The Land & Life Stories Series is a series of short stories about land and life.
An initiative of the Commodity & land rushes and regimes (RRUSHES-5) research project, the series provides short feature stories that combine terrible tales of displacement and dispossession, ordinary people’s courage to resist and stories of hope in fighting to defend or reclaim ordinary people’s land and territory.
The stories in this series are not random, isolated anecdotes; they are illustrative cases of a global phenomenon about the politics of land. Stories to be featured in this Series affirm the common view among ordinary rural people worldwide – that land is life: it is everything that could guarantee the maintenance of life.
Read our stories
Land is Life, Land is Hope, Land is Peace
The history of the resettlement of peace signatories in Caquetá, Colombia, Itayosara Rojas Herrera, May 2023.
'Land has been an enduring issue throughout Colombia’s history. If the people who negotiated a peace agreement, who had been in conflict for 60 years, signed a peace agreement – and have no land, what assurances exist for the peasantry?' – A signatory to the Peace Agreement
This story describes the struggles and aims of Colombia's former FARC guerilla fighters and 'Signatories of the Peace Agreement'. Many of them identify themselves as peasants and when asked what they would like to do, they answer that they would like to cultivate and grow their own food.
It describes their life in the special areas set up for guerilla signatories, the Transitional Village Zones for Normalization).
Read this story in Spanish - La Tierra es vida, la tierra es Esperanza, la tierra es Paz La historia de reasentamiento de los firmantes de paz en Caquetá, Colombia
Reclaiming land in Colombia
'Land is everything': Reclaiming grabbed indigenous land in Colombia - Lorenza Arango Vásquez, August 2022
'I was eight years old when they killed my father, and that was when we left this territory… I had to wander like a stranger, aimlessly…' Leader of San Rafael Warrojo.
This is a story of indigenous peoples who were forced to abandon their land many years ago because of violence. When they came back, they found their land being occupied and farmed in a big agribusiness operation. Since then, they struggled to reclaim their land.
Read this story in Spanish - 'La tierra lo es todo': La lucha por recuperar territorios indigenas arrebatados en Colombia
