It is Friday afternoon and in the offices of the Land Restitution Unit (URT) for Cesar and La Guajira, located in Valledupar, there is much to do: officials move from one place to another, read documents with concentration or care for victims of the armed conflict.
The territorial director of the entity, Astrid Navarro, has in her hands the historical figures for restitution requests in these two departments: 8,141, “Of which only 8,126 have been managed, with 15 without targeting properties, many times because of the area in which they are located,” he explains. Navarro.
Of these cases, 7,057 were finalized, leaving as a result 2,138 victims who were able to start the administrative stage of restitution, a possibility that was denied to 4,919 peasants.
That is, the denial is 69%, a scenario that also worries the national director of the URT, Giovani Yule, since there are departments with denials of 80 and up to 90% of the requests.
What do you plan to do in this situation?
It is necessary to review how the victims were being cared for because it is too high a rate. In this administration, what we are doing is reviewing many of those cases that were denied and we are focusing on the elderly population, which is close to 1,700 of the 4,919 people who received a denial.
There are older adults who are in extreme poverty or sick and that means that we have to care for them quickly, so we are reviewing those cases of people over 60 years of age or older, some have even died, and revoking them because the center of this Government is the victim.
We are also going to review the cases of compatriots, that is, Colombians who went abroad because a mistake was made with them and that is that the victim must accompany us to the property to be recognized and obviously they could not do it because they were outside or because there was no contact.
And how is the process progressing for the 2,138 people who did manage to register to achieve restitution?
1,975 cases from Cesar and La Guajira have already been presented before the judges, and of those, the courts and the tribunal in Cartagena have resolved 709 sentences, the majority in favor of the victims.
The Unit has been shrinking, when this began it was much larger because there were more cases, but unfortunately they were not registered. Law 1448 of 2011 established that the persons who can request restitution must be cases that occurred after January 1, 1991.
What is the care process like for a victim of forced dispossession or abandonment?
The process to care for the victim in the Unit is to register, there they assign a code and it is decided whether to register or not. If you sign up, you enter an administrative stage, which is where the Unit goes to the property, does the georeferencing, social proofs are done and from those studies that last around 4 months, it is decided whether to register the process so that a lawyer start the judicial stage and register it before the judge.
When there is a ruling in favor of the victim, the post-ruling stage comes where a sentence is issued and the person’s rights are restored with the delivery of the property. If it is rural, they receive a productive project for 40 minimum wages, advice and training for 24 months to develop your project, plus a home.
There is also a collective route that serves ethnic populations such as community councils and shelters. We have cases in Tamalameque, Chiriguaná, La Jagua de Ibirico, Agustín Codazzi, among others. In La Guajira we have shelters and community councils in Barrancas, Dibulla, Uribia, Riohacha, Albania…
Do you think that in your administration the more than 4,000 denied cases will be resolved?
No. A process should come out in a year or a year and a half, but there are cases that have lasted up to 3 years due to factors such as public order, the fear of the victim who does not dare to go to the property visit. In Pueblo Bello, about 4 or 5 years passed without field visits being possible due to security issues.
What does restitution mean to you?
For me, restitution is an integral process of compensation for dignity because it is not only compensation such as handing over the land itself, but also the possibility that the victim can recover the life he led because family, cultural and productive uprooting makes people lose their dignity.
I knew a case of displaced people from Becerril who ended up begging in Neiva, Huila, after having a hardware store, two farms, houses, these are tough situations.
Are you a victim of the armed conflict?
Yes, of the paramilitaries, although I never made the record. In 2000 I was traveling to Cartagena with my husband because his brother had just been murdered in Bogotá and they were going to transfer him to Cartagena. At that time we did not have the money for the tickets and since we had a Honda 125 motorcycle we went on it with a briefcase full of mourning clothes.
When we were going through Plato, two trucks picked us up and armed men came out, I say they were submachine guns, they took us down, threw us to the ground and asked us for the motorcycle to “do a few laps.” One said “kill them, kill them”, but another said “no, why?”
I had my small children, I told them that we were going to a funeral and I showed them the mourning clothes, so they left us lying on the road. We were still paying for the motorcycle and they used it to murder a number of people in Plato, in the Zambrano area; We made the complaint, but we had to continue paying the installments that we lacked.
And how did they get to Cartagena?
It was a traumatic process, we lasted about an hour on the road, where a bus from Brasilia passed by and took us to Carmen de Bolívar, suddenly we didn’t seem suspicious. My husband remembered that he had a cousin in Mompox, nearby, and he lent us $400,000 because we were taken away at that time.
Soon after we lived in a more complex situation, my husband is a civil engineer and we worked with contracts with the State on road issues and the paramilitaries extorted us with the works, they kidnapped the equipment and machinery if you did not have to pay, we ended up losing practically all.
Lea: El Cesar and La Guajira have a new director of the Land Restitution Unit
By Andrea Guerra Peña / THE PYLON.
@andreaguerraperiodista