My relatively brief education so far at Whitman College has culminated into a sweeping attempt to decolonize my mind. Regardless the factors that led to colonization of the New World in the 15th century, arguably all social inequality in Latin and South America is residual of European colonization of the Global South. Much of the colonization that remains to this day feeds off a European capitalist mindset which continues to rob sustenance and subsistence from indigenous populations across the Andean region and the rest of Latin and South America. Within the last century, multiple groups in Colombia have pushed for land reform policies that would break up multi-thousand-acre plots of arable land—held mostly by foreign corporations like Cargill—and return it in chunks to the small populations that rely on the land for survival. However, resistance to neocolonization has only increased in intensity and left Colombia in a sort of civil war between the government and a “stubborn” Leninist insurgency called FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army). To what extent can land reform in Colombia mitigate violence between the capitalist-driven government and the Leninist insurgency, ultimately taking pressure from the armed conflict off of indigenous peoples?

While the fight rages on between neocolonial Colombian forces and FARC-EP drug lords, the indigenous populations of the inner-Colombian Andean region continue to live in a passive state of submission under the heat of war. It’s lesser known that indigenous peoples remain the most concentrated population victimized by the war, but still “They continue living in fear of assassinations, forced displacements, unjustified arrests, and encounters with explosives and abandoned, yet still active, mine fields, all while their political liberties are highly restricted”. In the year 2012, 78 indigenous people were killed in acts of violence between FARC-EP and Colombian forces, and some 11,000 were “displaced forcefully”.

Indigenous populations may suffer the highest concentration of victims in a war over land reform, yet they claim the least concentration of landownership within all of Colombia. Currently 80 percent of arable lands in Colombia are owned by 14 percent of the total population. Indeed, between 2010 and 2012, US-based Cargill, Inc. acquired 52,576 hectares of land in the eastern plains through 36 shell companies, ultimately overcoming the Colombian law which limits the amount of land passable to a single person to a standard called the “Family Agriculture Unit” (UAF)—“the amount of land considered necessary for a family to obtain a decent livelihood”—by 30 times that amount. What’s more, the Colombian Institute of Rural Development (INCODER)—originally tasked with representing the needs of rural populations across Colombia—has been so far unsuccessful in its mediations: the last agricultural census of Colombia dates back to 1971, and neither the land registry nor any information about land redistribution has been updated since .

The disassociation of indigenous Inga—or Colombian Quechuan people—from their land is a disassociation of the Inga from their identity. For thousands of years, the indigenous populations of the Andes, including the Ingas of Colombia, have defined themselves through their symbiotic relationship of giving and receiving from the land. Ethnographer Catherine J. Allen writes of the Runakuna—an Andean cousin of the Ingas—that they and the land “are closely bound together by…ties of ongoing reciprocity, for without the Runakuna’s offerings, the Places are hungry and sad, and without the care and support of the Places, the Runakuna are poor and unhealthy”. If foreign capitalist economic interest is one edge of the sword severing this tender bond, FARC-EP’s violent Leninist movement for land reform is the other.

I can’t help but think that an in-depth investigation into the gap in information between 1971 and today would help to rightfully return tens of thousands of acres back to the families who have relied on a symbiotic relationship with the land for generations. Perhaps in solving—at least diminishing—the issue of land reform in Colombia, FARC-EP hostility would lessen, since one of the conceptual banners of FARC-EP in the 1960s was “a radical agrarian reform to seize large landholdings and redistribute land to those who worked it”. The civil unrest in Colombia does not directly involve indigenous peoples, though arguably indigenous peoples have been the most violently affected. Land reform in Colombia would mean increased safety for not only indigenous communities but also the peasant class who fight for their rights to the land alongside and among the Inga.