The cornerstone of President Juan Manuel Santos' year-old government is a bold plan to compensate an estimated 4 million victims of Colombia's long running civil conflict.
The so called victims law, enacted in June, is an ambitious proposition : nothing similar has ever been attempted on any continent.
Colombia remains at war, and determining who qualifies for reparations will often be tricky enough.
The cost is also high, an estimated $20 billion over a decade.
The biggest challenge : leaders of dispossessed peasants, emboldened by the law to try to win back stolen land, keep getting killed, and the state appears hard pressed to halt the slayings.
"I don't want to be a pessimist but I think in two years the violence is going to grow," said Yamile Salinas, a land expert with the National Commission for Restitution and Reparation.
Colombia's is a dirty war in which most victims are civilians, and land tenancy has been at the heart of the nation's bloodletting since independence two centuries ago.
Shadowy far-right militias known as paramilitaries have done most of the killing.
First formed in the 1980s to defend ranchers and drug traffickers against rebel extortion, they evolved into criminal bands that often operated in concert with the military.
Shakedown artists and drug runners, many now work as hired guns for holders of stolen land.
The Victims Law, in addition to providing cash to survivors of more than 50,000 slain, aims to return at least 7,700 square miles (2 million hectares) to 430,000 families from whom it was wrested over the past two decades.
Some experts estimate that four times that amount was stolen an area slightly bigger than West Virginia and nearly the size of Austria.
The dispossessed are mostly poor peasants, and their lingering dislocation is why Colombia ranks second after Sudan in internally displaced people, with more than 3 million.
Since Santos took office, more than a dozen leaders of landless peasants have been slain, says the CODHES human rights group.
At least 50 such activists have been killed since 2002, the same year Alvaro Uribe was elected president.
Uribe waged all out war on leftist rebels with U.S. aid and made a deal with paramilitary leaders, promising reduced jail sentences in return for their laying down arms.
Dozens of lawmakers and regional politicians who backed Uribe were later convicted of criminal conspiracy, or worse, for allying themselves with the militias.
As defense minister from 2006-2009, Santos was tough on rebels and thus popular in provincial Colombia.
But with the Victims Law, he's squaring off against shadowy provincial powerbrokers.
He blames the killings of activists on "a few who want to keep their ill-gotten land."
"We're not going to let this law fail," the president told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday.
Santos told the AP he couldn't estimate how much money his government will be able to dedicate to implementing it.
He is seeking help from the U.S. and European Union but, given tough fiscal times, knows he can't expect much.
Asked how he plans to protect activists, Santos said the government is "creating elite groups that will be dedicated to this process."
From its start, the reparation campaign has been bloodstained.
After the first ceremonial land handover on Sept. 21, one recipient was bludgeoned to death as he walked home in the turbulent Uraba banana growing region on the Caribbean coast.
The killers left four bullets beside Hernando Perez's body as a warning to his comrades.
The latest killing occurred in San Onofre, a northern town that straddles the Caribbean and the Montes de Maria mountains.
On June 30, a gunman shot and killed a town councilman who had worked closely with peasants fighting to regain usurped land.
Other activists are worried they could be next.
The so called victims law, enacted in June, is an ambitious proposition : nothing similar has ever been attempted on any continent.
Colombia remains at war, and determining who qualifies for reparations will often be tricky enough.
The cost is also high, an estimated $20 billion over a decade.
The biggest challenge : leaders of dispossessed peasants, emboldened by the law to try to win back stolen land, keep getting killed, and the state appears hard pressed to halt the slayings.
"I don't want to be a pessimist but I think in two years the violence is going to grow," said Yamile Salinas, a land expert with the National Commission for Restitution and Reparation.
Colombia's is a dirty war in which most victims are civilians, and land tenancy has been at the heart of the nation's bloodletting since independence two centuries ago.
Shadowy far-right militias known as paramilitaries have done most of the killing.
First formed in the 1980s to defend ranchers and drug traffickers against rebel extortion, they evolved into criminal bands that often operated in concert with the military.
Shakedown artists and drug runners, many now work as hired guns for holders of stolen land.
The Victims Law, in addition to providing cash to survivors of more than 50,000 slain, aims to return at least 7,700 square miles (2 million hectares) to 430,000 families from whom it was wrested over the past two decades.
Some experts estimate that four times that amount was stolen an area slightly bigger than West Virginia and nearly the size of Austria.
The dispossessed are mostly poor peasants, and their lingering dislocation is why Colombia ranks second after Sudan in internally displaced people, with more than 3 million.
Since Santos took office, more than a dozen leaders of landless peasants have been slain, says the CODHES human rights group.
At least 50 such activists have been killed since 2002, the same year Alvaro Uribe was elected president.
Uribe waged all out war on leftist rebels with U.S. aid and made a deal with paramilitary leaders, promising reduced jail sentences in return for their laying down arms.
Dozens of lawmakers and regional politicians who backed Uribe were later convicted of criminal conspiracy, or worse, for allying themselves with the militias.
As defense minister from 2006-2009, Santos was tough on rebels and thus popular in provincial Colombia.
But with the Victims Law, he's squaring off against shadowy provincial powerbrokers.
He blames the killings of activists on "a few who want to keep their ill-gotten land."
"We're not going to let this law fail," the president told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday.
Santos told the AP he couldn't estimate how much money his government will be able to dedicate to implementing it.
He is seeking help from the U.S. and European Union but, given tough fiscal times, knows he can't expect much.
Asked how he plans to protect activists, Santos said the government is "creating elite groups that will be dedicated to this process."
From its start, the reparation campaign has been bloodstained.
After the first ceremonial land handover on Sept. 21, one recipient was bludgeoned to death as he walked home in the turbulent Uraba banana growing region on the Caribbean coast.
The killers left four bullets beside Hernando Perez's body as a warning to his comrades.
The latest killing occurred in San Onofre, a northern town that straddles the Caribbean and the Montes de Maria mountains.
On June 30, a gunman shot and killed a town councilman who had worked closely with peasants fighting to regain usurped land.
Other activists are worried they could be next.
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