Hugo Chavez has taken over the educational curriculum, the congress,
the judiciary and now the private land. He calls it a peaceful revolution.
I don't think the poor of Venezuela will benefit from this, do you?
Pretty unlikely. OTOH, he did gain power (more or less) democratically and he claims to want to help poor people, so how can he possibly be bad for the country? < / > Sarcasm
If that doesn't sound frighteningly familiar to a modus operandi used by a *certain* political party used right here throughout the 90s, I don't know what does.
...people of the USA have more to worry about at the moment than they may think, too.
It depends if this reform creates the collective farms or individual/private farms. Actually if later style land reform were done in Russia at the beginning of the XX century the Communism would not win there.
Bolsheviks did such reform after taking power, but unfortunately they soon broke their promises and took the land from peasants by forcing them into COLLECTIVE farms. The harm was not caused by the land distribution among private farmers, but by the state ownership of the land.
Land reform in Poland after WWII helped Polish peasants/farmers to get out of poverty because the planned collectivisation failed.
The KEY difference between United States and Latin America is that the land in Latin America was given to the few, creating rich oligarchy and landless poor. In USA the land was distributed among general population laying the fundation for the middle class and independent citizenry.