A/HRC/11/11 page 9 27. In Bolivia, as in other countries, there have been incidents of lynching and of people taking the law into their own hands. Some social sectors and communications media have exploited these incidents in an attempt to defame indigenous justice and to deprive it of full recognition; in reality, however, one of the chief causes of these incidents appears to be the inability of the judiciary and the Public Prosecutor’s Office to ensure respect for the rule of law in many parts of the national territory. C. Reconstitution of indigenous territories 28. The structure of land ownership in Bolivia is highly inequitable: 10 per cent of the land is owned by 90 per cent of family farmers, most of them indigenous, while 90 per cent of the land is in the hands of large landowners. The 1953 agrarian reform distributed land titles to many small indigenous property owners and culminated in the development of the hacienda system in the altiplano. However, it also had the detrimental effect of creating the small holdings (minifundios) and so-called “furrow holdings” (surcofundios) in that region when properties that were tiny to begin with were fragmented still further through inheritance. Meanwhile, in the lowlands, property was distributed at the discretion of successive de facto governments, creating a new form of large-scale landholding (latifundio) in favour of the farming and forestry industries and at the expense of traditional indigenous territories. 29. The Act concerning the National Service for Agrarian Reform (No. 175), which was adopted in 1996, launched a process of agricultural land ownership regularization under the authority of the National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA). Among the main innovations of the Act is the creation of a class of property belonging collectively to an indigenous people and referred to as “tierras comunitarias de Origen” (TCO) (original community lands). The Act recognized indigenous peoples’ right to the sustainable use and development of the renewable natural resources of these lands, the right to the self-management of the lands, in conformity with indigenous customary law, and the principles of the inalienability and immunity from seizure of the lands. However, secondary regulation has done much to undermine the principles of the Act, with the regularization process having degenerated into an opportunity to obtain title to lands questionably acquired or occupied, thereby exacerbating the situation of legal uncertainty. 30. In November 2006, Congress adopted the Community-Based Agrarian Reform Renewal Act (No. 3545), which made substantive changes to the previous agrarian system. The Act provides for the regrouping of small agricultural holdings and for the distribution of lands to indigenous peoples who do not have sufficient land or who need to complement their holding with more land. In order to accomplish this, the Act prescribes, as cause for reversion, the failure of a property to fulfil its economic and social function and stipulates that all land expropriated in the public interest is to be distributed “exclusively to indigenous and/or native peoples” who do not possess sufficient land (art. 43). The new indigenous land titling policy has borne fruit. According to INRA data, since the current Administration came to power, some 3,889,291 hectares have been titled, as against the 5,516,210 hectares titled during the period from 1996 to 2006. 31. Despite all the efforts made, however, major delays continue to occur in the processing of many pending TCO titling claims, owing in part to budgetary constraints. In the altiplano and the valleys of the Andean region, where indigenous smallholdings predominate (between 1 and 1.5 hectares per family), indigenous organizations complain that the regularization process