Colombia High Court Orders Militia-Seized Land Returned to Owners

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia High Court Orders Militia-Seized Land Returned to Owners


BOGOTA – Colombia’s Supreme Court ruled Thursday that land taken over by now-disbanded rightist militias must be returned to its rightful owners rather than sold to fund reparations for all the victims of the paramilitaries. The court found in favor of a motion brought by a public prosecutor and private attorneys representing plundered landholders in the northwestern province of Antioquia.

The plaintiffs sought the revocation of fraudulent land titles obtained by Freddy Rendon Herrera, former leader of the Elmer Cardenas Bloc of the AUC militia federation. Rendon and the 1,535 fighters under his command laid down their arms in mid-2006, the last major unit of the AUC to demobilize as part of a peace process with the government of then-President Alvaro Uribe. More than 31,000 paramilitaries in all stood down under the Justice and Peace Law, which offered lenient punishment for warlords who make full confessions and provide compensation to victims.

The high court accepted the Antioquia prosecutor’s argument that individuals plundered by the militias should not have to suffer delays in the “restitution of assets whose illegal appropriation was already admitted by the demobilized (paramilitary) and whose legal ownership prior to the forced expropriation is documented by the victims.”

Tribunals operating under the Justice and Peace Law “cannot be indifferent to the humanitarian tragedy” of the millions of displaced people reduced to “begging at traffic lights in the big cities,” the Supreme Court said.

The families in Antioquia should have their land “return to their hands, and that it not be lost in the general tangle of a common grant,” Colombia’s high court found.

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