Objective:

To discuss historically how land restitution and its weak application express, on the one hand, the continuity of land dispute between peasants and agrarian elites in Colombian history, and on the other hand, the ambiguity and weakness of state policies on the agrarian model to be followed.

Methodology:

Considering a sample of land restitution sentences from 2012 to 2020 as primary source, the proportion of land restituted collectively on the Caribbean coast, epicenter of paramilitarism in the late 1990s, was privileged in cases that reveal structural elements of a regressive narrative.

Originality:

This is a recent topic in historiography, which sheds new interpretations on land restitution, seen as part of a continuum in the history of agrarian property in Colombia, from the creation of the resguardos in colonial times to the present, where war, landowner opportunism and weak State action appear as factors causing dispossession and agrarian counter-reform. This highlights the current relevance of collective property for ethnic communities and addresses the present and future risks of restitution in the face of the extractivist and agro-export model.

Conclusions:

Considering that land restitution revived notions such as the social function of property, the family agricultural unit, and vacant lots as an exclusive resource for landless peasants, its study through sentences shows the configuration of an agrarian counter-reform process on properties that had previously been handed over by the Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCORA, in Spanish). This highlights the importance of collective property and its close relationship with indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples, and finally, a collision between the agrarian land policy and the mining policy, prioritized in the development plans of the period.