draining development.pdf - Khazar University

152 Draining Development?Liberación Nacional and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia,more well known as ELN and FARC, respectively) and right-wingparamilitary groups have controlled many municipal governments andhad sufficient influence on some governments in the country’s departmentsto be able to extract significant amounts from local budgets tofund their activities.Illegal capital has been a factor in the extreme concentration of landtenancy and the political power of local landlords who, in large parts ofthe country, have had close ties to the illicit drug industry or have beenactive in this industry. 6 Illegal drug money could not be easily invested inthe modern economy, and drug traffickers purchased large amounts ofrural land (Reyes Posada 1997). This concentration has been achieved bypurchases, forced purchases under threat, and forced displacements ofpeasants and has been facilitated by the lack of well-defined, defendableproperty rights in many regions.Moreover, in towns controlled by armed groups or local traditionallandlords, public land and title registries (catastros) are outdated andincomplete, and tax assessments grossly underestimated. Municipal registriesthat should provide information on ownership are also inadequate,and, frequently, municipal staff refuse to cooperate with the Fiscalía(Attorney General’s Office) because the staff are controlled bypeople whose property rights may be challenged for money laundering.Land taxes are woefully low in many regions, and landed interests controlmunicipal councils, where they block any attempts to update theregistries and raise rural real estate taxes.Paramilitary organizations have stripped large amounts of land frompeasants. The lack of reliable land records and the fact that many peasantshave not had formal property rights to their plots make it impossibleto develop accurate estimates on the extent of the plundering. Today,but for Sudan, Colombia has the largest number of displaced citizens inthe world. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates thenumber of displaced Colombians, as of June 2010, at 3.3 million to 4.9million in a total population of 45.7 million. 7The gap between formal and informal normsGeography has also been a main factor in the development of diverse culturesbecause many regions essentially represent cultural endogamies