The Land Restitution Law against opponents in good faith

Abstract

Colombia has made great progress in reparation for the victims of the internal armed conflict; from Law 387 of 1997 to Law 1448 of 2011, there has been a legal paradigm cultural change in which redress through restitution measures have been gaining much importance as economic reparations. The aim of this paper is to show that the Law on Land Restitution, as it is conceived, can result in a new form of dispossession because it ignores opponents in good faith, many of whom are also farmers victims of political violence. This is due to poor regulation in areas such as the evidentiary, to the slowness with which the process advances and to the fact that it was not taken into account that the dynamics of the dispossession and neglect caused by paramilitary groups are different to the originated in guerrilla violence.

Keywords

• Land restitution
• holders in good faith
• legal difficulties
• practical difficulties