Colombia launches agency to sell, rent former fighters’ property to fund reparations

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Colombia launched a real estate agency on Wednesday, February 11th, to rent and sell properties handed over by former far-right paramilitaries and leftist guerrillas as a way of funding reparations for victims of the county’s internal armed conflict.

Real Estate FRV will list 1,606 properties on behalf of the fund for victims’ reparations. This includes houses, apartments, farms and land previously held by paramilitaries who entered a peace deal with the government in 2005.

Real Estate FRV will also list properties seized by authorities from the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the now demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Seizures of former FARC property took place before the group disarmed under a 2016 peace deal with the government.

The total value of the properties is about 500 billion pesos (around US$140.3 million).

“Through this platform, through our page, we are looking to establish the specific process of selling and renting these properties,” Ramon Rodriguez, director of the unit for victims assistance and reparation, said in a virtual conference.

The unit receives properties – many of them run down – from the attorney general’s office, before fixing them up and selling them to fund compensation for the 7.5 million victims awaiting reparations.

However, selling the properties is challenging due to buyers’ fears that previous owners or their relatives will show up, including those who have returned to Colombia after serving jail sentences in the United States.

“These properties have a history that people know perfectly well, sometimes a macabre history,” said Miguel Avendano, coordinator of the victims’ fund for reparations.

The victims unit has so far been ordered to pay some 2.5 trillion pesos (around $701 million) in compensation to victims, from 58 court rulings.

Assets owned by the victims’ agency do not include those the FARC promised to deliver following the 2016 peace process.