Ties to the Territory and Peacebuilding in Land Restitution Processes. The Case of the Municipalities of La Unión and Carmen De Viboral in Colombia

Territories in dispute and feelings of rootedness

In a legal sense, the territory is an area of spatial validity of the powers of the administrative entities, where the regulations for the extraction and ownership of its resources have been established, as well as for the distribution and management of these to regulate relations with the administered and to set the powers and public budgets. However, as Blomley (2022) mentions “Territory is very often symbolic, linking the territory to some form of identity.” We called this idea of roots territorialidad campesina, defined as the form of appropriation and management of the territory by the campesinos, a territoriality that is evidenced in the festivities, treats and pilgrimages that took place in the village² before violence. We can also find similar definitions in the literature, especially in: (Bendini and Steimbreger, 2014; Silva, 2016; Valencia-Castro, 2020; Pineda and Valencia, 2022).

In a geographical sense, the territory is the concrete relational space of society, where the transversal links by power take place, determining the global-local reconfigurations and the conflicts for the material or symbolic benefits that the territory procures; this evidences agreements or tensions between the actors on the appropriation of disputed resources, emerging territoriality as a category of situated analysis that reviews power relations, as well as the juxtapositions, resiliences and relationships between social actors and their territory (Haesbaert, 2013; Castro, 2020; Pineda and Valencia, 2022).

The case of Eastern Antioquia is due to a process of transformation and spatial, geographic, and political configuration as a space of globalisation, in which developmental interests linked to an economic project initiated from an industrial movement converge, but also territorialidad campesina that have been emerging in different historical moments (Pimienta and Pineda, 2021; Pineda and Valencia, 2022).

The graphic above (Figure 2) clearly reveals fluctuations in population growth and decline, particularly highlighting a notable decrease in the population of Eastern Antioquia between 1993 and 2005—a phenomenon attributed to the impact of the armed conflict. During this period, a significant population decrease is observed, reflecting the direct consequences of displacement. Between 2005 and 2009, despite slight growth, the majority of the population remains displaced, influencing the growth rate. However, starting from 2017, a substantial increase in the population is evident, indicating a significant change. This noticeable increase is directly related to the peace process, facilitating the return of the population to their original territories. This temporal analysis provides a detailed insight into the complex interactions among factors such as armed conflict, displacement, and reconciliation efforts, underscoring the importance of understanding the historical context to interpret demographic trends.

Figure 2

The Ordinance 41 of 1975, enacted by the Antioquia Departmental Assembly, was intended to create a sense of homogeneity in a subregion characterized by diverse terrain including moorland, forest, plains, and water reservoirs. Subsequently, a series of territorial intervention projects were implemented, predominantly of an economic-functional nature, with some being state-military interventions between 2004 and 2006, prior to the “total war” confrontation (Aramburo and García, 2011, cited by Pineda and Valencia, 2022) resulting in the displacement of campesinos. This intervention facilitated a deepening of territorial development based on industrial economic endeavours. Finally, social interventions have emerged to promote the idea of territorialidad campesina (Pineda and Valencia, 2022).

For this reason, following Pimienta and Pineda (2021), what emerges is, then, a dynamic process of transformation of the territory based on its functionality and advantageous uses by companies of all kinds and the tensions or adaptations that local actors carry out to this process through political action.

According to the participants in this research, the effects of the war broke the continuity of life, the ways of being and existing in the territory, and the collective functions of the social fabric. The disputed territory was not only a place of settlement but also a display of cultures, customs, and meanings, of roots of the people who inhabit or inhabited it, as well as the place where forms of subsistence take place, an economic network created by people whom they identify themselves as political, social, and socio-cultural subjects (I2, 2021, personal communication). Comparable studies in the field of forced migration have likewise uncovered that conflict and war have disrupted the local populations meanings and experiences associated with territory and place among the populations under examination. (Sakti, 2022; Sigona, 2014).

The war and the massive displacement brought “diverse effects on the community, being the fragmentation of the fabric and the community organisation, aspects particularly referenced by the campesinos as losses that the armed conflict left to the village” (Valencia-Castro, 2020: p. 20). However, the recent repertoires of political action in the territory include multiple expressions of unarmed civil resilience, local initiatives for food sovereignty and campesino autonomy, festivities for the defence of the territory and water against extractive projects which are considered by interviewees as actions of territorial intervention that “can lead to the expulsion of its inhabitants or that alter ways of life, such as the campesinos” (Pineda and Valencia-Castro, 2022). Other political actions are mobilised from various sectors of civil society that allude to criteria of link, of rootedness with the territory, similar actions can be found in other communities as alluded in like James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985).

This sociocultural plot shows that the described territory has several characteristics over time, before, during and after the most significant actions of the armed conflict. So then, the territory is described as follows.

It has been and is the subject and object of dispute because it is considered a resource that encompasses other valuable assets for the communities, but also for the armed groups and economic interest groups: biodiversity, water wealth, land for livestock, agriculture, or “fattening”.³ The territory is a victim of the conflict and, therefore, an object of collective reparation (I2, 2021, personal communication; I3, 2021, personal communication), which contrasts with difficulties in the plan to return to some villages where there are interests of private actors over the lands, and little clarity on the legal titling of the same (FG1, 2021, focus group).

It is the place abandoned both by the inhabitants due to the victimising act of forced displacement (I4, 2021, personal communication; FG1, 2021, focus group) and by the State. The territory is also a place of return due to land restitution processes. However, without guarantees of permanence (I3, 2021, personal communication), and many times, a place to which some campesinos return without healing wounds from the past: “People said that they hadn’t come back because they were scared, because it made them angry, they remembered when they killed their son, when they made them go, and of course that marks the way of relating” (I3, 2021, personal communication).

In turn, we find that those victims who inhabit the territory identify it or re-signify it in their narration from different perspectives:

1. The place to which it is difficult to return, but hope remains: returning to the territory has not been an easy process, but at the same time, there is the belief that land restitution is the path to peace; it is the way to build peace “returning has not been easy for many reasons; economically, emotionally… trying to start up again is not easy” (I4, 2021, personal communication), “but that figure of land restitution is helping us to return and recover, all of that goes hand in hand” (I4, 2021, personal communication).

2. The place where damages occurred. Without a doubt, in Eastern Antioquia, forced displacements, selective and systematic homicides, disappearances of persons, sexual violence, damage to infrastructure and the economic apparatus of the region and forced recruitment (FG1, 2021, focus group) were registered, which affected the relationship with the land and territory: “the territoriality that people live, from Santa Rita, la Honda, La Unión, Mesopotamia, El Cardal, has been a very fragmented territorial identity and hit by the conflict” (I3, 2021, personal communication).

3. The place where women became “spoils of war.” Many women, including those from the village of San Miguel de La Unión, were affected by sexual abuse by paramilitaries who were present in their territories. In this sense, women became “spoils of war” as an object of demonstration of the power of paramilitarism and its ability to break with the dignity of people (I1, 2021, personal communication). In the same way, in the municipality of Carmen de Viboral, the effects on women are not only observed in front of those who were raped, murdered or disappeared but also “in the women who were left alone, they took away our spouses or partners, siblings or fathers and that we have had to face this not only in rural areas, but also in urban areas” (FG1, 2021, focus group).

4. The place where the “chained love” took place, here the role of women romantically involved with actors in the conflict is described, who ended up being part of an armed group, perhaps without military or political conviction, but: “they simply fell in love of a very dear boy, beautiful and who also had a weapon that was very striking” (I1, 2021, personal communication), and that, then (…) “they ended up entangled in a conflict that was not theirs”. Another face of this phenomenon was explicitly presented in the municipality of La Unión with the paramilitaries since “many fell in love with a girl, and they put their eye on that girl, and that girl was for me by hook or by crook” (I1, 2021, personal communication).

So then, the feelings that accompany the narrative of the people consulted when they refer to roots are restlessness, rage, and impotence. The speeches reveal to us how the meaning of the bond with the land goes from an idealistic, romantic vision, from an emotional value to a material gain, “the sadness of leaving dreams, leaving things that one acquired with so much effort, my parents …and leave it thrown at the mercy of anyone where everyone takes advantage, everyone benefits, they take advantage of the vulnerability.” (I4, 2021, personal communication). Uprooting configures a rupture in the historical community and personal processes of connection with the land, accompanied by a loss of meaning and value to the “terruño”, a situation enhanced by the physical and mental consequences experienced by people and by the loss of attractions and reasons to want to stay (FG2, 2021, focus group). The relationship between territory and community has been subject to a profound study from a somewhat recent discipline called legal geography. As Nicolini (2022) specifically says “Territory and community are not separable and physical geography turns into legal geography” (p. 90).

In short, we show how rootedness is manifested in the narratives as the longing to recover past experiences in which one could be the owner of the land, but at the same time, one could share it with others, enjoy nature, and build stories and be happy (I2, 2021, personal communication). For this reason, it should be noted that: “The concept of land demonstrates the complexity of pigeonholing the discussion on the objectives and interests of transitional justice in simple terms of legal ascription to a particular class of rights” (Sánchez, 2017, p. 107). Land interventions vary based on their meaning and approach, and legal relationships related to land can involve different rights depending on the specific circumstances.

For the campesino population of this subregion, the land becomes a socio-spatial reference, a territory, a possibility of livelihood and a sphere of production of ways of life that claim singular and traditional practices in aspects such as the cultivation of the land, the construction of human relations, alternative initiatives against the model of capitalist development of accumulation, and land restitution processes (Ramírez 2015; Cuadros, 2019; Sierra, 2019) This shows that rural inhabitants build a feeling of rootedness with the territory, which manifests itself even as resistance to abandoning it despite the threat or occupation of armed groups or as an expectation of return when these territories have already been occupied (Puerta, 2015). The symbolic link with the territory is not lost for the person who has been dispossessed: control of space may be lost, the value of land as a resource may be lost, but the meaning It has is not renounced (Sierra, 2019).

The role of the State: between absences and contradictions

The Victims and Land Restitution Law (Law 1448 of 2011), a state response to human rights violations, care, assistance, and comprehensive reparation for victims of the internal armed conflict, establishes a legal recognition of land restitution as a form of reparation according to the status of “victim”. The political, regulatory, and institutional difficulties with the implementation of this law (Gutiérrez, Peña and Parada, 2019) have led to its characterization as “exclusive”, “restrictive” (Delgado, 2015) and “even inoperative” (Otálvaro and Witt, 2020). Given this, the social movements have sustained criticism denouncing how in their territories, the forms of illegal armed organizations impose social control, hindering, in practice, the restitution processes (Delgado, 2015, p. 137). One of the most significant problems is that in the implementation of land restitution, the strong local and national opposition was not considered, nor were the necessary mechanisms to protect the lives of the people who led these processes correctly implemented (Gutiérrez et al., 2020).

However, although it is a crucial Law, little is said or discussed about the actual situation that the victims covered by this law go through, especially those who want to return or have done so to re-establish ties with the territories, destroyed in the past. This, considering that the Victims and Land Restitution Law was created, among other things, to implement measures of attention, assistance, and integral reparation to the victims of the internal armed conflict through legal frameworks and public policy of the Colombian State to implement return and relocation processes in compliance with international principles and standards, such as voluntariness, security, and dignity (Ramírez, 2015).

Another important instrument is the Territorially Focused Development Programs (PDET for its initials in Spanish) created within the context of the Final Agreement between the Colombian government and the now-defunct guerrilla group FARC, these were adopted to devise strategies for achieving peace in rural areas and promoting social, political, and economic development during the post-conflict period. In addition, the Observatory of Transitional Justice of the Ministerio de Justicia de Colombia underscored the need to strengthen the restitution of land to victims of the conflict and transform it into a mechanism for collective reparation. In this regard, it was emphasized that its transformative nature should be aligned with the objectives of comprehensive rural reform through the PDET. Therefore, land restitution would not only serve a corrective function but would also play a pivotal role in achieving peace (Ministerio de Justicia de Colombia, 2022).

The lack of land ownership in Eastern Antioquia has been a “historical constant in the area” (Valencia Castro, 2020: 22). The land, in most cases, is not (legally) titled. In fact, as one of the interviewees in Carmen de Viboral pointed out to us, “there is an informality of land close to 70% and even more in rural areas” (I2, 2021, personal communication). The same was expressed in one of the focus groups: “the land was not titled, simply, it was the landowner who built his little house, the improvements, or what we call the terruño, there was never a title that guaranteed that it is mine” (FG2, 2021, focus group).

This problem deepened due to the dynamics of the armed conflict, especially forced displacement and the arrival of third parties. This led municipal public entities to adopt land protection measures, for example, freezing businesses or real estate sales also called protection against third parties.

However, because few people remained in the villages that were the object of confrontations during the armed conflict, many of those who abandoned did not request protection measures. Due to the absence of the cadastral registry (FG1, 2021, focus group), many families have not yet recovered their old properties. The land restitution processes are advancing slowly; for example, we found that, in Carmen de Viboral, there is a delay in the restitution processes; of 118 requests for land restitution submitted before the year 2021, only 12 rulings have been achieved (FG1, 2021, focus group and Socialization of Results, 2022, workshop).

In addition, to the difficulties in the restitution processes was added the declaration of the Regional Protective Forest Reserve Zone of the Melcocho and Santo Domingo River Canyons, through agreement 323 of 2015 of Departmental Assembly; part of the land declared as a reserve converges in the village of La Honda in the municipality of Carmen de Viboral and has restrictions for its economic exploitation, which means for the returning families, difficulties in stabilising their economic livelihood.

We observe that these situations: informality, due to lack of title and witnesses, and restrictions for the economic exploitation of the land, are seen as a problem without a clear legal solution, as can be deduced from the accounts of the officials who participated in FG1 and the socialisation of results, SR1. Even so, if property titles are hypothetically delivered, the mere delivery of the title for land restitution, is only a first step, it is important to guarantee these people’s inclusion in a new society and this must be comprehensive, which implies guidance and psychological and emotional support.

Despite this, in the context of the phenomena that we relate here, the State is a crucial actor that configures actions and relationships in the territory and barriers to guaranteeing the rights of the communities, which is contradictory. On the one hand, the Colombian State has designed attention routes and reparation measures. The interviewees pointed out the importance of Victims and Land Restitution Law and its socialisation spaces to dismantle the “culture of silence” (FG2, 2021, focus group). Additionally, they told us that they had access to programs and productive projects that facilitate the lives of the families that return to the land. However, simultaneously, they also pointed out that many times the State was not only late but “did its job wrong” (FG2, 2021, focus group).

The weak institutional, technical, and financial capacity, especially at the local level, allowed many mistakes in the registration, reporting and preparation of the baseline, making it possible for many abusive acts to remain unpunished and silent. Currently, there is underreporting of sexual and gender-based violence, timely psychosocial care is not provided, and information on mental health care routes is very precarious (FG2, 2021, personal communication). This weak institutional capacity in the municipalities is recognised in the literature as one of the problems of the Victims and Land Restitution Law since the Municipalities “do not have the necessary professionals in terms of suitability and quantity to respond to all the required aspects and do not have own sufficient resources to do so” (Vargas, 2014).

The delay, the doubts of victims and officials, and the barriers in the land restitution processes cause uneasiness. Still, at the same time, a kind of hope: “(…) for me he is a very valid and important figure because if it were not because of this land restitution, the truth is, I would be in (…) despair and uncertainty (…)” (I3, 2021, personal communication).

Given this panorama, we found that it is the duty of those who develop and apply restitution processes to adopt a focus on territorialidad campesina, which is urgently needed, given the discontent, lack of interest and misinformation of some victims of the conflict. The focus on territorialidad campesina, according to Silva (2016), involves “a commitment to opening up possibilities for autonomous development where it is possible to decide what is grown, how it is grown, and what all this effort is for” (p. 13). This entails a constant struggle for land, sovereignty, and independence and respect for their own projects and the land that forms a vital part of their way of life.

Some of the victims of the conflict have resorted to the option of mobilisation and other repertoires of political action to assert their rights, to problematise the economic planning model of the region, while at the same time assuming burdens derived from the decision to insert themselves in restitution processes to recover what was taken and try to re-establish themselves in the territory in decent and viable conditions to obtain personal or family economic support.

Situated peace: resilient organisational processes for the guarantee of rights to “overcome the conflict”

From the conversation with the social actors interviewed, we observed dissatisfaction with the role of state institutions in the two municipalities since they have not been able to generate pedagogical and socialisation strategies to build capacities. In this way, the victims of the armed conflict restore their violated rights and obtain truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. Faced with the omissions of the State, the groups involved in the construction of peace have organised themselves and generated mechanisms of affective and political bonding; they shave been trained on legal aspects, the construction of historical memory, and at the same time, they have articulated themselves to manage needs and consolidate initiatives mainstreamed by art, multimedia resources and community production of mental health. In short, an essential tradition of resilience and communality has been configured in eastern Antioquia that is expressed to this day.

One of the interviewees in the municipality of Carmen de Viboral told us that these community self-management processes are essential “so that many people who have not found the way, find it” (I4, 2021, personal communication). This “finding” process is a subjective and common task. Restoring capacities for mental health production is an asset of resilience and a connection with the common goals co-constructed within the framework of the relationship between the local territory and the social actors.

According to the above, the theoretical approaches and research product lead to paying particular attention to the concept of resilience and actions in favour of reconfiguring the social fabric, the link with the land and organisational processes. For Arias (2014), resilience operates as a possibility of confrontation with power relations, not only those related to the State but all those manifestations that generate multiple and diffuse forces of power in everyday life, in a micropolitical level. In the two municipalities we studied, civil resilience actions appear, mainly at the head of women and young people who produce mobilisations in the local power configuration. These mobilisations and tensions in themselves contribute to the manifestation of strengthened mental health from psychosocial action, the reconfiguration of the social fabric and roots from self-managed initiatives. According to the scientific literature, these actions can be grouped in two ways: first, the resilience generated ways of dealing with adversity, confronting injustices and psychological and social conflicts within the framework of a society strongly affected by the capitalist and neoliberal model, which it produces human and nature suffering (Nieto, 2009). In the second sense, resilience made possible the emergence of processes of association, collective construction and production of identities connected by affections, events, stories, beliefs, and similar desires (Arias, 2014; Scott, 2004). These links are the primary inputs of a social framework that allows the re-establishing of the collective functions of the territories where life happens in the municipalities of La Unión and Carmen de Viboral.

Women have configured a fertile setting for the emergence of new forms of resilience and proposals for social change. The role of victim-led processes stands out, being a successful case in the municipality of La Unión, where they managed to design and approve a public policy for the entire municipality (FG2, 2021, personal communication). The Victims’ Roundtables stand out in both municipalities since they are positioned as institutional settings for the organisation but have had difficulties and disarticulation in their operation, problems that, among other things, are associated with the restrictions on meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic mainly in the years 2020 and 2021.

Similarly, women are the ones who historically overcame the conflict and achieved unionisation and “joining” processes even in the tensest and most challenging moments (Higuita, 2018; Ramírez, 2018). In this sense, peacebuilding movements such as that of the Association of Women of Eastern Antioquia (A.M.O.R) allow us to affirm that rebuilding the ability to face conflicts with integrity, empathy, non-violence, and creativity is possible, valuable and necessary to resist the multiple forms of violence within and between human beings, societies, cultures and their roots, and about what it means to be a man and a woman in contexts of war (Rojas, 2012; Ramírez, 2018); thinking about the relationships between body and territory, as a great struggle of many women who see in the territory-land the display of their own body and the ability to make decisions about themselves and the common, as scenarios of autonomy, life and care (Haesbaert, 2020).

In this perspective, the territory is the collective body. It becomes a political issue in which care is an intersubjective framework and connects with the territory and the ecosystem processes that occur in it, with essential pedagogical and educational elements; preventive measures that favour the human development of families, young people and other populations highly exposed to violence (Ramírez, 2018).

On the other hand, we currently see a generational change in peacebuilding processes, which positions young people in favour of different discourses and practices, which place issues such as care for the territory, water, nature, agroecology practices, and the strengthening of social organization for peaceful coexistence on the public agenda as essential elements for peace. Youth groups appear with this agenda, among which the following stand out: the Community Tulpa Corporation, the Social Movement for Life, and the Defence of the Territory – MOVETE, the Adagio Artistic, Social and Cultural Corporation, the Awa Collective and UBUNTU – Youth Platform of the Union (FG1, FG2).

This incipient but significant movement of young people questions, challenges, and produces self-managed research processes, social mobilisation, and incidence on extractive practices of the territory and colonisers of subjectivity. According to one of the interviewees, this resurgence of critical thought and youth political subjectivities in the territory occurs after almost two decades of silence and “confined bodies” (I3, 2021, personal communication) due to the paramilitary violence that generated an escalation of terror, subjugation and subjection of any identity that distanced itself from the dominant pattern of power in both municipalities.

The political subjectivities that make up the youth have promoted change processes in the two municipalities and a new political and social agenda. The organisational processes for the effective enjoyment of youth citizenship, the processes of resilience and re-existence in the face of violence, the artistic and cultural manifestations that become mechanisms of social mobilisation and identity expression, and recently, the promotion of socio-environmental initiatives and defence of the territory. Here, Kattya Hernández’s concept (2019) of insurgent bodies and territories of re-existence helps understand the ways in which individuals shape their bodies as political territories. Simultaneously, they deploy ways of inhabiting places in a reciprocal and creative experience of life production and daily power dispute. In La Unión and El Carmen de Viboral, people reconfigured the ways of being and inhabiting the territory, generating new social struggles towards water conservation, critique of land use, and clean production.

The findings in this regard show consolidation of youth political participation, with a territorial deployment that brings global and local awareness into play when it comes to an understanding of social problems, as well as possible solutions or transformative actions (Agudelo-Ramírez et al., 2013; Alvarado and Vommaro, 2010).

These experiences suggest a proliferation in the discourses that are built on subjectivity in the territory and manage to impact other political and social scenarios, such as those related to the armed conflict, socio-environmental conflicts and the effective participation of youth, which connects identity issues with peacebuilding process (Higuita, 2018).

These organisational processes configure a practice of situated peace insofar as it is produced from the experience of individuals and groups with the capacity to act and state their positions regarding the situation they are experiencing. It is a practice that generates knowledge about how peace is built in the territory.

The peace process in Colombia must continue to advance along the lines of generating participatory processes in the different territories, endowed with a binding and autonomous nature – that is, not subject to the agreements reached at the negotiating table, but understood as spaces for symbiotic exchange with them, and at the same level of importance- since this becomes a necessity when it comes to meeting the demands, and guaranteeing the rights of Colombian citizens (Ramos, 2016).

Peace is a construct that takes a process and considerable time, in which collectivity is imperative, as well as the active participation of State and non-governmental actors; it is in this way that the overflowing violent structures found, not only in the social conflict, but also in the armed conflict, and citizen security, can be minimized.