Piscícola Botero occupied a property, apparently private, for his commercial usufruct. The Neiva Country Club was also linked to the process.
Diario del Huila, Investigation
CARLOS ANDRÉS PÉREZ TRUJILLO
The municipality of Hobo and the Botero fish farm were about to pay a millionaire sum for an easement – a small stretch of road – that apparently belonged to Mr. Jairo Manrique Paredes.
The litigation began on November 13, 2013 when Manrique Paredes filed a lawsuit against the fish farm and this municipality in the center of Huila. The plaintiff farmer sought to have them declared financially responsible for the damages caused by the permanent occupation of a private road that they had built – according to his version – on land he owned.
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The sum he sought to be paid was $3,152,355,000, in addition to the judicial recognition of this property.
The plaintiff considers that the municipality of Hobo and the company CI Piscícola Botero SA were “patrimonially responsible for the damages caused by the permanent occupation of the road it built.” According to his story, in the body of evidence, there was evidence ““ because there was no access road to the reservoir, different from the
internal private road built on the ‘Paraguay’ property… at his expense years ago, unilaterally, by de facto, without prior consultation, authorization or negotiation, the municipal mayor of Hobo, in conciliation with the company CI Piscícola Botero SA, They decided to intervene with the municipality’s machinery to use it as a transit route to the Betania Dam, without taking into account that[ra] private road […] The disturbances that were illegally operated on its internal highway, for the benefit of individuals and fishing companies, must be compensated for the reasons, damages and losses stated.”
Manrique Paredes’ claim was based on the fact that on July 9, 1998, he built a private road that crossed his property.
The judicial process
On April 27, 2016, the Administrative Court of Huila held the initial hearing in which it carried out the process, resolved the previous exceptions, ordered evidence and established the object of the litigation.
Four years later, on March 12, 2020, the Administrative Court of Huila declared proven the exception of lack of standing in the active case proposed by the municipality of Hobo, considering that “the evidence presented does not demonstrate the ownership of the right of possession that Mr. Jairo Manrique Paredes alleges over the ‘Paraguay’ property (servant property), since they are unable to prove the animus or the corpus, necessary requirements to prove possession, and in short to prove its active legitimation.”
La Piscícola Botero SA maintained that the plaintiff was not entitled to file the lawsuit, since as stated in public deed No. 3642 of December 15, 1995, the property on which the road was built was owned by the Club Campestre Corporation of Neiva.
For its part, when the Club Campestre de Neiva Corporation was requested, also linked to the process, for being the owner of the servient property, “it indicated that in 2006 it granted permission to the company CI Piscícola Botero SA to use the transit easement established in public deed No. 3642 of December 15, 1995.”
Discontent over servitude
Given the refusal that Jairo Manrique Paredes received, he proposed the appeal on November 13, 2020, which was granted on March 2, 2021, and admitted on May 24 of that same year.
Basically what he alleged at the time was that he was entitled to act since the means of conviction in the file allowed him to prove that it was he who built the private road that crossed his property and that of the servant farm, owned by the Club Campestre Corporation. From neiva.
However, in the file it was also established that by public deed No. 163 of June 12, 1996, Jairo Manrique Paredes and Maribel Murcia Rodríguez purchased the rural property identified with real estate license plate 200-54442 from the Betania SA Hydroelectric Power Plant, located in the municipality of Hobo (Huila), adjacent to the property owned by the Club Campestre de Neiva Corporation and the Betania Dam. Additionally, in the same deed it was stated that the “property being sold will be subject to the transit easement for all its access roads to the reservoir and its bank, in favor of the selling entity or the official or private entity that makes its times”, according to an authentic copy of said deed.
For Manrique Paredes it is clear that he promptly informed the Hobo mayor’s office of the occupation of machinery on the property. As he also confirmed that on July 21, 2010, he informed the Agrarian, Judicial and Environmental Attorney of Huila about the arbitrary occupation of the road he owned by the Hobo Mayor’s Office and third parties, who were illegally using it to travel to the Betania Dam, according to an authentic copy of said memorial.
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What the Council of State said
The appeal of this process was resolved by the Council of State. At the outset, what he stated was that the opportunity to file the action for direct reparation had expired, that is, the time to which he had the right to exercise the judicial authority: “according to the above, it is noted that in the case in question the right to take action was not exercised in time, taking into account that the term to file the claim in a timely manner expired on July 23, 2012 and that the document of claim was only presented until November 13, 2013, that is, when The two (2) years granted by the procedural law to exercise the right of action in a timely manner had already elapsed.”
In other words, the owner Manrique went for the wool and came out shorn, because in addition to losing the process and being shown that he was not the owner of the easement, he was sentenced to pay the costs of the process “which will be liquidated in a concentrated manner by the Court… ”.
An outstanding fish farm
The media in the region have witnessed the work carried out by the Botero family fish farm.
In the department of Huila, this company was born that has managed to stand out in the aquaculture industry internationally. Botero, founded by Efraín Botero Rendón in 1990, began its operations with the production of tilapia in floating cages in the Betania dam. Although it was in 2008 when the constitution of Piscícola Botero was formalized, it was not until 2011 that it was registered as an International Trading Company, thanks to the resolution of Dian number 005271.
Ten years later it was in the news in several national media, one of them was in the renowned economic dissemination medium La República, where it appeared in the ranking of the 30 most influential companies in the country in 2022. Thus, it was nominated in fifth place.
Efraín’s work ended up consolidating into what is known today as “Piscícola Botero.” Currently, the fish farm has already managed to establish itself in the US market thanks to the production of tilapia. In 2022 alone, the company exported a total of 2,794 tons of fillets and whole tilapia, showing the constant growth of its presence in the international market.
