Land Restitution to Community Councils in the Bajo Atrato Region, Colombia

Abstract

This article synthesizes and updates a masters’ thesis in Political Studies on the process of resistance to dispossession that the ancestral communities of the Lower Atrato have lived during the period prior to the signing of the Peace Agreements between the government and the farc and on the difficulties for the effective restitution of their lands at the present stage of the Post-Agreements. To do so, I specify some factors that prevent the application of the law related to anomalies of Colombian democracy and a development model based on accumulation by dispossession. There are multiple institutional obstacles as the absence of updated cadastral data on extension, boundaries, and physical location of rural properties; besides the ineffectiveness of justice that is subject to multiple horizontally and vertically fragmented powers in national and territorial institutions. This has prevented the application of Law 1448 of 2011, also called the Law of Victims and Land Restitution, and of Decrees Law 4633 and 4635 of 2011 on the claim of the rights of indigenous and Afro-descendants in territories violated by war. Currently, the presence of new paramilitary groups and the killing of social leaders of the Community Councils has increased. The article seeks to analyze the cultural characteristics and community policies that are characteristic of the Colombian Pacific riparian culture, as potentials for the preservation of collective rights in community processes of civil resistance for the right of life and territory; in the face of circumstances of recent victimizing events, the investigation records the current resistance process, with complaints before the Special Justice for Peace (jep) and with the completion of the Humanitarian Caravan for Peace towards Chocó. These actions of the affected communities have been accompanied by the networks of National Human Rights non-governmental organizations and international cooperation.