Paramilitaries Dig in to Fight Return of Stolen Land

[Judi Lynn]

Paramilitaries Dig in to Fight Return of Stolen Land
By Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Aug 6, 2011 (IPS) - While President Juan Manuel Santos described his government's land restitution policy as "a veritable revolution" during a speech in northwest Colombia, some 300 far-right paramilitaries were taking up positions less than 100 km from there to fight the effort to return land to small farmers displaced by the violence, human rights activists say.

Santos, accompanied by a high-level delegation that included Agriculture Minister Juan Camilo Restrepo, reached Apartadó, the main city in the banana-growing region of Urabá, Wednesday to explain and celebrate his administration's land reform policy, four days before the one-year mark in his presidency.

"We are changing the face of Colombia, we are carrying out a veritable revolution," said the conservative Santos, whose government is granting legal land titles to small farmers and returning land to families driven from their farms by the armed conflict that began in the 1960s.

"As of Jul. 30 we have (granted titles to and restored) 361,000 hectares of land, benefiting more than 17,000 families," the president said. "We have thus even gotten ahead of" the Victims and Land Restitution Law, which does not go into force until January 2012, he added.

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