Un poco de contexto: los modelos del régimen de la tierra y su despojo en Colombia

Agrarian change through speculation: Rural elites as land brokers for mining in Colombia

“…These groups did not operate in political and social isolation but were often supported financially and otherwise by rural elites, support that was legitimized by assertions of self‐defence and counterinsurgency (Counter, 2019). In their study on ‘agrarian elite participation’ in Colombia's civil war, Francisco Gutiérrez‐Sanín and Jenniffer Vargas (2017) show that large‐scale cattle ranchers participated directly in the development and actions of the paramilitaries, as leaders of the units, or as the promoters and final beneficiaries of coercive land dispossession (see also Quinche Roa et al, 2018). Gutiérrez‐Sanín and Vargas state that one central motivation for the agrarian elite to accumulate land by dispossession was to expand landownership in order to—sooner or later—derive ‘legal’ economic benefits from it, by pocketing state subsidies, putting it to productive use or through speculation (see also Richani, 2012).…”

“…A particular form of this is ‘administrative dispossession’ (del Pilar Peña‐Huertas et al, 2017), where state actors are central agents of dispossession. In Colombia, legal dispossession has been critically discussed in relation to the role of the Colombian Institute for Agrarian Reform (Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agrarian [INCORA]; later the Colombian Institute for Rural Development, Instituto Colombiano de Desarrollo Rural [INCODER]) (Grajales, 2011, 2016; Quinche Roa et al, 2018).…”

“…To develop these arguments, I refer to the concept of accumulation by dispossession as defined by Michael Levien (2011, 2013), land speculation, and land brokerage in the context of the global commodity boom and the expansion of the extractive frontier (Capps, 2016; Emel & Huber, 2008). I link these approaches to other theoretical concepts used for analysing (coercive) land grabbing and rural elite participation in the armed conflict in Colombia, as well as the expansion of extractive frontiers in Latin America more generally (e.g., Ballvé, 2013; Campbell, 2015; Gill, 2020; Grajales, 2013; Gutiérrez‐Sanín & Vargas, 2017; Quinche Roa et al, 2018; Vargas & Uribe, 2017).…”