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The music was still playing when the first bodies hit the floor. Blood spread beneath the dancing feet. Moments earlier, as the vehicles approached the palm hut and killed their headlights, the cattle shifted in the dark. Few heard the hooves scrape. The band kept playing when the gunmen came. They had been paid to play until late. Years later, artist Fernando Botero would reimagine the scene as bodies piling up mid-dance.
The 1988 massacre of Mejor Esquina, in the department of Córdoba, is often cited as the first large-scale paramilitary killing in the Colombian Caribbean. The murder of the 28 campesinos, as they celebrated Resurrection Sunday at a village dance, had been announced: signs had appeared on the walls of nearby houses warning of a coming purge of guerrillas.
Though the gunmen disappeared without a trace, the killing was a harbinger of what was to come—state-sanctioned, narco-financed paramilitary terror against civilians with a clear objective: the acquisition of land.
Today, Mejor Esquina has become a harbinger of something else. Through the ambitious agrarian reform program of the country’s first left-wing president Gustavo Petro, rural communities are returning to land once controlled by the very networks that terrorized them. Yet the future of the program remains uncertain. With Colombia heading toward a presidential runoff, the fate of the reform hangs in the balance. While the left-wing candidate Iván Cepeda has called for deepening what he describes as an “agrarian revolution,” his rival Abelardo de la Espriella has embraced the hardline politics associated with the era of paramilitary expansion, a stance made less surprising by his documented ties to these same groups.
The story of Mejor Esquina offers a glimpse into what is at stake. For many rural communities, the coming election is not merely a contest between political projects. In some ways, it is a choice between life and death.
Land Concentration and Resistance
If Colombia’s entrenched land inequality made conflict inevitable, Córdoba’s geography of abundance ensured the region would stand at its center. First came the land grab. The elites of the new republic—descendants of colonial settlers—accumulated territory with the backing of political connections and, in what would become a pattern, the privatization of coercion. Displaced peasants packed what little they could carry and ventured off in search of land, pushing the agricultural frontier ever outwards.
If Colombia’s entrenched land inequality made conflict inevitable, Córdoba’s geography of abundance ensured the region would stand at its center.
Rather than confront the issue of land concentration, the Colombian state encouraged the colonization of the frontiers. The drive of landless families to carve out plots in remote regions outpaced the state’s ability to reach them with institutions. As the jungle receded, new improvised outposts emerged. Violence was often a built-in feature of these marginalized regions, its volatility impossible to control from Bogotá.
The dispossessed peasants did not always run; sometimes they fought back. Their slogan was simple: those who work the land own it. On theslopes of Tolima, they tried to turn those words into reality. The government answered with bombs, launching “Operation Marquetalia” in 1964 and striking the defiant enclaves with the fury of someone trying to kill an idea. The idea survived. So did the future fighters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). They would soon after be joined by similar left-wing insurgencies.
The rise of the leftist guerrillas allowed elites to blur the line between peasant activism and insurgency, choosing to wage war on the former. Córdoba became the epicenter of a paramilitary crusade that decimated labor unions, campesino organizations, and left-wing political parties, crushing any resistance to dispossession and the unequal rural order. Massacres such as Mejor Esquina did not always take land directly. They created the conditions under which land could later be accumulated. Rural communities were on their own: behind the gunmen stood local elites, security actors, accommodating officials, and political patrons reaching all the way to Bogotá. Under such protection, stolen land was transformed into legal property while previous owners vanished not only from their farms but from the records themselves.
As millions of Colombians walked the path of displacement, estates grew larger, smallholdings smaller, and the legal origins of ownership ever more obscure. Colombia today remains the most unequal country in Latin America in terms of land distribution: one percent of agricultural holdings control more than 81 percent of the land. Nearly half of the country’s largest landowners cannot clearly establish the legal origins of their properties. At least six million hectares were forcibly vacated.
In the wake of this hollowed landscape, more than sixty percent of the rural population remains without land of their own, while nearly half lives below the poverty line, and land remains an open wound in Colombia.
The Land Changes Hands
On the night of the massacre, the assassins likely departed from a paramilitary training camp nearby. Many such encampments had begun to appear across vast private estates of Córdoba. Financed by drug money and protected by local elites, they served as operational bases, sites of torture, and laboratories for drug processing.
Land redistribution is both material and symbolic. Land once accumulated through violence is transferred to those driven from it.
A few kilometers up the dusty road from Mejor Esquina stood Caballo Blanco. Located just below the Caribbean coastline, the estate had its own airstrip for shipping out cocaine. At its peak, traffic was said, half in jest, to rival that of El Dorado Airport in Bogotá. By the late 1980s, Caballo Blanco was run by a local cattle rancher turned kingpin and paramilitary commander César Cura Moya. One detail about the massacre is now clear: Cura paid the band to play as his gunmen carried out the killing.
For a long time, the secrets of Caballo Blanco were well kept. Those who strayed into it were said to disappear. Now, the same land that once anchored the paramilitary project has since changed hands. The estate is now in the hands of fifty-three rural families from the region. Little remains of the tarmac beneath the tall grass.
The transfer forms part of Colombia’s agrarian reform, revived under President Gustavo Petro after years of stalled implementation following the 2016 peace agreement, which identified land inequality as a root cause of conflict. The accord envisioned the transfer of three million hectares over 12 years. To date, the Petro administration has redistributed around 700,000 hectares, while an additional million hectares have been formalized.
Land redistribution is both material and symbolic. Land once accumulated through violence is transferred to those driven from it: campesino families, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, and female heads of households. In regions long marked by conflict, previously idle land is worked again.
The Magdalena Medio region, the birthplace of paramilitarism, has become a stronghold of the country’s agrarian reform. Among the redistributed properties is Hacienda La Fe, a 346-hectare estate once used by the Israeli mercenary Yair Klein to train the first paramilitary recruits.
“Colombia’s farmers perform a vital social role,” Gustavo Petro said at a land transfer event. “Turning the land into food, and in doing so, turning the land into life. You are a force for life.” Estate after estate, the symbols of Colombia’s dark past become safeguards of its future.
In Buenavista, Córdoba, where criminal networks once controlled most of the land, campesino communities are beginning to reclaim territory. The estate once used to process drugs now grows food to sustain a sizable community. As campesinos come together in Caballo Blanco, the mood is convivial, almost buoyant. When they speak of their new land, however, they do so with quiet reverence.
“We look around us and we see the future. We see the fruit of our work. We see that the effort of each person was worth it—the men who are here, and those who are no longer here,” says Astrid.
Many of the people gathered here are victims of the Colombian conflict. Well into her seventies, Maria spent most of her life in exile, desperately trying to protect her children from the scourge of war. For her, the wandering is finally over.
“When I made my first harvest here, I sat in the house and I cried. I feel proud of what President Petro is doing, because it’s filling my life. What I suffered before, I now feel is being made whole,” she says.
The Land of the Survivors
Arriving at Mejor Esquina, a clearing opens at the foot of an old, sprawling mango tree. Once, a palm hut with an earthen floor stood here, though its traces are barely visible. The house’s threshold, though, remains the same one that the villagers were forced across as they were led out to their deaths. Up in the mango tree, under which their bodies were left, fruit hangs left to grow wild, unpicked and sour to the taste.
After decades of fighting for recognition and reparations, in 2024, the Petro government allocated the victims El Sambo, a piece of land that was formerly in paramilitary hands.
Ever since the music stopped that sultry night of Easter Sunday, the people of Mejor Esquina have reckoned with how to move forward. For 37 years, the struggle was a lonely one. After decades of fighting for recognition and reparations, in 2024, the Petro government allocated the victims El Sambo, a piece of land that was formerly in paramilitary hands. For the victims, it felt like the first time the government had finally seen Mejor Esquina.
As we tread along the rows of young cassava plants under the scorching sun in El Sambo, the members of the campesino association inspect the land they now so proudly own. Among them are the survivors of the massacre: a man who lived because the bodies of the dead collapsed over him, a woman who remembers bullets slicing through the darkness, another who was just eleven when he saw a man with his hands up shot in the head.
Their cracked hands sweep across the field as they discuss what will grow here: watermelons, black-eyed peas, rice. Nearly 500 families depend on it. If only they had heavy machinery. Many are older now, their bodies worn. And there are so many acres of earth to break.
But, whatever the sacrifice this plot of land throws at them, it feels incidental. “I can’t fit into my trousers for all this joy,” laughs Jaime, the leader of the association. “I keep telling my compañeros, ‘We’re eating rice from our own land. What a blessing!’”
He turns to the others, his tone now solemn.“ But all of this takes hard work. Look at us—we are survivors. Yet here we are. The fear is gone now. Now we have courage. We have the will to live. We are finally waking from the nightmare.”
Looking Ahead
Petro is in a hurry. The fear of counterreform remains—the far-right’s candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, will likely curtail land redistribution altogether, given that he represents the interests of the landowning elites. While the leftist Cepeda has pledged to deepen the agrarian reform of his predecessor, if polling is to be believed, the far-right looks set to return to power.
Yet history is not so easily reversed. The rising political consciousness mentioned by Jaime—millions discovering their rights—is shifting the balance of power.
This transfer of land is about much more than the property itself. It’s perhaps the most tangible gesture of redress available to those who bore the brunt of Colombia’s violence. Collective access to land may shield entire communities from physical or cultural disappearance. In a country where so much blood was spilled over land, it is also a wager on peace.
One of the campesinos at Caballo Blanco put it more simply. “If all the previous governments had done what this government is doing, there would not be the violence we have today.”
As the afternoon brings a change in weather to El Sambo, bundles of freshly cut rice straw dry in the wind. At the thought of a possible policy reversal, Jaime stands firm: “Now we are rights-bearing subjects because we are recognized. Our rights count as campesinos in Colombia. We have hope.”
He lets his eyes wander across the field where swallows now whirl overhead, before adding: “We want these lands here. And these are our lands.”
Piotr Wójciak-Pleyn is a writer and political scientist who reports from Colombia on conflict, peacebuilding, and memory. He holds a PhD in International Relations from Universitat Autònoma in Barcelona.