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Land Reform in Venezuela

Reed Lindsay
September 21, 2003

http://www.thestar.com/

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"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.

`There are signs distribution of land in Venezuela is finally being democratized'

Marino Alvarado, land-reform analyst

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."