Colombia Going After Drug Lords' Land
New Law Seeks to Redistribute Rural Holdings

By John Otis
Chronicle Foreign Service
Hacienda Napoles, Colombia

This was once a pastoral playground for Pablo Escobar, featuring pet e
le
phants, a herd of zebras and the cocaine kingpin's collection of
stagecoaches, motorcycles and swamp buggies.

Today, four years after Escobar was gunned down by police, the runway of
his private airport is pocked with divots, the paint is fading from the
dinosaur statues and the hippopotamuses that wallow in the artificial lakes
are dying off.

Hacienda Napoles' 320 hectares could be put to good use turned into an
agricultural school or allocated to farmers. But because the title is
registered in the name of an Escobar associate, the case is tied up in
court.

Indeed, until recently it has been nearly impossible for the Colombian
government to expropriate land from drug lords even when they are dead.

To cut through the legal restrictions, lawmakers recently approved an
asset forfeiture law that gives the government wide powers to confiscate
the hold
ings of narcotics traffickers. The legislation also applies to guerrillas,
kidnappers and other criminals.

In a country with one of the most unjust ratios of land distribution in the
hemisphere, analysts say the law if strictly enforced could free up
vast tracts of property for the poor and help to pacify the violenceplagued
countryside.

German Vargas Lleras, a senator who was one of the bill's main backers,
confidently predicted: "This legislation will produce a redistribution of
wealth as has never bef ore been achieved in Colombia."

There is a lot to divvy up.

For the past two decades, Colombia's powerful and feared drug lords have
been buying dairy farms, orchards, coffee plantations and cattle ranches.
It was a way to saf ely invest their cash and launder money, and provided
secure, isolated lots on which to construct country mansions.

A 1995 study by Alejandro Reyes, a professor at the National University in
Bogota, estimated that drug cartels had acquired at least 3 million
hectares or about 8 percent of the nation's best farming and grazing
lands. Others say the figure is closer to 5 million hectares.

In the northern province of Cordoba, for example, Reyes said that more than
450,000 of the 850,000 hectares of fertile land may be in the hands of drug
dealers.

The Ochoa family once one of Colombia's most notorious drugdealing clans
is said to have thrown a lavish party after amassing their first million
hectares.

Former Agriculture Minister Cecilia Lopez said rural investments account
for only 10 to 15 percent of cartel holdings in Colombia. But their effect
has been devastating.

The drug lords had so much disposable cash that, in some areas, the cost of
land jumped by 60 percent and legitimate buyers were priced out of the
market. As farmers sold out, the new landlords turned cornfields and cow
pastures into landing strips and golf courses. Production plummeted.

"They buy and buy and buy, but they do not produce, and that is the
problem," said Alba Otilia Duenas, director of the Agrarian Reform
Institute, or INCORA. "The investments were made simply to hide their
resources."

Reyes said some dabbled in cattle ranching because "it doesn't require much
administration. The money is liquid. If you ave 100 head of cattle, you can
.iake the sale with a phone call."

Along with the drug traffickers came their private militias, which soon
began to clash with the leftwing guerrillas that permeate many rural
areas.

The violence, as well as a flood of cheap grain imports, drove still more
growers off the land. All told, small farmers sold or abandoned 700,000
hectares in the past six years, Lopez said.

The assetforfeiture law wasdesigned to reverse those trends by giving
authorities the power to seize Properties registered to drug dealers or to
their associates. They can also prosecute front companies and others who
help traffickers protect their holdings.

The bill so upset the cartels that there were reports that legislators were
offered up to$25,000 to vote against it. Ivan Cespedes, an INCORA official
in Antioquia province, said the prices of some properties have dropped by
50 percent since the law was passed.

"First, (the drug traffickers) overpaid. Now they are offering incredible
discounts because the government is threatening to take their lands," Reyes
said.

INCORA hopes to acquire I million hectares through such conf iscations and
to parcel out the land to Indians, growers who have renounced coca
cultivation, and some of the 800,000 Colombians who have been displaced by
guerrilla warfare and paramilitaries.

Others say that forecasting a rural revolution is premature. For one thing,
fearful farmers may resist the notion of breaking sod on narco estates.

"We are afraid of those lands," said Jesus Emiro Angarita, a farmer who was
chased off his land by paramilitaries last year and is waiting to be
relocated by INCORA.

He said the former owners "could return and kill the peas
ants."

Furthermore, 290 judges havebeen killed by drug traffickers in the past
eight years. Although they now have the power, courts may lack the nerve to
order expropriations, said Armando Sarmiento, a deputy federal prosecutor.

Alvaro Camacho, another land expert at the National University, pointed out
that the law was approved only after the Clinton administration threatened
to impose economic sanctions against Colombia.

,,I have the feeling that the law was the product of U.S. pressure rather
than the will to roll back the power of the narcos," Camacho said.

All the while, the drug dealers have been retaining lawyers and scrambling
land titles.

The paper chase is so complex that the state has yet to permanently
repossess a square inch of soil from the leaders of the Cali cartel, who
were jailed two years ago, or from the estates of Escobar or Jose Rodriguez
Gacha, another infamous drug kingpin who was killed in 1989.

"I'm not optimistic about it," Duenas said. "Everyone knows that Gacha was
a narco. Everyone knows that Escobar was a narco. where are their lands?"