MAPPING COLOMBIA: THE CORRELATION

BETWEEN LAND DATA AND STRATEGY

Geoffrey Demarest

March 2003
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ISBN 1-58487-113-X

ii
FOREWORD

In this monograph, Dr. Geoffrey Demarest addresses

what—at first glance—seems to be an esoteric and

inconsequential issue. The mapping of Colombian national

territory, however, is fundamental to the problem of control

of national territory. As a threshold matter, policy, strategy,

and military asset management in contemporary conflict in

virtually any unstable part of the world must deal with the

problem of governance in “lawless areas.” Unless a central

government such as that in Colombia can exert legitimate

control and governance in the 60+ percent of the

municipalities not under its control, there can be no

effective judicial system and rule of law; no effective legal

crop substitution programs; no effective democratic

processes; and, only very little military or police action to

bring law and order into unknown and difficult terrain.

Indeed, control of the national territory is a strategic

paradigm for 21st century conflict. The state is under

assault by a powerful combination of state weaknesses,

“lawless areas,” and insurgent and criminal terrorism. All

these contributors to instability and violence have a powerful effect on local, regional, national, and international

security. As a consequence, this monograph is extremely

salient. Colombia and other states experiencing conflicts

that range from criminal anarchy to virtual civil war must

understand that putting treasure and blood into a conflict

situation without first establishing the strategic

foundations of success only result in ad hoc, piece-meal,

disjointed, and ineffective reactions to truly inconsequential problems.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to join with the

North-South Center in offering this monograph as part of

our ongoing attempt to recognize and respond to the

strategic realities of the current security situation in the

Western Hemisphere, and reframe Plan Colombia and

iii
related policy and strategy in a more workable context. This

is critically important to the vital interests of the United

States, Colombia, the hemisphere, and the entire global

community.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute

iv
PREFACE

For the past 2 years, the Strategic Studies Institute and

the North-South Center have engaged in an effort to bring

creative thinking and analysis to the most challenging

security problem in the Americas, the multifaceted conflicts

in Colombia. This monograph by Dr. Geoffrey Demarest

looks at an important issue, property rights, as bearing

directly on the inability of Colombia to assert authority over

its entire territory as well as to implement the social agenda

of Plan Colombia.

The author appropriately cites the much-discussed

latest work of Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital.

The Peruvian economist makes a strong case that

development in less-developed countries does not take

place, in large measure, not because the poor lack assets but

because without recognized property rights they are unable

to mobilize them. In Haiti alone, says de Soto, “the poorest

nation in Latin America, the total assets of the poor are

more than one hundred fifty times greater than all the

foreign investment received since Haiti’s independence

from France in 1804.”1

In Colombia, Demarest points out in detail, large areas

of the country are not even mapped. The implications, he

points out, are enormous in terms of the government’s

ability to deal with criminality as well as its ability to offer

alternative development to combat reliance of the

campesinos on coca cultivation. As for the support of Plan

Colombia by the U.S. Government, he makes the case that

such aid and the planning for it cannot properly be made in

the absence of adequate information concerning property

ownership and use.

v

1 Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, New York: Basic Books,

2000; p. 5.
The importance of property ownership, of course, is not

lost on the FARC guerrillas, who aspire to become

landowners, control territory, and collect “taxes.” In my own

experience, I spoke with a Colombian whose farm in the rich

Cauca Valley was sold under duress and through proper

notarial act, to presumed FARC agents. The cash payment

for the land was confiscated from him in Cali shortly after

the sale by accomplices of the new owner (whereupon he

took the next plane for Miami and safety.)

Nevertheless, the author makes the valid point that to

succeed both in counternarcotics as well as the suppression

of lawlessness, an indispensable starting point is the

knowledge of ownership and value of land. He argues

convincingly that the continuation of large amounts of

informally owned and unregulated land are major

impediments to progress. The objective, a “stronger

Colombian State with a visible commitment not just to

security but also to civil rights and open government” will be

the result of dealing with the land problem.

This monograph is a valuable contribution to an

understanding of the Colombian dilemma and should be

read by policymakers.

AMBLER H. MOSS, JR.

Director

The Dante B. Fascell

North-South Center

University of Miami

vi
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

GEOFFREY DEMAREST is the IberoAmerica researcher

at the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO)

located at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. During a 23-year

military career, Dr. Demarest served in multiple

assignments in Latin America and is a graduate of the U.S.

Army School of the Americas, the Defense Attache Course,

Foreign Area Officer’s Course, Defense Strategy Course,

Defense Language institute, and others. He has written

numerous articles dealing with internal conflict including

“The Overlap of Military and Police Responsibiliites in

Latin America.” Dr. Demarest’s first book, Geoproperty,

considers property ownership as an issue for national

security and strategy. His areas of academic interest

include emerging threats and responses, new strategic

alignments, military history, and international law. Dr.

Demarest holds a Ph.D. in International Studies from the

Denver University Graduate School of International

Studies, a J.D., and has practiced as a civil attorney.

vii
viii
SUMMARY

This monograph highlights a shortcoming of U.S. and

Colombian efforts attempted thus far to contain and reduce

organized crime and terrorist violence in Colombia. Both

governments acknowledge the importance that property

rights play in long-term state legitimacy and in the

short-term restraint of organized criminality. Nevertheless,

inattentiveness to the condition of property rights,

especially in rural areas, is both a cause and effect of a

fundamental omission bearing on military operations:

Colombia is not well-mapped, some of it not at all. For

decades soldiers have been sent out to patrol in unmapped

areas. This military inadequacy is overshadowed, however,

by longer-term social implications. The country cannot hope

to establish the rule of law without extending effective,

formal land ownership, which implies creation of the maps

and registries attendant to that ownership. While

immediate military victory may be achieved without

comprehensive mapping, establishment of a lasting,

peaceful social order is unlikely. Ironically, in 1997 the

United States removed its liaison to the Colombian national

cartographic institute—one milestone of a transcendent

failure to identify as essential the work of that piece of

government. Cartographic inadequacy has weakened

effective response to what has been (perhaps wrongly) the

U.S. national preoccupation in Colombia—countering the

industry of illicit drugs. U.S. programs have not been

informed regarding who owns the land on which heroin

poppy or coca is grown, or even what factors bear on the

value of that land. Also overlooked is the powerful nexus

between poorly enforced property rights and the violation of

human rights. Good maps and registries are an essential

tool for understanding the specific linkages between

economics and land ownership, between land ownership

and terrain control, and between control of terrain and

terror. Property maps help define and visualize the vague

ix
geographic boundary between lawlessness and civilization.

Incomplete mapping, beyond hamstringing military

operations against guerrillas and illegal paramilitaries,

puts Colombia’s social, economic, and security objectives at

risk. And to the extent this is true for Colombia, it is all the

more a reality in other countries of the hemisphere where

property records are even less well-developed.

x
MAPPING COLOMBIA: THE CORRELATION

BETWEEN LAND DATA AND STRATEGY

War is God’s way of teaching geography.

Attributed to George Carlin

Bountiful Property.

Colombia’s extravagant geography guides decisionmaking in that country more than in most. The history of

Colombian conflict is a record of competition for control of

lands and movement routes related to export products or

their taxation.1 Rebels, pirates, and their hybrids, arrayed

against the Colombian state and each other, have forever

fought over control of product sources, transportation

routes, taxation, and fiscal policies bearing on Colombia’s

natural bounty.2 While the current civil conflict differs in

significant ways from those of the past, the correlation of

outlaw strategies to agricultural and mineral geography is

the same, often exactly the same.3 Leaders of today’s

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP or

FARC), Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN), and Auto

Defenses Unificados de Colombia (AUC) intimately are

aware of the effects that the control of “place” has on profit

and on prospects for their long-term organizational health.4

Like the classic combat commanders, the Alexanders and

Napoleons, a successful outlaw strategist recognizes the

critical advantage of choosing favorable fighting terrain,

protecting his lines of communication (LOCs) and

compromising those of his enemy. In Colombia, he must also

be sensitive to the relative commercial and industrial value

of property and movement routes. Likewise, a winning

government strategy to defeat an organized outlawry, or for

that matter to establish long-term social peace, must

recognize and respect the incremental worth of land. Even

as a question of military strategy, Colombia’s terrain should

1
be considered both in terms of maneuverability and

according to specific material value. This reflects a

difference between internal armed conflict and

international war generally. In an internal war such as that

being waged in Colombia, land is not only the space over

which combat materiel might move, or firefights occur, it is

also the engine of disposable wealth and wellspring of the

war-making strength of all contending forces.5 The FARC

may destroy a bridge or a high-tension tower, but is unlikely

to destroy a bridge over which its own taxable products are

moved.

Moreover, the performance grade given internationally

to Colombia’s armed forces always includes a human rights

component, yet it is failure on the part of the Colombian

State to give meaning to property rights that has led to

human rights violations. If the Colombian armed forces are

ever to clarify the human rights issue in their favor, they

must better understand the contract between citizens and

government that is called “property.”

Dosn’t thou ‘ear my ‘erse’s legs, as they canters awaäy,

Proputty, proputty, proputty—that’s what I ‘ears ‘em saäy.

Proputty, proputty, proputty—Sam, thou’s an ass for thy

paaïns; Theer’s moor sense i’ one o’ ‘is legs, nor in all thy

braaïns.6

Alfred Tennyson

from “The Northern Farmer” (new style)

Paradoxically, a vast and growing public record exists in

Colombia to measure the insidious invasion of lawlessness

throughout the country. Perhaps to the reader’s surprise,

millions of Colombians claim ownership of land parcels, an

ownership formally recognized in one of five cadastre

systems (recorded property surveys and accompanying

economic descriptions) and a separate national land

ownership registry. A typical cadastral map of platted

properties is shown in Figure 1.7 The cadastres, principal of

which is maintained by the Instituto Geográfico Augustín

Codazzi (IGAC, the nation’s cartographic institute) have

2
existed more or less in their present form since 1940, and

they include most rural and urban claims from the

mountains west. Aside from their central role in equitable

tax appraisal, the national cadastre is today recognized as a

fundamental source of information for growth and

conservation planning.8

Figure 1. Typical 1:10,000 Scale Colombian

Cadastral Map.9

Developmental planners believe that protection of

property rights through formal documentation,

administrative transparency, and insurance will make a

long-term material difference in much of the world. The

fullest expression of this developmental belief can be read in

Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital.

10 De Soto

extends a line of free-market theory outlined in his earlier

bestseller, The Other Path, for which he first gained

international recognition.11 De Soto and his team of

researchers exhaustively documented that for the poor to

advance materially, they need to be able to create capital,

3
and that in most developing countries they cannot. The

reason for this inability to create capital can in part be found

in a lack of formalized property regimes—the kind that in

advanced economies surveys, records, protects, insures, and

represents property rights of all kinds. The result of a

failure to create precise, reliable documentation of property

rights, property courts, title insurance, brokerage laws, and

the like, is an invisible world of dead capital—assets worth

literally and measurably trillions of dollars, but which

cannot attract investment. De Soto’s perspective is a

powerful, unavoidable challenge to any developmental

strategy or project that does not embrace the question of

broad-based capital formation. Furthermore, it has created

an intellectual environment in which openness and

availability of reliable land ownership data (popularly

referred to as “transparency”) is assumed to be a necessary

condition for the success of economic development

projects.12 Even traditional redistributive land reform

proposals depend for their success on the fidelity and

openness of ownership documentation. As a result of this

developmentalist acceptance of the cadastre as a central

institution and organizational technology for progress, a

great deal of money has been devoted to extending and

modernizing cadastral systems, including in Colombia.

The land records in Colombia can be used to trace

ownership to national identification numbers and then to

passports, telephone bills, etc. The application of land

information for cross-referencing databases is doubly

attractive because land records have inherent stability and

reliability. People do, of course, cheat the records, often to

avoid taxes, but such cheating is self-limiting, and can

actually be helpful to law enforcement. The special

characteristic of land records resides in the ultimate need of

an owner to prove his identity in quiet-title court actions

(actions in court to establish ownership). Since property is a

contract with the state for the recognition and support of

specific preferential rights, an ostensible owner cannot

pretend he is someone else for very long, or indeed his

4
ownership preference will disappear. At any rate, the use of

cutouts or dummy-owners is a red flag for the detective.

There is rarely a legitimate reason to pretend someone else

is the owner of your land.

While the forensic value of land ownership data is

relatively obvious, not so obvious is the correlation between

land data and military strategy, but this correlation

precisely marks an essential attribute of successful

counterinsurgent campaigns. A few illustrations will help.

The Colombian FARC maintains wide dispersion of its

subordinate units.13 This is done not only for reasons related

to the autonomous, obstreperous nature of guerrilla

commanders, but also as a method to deny the Colombian

army the opportunity for battles of annihilation. For the

60-odd FARC fronts organized into seven blocks, logistics is

a primary occupation. For some fronts the most lucrative

activity may be taxation of coca farmers, but in others

perhaps the control of kidnapping contractors, or movement

of weapons is more important. The fronts are also

encouraged toward the FARC’s strategic objective of

controlling urban centers. To achieve this, FARC fronts

work toward systematically influencing and eventually

controlling movement corridors (lines of communication)

into assigned cities.14 Some cities, such as Medellín in

Antioquia Department, are susceptible to being choked and

extorted because their mountainous environs so constrict

access.15 Much of the combat responsibility, as well as

maintenance of discipline among the fronts, falls to mobile

columns, which have a wider geographic range.

In order to maximize security and for economy of force,

the FARC created networks of movement corridors within

the blocks, and mobility corridors between the blocks. Some

of these routes follow standard road and river

transportation infrastructure and are used to move large

quantities of illicit product. Secondary routes are more often

used for the movement of units and materiel. In

mountainous areas it is common that the routes follow

ridgelines. The FARC has worked to control owners and

5
ownership of properties all along the movement and

mobility corridors (it is suspected that this is especially true

along remote ridge line routes), thus helping to assure

operational security. Lately, the FARC is known to have

assisted in the formalization of property holdings by

peasants under their direct control in active drug

cultivation areas, one being the Puerto Leguísimo area in

Putumayo.16 Additionally, that the guerrillas have

effectively purchased mineral mines has been rumored.

Labor tactics, selective extortion, and bribery can be

supported by using cutouts to gain control of licenses or by

surrounding publicly-owned mineral extraction sites with

peasant clients and then formalizing the ownership of those

properties.17

When the Colombian army reentered San Vicente

Caguan in the former clearance zone in February 2002, it

found that fleeing FARC units destroyed government

offices, with the exception of the land registry office.18 The

records of land ownership did not show a rash of takings by

the guerrillas and, apparently, land values had not changed

appreciably (although they were extremely low to begin

with). In Puerto Leguísimo, the local FARC commander

accepted letters of introduction from the government to

permit workers of the cartographic institute to complete

cadastral formation for hundreds of agricultural properties

in the area under FARC’s immediate control. One has to ask

why the FARC would be willing to have the government

formalize property ownership. The answer is troubling,

considering the natural inference that the Colombian

government was involved in some level of accessorial

behavior. If the FARC has control of the occupiers, it can

enforce a sharecropping relationship, force sale or

mortgage, tax, etc., all the while using governmentprovided records to facilitate and legitimatize its actions. It

also acquires options if the area is overtaken by government

troops or by another outlaw entity. In case of some interim

or final negotiated settlement, the outlaw leadership has

put in place the basis of legally controlling population and

6
territory, the population controlled by feudal connections to

the land, and the land controlled by a client population. The

guerrilla leader thereby succeeds in becoming a great

landowner, or terrateniente.

19

The FARC does not enjoy widespread mass support in

the Colombian population, even in rural areas. It has,

however, carefully proselytized or terrorized in select

locales related to its nation-wide, logistics-based strategy.

Meanwhile, the AUC, a newer force, appears to have a

varied and growing popular support base greatly exceeding

that of the FARC—but less so along many of the movement

corridors for which the AUC and guerrillas fight. Apposite

to the property discussion is AUC heritage, the organization

having been born of the frustration of ranchers at the failure

of the government to protect their rural properties from the

FARC.

Conceivably, the historical and geographic bases of the

struggle between the FARC and the AUC could be painted

using existing cadastral maps by tracing back to a handful

of ranch properties. The property-based origins and

purposes of the AUC logically drive it to augment formal

ownership of land in areas it considers strategically

important. This is not only true of rural areas. Recent urban

combat among the FARC, AUC, ELN and lesser groups in

the city of Medellín seem to attest to the selective

importance of commercial property and its relationship to

rural terrain. Recent urban combat between outlaw groups

in Medellín broke out over control of the major land route to

the Urabá Gulf and Atrato River Valley lowlands to the

northwest.20 The Urubá/Atrato area represents a major

illicit logistics corridor. If the corridor were better controlled

by the government, the fighting in Medellín would logically

not have occurred. Urban contests between outlaw groups

would be obviated if control of key military and commercial

terrain in the rural region to the northwest belonged to the

government. To attain control, the government will have to

pursue a strategy that recognizes land ownership as a key

information element. Formal, visible, and protected

7
property rights should be the foundation of long-term

government presence in the area of Colombia facing

Panama. Until that is achieved, the area will be outlaw in

all respects, and Medellín will continue to suffer periodic

violent eruptions. Meanwhile, the people of the

Urubá/Atrato lowlands are likely to continue suffering

forced displacements and mass killings.21

Along the same general axis in Antioquia, a secondary

network of rural transportation routes runs through the

Dabeiba, Peque, and Ituango municipalities to the west of

the Cauca River. It is a major confrontation area between

the AUC and the guerrillas. Warfare imposed and suffered

in this mountainous subregion encapsulates the nature of

the conflict in Colombia. Almost all combat, human rights

cases, and criminal encounters relate to the dominance of

passage routes used for illicit purposes. Putting a stop to

intra-outlaw combat in the area will require a greater

presence of government military force to physically deny

use of the zone’s passes for illicit product shipment.

Pacifying the region in the long-term may require a change

in the mix and quality of real property ownership. Few

proven treatments exist for the kind of social poisoning that

years of ruthless competition for the control of land causes,

but one antidote is to redistribute populations and property

ownership. The Colombian government may decide to

embark on programs changing ownership of land in local

areas most affected by the violence, perhaps by empowering

ethnic communities and better securing communal land

rights, or perhaps by encouraging private ownership by

persons and organizations more likely and capable of

resisting outlaw incursions. Regardless of the details, any

land-oriented part of a solution will depend for integrity on

precise, electronically available, complete records of

ownership interests at key locations. Precision lends

juridical strength to the documentation, as well as future

market confidence. Electronic availability (transparency)

helps protect the ownership documentation against fraud

8
and corruption, and allows individuals and nongovernmental organizations to monitor land policies.

The value of terrain for illicit uses is heightened in many

locales, like the Peque-Ituango passes; nevertheless, many

properties will be abandoned or subject to forfeiture. These

need to be identified in detail, but they also need to be visible

at a strategic level so that the evolution of ownership serves

a peace-intending initiative of the government rather than

outlaw competitiveness. If the government does not mount a

national property strategy that helps placate the cycle of

violence, property strategies mounted by outlaw groups will

continue to catalyze it.

In Colombia the terrain calculus is intricate and local,

each hectare presenting its own mix of military and

economic value. Reconciling the two (what we might call the

maneuver view of terrain and the economic view) for the

purpose of shaping strategy is crucial. Fortunately, the

government of Colombia, with U.S. assistance, can produce

a comprehensive, detailed database of Colombian land use

and ownership. To understand the specific utility of such a

map, especially for the formation of military strategy, some

foundational assertions are offered regarding what makes

one piece of land more valuable than another.

A suburban American real estate broker might quip that

three factors contribute to the square-meter value of a piece

of property—location, location, and location.22 Of course,

location dominates the value of Colombian rural land as

well, even more so if we allow the definition to encompass

productivity factors such as climate, soil, and rainfall.

However, and this is the part that is too often overlooked,

the single most important determinant of the value of real

property is not its location, but rather the mix of theoretical

rights associated with the land, along with the practical

expression those rights are given through government

endorsement. This is not an abstract comment on political

philosophy. The market price of a piece of land depends on

the contents of the basket of rights being sold. If we want to

9
sell Granddad’s farm in American suburbia, we will get less

for it if there is an easement for a power line across it, or if

there is a zoning ordinance disallowing commercial

construction, etc. The farm’s longitude and latitude are

important, but not as important as the mix of rights

associated with the sale. Property is not a thing; it is not dirt

in a place; it is the set of rights that regulates relations of

persons to places. Just listing and formalizing the

understanding of those rights, however, is not enough to

give them their entire value. If the police cannot or will not

prevent the use of an empty lot as a place where drug

dealers convene, the market value of the houses nearby may

plummet. If potential buyers of a Colombian farm cannot

travel the road to the farm without the likelihood of being

assaulted or kidnapped, the farm’s market value will be

almost nil.

The value of land speaks volumes about the degree to

which rights are established, recorded, and enforced. The

market for property describes in detail what an internal war

does to the essential contract between government and the

population.23 That contract is supposed to be one in which

the government creates the possibility of property. In other

words, when the contract has practical effect, people can

obtain a set of preferential rights, enforceable by the

government and associated with a specific place. When the

contract is not functioning, property is reduced by degree to

the base state of possession by force. When that occurs,

those in control of the most force are the most lords of the

land.

Aside from their importance for capital formation and

economic opportunity, formalized land records are

becoming a central theme within the study of violence.24 An

increasing number of scholars recognize that those polities

enjoying formalized, consistent property regimes are less

likely to suffer internal conflict than those where

informality in property ownership reigns.25 Furthermore,

the existence of formalized and maintained land records

offers a variety of forensic possibilities especially related to

10
illicit use of terrain and to large sophisticated criminal

enterprises, to wit, narcoguerrillas. A more highly

developed property regime, in other words, would support

all U.S. Government and Colombian visions of changing the

underlying social and juridical conditions conducive to

violence, diminishing Colombia’s role as a producer and

exporter of illicit crops, and improving the overall material

well-being of the citizenry.

Putumayo Coca Eradication and the World War II

Raid on Ploesti.

As a central tactic in U.S. counternarcotics strategy in

Colombia (a dimension that was reinforced rather than

diminished after the changeover to the administration of

President Alvaro Uribe), aerial eradication merits special

attention in the context of the property rights focus of this

monograph. It is a conclusion that aerial eradication, like all

counternarcotics and counterterror efforts in Colombia, will

be less effective outside the context of a property-based

overall strategy.

Allied war planners felt that a decisive raid on the

Romanian oil fields around Ploesti could be a knock-out

blow, possibly crippling German warmaking capacity and

shortening the course of World War II in Europe.26

Churchill called the Ploesti fields, producing more than half

the crude oil imported into Germany, the taproot of the Nazi

war machine. An ensuing operation on August 1, 1943, was

costly—54 of 177 of the B-24 Liberators sent on the raid did

not return, giving the raid its nickname, Black Sunday.

There was no knockout blow at Ploesti; the immediate

results were insubstantial, and, in terms of the overall

outcome of World War II, the effectiveness of the raids is

still debated. A resilient, determined enemy took

countermeasures and found alternatives. Eventually, Nazi

use of Romanian oil had been reduced by as much as 85

percent by the time the Russians occupied the fields in 1945.

Hurting the Nazi resource base was a good idea, and the oil

11
bombing campaigns did speed the end of the war. The Battle

of the Bulge, in which the final German offense stalled for

lack of fuel, is an oft-cited proof. However, starving the Nazi

war machine of Romanian oil was as effectively

accomplished by railhead interdiction and destroying

rolling stock as it was by bombing production facilities in the

oil fields themselves.27 The overall air effort in Europe can

be said to have been most effective when it supported major

allied ground operations by interdicting Wehrmacht

operational reserves. The air campaigns had to be part of a

broad effort that correctly identified various critical

vulnerabilities and attacked as many as possible. For Nazi

Germany to be defeated, the Allies had to close with and

destroy the Wehrmacht on the ground.

Plan Colombia’s Putumayo aerial eradication was a bit

like the raid on Ploesti. The spray planes did not suffer a

Black Sunday, but the strategies are analogous in that our

massive aerial attack against the dense and extensive

Putumayo coca crop was supposed to cause grave harm to

the FARC’s cocaine-based financial health—just as the raid

on Ploesti was to deprive the Nazi war machine of its

supposed lifeblood. The strategy identified Putumayo,

hardly the geographic center of gravity of the war in the

traditional military sense, as the locus of a significant

amount of the FARC’s overall warmaking strength. The

long-term value of eradication spraying may, like the

Ploesti raid, be ambiguous. Spraying achieves the

immediately visible result of knocking out a lot of noxious

and fiscally valuable vegetation. The extent to which the

outlaws shifted to other income sources, protected other

crop areas, dispersed cultivation, replanted, shipped from

storage, increased kidnapping and oil extortion, exerted

political pressure to end the spraying, or took other

countermeasures will remain difficult to precisely

calculate.28 Outlaw countermeasures, however, beg the

next question: How do we readjust when it appears that

aerial eradication has achieved what it can, and yet the

outlaw calculus in Colombia does not appear to have

12
sufficiently changed as a result? Aerial eradication makes it

a little more difficult for the FARC, the ELN and the AUC to

fund their respective wars, but they will do so.

Strategy is best devised when resources, method, and

objective can all be reconciled at the outset. That is to say,

there is no sense entering into a project undercapitalized or

without a reasonable goal. A military strategy,

furthermore, must support the larger political strategy. In

these respects, the Putumayo portion of Plan Colombia was

strategically correct. Given the amount of political and

financial capital available, and given restraints (some

artificial) as to the use of military resources, it was logical

and appropriate to have identified Putumayo as the locus of

U.S. assistance efforts—at the time. In 1999, crop surveys

and remote sensor images of Colombian coca cultivation

showed a dense blob in Putumayo department, while other

maps showed something else. Guerrilla activity, displaced

persons, land mine injuries, or almost any other indicators

of internal conflict over the previous 10 years indicated that

Putumayo was not at the center of Colombia’s warfare.29

The department was peripheral to “counterinsurgency,”

and yet central to coca production. It was a place where the

U.S. military could provide assistance while satisfying the

politically preferable, if practically ludicrous, distinction

between counterinsurgency and counternarcotics.

Providentially, the Putumayo target selection was useful in

another way. Putumayo lays between the zone ceded by the

government (at the time known as the despeje) to the FARC

and Sucumbios Province in Ecuador, an area used by the

FARC as a cross-border support sanctuary. The Putumayo

operation, in effect, increased government military

presence across a major FARC line of communication.30 It is

not surprising that a map showing arms smuggling routes

into Colombia at the time of the War of the Thousand Days

at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries would be

strikingly similar to a current map of the same theme.31

Among the ancient smuggling routes are the same crossings

into Sucumbios, Ecuador that appear to have formed a

13
major FARC line of communication that included

pre-provisioned encampments for hundreds of fighters.

Neither the Black Sunday raid on Ploesti nor Putumayo

eradication were abject failures, even if they were not

decisive blows. The costly experience at Ploesti led to better

planned and executed follow-on operations that evolved

with the broader counter oil strategy. Like Ploesti, the oil

field targeting may have been the result of the obvious. That

is to say, like the coca blobs of Colombia, oil field infrastructure stuck out in aerial photos, prompting a planning

momentum too impatient for the painstaking identification

of less dramatic and more disperse transportation nodes

and infrastructure. Had there been a methodology in place

able to precisely scale the relative economic-military value

of European terrain, then perhaps the Ploesti fields

themselves might never have been rated as an optimal

target as compared, say, to railheads. In Colombia, while

drug traffickers will use all means at their disposal for

product shipment, cost constraints have them employ roads

and rivers, probably in a measure consistent with the

carrying capacity of the route.

The Putumayo eradication strategy recognized a place in

Colombia as particularly valuable economically to the

outlaw enemy, and therefore a valuable military target.

Fortunately, the eradication plan also assisted the

government in compromising a major enemy line of

communication (LOC). Unfortunately, the Putumayo spray

plan, like the Ploesti bombing raid, was not based on a

sufficient understanding of the relative economic value of

terrain as a targeting guide. For instance, little was done,

upon looking at the crop extension blobs, to find out in detail

who owned the land on which those blobs appeared. Perhaps

planners incorrectly assumed that all the land was

no-man’s land, or that knowledge of personal ownership

was unavailable or unreliable. Furthermore, the Putumayo

plan neglected to identify terrain that might have been

more important in the overall value of the product than the

fields themselves. The importance of the coca plant was

14
perhaps over-rated as an ingredient in the commercial

value of cocaine. Consider another widely available product

on which there can be some physical dependency—water.

Bottled water is an extremely lucrative enterprise in the

United States, and, as some note with chagrin, bottled

water can sell for more money than the soft drink on the

shelf next to it, even if the store has a public water fountain.

This makes one question the value of sugar, but neither

should we be fooled into thinking the price is associated with

the quality of the H2O. The plastic in the bottle is not worth

much either. If we wish to choke off water profits from some

ill-doing water trafficker, we might try drying up the

sources of water, perhaps because we can identify an

offending lake or water main. Still, that strategy seems

unlikely to succeed. It would be more efficient to knock off

the truck on the way to the store. Where is the most valuable

geography in the bottled water industry? It is not the lake,

but the bottling plant or some point on the road to the

convenience store. The value of bottled water is the fact that

it is found in a portable form in the convenience store, not

that it is water. While this analogy is soon overdrawn, the

question it highlights regarding relative geographic

value—route vs. ingredient source—is valid.

The centerpiece of recent U.S. counternarcotics strategy

in Colombia has been eradication, and, as argued earlier,

this has not been an irrational approach. However, given

that the impact of eradication efforts is likely to diminish

over time in accordance with outlaw reactions, eradication

should not constitute the concept around which U.S.

counternarcotics in Colombia evolves. On the other hand,

eradication programs can increase in effectiveness within

the right strategic context and supported by the right kinds

of intelligence. The selection of what and when to eradicate

must be better informed, and the logic made more

transparent. Aerial eradication, especially to the extent it is

identified with the United States, should be armored

against criticism of targeting decisions by incorporating

absolute detail regarding land ownership, along with public

15
transparency regarding the targeting decisions. It is now

practicable to establish a matrix of use, ownership quality,

and applicable law that can indicate the most appropriate

method and timing for eradication of illicit crops even in

areas where minifundios (very small land holdings)

dominate. Such data can also be used to reveal anomalies in

market prices, ownership interests by outlaw organizations, and hidden political or familial associations, the

ignorance of which might warp eradication decisions. It also

provides legal and technical justification for taxation policy.

Much of the information can be obtained now, although

basic cartography, surveying, and registry will have to be

accomplished in many areas where illicit cultivation is

pronounced.

Giving Property Away.

In 1999, to find a way out of what the Colombian

government claimed was an impasse, Colombian President

Andrés Pastrana agreed to concede to the FARC a piece of

Colombian territory the size of Switzerland. The

government withdrew forces from the area as an assurance

of security in order to resume another round of peace

negotiations. The results were dubious: in 3 years the FARC

gave up nothing, and in the meantime exploited the natural

military advantages of safely occupying a huge zone

situated near the heart of the country.32 Protected interior

lines allowed the FARC to increase its effective presence in

areas around the zone, expanding the territory under its

control.33 It especially helped secure the FARC’s southern

line of communication out of Colombia into Ecuador and

Peru. Within the despeje (clearing) as the area was called,

the FARC was able to hide and manage its inventory of

hostages, accelerate terrorist training and even

manufacture bombs and mines. In fact, three Irish

Republican Army (IRA) members were captured in

Colombia after having provided training to FARC members

there.34

16
By 2001, as it became obvious that the land concession to

the FARC was a huge failure, the Colombian president

prepared to give an even more valuable zone to the smaller

ELN.35 Aside from dominating the most important

transportation route in the country, the proposed zone,

commonly known as the Magdalena Medio (Middle

Magdalena), included a major coca crop concentration, as

well as oil-industry infrastructure. Asked by a newsperson

about his decision, Pastrana answered, “The country needs

to understand that the ELN is prepared to make peace, but

if it doesn’t happen, it is prepared to make war. And it has a

great terrorist capacity.”36 In a nutshell, a national

president stated that his countrymen must simply resign

themselves to the fact of capitulation; if the Colombian

president did not offer up the most important corner of the

country to a group of outlaws, that group would hurt

Colombian citizens.

The Magdalena River runs generally south to north

between Colombia’s central and eastern mountain ranges to

the Atlantic coast. It is the single most important

transportation corridor in Colombia and the principal

artery to Bogotá. The middle reaches of the Magdalena have

always been of particular strategic value, and are more so

today because of a concentration of oil industry

infrastructure. The southern bulb of Bolivar Department is

home to a huge coca crop concentration. In recent years, the

area has been a battleground between the AUC and the

ELN, with the AUC apparently having gained the upper

hand. To dominate the area would be doubly advantageous

for the ELN. Impunity in the zone would have allowed

uncontested access to the favorite object of extortion for that

group: petroleum infrastructure. Proximity to taxable coca

harvests, as well as major transportation routes, makes it a

near-perfect staging area for taxation and kidnapping

sorties. Physical dominion in the zone would also have given

the ELN a spatial advantage in terms of attacking into the

heartland area of the AUC to the west. Incredibly, and in

light of no appreciable benefit to the nation from the

17
experiment with the FARC’s despeje, President Pastrana

pushed to concede three counties to the ELN, two in the

southernmost tip of Bolivar department and one in

Antioquia just to the south of the others.37 A militarily more

valuable piece of ground could hardly have been chosen. The

government plan to concede the area was blocked by

protests from local residents, the inability of the

government to deliver possession to the ELN because of

AUC assertions, and perhaps indirectly because of the

perception shift created by the September 11 attacks.38

The Middle Magdalena has been prized territory for

hundreds of years.39 Assuring that the reaches of the Middle

Magdalena are strategically denied to an enemy is one of the

basic elements of Colombian military history, whoever the

contestants. Trying to give it away is an anomaly. The

Colombian government’s move to engage the ELN in peace

talks by way of ceding such a militarily critical place is hard

to fathom. One is led to suppose that President Pastrana

and his advisors assigned more power and terrorist capacity

to the ELN than it actually had, were overly committed to

the concept of negotiation, were under some unspoken

duress, sympathized with the guerrillas or simply did not

understand. While the AUC is a drug trafficking, terrorist

organization that the government must defeat, it may have

been strategically fortuitous for the government that the

AUC rejected ELN occupation of the Middle Magdalena.

Comprehending the value and ownership of land as a

function of divisible rights, rather than simple location,

could offer a unique perspective on President Pastrana’s

policy. If the world had a map detailing particularized

ownership interests in the Middle Magdalena, a whole new

realm of understanding might attend the Pastrana position.

If it were possible to view the whole picture of preferential

rights in land that would have been transferred or

jeopardized by a concession to the ELN, a better

understanding might emerge of what was at stake. Most of

the land in the region is privately owned and has been

appraised.40 Why there is an isolated blob of coca cultivation

18
and how that cultivation relates geographically to oil

industry licenses and concessions should be of particular

interest. These questions are not posed out of historical

curiosity. The land remains under coca, and is still under

outlaw dominance. It is possible, however, to obtain and

display detailed ownership data for this region.

A president giving land away to outlaws in huge chunks

is a rare occurrence. More common is programmatic

give-away. Land reform, and especially agrarian reform,

has been a staple of developmental and redistributive

campaigns in Colombia for many years. Since 1962 more

than 1,700,000 hectares of land ceded to, bought or

expropriated by the national government has been turned

over to campesinos and tribal peoples.41 More than

18,000,000 acres of government open land has also been

redistributed.42 Curiously, while this seems to be a great

deal of land, officials from the national agrarian reform

institute (Incora) state that the distribution of land

ownership in Colombia remains radically inequitable.43 The

validity of the observation may be the subject of

considerable economic and social debate, but it is a debate

conducted in the absence of needed data regarding what

happened to all the redistributed land. Incora is able to

show almost every acre of land distributed to whom and

when. What it apparently cannot show, at least for

redistributions done until the last few years, is exactly

where. The Incora mandate has been to redistribute land,

not to keep track of what was redistributed. For that reason,

most Incora records indicate a precision of location only

down to the county level. Apparently there has also not been

any systematic effort done to determine the consequences of

ownership or divestment during more than 40 years of

redistributive activity.

Without asserting that the Incora land redistribution

has been a failure or has contributed to violence, it is at least

fair to say that the effect of programmed redistributions is

speculative. Today, it is technically possible, using

commercially available software, to match the Incora

19
database with cadastral and registry databases to

determine the ownership results of the Incora programs

and, more interestingly, to see what the geographic

correlation of the redistribution programs has been to the

incidence of violence in the countryside. It appears that

some of the Incora land may have been redistributed more

than once, especially in lawless areas.

Military Options.

At the time of this writing, it appears that counterterror

has displaced counternarcotics at center stage in our policy

toward Colombia.44 Accordingly, one supposes that our

principal military objective in Colombia is not to help reduce

the amount of illicit drugs leaving the country. Now it is to

establish the security conditions necessary for the

development of an allied country where liberty and property

are protected, and where material progress is a reasonable

expectation for the majority. If this does not misrepresent

the dominant current of U.S. policy, it means we are back in

the business of assisting an ally with internal security.

Countering illicit drugs becomes a subordinate mission, but

remains an indispensable objective. The Uribe Velez

administration has set Colombia on a course toward

defeating the FARC and ELN. How his administration will

deal with the AUC is less certain. By the time this

monograph is published, the Congress of the United States

may have formally acceded to the idea that counternarcotics

monies be spent on counterguerrilla endeavors of the

Colombian armed forces.

The question remains if stopping narco-trafficking

should be our main contribution to defeating the outlaws, or

if we should launch headlong into counterterrorism. Loss of

drug income would logically accelerate the demise of any of

the outlaw groups. Still, while true that the outlaws benefit

militarily from drug income, trafficking in drugs is not their

only source of financial strength. Reducing coca production

might reduce the overall terror capacity of the FARC, but

20
destroying the FARC would logically have a greater impact

on the coca industry. Maybe U.S.-Colombia strategy has

been inside out. U.S. counternarcotics efforts have been

counterguerrilla to the extent they have been based on the

theory that, by reducing drug income from Putumayo coca,

the FARC would be weakened and therefore encouraged to

yield in peace negotiations. At least part of the idea was to

harm the traffickers by reducing their profits. Now we will

attempt to reduce the amount of product by more directly

harming the traffickers. Which would be more efficient,

reducing traffickers by eradicating drugs or reducing the

drug flow by eradicating traffickers? A change toward the

latter could indeed prove more effective in decreasing the

quantity of illicit drugs sent to the United States from

Colombia, but the optimal contribution that the United

States can make toward ridding Colombia of its outlaw

enemies may still be to proceed on the basis of a primarily

counternarcotics strategy. This leads to another subquestion: If the United States is to contribute to the Colombian

government’s prosecution of the war by way of counternarcotics programs, is aerial eradication an optimal use of

counternarcotics money? If, in fact, it is better to

de-emphasize eradication and instead create a system of

internal route control and LOC interdiction, to do so would

require a better mapping effort.

An interrelated issue is that of paramilitary forces and

how the government should confront them as compared to

the traditional guerrilla groups. The spawning of the

anti-guerrilla paramilitary forces is an outgrowth of the

failure or inability of the state to meet an obligation to

protect persons and property from outlaw predation. It can

be cogently argued that a system of local paramilitary

defense structures is, if not a requirement for winning an

irregular war, at least an historically successful element.45

The debate regarding the establishment of a disciplined

community defense system is beyond the purposes of this

monograph; nevertheless, the question of civil self-defense

rarely fails to enter debates about what kind of strategy

21
should apply to Colombia’s war. The observation that

guerrilla forces, at the moment of potential government

victory, universally slouch back into a latency of civilian

garb and popular protection impels the argument for

community organizations that can spot and report

guerrillas organizing and metamorphosing. As imposing as

this historical tendency may be, the political and

propagandistic climate in Colombia does not yet appear ripe

for re-engagement of civilian communities in such a way.

Having said that, an apparently grassroots movement of

resistance to guerrilla violence has bloomed in a few areas,

and this phenomenon may present a vehicle for local

organized resistance to outlaws in select areas.46 The

question, therefore, of local militias has not dissipated, and

U.S. posture regarding their creation must be better

informed by facts on the ground.

The existence of the AUC is attributable in some

measure to the failure of the government to establish

effective discipline and to crisply delineate the authority

and range of initiative accorded to civil defense groups. The

juridical turn in Colombia against legal establishment of

militias is generally attributed to excesses in their

vigilantism, to put it coldly. Moreover, the virulence of the

self-defense movement can be associated more broadly with

two factors. One is the failure of the Colombian state to

defeat and remove the guerrillas, which have become the

raison d’etre of the AUC. The second is the early lack of

commitment to destroy the illicit drug industry, which

provides autonomous financial power to outlawry and

corrupts the enforcement regime. Had the government of

Colombia reformed the controls and linkages over the

several types of authorized militias, and maintained a

participation in their existence and discipline, it is unlikely

they would have as close an intermarriage with drug

trafficking that they now do. Because many in and outside

Colombia consider the establishment of a militia system to

be an effective and legitimate part of counterguerrilla

strategy, it behooves U.S. planners to be informed about the

22
home communities and memberships of any future militia.

Such information can be optimally gleaned from cadastral

and land registry records.

Mapping.

It is hard to understand how, after 30 years of internal

conflict, there is so much unmapped territory in Colombia,

and that the existing maps are so out of date. Partly to

blame is a bureaucratic distancing of the state’s geographic

interest and function from military identity. Until 1950, the

Colombian national geographic institute was called the

Augustín Codazzi Military and Geographic Institute

(Instituto Geográfico y Militar Augustín Codazzi or IGAC).

The name change followed the movement of Colombia’s

mapping responsibilities out of the defense ministry in

1940, thus creating South America’s first civilian

geographic institute.47 The change permitted growth of an

institutional attitude that correlates technical objectivity

with neutrality in the face of the guerrilla war—not showing

favoritism toward either the guerrilla or the army. Such a

construction of objectivity is anathema to the wisdom that a

governmental strategy must be integral, employ all

strengths and prerogatives of the state, and establish

conditions under which the causes of disaffection can be

positively resolved. An institutional attitude that eschews

identity with the army under a claim of scientific

nonpartisanship is, in this case, especially damaging to a

war effort because the product of the geographic institute is

central to the prosecution of so many other government

functions. The geographic work of the state must be both

loyal and active in the promotion of state authority. As it

stands, the cadastral function of the Colombian government

has at times favored the sovereign challenges of the

guerrillas, not opposed them.48 The cadastral office and all

the cadastral records must be made to represent the

contract that the government has with the people to uphold

rights in land. Winning an internal war requires that the

whole gamut of government enterprises and every aspect of

23
a nation’s power be used to a common end. In the context of

an internal war, when it comes to the cartographic function

of the state, there can be no logical distinction between

military and nonmilitary effort.49 Cartography supports the

whole range of state interests, from the most immediate

combat needs to long-term pacification and development,

but it must in any case be comprehensive and current.

The developmental importance of cadastral mapping is

not lost on Colombians in a position to know. The chief of the

cadastral office of the Colombian geographic institute wrote

a 2001 essay outlining the long-range goals of his office and

asserting the importance of his organization’s mission.50

The InterAmerican Development Bank, in turn, has

supported the government of Colombia, although haltingly,

with generous loan agreements. Work on the modernization

of the cadaster has proceeded, but at an inadequate rate.

Cadastral coverage, responsibility, and authority in

Colombia is divided into five major parts, the national

cadastral office and four independent cadastral offices

(Federal District of Bogotá, Antioquia, Medellín, and

Cali).51 The existence of the independent cadastral offices is

related to historic anti-federalism. The offices are

politically, administratively and fiscally independent, but

they take technical guidance from the national cadastral

office and follow the same general technical protocols.

Technical and professional conditions among the cadastral

offices are not uniform, and unification of the offices is not

foreseen.

The cadastral offices are responsible for appraising land

values as these appraisals are the basis of equitable

taxation. The tax rates vary as a percentage of market value

and no general figure for the relationship between the

appraised value and market value would be broadly

accurate. According to many familiar with the system of

appraisals and the market for real property, an appraisal of

around 50 percent of market value would be typical in a

normal (not affected by the violence) market. The cadastral

24
offices keep records of the size, location, use, potential use,

and tax currency of all properties. In order to fulfill all the

requirements of Colombian administrative law, a seller

must produce a certification from the cadastral office

showing the precise boundaried description and location of

land to be sold, as well as any tax debt. This process seems to

be followed as an exception, however, in many rural areas,

and often in the city.

The cadastral offices, meanwhile, are not the official

record of ownership of a property. That function belongs to

the registry offices of a separate ministry, the Superintendency of Notaries and Registries.52 In the course of

transactions in land, new owners consider it sufficient to

register a bill of sale in the registry, but often without

consulting the cadastral office or having received a

certificate of description and tax appraisal from the seller.

The cadastral records, while determinant of the location,

shape, size, and tax value of a piece of land, are not sufficient

to establish legally definitive ownership. Furthermore, an

unknown percentage of the land sales in rural areas are

legally insufficient (might not be ratified or enforced by the

courts).

The cadastral office records historically have not been

compatible with the registry files. That is to say, until

recently there was no common field of data that made the

two sets of files reconcilable. Even descriptions of location

and size have not always been of the same type in both

record sets. It may be that in the course of reconciling the

two sets of land records, thousands of inconsistencies arise.

Recent efforts by national and international agencies to

systematize the cadastral and registry files did not

establish a method of records reconciliation. Today, at least

there is a technical intention and a technical method for so

doing. Each of the millions of properties listed in the registry

file carries an identification number, and this number is

gradually being assigned to corresponding properties in the

cadastral files. This process promises some quantity of legal

25
challenge and dispute; however, it is generally conceded

that, in the long run, the two files must be reconciled.

Creating basic ownership and survey data in unmapped

areas is an additional challenge, especially where security

for surveyors and interviewers is complicated. Still, the

opportunity to do original cadastral formation in areas of

greatest illicit cultivation should be seen as golden.53 There

is no place in Colombia where cartography, cadastral

formation, and digitization of registry files cannot be

speedily accomplished, although in some areas this may

require direct military or police escort for the protection of

administrators, surveyors, and other technicians. While the

creation of files and precise mapping does not assure

effective government presence and authority in outlaw

areas, the creation of digital files (with their characteristic

permanence and visibility) provides a useful tool for

extension of government presence and authority.54

The Colombian government is attempting to formalize

land ownership throughout the country and to digitize the

related data.55 As it is now, results of that effort will not be

realized for several years at best. Moreover, there is a strong

possibility that the resulting data will not be totally

transparent, or not provided in a timely and comprehensive

manner to U.S. Government agencies. A multi-agency

program of assistance can be implemented to accelerate the

Colombian government cadastral program, foster and

monitor transparency, and gain timely use of digitized and

digitally mapped description, ownership, use, and value

data for property throughout Colombia. Most of this data

would be necessarily unclassified, openly obtainable, and

could be made available to the full range of participating

agencies. A portion of the data could be made available on a

public Internet site for use by interested scholars.

U.S. Government decisions regarding Colombia,

whether related to counternarcotics, counterterrorism, economic development, military

operations, long-term peace or otherwise, are not

26
well-taken unless fully informed regarding the

ownership of real property. Only a few years ago such an

assertion would have been not only curious but

unreasonable—not so much because property ownership

did not influence political actors in foreign countries, but

rather because such intelligence could rarely be had. Even if

U.S. decisionmakers would like to have had better

information about who owned what in foreign countries, the

intelligence challenge was generally insurmountable, at

least beyond the most immediate and anecdotal

investigation. Today, property data can be collected,

organized, analyzed, and presented in ways that can

support foreign policy and strategy. A convergence of new

technologies, including global positioning satellites, and

expanding technical protocols such as the National Spatial

Data Infrastructure, makes provision of detailed property

information practicable.

The Upshot.

Among the uses of real property information discussed

above were support to military tactics and territorial control

strategies, asset forfeiture or denial; precision eradication

of illicit crops; prediction and prevention of human rights

violations; corruption limitation, long-term capital creation,

alternative development contract monitoring; and

improved understanding and expression regarding the

ultimate effect of policies and projects. Other uses include

money-laundering tip-off, avoidance of collateral damage in

military operations, improved disaster relief planning,

support to ecological protection strategies, and equitable

tax assessment practices.

Of all the uses of property data, however, perhaps the

farthest-reaching derives from the potential to map market

values. Almost all the individual holdings in Colombia have

been assigned a tax appraisal that responds to the essential

purpose of the cadastre as a tax base record. It is feasible to

obtain detailed market assessment appraisals throughout

most of the country that would allow a comparison of

27
market prices to the tax appraisals. With such information

we could create a map that would reflect the condition of

human rights in Colombia. As argued earlier, real property

is a set of rights (and duties) associated with a place. The

fuller the set of rights, the more valuable the place. The

more stable and better protected the rights, the more

valuable the place. Not only will land values rise generally

in Colombia when the war is over, but the value of

individual pieces of land will increase or decrease in relation

to the quality of rights enjoyed. If persons can travel and live

safely, the market prices of their lands will increase. We will

be able to see on a map, in color and in detail, the quality and

stability of rights as they improve or diminish. Of course

this is important for knowing if civilization is winning or

losing against outlawry, but it may be more important as an

engine for a sea change in U.S. foreign policy. The

inhumanities that energize American foreign policy are the

violent consequences of underlying conditions, conditions

that by themselves failed to generate emotional energy.

Violent symptoms rather than underlying causes become

the focal point of policy. By better appreciating property, we

can consider a broader range of contested rights and duties

that lead to grave violations of human rights. Even in

relation to the most serious human rights abuses, property

issues will be identified as causes. Few abuses are not

rooted in competitions for property. Unfortunately, when

dealing with international human rights, the problem

becomes one of metering the status of human beings not

only to the extent that their property rights are being

protected, but to the extent that they themselves are being

treated as property.

In every civilized society property rights must be carefully

safeguarded; ordinarily and in the great majority of cases,

human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the

long run, identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a

real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper

hand; for property belongs to man and not man to property.56

Theodore Roosevelt

28
Accepting President Roosevelt’s observation, U.S.

foreign policy toward Colombia and elsewhere need not veer

away from human rights discipline, but should refocus on

the erosion of liberty and property that precede gross

violations. A map of the quality of rights in Colombia can be

made, and that map will show progress (or lack of it) against

the underlying causes of gross human rights violations

there.57

Colombia’s government has not done enough to make

land ownership precise and transparent, and therefore not

enough to control corruption and reduce disillusionment.

The problem may owe to an underestimate of the

importance of formalized land ownership as a fundamental

mechanism for social peace and honest government.

Recently, Colombians overwhelmingly elected a candidate

who announced his intention to mobilize the Colombian

nation to take an aggressive stance against the guerrillas.

His treatment of the AUC is more of a question mark. In the

face of U.S. desire to assist Colombia to rid itself of all

terrorist groups and to curb corruption, the United States

needs new, more detailed information—not just anecdotal,

but strategically relevant, comprehensive data about who

gains and loses in Colombia when major decisions are made.

Success for Colombia in dealing with organized outlaws,

and in establishing the conditions for long-term peace,

depends on gaining a better understanding of the details of

ownership in Colombia. To influence the course of

Colombian change, the United States would be well-served

to know who specifically benefits from the redistribution of

interests in land. To succeed at counternarcotics, the United

States must know more about who owns illicit cultivation

and how, and about geographic values beyond the crop

areas themselves. A complete map of Colombia is needed,

one that comprehends ownership and assists in the creation

of stable property. The United States can support its

creation and encourage its transparency.

29
The measures of effectiveness applied in determining

the success or failure of U.S. and Colombian government

policies also need to be improved. It will be useful to keep

track of quantities of illicit drugs grown, shipped, or

sprayed. Effectiveness in healing the Colombian state and

society, however, must be measured in other ways. One

indicator ought to be the value, in detail, of Colombian

land.58 When Colombia begins to enjoy widespread, regular

increases in rural property values, it will be one of the surest

indicators that its war has been won.

The upshot of these observations about the nature and

significance of property and property mapping in Colombia

is clear. The government of Colombia, at U.S. insistence

backed by U.S. aid, should formalize all land ownership in

Colombia as soon as possible, make land ownership and

value information completely and readily available,

challenge concentrations of ownership in the hands of

outlaws, and incorporate real property purchases and

distribution into its own counternarcotics and

counterterrorist strategy. All this will contribute to a

stronger Colombian State with a visible commitment not

just to security, but also to civil rights and open government.

To restate:

A positive correlation between formal land ownership

and material progress exists;

A complementary relationship between formal land

ownership and social peace exists;

Informally owned and unregulated land ownership

favors illicit land use and violence;

Property manipulation is an overlooked dimension of

outlaw political and military strategies;

Collection of property information on a strategic scale

is practicable because of new technologies; and,

30
Property information supports law enforcement,

military, developmental, economic, and diplomatic

decisions and programs.

Therefore, if we are to expend more human and financial

capital on Colombia, we should assure that Colombian land

is thoroughly mapped.

ENDNOTES

1. On the history of agricultural and extractive products as a factor

in Colombian conflict, see, for instance, Frank Safford and Marco

Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society, New York:

Oxford University Press, 2002. See also, generally, Indalecio Lievano

Aguirre, Los Grandes Conflictos Sociales y Economicos de Nuestra

Historia, Bogotá: Círculo de Lectores, 2002.

2. This theme of conflict over cash products and their geography is

not at odds with another common thread in the literature of Colombian

conflict—the struggle for control of labor. Colombian labor sources,

whether indigenous populations, imported slaves, or otherwise, have

been variously courted and abused for the purposes of exploiting

product or controlling terrain. Thus the two themes are interwoven and

complementary. The political assumptions and preferences of

Colombian authors seem often to correlate with one theme or the other.

Those Colombian authors focusing on human exploitation tend to favor

socialist solutions. See, for instance, María Clemencia Ramírez, Entre el

estado y la guerrilla: identidad y ciudadanía en el movimiento de los

campesinos del Putumayo (Between the State and the Guerrilla:

Identity and Citizenship in the Campesino Movement in Putumayo),

Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2002; Orlando

Fals Borda, Historia de la cuestión agraria en Colombia, Bogotá: Carlos

Valencia Editores, 1982; Margarita González, El Resguardo en el Nuevo

Reino de Granada, Bogotá: El Áncora Editores, 1992.

3. The author does not cite illicit drug profits as the characteristic

distinguishing the current struggle from those of Colombia’s past,

although this is clearly important to the scale of the problem. Rather,

the key difference between today’s civil conflict and its predecessors is

the imported nature of the ideological base of the rebel (FARC and ELN)

projects. The ostensible argument of the guerrillas is not rooted in the

traditional Colombian federalist—anti-federalist—debate, but rather

in class struggle. It may be that the un-Colombian nature of the

argument is part of the reason that the guerrilla has seemed to loose

ideological compass. Interestingly, there is a new and growing body of

31
political literature in Colombia that emphasizes regional and territorial

issues, advocating the reshuffling of administrative political units of the

state. Even those writings inspired by socialism seem less taken by

class-consciousness than by the traditional Colombian centrifugal

quarrel. See, for instance, “Conflicto, Autonomia Regional y Socialismo

Ecológico” (“Conflict, Regional Autonomy and Ecological Socialism”) or

“Descentralizar para Pacificar” (“Decentralize to Pacify”) in Agenda

Ciudadana, Las claves territoriales de la guerra y la paz, desarrollo

regional, participación ciudadana y agenda de paz (The Territorial

Clues to the War and Peace, Regional Development, Citizen

Participation and the Peace Agenda), Bogotá: Agenda Ciudadana y

Cátedra para la Paz, 2000; Jaime Castro, La Question Territorial,

Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 2002; and Orlando Fals Borda, Kaziyadu: Registro

del Reciente Despertar Territorial en Colombia (Kaziyadu: Record of the

Recent Territorial Awakening in Colombia), Bogotá: Ediciones desde

abajo, 2001; Alejo Vargas, “La guerra por el control territorial” (“The

war for territorial control”), El Espectador, November 17, 1998, p. 4A;

“Guerrilla exigirá derecho a gobernar territorios” (“The Guerrillas Will

Demand Right to Govern Territories”), El Espectador, November 16,

1998, p. 6A.

4. The roots of these two communist guerrilla groups reach back to

at least the early 1960s. See, on the history of the Colombian guerrillas,

Michael Radu, Violence and the Latin American Revolutionaries, New

Brunswick, 1988; Russell W. Ramsey, Guerrilleros y Soldados, Segunda

Edición, Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 2000; Cordillera Editores,

Historia de las Fuerzas Militares de Colombia: Ejército, Tomo III,

Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana, 1993, pp. 124-141; Eduardo Pizarro

Leongómez, Las FARC: 1949-1966, Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1992; Carlos

Medina Gallego, ELN: Una historia de los orígenes, Bogotá: Rodriguez

Quito, 2001. The AUC is another illegal, armed irregular force popularly

described as “paramilitary” and as “right wing,” although it has made

few ideological statements beyond opposition to the communist

guerrillas. For more on this organization, see David Spencer,

Colombia’s Paramilitaries: Criminals or Political Force? Carlisle, PA:

Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2001; Maurico

Aranguren Molina, Mi Confesión: Carlos Castaño revela sus secretos,

Bogotá: Editorial Oveja Negra, 2001; “Place” as used here alludes to a

body of theory in the study of geography, a centerpiece of which is called

“central place theory,” that considers competitive weeding-out and

survival of businesses. Associated normally with urban economics and

geography, place theory has obvious application in Colombia. See, in

this regard, http://geography.about.com/cs/centralplace.

5. For a brief description of Colombia’s current “contending forces,”

their methods, and goals, see generally Max G. Manwaring, Nonstate

32
Actors in Colombia: Threat and Response, Carlisle, PA: Strategic

Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2002.

6. Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson Selected Poetry: Edited, with

an Introduction by Douglas Smith, New York: Random House, 1951, p.

307.

7. The type and quality of tenancy, mortgager, renter, sharecropper,

etc., often arises in analyses of Colombian agricultural reform, and

tenancy conditions are highly varied even within a single department.

Quality of land ownership in Nariño is typically varied, as a thematic

map of tenancy there indicates. See Instituto Geográfico Agustín

Codazzi, Análisis geográficos: Aspectos geográficos del sector Andino

Nariñense, Bogotá: Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi, 1982, p. 26.

8. Yovanny Arturo Martinez and Nyrian Angelica Ubáque, El

catastro del nuevo milenio, Bogotá: Instituto Geográfico Augustín

Codazzi, 2001, p. 1

9. This is actually a digitized composite of two cadastral maps

featuring the county seat and surroundings of Tablón (a municipio or

county) in Nariño Department in southwestern Colombia.

10. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism

Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, New York: Perseus

Books Group, 2000.

11. Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in

the Third World, New York, Harper & Row, 1989.

12. On the subject of public information transparency, see Luz

Estella Nagle, The Search for Accountability and Transparency in Plan

Colombia: Reforming Judicial Institutions — Again, Carlisle,

Pennsylvania: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College,

2002. “Transparency and accountability are essential to good

governance. They will discourage nepotism and curb the bestowing of

favors on family and friends.” Ibid., p. 8.

13. Numerous unclassified maps of FARC dispositions have been

published in recent years. Among the best are Alvaro Valencia Tovar,

“Ubicación Cuadrillas FARC” in Inseguridad y Violencia en Colombia,

Bogotá: Universidad Sergio Arboleda, 1997, p. 126; “Localización de los

frentes guerrilleros, 1995,” in Jesus Antonio Bejarano Avila, Colombia:

Inseguridad, violencia y desempeño económico en las areas rurales,

ibid., p. 119; Angel Rabasa and Peter Chalk, “Figure 4.3, Areas of

Expansion of FARC Activity, 1996-1997,” in Colombian Labyrinth: The

33
Synergy of Drugs and Insurgency and Its Implications for Regional

Stability, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001, p. 49; a map image is also

available only from “The Center for International Policy’s Colombia

Project,” at http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/farcmap.htm.

14. See Thomas Marks, Colombian Adaptation to FARC Insurgency,

Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2002,

p. 16.

15. A 1961 U.S. Army Field Manual on irregular war states that,

“Surface lines of communication which have proved particularly

vulnerable to attack and sabotage should be abandoned, at least

temporarily, if at all possible. Long surface lines of communication

cannot be completely protected against a determined irregular force

without committing an excessive number of troops.” Department of the

Army Field Manual (FM) 31-15, Operations Against Irregular Forces,

Washington: Headquarters, Department of the Army, 1961, p. 23.

However sound this advice might have been in the context of the

conflicts contemplated by the authors at the time, this would be

disastrous advice for the Colombian situation and is rejected here.

Colombia’s urban centers depend on a limited number of long-haul road

routes. Colombia has the material wherewithal to not abandon legal

commerce to its fate on the nations major highways.

16. Personal interview of the author in February 2002 with

government officials who requested anonymity.

17. Colombia’s outlaws have property-awareness. They know what

property is most valuable and they know that property is a relationship

between land, people and government. They know further that accurate

records help govern. Outlaw leaders, especially guerrillas, understand

property as a contract between government and people—but they want

that contract to exist between Colombia’s countrymen and themselves,

not the democratically constituted government the United States

supports.

18. On the clearance zone or “despeje,” see Geoffrey Demarest, “In

Colombia: A Guerrilla Sanctuary?” Military Review, March-April 2002,

pp. 48-50.

19. The translated denotation of the word terrateniente is

landowner, but the connotation, especially in Colombia, is of an

arrogant holder of more land than justice should permit.

20. “Milicias se pelean a Medellín,” El Tiempo, May 23, 2002, pp. 1,

2.

34
21. The Atrato area has been an especially unfortunate victim of

mass civilian suffering and death. One of the worst human rights

offenses of the war occurred in late April 2002 at Bojayá in Chocó

Department. In the context of a battle with the AUC for control of the

area (the same general confrontation as that in Medellín), the FARC

launched a gas cylinder mortar/rocket that detonated in a packed

church killing at least 110 persons. See “Crece la pesadilla en Bojaya,”

El Tiempo, Bogotá, May 8, 2002, p. 1.

22. On the nature of property ownership, see Wesley Newcomb

Hofeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied to Judicial

Reasoning, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919, reissued 1964;

Reinold Noyes, The Institution of Property, New York: Longmans, Green

and Co., 1936.

23. See, for instance, Jesus Antonio Bejarano Avila, Director of

Research, Colombia: Inseguridad, violencia y desempeño económico en

las areas rurales, Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia 1997, p.

225. This work includes extensive presentation of the relationship

between violence and rural land use and markets in Colombia.

24. In this vein, a U.S. Agency for International Development

(USAID) initiative stemming from the Summit of the Americas, the

Inter-Summit Property Systems Initiative (IPSI) calls for the

governments of the Americas to incorporate alterative dispute

resolution mechanisms into their plans. It is understood that successful

local judicial and nonjudicial resolution of property conflicts depends on

reliable, open information regarding ownership. Assuring the fidelity

and permanence of public records is an obvious start point for building

systems for quieting title, ending dispute over ownership by court

decision. See “Virtual Office for the Inter-Summit Property Systems

Initiative” http://www.property-registration.org/Documents/

IPSI.htm.

25. Parallel works, such as John P. Powelson’s The Story of Land: A

World History of Land Tenure and Agrarian Reform, Cambridge, MA:

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1988, highlight correlations between

civil violence and informality in systems of property ownership; see also

Geoffrey Demarest, Geoproperty: Foreign Affairs, National Security and

Property Rights, London: Frank Cass, 1998. In this book, the author

deals with the foreign policy and strategy aspects of property and

ownership theory. Of the American failure to attend to the question of

property in international affairs he states,

If, in all the lands where the United States regularly cites grave

human rights inadequacies, one were to ask simple questions

35
about landlord-tenant laws, title registry systems, zoning

ordinances, mining stakes, paving contracts, street gang

territories, paternity laws, or water courts, two judgments

would be reached. First, that powerful linkages exist between

violent abuses of human rights and contested property rights.

Second, that U.S. intelligence collectors, analysts, and

policymakers are indifferent to details of the ownership

environment.

26. Michael Hill, Black Sunday: Ploesti, London: Schiffer

Publishing, 2001; see also B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second

World War, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970, pp. 607-608; U.S. Air

Force Museum, WWII Combat Europe, Ploesti, Rumania Mission

Details, online at http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/history/

wwii/ce10.htm.

27. Except perhaps later in the war, when a comprehensive, near

simultaneous campaign against production facilities within Germany

had a devastating effect on supply. Therein, too, may lie an important

lesson. Eradication will be more successful in hurting guerrilla finances

to the extent it can be done massively and simultaneously throughout

the county. This may be practically impossible until the expanse of crop

areas and the complexity of the outlaw logistics routes are reduced.

28. These responses also show that eradication is having an effect,

and more than mere annoyance. Still, the effect could be worse than the

cure. See, for example, Juan Londoño M., “Violencia, peor que la broca”

(“Violence, Worse than the Blight”), El Tiempo, December 5, 2001.

Describing the effect of the war on the traditional coffee growing region,

the eje cafetero, Londoño reports on an increase in violence, including

the robbery of whole shipments of coffee beans by the guerrillas. Such

acts may be compensatory means of reacting to diminished coca

revenues. They raise a question about fencing. To convert coffee beans to

cash, the guerrilla organization must have in place the correct set of

owned or extorted businesses, and/or the right array of government

bribes.

29. For a relevant series of maps, see Geografía de la guerra, online

at http://www.disaster.info.desastres.net/desplazados/geografia/

indexmap.htm.

30. In addition, a sizeable percentage of the money spent on the

counternarcotics military portion of Plan Colombia was for helicopter

purchases. Helicopters, perhaps the single most accepted and

significant machine for overcoming terrain and time disadvantages in

irregular warfare, are to some extent fungible. Giving helicopters for the

36
purpose of counternarcotics frees others for different uses. In addition,

the semantic warp of counternarcotics vice counterinsurgency may, as

hoped, be ending. The helicopters will be available for broader,

counteroutlaw use.

31. Compare “Figure 3.2 Arms Smuggling Routes Into Colombia,” in

Angel Rabasa and Peter Chalk, Colombian Labyrinth: The Synergy of

Drugs and Insurgency and Its Implications for Regional Stability, Santa

Monica, CA: RAND, 2001, p. 36, citing the Colombian Ministry of

Defense, with Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo, “Principales rutas . . .,” in Los

Guerrilleros del Novecientos, Bogota: Fondo Editorial CEREC, 1991, pp.

286, 293.

32. One of the natural military advantages the FARC gained

included interior lines, rear area security, protected lines of

communication, protected financial resource bases, marshaling areas,

training areas, and access to strategic corridors, including into the

federal district of Bogotá. The propagandistic value cannot be

understated, either, propaganda and operational strategy being at some

point linked. The FARC has long made explicit arguments in favor of

belligerent status under international law. See, for instance,

“Beligerancia,” FARC-EP Documentos at http://www.farc-ep.org/. As

the FARC points out, application of the conventions (and with it a

strengthened argument for separate and legitimate international

identity) includes a requirement that the dissident armed force

“exercise such control over a part of its territory as to enable them to

carry out sustained and concerted military operations. . . .” More

important still is the very fact of participating in a peace process while

carrying on its violent activities. Sitting at a peace negotiation lent the

FARC both legitimacy and media profile, especially overseas. Without

the peace process, the FARC image is diminished. The despeje and the

Pastrana peace process were so linked that elimination of the despeje

meant the end of the process and the political benefits to the FARC that

went with it. See Armando Borrero Mansilla, “La Importancia Militar

de la Zona del Despeje,” El Tiempo, October 19, 2001, online at

http://eltiempo.terra.com.co/19-10-2001/prip118531.html.

33. See Scott Wilson, “Colombian Rebels Use Refuge to Expand

Their Power Base: FARC Pushes Boundaries of Government-Backed

Safe Haven,” The Washington Post Online, October 3, 2001, p. A25, at

http://www.washingtonpost.com/. “Envisioned as a way to end

Colombia’s nearly four-decade civil war, the FARC’s safe haven instead

has become the guerrillas’ single biggest military advantage in the

widening conflict, according to senior army officers and defense analysts

in Colombia.” Ibid.

37
34. “Colombia details fresh IRA link to guerrillas,” Financial Times,

September 17, 2001, online at http://ft.com. See also “IRA Denies

Sending Trio to Colombia,” Agence France Presse, Wednesday,

September 19, 2001, online at http://www.prairienet.org/clm/

clmnews_files/010919AFP01.html>. The long-standing issue of Cuban

government sponsorship of Colombian subversive groups should regain

currency. See, for instance, Ninoska Pérez Castellón, “The Cuban

Connection,” Latin American Special Report, Vol. 12, No. 11, September

30, 2001, p. 1.

35. “Mi Única Prioridad no es la Paz.” Interview with President

Andrés Pastrana, Semana, February 26, 2001, p. 30.

36. Ibid.

37. These counties are Yondó, Antioquia; Cantagallo, Bolivar; and

San Pablo, Bolivar. The Magdalena River itself was not to be included

and, according to President Pastrana, the time would be limited to 9

months. For a detailed description of outlaw competition for the area,

including a series of maps describing Magdalena Medio, see

Vicepresidencia de la República, Programa Actual del Magdalena

Medio, Current Program on the Middle Magdalena) online at

http://www.derechoshumanos.gov.co/observatorio/04_publicaciones

/04_03_regiones/magdalenamedio/index.htm. For a chronology of the

Pastrana government’s policy regarding the ELN, see also

Departamento de Comunicaciones, Oficina del Alto Comisionado de

paz, Santa fé de Bogotá, Colombia, Hechos de Paz (Peace Facts), online

at http://www.hechosdepaz.gov.co/es/load.php/uid=0/

leng=es/5/cronologia_eln00.htm.

38. Vicepresidencia de la República, Ibid.

39. Thrusts to seize control of the big river mark most of Colombia’s

civil wars. Typical was an early incursion by Liberal (rebel) forces at the

outset of the War of the Thousand Days. On October 24, 1899, at a

mid-river turn called Los Obispos, a group of rebels led by Baranquilla

doctor Julio Vengoechea sank one of their own paddleboats and watched

the government gunboat Hercules sink the rest. The rebel plan to wrest

the Middle Magdalena was well-conceived, but botched. See Geoffrey

Demarest, “War of the Thousand Days,” Small Wars and Insurgencies,

Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 2001, p. 7.

40. Knowledge of ownership by plat in southern Bolivar Department

would not likely point directly to those responsible for drug cultivation,

although it might indeed. It is more likely that ownership information

such as residency of absentee owners or hometowns of mortgage banks

38
might tend to prove or disprove territorial theories concerning the lack

of material progress in the area. One popular hypothesis holds that the

departmental capital is simply too distant from the southern cone of

Bolivar. It would be interesting to see, by way of the property ownership

records, what the relative connection of the agriculturalists in the area

is to the departmental capital of Cartagena on the Atlantic coast. See

Orlando Fals Borda, Región e Historia: Elementos sobre ordenamiento y

equilibrio regional en Colombia, Bogota: Tercer Mundo, 1996, p. 9.

41. Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria—Incora, Colombia

Tierra y Paz: Experiencias y caminos para la reforma agraria,

altrenativas para el siglo XXI, 1961-2001, Bogota: Incora, 2002, pp. 174,

175. This work contains several essays relating the agrarian reform

efforts of Incora to social problems, including violence, facing Colombia.

The essays should be compared to those in an earlier Incora publication,

Marta Rojas, editor, Tierra, Economia, y Sociedad, Bogota: Incora,

1993.

42. Ibid., p. 187.

43. Author interview of Colombian government officials who

requested anonymity. Incora is the acronym of the Colombian Institute

for Agrarian Reform, Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria.

44. The policy of the Clinton administration was formalized in

Presidential Decision Directive/NSC 73, dated August 3, 2000, that

stated in relevant part,

The primary focus of the Colombia initiative is to provide

support for Colombia’s intensifying counterdrug effort. As a

matter of Administration policy, we will not support Colombian

counterinsurgency efforts. We will, however, provide support, in

accordance with existing authorities and this policy, to the

Government of Colombia for force protection and for security

directly related to counterdrug efforts, regardless of the source

of the threat. This Administration remains convinced that the

ultimate solution to Colombia’s long-standing civil conflict is

through a successful peace process, not a decisive military

victory, and believes that counterdrug progress will contribute

to progress towards peace.

For a more recent U.S. government statement regarding the Colombian

situation, except in counterterrorism terms, see U.S. Department of

State, Patterns of Global Terrorism, Department of State Publication

10940, Washington: Office of the Secretary of State, 2002, pp. 45-47.

39
45. See, for instance, Spencer; Ibid. note 4.

46. See Susannah A. Nesmith, “Colombian Rebels Face New

Adversary,” Associated Press, Thursday, January 3, 2002, online at

http://www.prairienet.org/clm/clmnews_files/020103AP01.html;

“Rebeldes con causa,” Semana, November 19-26, 2001, No. 1020, p. 32;

“La Resistencia,” Ibid., p. 54.

47. Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi, Agustin Codazzi

Geographic Institute, Bogotá: IGAC, 2002, institutional information

folder.

48. Failure to pull in one direction is not limited to the Colombian

government. If the U.S. Agency for International Development embarks

on an alternative crop development project, the goals are both

developmental and counternarcotic. If a deal is made with local

agriculturalists in which agricultural and financial assistance is

exchanged for a promise not to grow coca, the United States should be

fully informed regarding the nature of the deal. What exactly are the

rights in land held by the individual farmer? Is he a sharecropper? Is he

beholden for rent, or is he subject to an unregistered mortgage? To

whom is he beholden for protection of his basic rights of peaceful

possession? Are all interests in the land registered and verifiable? No

aid project could be useful to the strengthening of the contract between

the duly constituted government and the population if that project

serves a different contract—a forced contract between the peasant and

the outlaw. Nevertheless, it appears that many U.S. aid programs are

underinformed regarding the status of local property. In some project

areas not even basic cartography exists, and the property contract of the

peasants appears to be with the guerrillas or paramilitaries rather than

with the government.

49. Other observers have noted that the Colombian state is at odds

with itself and so is its war effort. See Dennis M. Rempe, The Past as

Prologue? A History of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in Colombia,

1958-66, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2002. “The violence in

Colombia requires an integrated strategy that addresses the social,

economic, political, and military dynamics of the problem.” Ibid. p. 31;

“We can talk of nothing until the government actually exercises its writ

within its national territory. This will come about only through a

combination of military and socio-economic means.” Marks, Ibid., note

18, p. 31; “Colombia as a system is not involved in its own struggle.

Though commendable initiative has been shown by some government

organizations, others . . . have proceeded as though an internal war was

not raging.” Ibid., p. 32.

40
50. Yovanny Arturo Martinez; Ibid., note 10.

51. The national cadastral office is a directorate of the national

cartographic institute, Instituto Geográfico Augustín Codazzi, which is

a dependency of the Ministry of Interior and Public Credit, Ministerio de

Hacienda y Crédito Público.

52. Real property registrars are named to all of the departmental

capitals and to a number of other cities. Registrars to the departmental

capitals are named directly by the President of the Republic. Registrars

are subordinate administratively to the Superintendency of Notaries

and Registries, Superintendencia de Notarios y Registros, and those

registrars named to nondepartmental capitals are generally named by

the Superintendent, who is in turn appointed by the President. The

Superintendency is subordinate to the Ministry of Law and Justice,

Ministerio de Justicia y Derecho. The registrars direct the registry

offices, known as Offices of the Registry of Public Instruments, Oficinas

de Registro de Instrumentos Públicos, which are organized into what are

called Registry Circles, Círculos Registrales, and into which may fall

several to many counties, municipios. That is to say, only about one in

ten counties has a registry office.

53. Original ownership adjudication presents the government with

an opportunity to create property in the hands of persons most likely to

oppose invasion by illicit interests. This opportunity, however, has not

being exploited. Agrarian land redistribution decisions mostly have not

been guided by counternarcotics, counterterrorist, market, or for that

matter, even ecological considerations. Land redistribution programs

should be made to fit into the overall government counternarcotics,

counterterrorist and land-use strategies. Failure to do this has been a

critical (and, unfortunately, willful) omission on the part of the

Colombian government.

54. Developing a modern, formal land ownership regime is a larger,

more difficult objective than that of creating or obtaining property data.

A modern property regime includes mechanisms for trust-building and

for market fluidity. These mechanisms include title insurance; a

regulated brokerage profession; professional property inspectors and

appraisers; statutorily specific “quiet title” actions; clearly delineated

occasions for self-help in regaining possession; enforceable

punishments for unlawful self-help; enforcement of restraining orders

and eviction; transparency of ownership files; well-publicized

statutes-of-fraud that require transactions in real estate to be in

writing, signed, notarized, and registered; requirement that mortgages

and encumbrances of all kinds be recorded or be without state

enforcement; and so on. This litany of needs is included to underline an

41
important disclaimer: creating property data (even if is technically

exact, judicially correct, and accessible) is not the same as creating a

property regime similar to that known in the United States.

55. Cadastral maps and data do not constitute all the government

property data readily available in Colombia. A variety of government

offices maintain other geographically referenced data. For instance,

ECOPETROL, the national petroleum company, maintains a variety of

map data layers that include pipeline easements, exploration licences,

areas of geologic promise, etc. INGEOMINAS, the national mining and

mineralogical institute, has similar map data on valuable minerals.

Other agencies maintain ecological and agricultural data, and the

National Police keeps a massive geographically coded database of

incidents that could be displayed on a common map with the property

information using software such as ESRI ArcGIS.

56. Theodore Roosevelt, speech at the University of Paris, April 23,

1910, found in Daniel B. Baker, ed., Political Quotations, Detroit: Gale

Research Inc., 1990, p. 201.

57. Violations of human rights most decried by our government and

by private citizens working through nongovernmental organizations

include lack of habeas corpus, torture, organized rape, extrajudicial

execution, forced exile, disenfranchisement, and genocide. Any

situation involving the violation of human rights could be expressed in

ownership terms, but with reference to these most serious violations,

the use of property terminology might sterilize or routinize descriptions.

At that point, the relative utility of a property-based description of

events and conflicts would be exceeded. Observation of the close linkage

between denied property rights and evolution of basic human rights

abuses is most important in defending broad attention to property

rights in the analysis of national and international security affairs.

58. Colombia has a sufficiently competent and knowledgeable

quantity of land appraisers, organized into a national professional

federation, that it is feasible to implement a methodology for

determining market values of land in most areas of the country.

42
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Robert R. Ivany

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Director

Professor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.

Director of Research

Dr. Steven Metz

Author

Dr. Geoffrey Demarest

Director of Publications

Ms. Marianne P. Cowling

Publications Assistant

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

*****

Composition

Ms. Kimberly A. Rockwell-Jacoby