Episode 1: There is no land for so many peopleIndigenous people, Afro-descendants, peasants, and sugarcane growers are facing each other over the flat lands of the Colombian department of Cauca, where large farms, smallholdings, territories of black communities, and reservations converge. A laboratory in which the Agrarian Reform is put to the test, a pillar of Total Peace led by the first left-wing government in the country’s history. Report by Angélica Pérez, special envoy for RFI
“If we achieve peace in the north of Cauca, we achieve peace throughout the country,” he said in November 2022 Alfonso Prada, then Minister of the Interior and government spokesperson, during the Binding Regional Dialogues held in the municipality of Santander de Quilichao.
In that kind of Greek Ekklesia that President Gustavo Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez promoted throughout the country, some 3,000 people, coming from the 13 municipalities of northern Cauca, sat down to put together an insoluble puzzle at first sight. : the fate of its territory in tension
The voices also crossed, revealing a local conflict of long standing and ignored by the rest of the country: the confrontation between indigenousafros, peasants and cane farmersfor access to the flat lands of the north of the Cauca, the region of the department where they share the most territory.
“Today we cannot cover the sun with a finger. There is an inter-ethnic conflict, a conflict with business sectors. And we cannot allow us to end up attacking each other between brothers, between towns, between communities. In the end, we have all lived marginality ”he said from the rostrum France Marquez.
And it is that she, the vice president of the country, was born in La Toma, a township in northern Cauca inhabited by the black community since slavery was abolished. And forgotten by the Colombian State during the 150 years that separate us from that date. Faced with hundreds of blacks like her and indigenous people, Francia Márquez urged to shape a route that allows everyone to live together “because, as you said, no one is leaving Cauca. We all stay here.”
Few with a lot of land, many without land
Mosaic of identities and interethnic and intercultural conflicts, northern Cauca also suffers from the presence of all the armed actors: the ELN guerrilla, FARC dissidents, criminal groups called post-FARC and various paramilitary bands at the service of drug trafficking and large economic interests.
56,000 hectares of the most productive lands in Northern Cauca are planted with sugar cane, from large properties of more than 800,000 hectares to some of just 5,000 hectares belonging to small owners, indigenous blacks or peasants, who associate to sell the cane to the great geniuses.
In addition to beingOne of the departments with the greatest ethnic plurality, variety of social organizations and biodiversity in the country, Cauca has a higher concentration of land than the national average and its problems are older than the very emergence of the Republic.
Colombia’s rural problems are centralized and maximized in Cauca. These are problems that are 400 years old,” says Edwin Novoa, a land expert from the Environment and Society Association.
The researcher explains that it is the only department in the country where the two jungle systems, the Amazon and the Pacific, converge, while its northern region corresponds to the Andean mountainous region. Despite the productive wealth of the Caucanian land, Novoa warns that many of these lands are not legally available, either because they are preserved for an ecological function or because between 30% and 40% of these productive lands are occupied by sugar mills.
The lack of access to productive land has been brewing conflicts between the communities that make up the immense ethnic, cultural and social range of northern Cauca. C.Onflicts that made headlines in 2022 when the first left-wing government of Colombia launched the Agrarian Reform, that enormous historical debt of the Colombian State with the rural areas of the country.
Both the indigenous people, the original inhabitants of the country, and the black descendants of Africans brought as slaves during the conquest, consider the flat lands of Cauca their ancestral territory. Each one claims 150,000 hectares for their communities. Is there land for so many people in the North of Cauca? Noanswers CarlosArturo Duarte, researcher in Rural development and territorial planning at the Center for Interethnic Studies of the Javeriana University of Cali.
“The 13 municipalities of northern Cauca have about 350,000 hectares that easily equal the need for land,” says Duarte and adds: “That’s why The idea has been created that in order to solve the land problem in northern Cauca, a second or third floor would have to be created.”
The territorial tension is aggravated by the concentration of property. “We are talking about a Gini index, which is the measure through which inequality is measured, close to 0.88. Taking into account that 1 is total inequality, that is to say that a single person owns everything, since in the north of Cauca we clearly have few owners who have a large extension of land, that is, landowners, and many owners with little land.
The trap of interethnic conflict
Paradoxically, the territorial tensions took on an ethnic and cultural nuance from the avant-garde Constitution of 1991 that, although it revitalized the ethnic groups, granted them rights on a different scale. “Indigenous people have reinforced protection, Afro-Colombians less. And the peasants hardly have it developed. With the Constitution of 1991, the peasantry went from being the privileged subject of the agrarian reforms in the 20th century to being invisible and marginalized”, affirms the expert.
“Colombia was the first multicultural constitutions, but for that very reason it was designed in a strict manner, regarding identity” explains Duarte. Because? Because at that time they came from a process of denial and stigmatization of these ethnic identities. The result today is that “Afro-Colombians, the poor, poor workers, vulnerable indigenous people, landless peasants, end up facing each other over a system that gives them rights with different scopes.”
“Don’t fall into the trap of a local inter-ethnic conflict. QYou are right, yes. Which is the reason? The earth. Sure, but if the land is the cause and we kill each other, the people are being killed.” In his visits to the north of Cauca, President Gustavo Petro has prodded indigenous and black people for allowing their differences to be nuanced by powers that obtain political and economic benefits with it.
According to the Colombian president, the message of those who fuel the killing is “don’t think about change, don’t think about power. Don’t look at national power. And kill each other. slaughter yourselves.”
