Decreto Legislativo 803 created COFOPRI as a single national agency empowered to survey, adjudicate and register property in informal settlements, bypassing the slow municipal and notarial route. Peru's barriadas had been growing by organised invasion since the 1950s, with occupancy recognised piecemeal and titles rarely reaching the public register. Backed by the World Bank and informed by Hernando de Soto's argument about dead capital, COFOPRI issued well over a million titles in Lima and other cities within a decade. Titles were recorded in a simplified urban property register designed to make each plot mortgageable and tradeable.
COFOPRI was the largest and most-studied test of the proposition that titling informal settlements converts occupancy into capital, and it was copied across Latin America, Africa and Asia. Evaluations found real gains in tenure security, housing investment and household labour supply but very little of the promised mortgage lending, which shifted the international debate from title deeds towards tenure security, services and incremental upgrading.
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