups or joined existent militias linked to drug smuggling.

⁵Author interviews, Bogota, January and February 2011.

⁶Ballvé (2013) and Restrepo and Franco (2011) abundantly explore the issue of the links between criminal and corporate actors.

⁷As stated by Foreign Affairs (2005), that placed Colombia at the 14^th position of its ‘Failed States Index’ in 2005.

⁸Since the late 1990s, there has been continuous debate over the figures of internal displacement in Colombia. IDMC's different figures correspond to the Colombian government (the lowest assessment) and to the Colombian NGO CODHES (the highest).

⁹Author interview with the attorney in charge of the first indictment against Del Río. Bogota, February 2011.

¹⁰The General Inspector's Office is in charge of controlling the public servants’ compliance to the law.

¹¹Source : Ley 030 de 2006-Senado, por la cual se dicta el estatuto de desarrollo rural, se reforma el Instituto Colombiano de Desarrollo Rural (INCODER), y se dictan otras disposiciones.

¹² Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Revolutionary armed forces of Colombia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Land Deal Politics Initiative Small Grants Programme.

Jacobo Grajales is a junior lecturer (ATER) at Sciences Po Rennes and an associate researcher at the Center for International Studies and Research (CERI). He holds a PhD from Sciences Po Paris. His doctoral research concerned the relation between paramilitary groups and the state in Colombia. It led him to conduct field research and archival work, following a socio-historical approach. He is currently working on the transnational circulation of norms related to the government of natural resources. Email: [email protected]