To get to the Pontevedra farm, a property of 1,200 hectares confiscated from a drug gang in the department of Córdoba, you have to travel the more than two hours of road that separate it from Montería, the departmental capital.
The first hour on a paved road, and the second on a dusty road that cuts through a fertile landscape, with trees and grasslands on both sides of the road.
Last Friday, a delegation of a dozen congressmen and the director of the Special Assets Society (SAE) arrived in that sector of Planeta Rica to formally deliver the land to 120 peasant families, a sort of laboratory for agrarian reform. that President Gustavo Petro has promised.
The emotional event, enlivened by a joint joint and community pot under the relentless midday sun,
The SAE will allocate the land to what the Government has dubbed a "popular public alliance" so that the peasant organization can put it into production.
"When we till the land, when we produce food, we are generating peace, we are generating change for society, for our children," says Marjorie Ramos, one of the various speakers at the day, mostly women, who belong to the Peasant Association for the Development of Alto Sinú, Asodecas, made up of some 7,500 people, close to half of them victims of the armed conflict.
She intends to carry out a productive project of cocoa and vegetables.
Many families come from the Montes de María and have suffered the multiple violence that has plagued this region of Colombia.
"For years we have worked the land but it has never belonged to us," Tatiana Ortega, 38, another of the association's leaders, told this newspaper, moved to the brink of tears.
She recounts how she was displaced from her home in Tierralta at 14, and how she has relatives who have fallen victim to violence that still does not stop.
Her plan is to grow cocoa, accompanied by shorter-term ventures such as laying hens and fish farming.
“She feels as if her heart is going to jump out of her chest,” she says about handing over the land where they have already settled.
Pontevedra, with an appraisal of more than 2,000 million pesos (more than 400,000 dollars) and a commercial value that can be five times that figure, was confiscated from Juan José Valencia Zuluaga, alias
Falcón
, a member of the Clan del Golfo, the largest gang in the country's drug trafficker and from whom two Ferrari cars had already been seized.
It is the second piece of land delivered to peasant families in Córdoba.
The first was the Tamésis Farm, 590 hectares seized from a paramilitary boss and destined for 50 peasant families, in October.
“A process starts here,” President Petro said then.
"This agrarian reform process has to gain such speed that, when we reach the last day of the government, we will be at the maximum," he stressed.
The Executive is working on the delivery of dozens of more properties.
The lands of the Pontevedra farm in Planeta Rica, in the department of Córdoba. Chelo Camacho
The Special Assets Society, surrounded by multiple scandals for years, manages the assets and companies seized from drug trafficking organizations and later converted into State property through the legal concept of asset forfeiture.
It has come to be classified as the largest real estate agency in the country, with more than 20,000 properties, but its inventory has been a constant source of controversy.
"Starting today, all assets in extinction owned by the SAE will become the basis of a new productive economy managed by peasant organizations, by urban cooperatives of productive youth and by women's popular associations," said Petro el same day of his possession, on August 7.
At the helm, he appointed economist Daniel Rojas, the programmatic coordinator of the Historic Pact campaign and, after the victory at the polls, coordinator of the team to connect with the outgoing government of Iván Duque.
A declaration of intentions.
The president has also insistently promised that he will carry out an agrarian reform "for good".
His Administration intends to buy land even at a commercial price, and a few weeks ago it announced an agreement with the National Federation of Cattlemen, Fedegán, with the goal of acquiring the additional three million hectares that the peace agreement with the FARC foresees to hand over to peasants. They do not have access to land.
Other unions in the agricultural sector would like to join the initiative.
"Our job is to ensure that these assets that were part of the illegal economies now become not only legal, but productive," explains Rojas, the head of the SAE, proud of a change in land use with a productive approach.
“We have proposed to be the laboratory of the main proposals of the Government program.
And one of them is agrarian reform, ”he adds.
That government program emphasized, among other things, the popular economy, public-popular alliances, and generating productive ecosystems.
The agrarian reform, Rojas concedes, has the purpose of democratizing more than three million hectares, a goal well beyond the reach of the SAE.
"But we put our grain of sand
."
There is not a single law that concentrates all the purposes of carrying out an agrarian reform.
They are different public policy bets around the same objective, says representative David Racero, president of the Chamber, who accompanied the delivery on Friday along with other legislators from the government coalition.
The legislature has processed important projects in recent months that have to do with rural issues, he defends, such as the law on the peasantry as a subject of rights, the law on the right to food or the Special Agrarian Jurisdiction, which is the possibility of there being a specific court to resolve land disputes.
"All of this does go through Congress, which cannot be isolated from this discussion of what the national government has proposed as the great agrarian reform," he explains.
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