The Ring. The government of Gustavo Petro has granted 52 land titles to peasant families in the district of El Aro in the Colombian department of Antioquia hand over.
In October 1997, paramilitaries killed 17 people there and about 1,400 had to leave their homes and farmland. With the new land titles for 600 hectares of land, the families can take out loans as legal owners and pass the land on to their children.
In a speech on site, Petro advocated further improving the living conditions of the community’s residents. In addition, said he said the Colombian state had to apologize for being an accomplice in the massacre: “There was no state presence to prevent the death.”
Agrarian reform and the acceleration of the return of land to small farmers was one of Petros Election promisesWithout agrarian reform, there will be no social justice in the country, said the President.
Already in June of this year, 35 other families of victims of the El Aro massacre received 800 hectares of land.
In Colombia owns About one percent of the population owns 81 percent of the land. In the peace agreement between the then FARC guerrillas and the government of Juan Manuel Santos in 2016, agrarian reform is one of the central commitments. In total, the Colombian state is to formalize the ownership of seven million hectares of land and distribute three million hectares of land to landless farmers. Early in his government set Petro set himself the smaller goal of 1.5 million hectares of land. To this end, he reached an agreement with the Federación de Ganaderos de Colombia (Fedegan) that the large landowners would voluntarily give up their land. sell But so far the government has only bought 180,000 hectares of land and only passed on a portion of it.
In order to speed up the process, Petro has now proposed reforming the National Land Agency (Agencia National de Tierras) by decree and integrating it into the National Agency for Rural Development (Agencia de Desarollo Rural).
Senate President Efraín Cepeda criticized the approach at X and called for the institutional route via the Senate instead of decrees.
In the past, there have been several Tensions between the conservative-dominated Senate and Petro, as well as blockages or delays of important government projects.
The legal basis for the restitution of land is Law 1448 from 2011.
