Coffee plantation at the Coffee Axis. Uribe’s home department and starting point of his political career. Key location for land grabbing and paramilitarism in the Afro-Colombian and Mestizo communities’ in the Lower Atrato region of Chocó. January 2011, Antioquia, Colombia.
A Land of Paradox Known largely for its excellent coffee, for artists like Nobel novelist Gabriel García Márquez, or for the violent genius of world-class drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, Colombia has enormous human talent. It is a land of contrast, contradiction, and paradox — and a land of mirages, a land where things are often not what they seem. Varied topography and high biodiversity bespeak a natural richness: Caribbean and Pacific littorals rise gently to Andean uplands, where cold, windy puna descends through cloud forest to inter-montane valleys, or plunges into deep canyons in the southwest. To the east sprawl the arid Orinoco plains, to the south river-laced Amazonian rainforest. Government is absent to weakly-present over most of this myriad vastness. Inhabiting a milieu of rigid social classes, the people are as varied as the fractured land, whose richness hides a somber reality. Less than 3% of a population of 46 million is indigenous, with Afro-Colombians from 10 - 25%. Living in remote areas, these groups have low human-development
indicators, figure disproportionately among conflict victims, and today suffer the invasion of a growing resource extraction. Half of the country — 60% of rural areas — endures poverty, with some of Latin America’s worst just outside the walls of the colonial port city of Cartagena, site of the Sixth Summit of the Americas in April 2012. Colombia is by income the world’s fourth most unequal country — in one of the earth’s most unequal regions. Land distribution is highly skewed; Colombia has
never had a viable land reform, or a reliable cadaster. Informality, corruption, straw ownership, tax evasion, and violence mark land transactions. Less than 1% of landowners control 60% of farmland — the region’s highest concentration. Drug mafias and rightwing paramilitaries today control 35% of prime farmland. Land inequality has long linked to the country’s conflict, which has internally displaced some six million people — highest in the world. Many settled on urban fringes; thousands more fled to Ecuador and Venezuela.
Colombian soldiers, pressed for results and offered benefits, had since 2002 lured up to 3,000 young civilians to secluded spots under the pretense of employment, then killed them to present their bodies as felled rebels. 55