Elusive Justice: Women, Land Rights, and Colombia’s Transition to Peace by Donny Meertens (review)

Although the geographic reach of this book is limited to Montes de María and César, two regions of the Colombian Caribbean, the conceptual framework and analytical development refer to situations suffered in other countries that emerge from what are generally armed and prolonged conflicts. The book compares the transitions in these Colombian regions with transitional processes in Uganda, South Africa, Bosnia-Herzegovina, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Meertens focuses on a brief but crucial period in Colombia’s recent history: from the Victims and Land Restitution Act of 2011 to the solemn signature of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) and its immediately subsequent rejection in a 2016 plebiscite. The core manifestation of the Colombian conflict was the forced and massive displacement suffered by populations that found themselves in the middle of a war fought among the state, parastatal armies, political insurgents, and criminal organizations. The resulting peasant exodus generally reflected three central problems: (a) the fundamental inequality derived from land concentration and water rights; (b) the violence associated with that structure; and (c) the malfunction of state institutions.

The major contribution and great merit of Meertens’s book is its detailed descriptions and analysis of the problems of “gender justice.” Using ethnographic and social anthropology methods, it highlights the social universe on a micro level. It illuminates, among others, the situation of homeless widows in the exercise of their civil rights and women heads of household who still suffer from the application of Roman capitis deminutio as soon as they enter the bureaucratic apparatus responsible for attending to land restitution. Bringing out life stories and developing specific statistics, the book demonstrates that the state apparatus is slow and casuistic and shows how it works with the colonial method of “piecemeal and patchwork.”

In this tour, the book highlights the persistence of the patriarchal order, its practices, and its discourse, in which the guerrilla world of the FARC-EP is included. Neither the Victims and Land Restitution Law of 2011 nor the 2016 Peace Agreement addressed in its fundamental premises the issue of historical gender inequality. The biggest obstacle lies in the deep layers of Colombian society that continue to conceive patriarchalism as a normal agrarian and family system. However, the author points out loopholes and possibilities that can strengthen collective initiatives and networks of women returning to their places of origin.

As with many works on public violence in Colombia, this one does not avoid a topic that needs to be reviewed: that the Colombian conflict has been going on in the same way for more than half a century. Sources of the most diverse nature show that in the decades from 1964 to 1984 public violence was marginal. This applies both to peasant societies and to Colombian political life at the local, regional, and national level. Massive problems of displacement and dispossession of land, with the consequent concentration, emerged later under the dynamics of the triad: drug-trafficking, landlordism, and paramilitarism. Although the author is cautious and does not generalize about the concentrated effects of forced displacement in the Montes de María and César, the phenomenon has been proven in other Colombian regions. There is also an important problem in land restitution that this book does not address: the precariousness of the Colombian system of cadastre, notarial records, and public property registration.

This is a substantial book that will serve Colombians who want to broaden their horizons in pursuit of a more conscious exercise of civil and political rights, as well as jurists and judges, alert officials, and academic specialists. In sum, it will serve all those interested in current issues of patriarchalism, gender justice, transitional justice, land restitution, and public violence.