Land Inequality

Land Inequality as a Source of Conflict

Colombia's land inequality has its roots in the Spanish colonial period, when vast territories were granted to a small number of European settlers and the Catholic Church through a system known as the encomienda. Indigenous communities were dispossessed of their ancestral lands, and this concentration of ownership was never meaningfully reversed after independence. By the 1960s, less than 5% of landowners controlled over half of Colombia's agricultural land, leaving millions of rural peasants — known as campesinos — with little to no land of their own. This extreme imbalance created a permanent underclass of rural poor, whose desperation and anger would become one of the primary fuels of the armed conflict that followed.

The Failure of Land Reform

In the 1960s, the Colombian government launched the National Land Reform Institute — known as INCORA — with the goal of resettling approximately 600,000 landless peasants by redistributing unused land. The effort collapsed almost immediately. Colombia's landed elite, deeply embedded in both the legislature and the executive branch, systematically blocked any meaningful redistribution and redirected policy toward capitalist agricultural integration instead — prioritizing large-scale commercial farming over peasant land rights. By the time the program was effectively abandoned, fewer than 11,000 peasant families had received land titles. For the hundreds of thousands left behind, armed resistance began to look like the only remaining option.