with the support of the “lords and landowners” was constituted as the largest criminal structure that ever existed in the country, turning the nineties and part of the new century into one of the most bloodthirsty and violent periods in Colombia’s history.
Both guerrillas and paramilitaries have instrumentalized the institutions and mechanisms of democracy according to their interests; not only the elections, but also the spaces for social participation, protest and social movements, such as community boards or unions. Both have violently punished the gestures of autonomy made by communities and social leaders. Democracy has been seen by all armed actors as both a positioning opportunity and, in turn, a threat to their war plans. Thus, the different forms of struggle have been combined, dangerously mixing war and politics. Therefore, from this perspective, the great victim of this conflict has been democracy itself (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013, p. 52).
Armed conflict and land control
Together with political control, the agrarian question constitutes one of the central axes of the Colombian armed conflict. In the opinion of the “Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica” or “National Historical Memory Center”:
It is not only because the land remains an unfulfilled promise for a large part of the rural population, but also because until the Peace Accords are signed, there is a state deficit in the countryside and a strong, firmly rooted presence of armed groups that today have found adequate space for the exercise of illicit activities, such as drug trafficking, in the rural sector. (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013, p. 49).
The land problem is not a recent issue, but instead has been brewing from the nineteenth century through to the present day. The land issue has been determined by different political, institutional and legislative actions over the different historical periods, and characterized by a common denominator; the continuance of the concentration of agricultural property in the hands of a minority, which is the main cause of the serious situation of poverty and social inequality that characterizes Colombia, especially in rural areas.
There are three fundamental periods to understanding the worsening of this conflict. The first, from the end of the 19th century until 1958, where the result of the Thousand Days’ War and the promulgation of the Political Constitution of 1886, consolidated a national project in which the elites held power, leaving out the rest of society. This caused a social upheaval, promoted mainly by the “campesino”1 population, who saw how wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few, resulting in conflicts between large landowners and smallholders. This occurred under the influence of three major crises: the demographic, which affected the balance between the population and natural resources, the opening of the land market and the integration of campesino production into trade channels, and the crisis of authority, which weakened the power of traditional elites and dislocated the mechanisms of domination (Bejarano, 1985).
In order to resolve such a conflict, Law 114 of 1922 authorized, for the first time, the creation of agricultural settlements under a policy of colonization of barren lands. With this, the role of the State was directed in two ways: to standardize certain guidelines to –apparently– favor the campesinos in need of land; and at the same time, use force mechanisms to prevent said population from taking over the land they cultivated. Thus, the institutional response to the demands of the campesinos oscillated between a policy of the allocation of plots with compensation to the landowners and a strong repression of the mobilized campesino population.
Subsequently, with the arrival to power of liberalism, the strengthening of the nascent Communist Party and the appearance of important figures such as Gaitán, Law 22 of 1936 was issued, which in practice upheld the economic, political and social power of the landowner, granting a new legitimacy to private ownership whilst not necessarily democratizing land tenure.
The second period is determined by the plans of the Frente Nacional, in which Carlos Lleras Restrepo, president at that time, in order to end the unproductive estates of the landowners, proposed a new agrarian reform, stimulating the organization of the campesino population. This was consolidated through Law 135 of 1961 which allowed the use of strong mechanisms, such as land consolidation, to provide “Unidades Agrícolas Familiares” or “Household Farming Units” to smallholders affecting privately owned land, nearby and close to the smallholding areas, whatever their degree of exploitation (Villamil, 2015, p. 10). Despite the measures taken, in 1972, a coalition of large landowners, threatened by the empowerment of campesino organizations, prompted the “Pact of Chicoral” with the support of the National Government and the dominant political parties. This later became Law 4 of 1973, which prevented the legal structure of land tenure from being modified for the benefit of the Colombian campesinos, thus halting said reform.
Under similar circumstances, during the eighties, due to the expansion of the agrarian frontier:
Thousands of settlers arrived in remote and forgotten jungle areas, driven by the coffee crisis and the rise of agribusiness, mining, oil and coca. In these regions of recent colonization, the state presence had been very weak, resulting in armed groups, guerrillas to begin with and then also paramilitaries, taking their place. This in turn aggravated the economic opening processes promoted at the beginning of the nineties. (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013, p. 53).
Finally, the third period is the one characterized by the agrarian reform of 1994, established with Law 160. This law focused on establishing a mechanism to affect the agrarian structure through the redistribution of land by trade, that is, through the direct purchase of land by campesinos, partially subsidized by the State and mediated by the institutional action of the “Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria” (Incora) or the “Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform”. However, this did not mean true redistribution, nor was the increasing dispossession and displacement caused by the armed conflict taken into account (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2013, p. 50).
In this sense, the same laws that should have favored the campesinos, turned out to be those that secured the landowner in the tenure of the land, which, together with the disappointment of the campesinos, ended up worsening conflicts over land. As Alfredo Molano puts it, “Law 200 is the axis around which agrarian conflicts have revolved since the armed struggle took root” (2015, p. 9), because not remedying the high levels of land tenure inequality and not providing legal settings that facilitate access to it, has led campesinos to continue fighting for the dream of agrarian reform, even if that means fighting with weapons (Pineda, 2016, p. 19).
Peace processes in Colombia: the intent and the reality of an effective agreement
The internal armed conflict, since its inception, has had a serious effect on social and institutional structures, prompting several governments to try and establish channels of dialogue with belligerent groups. These processes, although with varied interests and scope, failed to successfully consolidate a path to peacebuilding. They did, however, contribute to the identification of stakeholders, contexts, routes and, above all, generate lessons for the consolidation of the current peace process.
Thus, tradition in the face of negotiations has long been a part of the country’s history, dating back to the fifties where, after the coup d’état of General Rojas Pinilla, two initiatives to cancel the violence arose. The first of these was aimed at granting amnesty for the campesinos and day laborers aligned with the liberal guerrillas; and the second, was derived from the partisan agreement of traditional political groups that gave rise to the National Front. However, the exclusionary nature of these agreements and the lack of State protection for the nascent organizations and mobilizations prevented the initially established objective from being achieved.
Once the armed conflict intensified, with the appearance of new participants in the eighties, the Governments of Belisario Betancur and Virgilio Barco proposed a series of initiatives aimed at negotiation.
The government of Belisario Betancur foresaw, given
