Chavez Led Land Reform Enrages Large Landowners
September 25, 2003
In this oil-rich and largely urban nation, the ruling elite has long overlooked gaping inequalities in land ownership. In an attempt to rectify this inequity, President Chavez says, the government will distribute 2 million hectares of idle, state-owned land to as many as 100,000 families by the end of this year.
| Reed Lindsay |
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| The Toronto Star |
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The Toronto Star
Sep. 21, 2003.
Land reform in Venezuela:
Ambitious Chavez program enrages big landowners Peasants replace huge
estates with collective farms
BY REED LINDSAY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
BARINAS, Venezuela -- Richard Padron was born under democracy and into
modern-day vassalage. "My dad worked on a cattle ranch," says the sinewy Padron, 25, wearing mud-coated rubber boots and a butcher's knife held in a leather sheath at his side. "The owner let him use two hectares to grow corn and a few other crops to eat. The wages were enough for food, but not much else. I left school and began working with him when I was 14." Padron still lives in poverty; he and his wife and two children survive largely on corn and sleep in hammocks with several other families in an abandoned cement-block farmhouse.
But he is in high spirits. For the first time in his life, Padron says, the
land where he is living and working is his own. In February, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez granted the Padron family, along with 300 others, the right to farm more than 3,000 hectares of land in the heart of verdant Barinas state, southwest of Caracas.
"I was going to be a worker my whole life," says Padron, as he flips corn
pancakes called cachapas with a machete over a jerry-rigged stove made from
an overturned empty oil drum.
"There was no way of rising from below. Without land, we had no future."
In this oil-rich and largely urban nation, the ruling elite has long
overlooked gaping inequalities in land ownership. According to the National
Land Institute (INTI), 60 per cent of the nation's arable land belongs to 2
per cent of its landowners, while hundreds of thousands of farmers remain
landless or scrape by on small subsistence plots. Now, in a bid to reduce poverty and bolster agricultural production, Venezuela's embattled president is implementing a controversial land-reform program that has drawn fierce resistance from landowners, business groups and opposition politicians.
By the end of this year, Chavez says, the government will have distributed 2
million hectares of idle, state-owned land to as many as 100,000 families.
"Venezuela right now has the only serious government-administered land
reform in Latin America," says Peter Rosset, co-director of the Institute
for Food and Development Policy, a San Francisco think-tank. "In the U.S., Chavez is painted as a villain or crazy, but this land reform, small and incipient as it is, shows he is much more on the side of the poor
than other presidents in the region."
Historically, land reform has been an explosive issue throughout Latin
America. Approval of the "land law," which Chavez decreed along with 48 other
measures under special powers to avoid a debate in congress, helped unify a
disjointed opposition and quickly triggered the first national work stoppage
in December, 2001. Since the law was passed, the opposition has engaged in an all-out drive to
oust Chavez.
It has included a coup in April, 2002, a two-month work stoppage last
December and January, and most recently, a campaign to vote the president
out in a recall election.
Chavez has held on, however, and in rural states like Barinas, known for its
extensive lush estates and chronic poverty, the government has marched apace
with its agrarian reform program, propelling an emboldened movement of
peasants, or campesinos, that has clashed with wealthy cattle ranchers who
lay claim to the land.
The cattle ranchers accuse the government of illegally expropriating
privately owned estates in full production without compensating their
owners, instead of targeting state-owned land.
"They're going after the best ranches, not idle land," says Rogelio Pena,
former mayor of Barinas city. "Just like Fidel Castro in Cuba, the
government wants to take control of the productive sector."
Pena says he was running a $2 million ranch with 1,700 Brahman cattle when
soldiers forced him off the land in February. Dozens of campesinos, including the Padron family, moved in and began farming with authorization from the INTI, which is in charge of distributing land under the new law.
According to Leonardo Patino, the INTI legal counsel in Barinas, the land
was given to the campesinos because it was considered both public and idle.
Pena's title to the land was a forgery, he says, and Pena brought in cattle
only recently in order to give the appearance that the ranch was productive.
A large, iron-barred corral stands at the entrance of the ranch, and
hundreds of the hump-backed cattle are still grazing nearby, watched over by
a few caretakers who have been allowed to stay. Pena has sued the
government.
Ranchers also accuse government officials and pro-Chavez politicians of
encouraging campesinos to occupy private ranches without official sanction.
Giovanni Scelza, president of the Barinas Ranchers' Association, says there
have been 95 illegal occupations since December and authorities have
responded to only one request for eviction.
"The government is breaking its own law," says Juan Pedro Manrique, a
Barinas lawyer who represents several ranchers. "Anyone has the right to invade: This is the message that Chavez has given people. The government knows, if they back the invasions, they'll get votes." Manrique also accuses the INTI of granting land to political adherents and military officials in exchange for support.
INTI officials deny these charges, saying they have openly condemned illegal
occupations, attributing them to groups of campesinos acting independently.
For their part, campesino leaders say dozens of peasants have been murdered
by hired assassins, called sicarios, whom they link to the ranchers. The
ranchers say these numbers are exaggerated.
Both campesinos and ranchers are armed and threats of violence abound.
"If they take away my ranch, I'll kill them all, one by one," says Felipe
Corelli, 66, a burly rancher who claims to have lost eight bulls to
campesinos squatting on his property. "Believe me, there are ways of doing
it."
Increasingly combative peasants are nonetheless pushing the government to
move even faster. Here in Barinas early this month, impatient farmers awaiting land grants temporarily seized INTI offices.
According to Marino Alvarado, who is writing a report on the land-reform
situation for a Caracas-based human-rights group, the government might be
moving too slowly. "The illegal invasions are the exception, not the rule," says Alvarado. "The one criticism that could be made is that the government is not touching the big latifundios."
For now, the INTI is only distributing state-owned land, with no immediate
plans to expropriate private latifundios — huge estates that are typically
holdovers from the colonial era.
Alvarado says the land law itself is relatively bland, as it limits the
definition of latifundio to only large estates that are idle.
Even then, the owner has a two-year grace period to initiate production and
thus avoid expropriation.
But beyond the controversy surrounding the illegal squats and expropriations
lies a deeper, ideological dispute about agricultural production.
Under the law, the distributed land remains in the hands of the state, and
the government must encourage the formation of peasant co-operatives and
collective farms, where the state is to provide housing, health care and
education. The law also gives the government power to dictate how private
land can be used.
Critics argue the law violates the right to private property and is a
throwback to state-planned communist economies.
"The model of the collective farm doesn't respond to our reality," says
Roque Carmona, founder of Campesino Alliance, a non-profit organization that
assists small-scale farmers. "It looks good on paper, nothing more."
Government officials maintain that the ban on creating new private property
is an attempt to avoid the failures of past land reforms in Venezuela and
elsewhere in the region, in which small-scale farmers were eventually forced
to sell their plots to large landowners because of a lack of credit and
government support.
They also argue that forming peasant co-operatives is the only way
campesinos can compete with large-scale agribusiness. For his part, Chavez has defended the law not only in terms of social justice but also by appealing to the need for "food security" mandated by the constitution, which was passed during his first year as president in 1999.
"We have excellent conditions to supply ourselves with the good part of what
we consume, so how is it that we're importing black beans?" Chavez said in a
recent presidential address, referring to a staple of the Venezuelan diet.
"Venezuela will keep being an oil country for a long time, but not just oil.
We must go back to being an agro-producer."
Amable Soto, 31, seems preoccupied with a more immediate question: What
price will his co-operative get for this year's red pepper harvest.
The mud-encrusted campesino says he dreamed of owning a piece of land since
he began working as a ranch hand at age 11, but he was afraid to join others
in land occupations, which frequently were met by repression by landowners
or police.
Now, he is overseeing production on a 1,400-hectare collective farm, called
Jacoa, where 33 campesino families have been given three tractors and
$587,000 in loans to buy seeds and fertilizers. The farmers are about to pick their first harvest of red peppers and corn, with plans to plant sorghum, watermelon, cantaloupe and passion fruit.
"Chavez has given us what no government has," Soto says.
Other campesinos at Jacoa are more guarded in their praise.
Chavez visited the farm in February to launch his land-reform program, but
the families are still sleeping in leaky shelters with palm-frond roofs and
surviving on the corn they grow.
They say they are waiting for Chavez to keep his promise to build housing.
"There are signs that the distribution of land in Venezuela is finally being
democratized," says Alvarado.
"But we have yet to see if the government will continue to follow through
with credits, tractors and the technical support necessary to make this land
reform work."
Reed Lindsay is a freelance reporter based in South America.
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