Land War Stirs in Venezuela's Farming Heartland

yahoo.com news ^ | June 27, 2003 | Patrick Markey

[Cincinatus' Wife]

HATO VIEJO, Venezuela (Reuters) - A battle is stirring in Venezuela's farming heartland pitting rural laborers clamoring to work the soil against cattle ranchers who dismiss them as squatters backed by a government with no respect for private property.

At Hato Viejo, a remote cattle farm in Venezuela's sweltering savannah in Barinas state, a band of peasants armed with rifles and machetes greeted recent visitors first with threats and then with vows to fight for a plot of land.

"We just want to work. If this is private property, they have to prove it," said Arturo Munzon, a leader of the peasant cooperative that has set up camp at Hato Viejo. "We'll defend this land with our lives."

Land redistribution has been a key promise of President Hugo Chavez, a populist ex-army officer elected in 1998 on pledges to ease poverty in a nation whose oil wealth has been left beyond the grasp of the impoverished majority.

Since February the government has stepped up land redistribution, handing out hundreds of deeds to parcels of land based on a 2001 agrarian reform law.

But farmers say the government is promoting illegal invasions of land in use, disrupting production and ignoring their pleas to resolve disputes through courts.

Cattle farms in rural states such as Barinas are speckled with makeshift camps and palm-leaf shacks of peasants who live in chronic poverty sustained by the hope the government will grant them plots enabling them to feed their families.

More than 15 peasants have been killed in clashes with ranchers since February, the government says. Both sides trade accusations of death threats and intimidation. The National Guard has been deployed -- illegally say land owners -- at least three farms in Barinas.

"We have exhausted every legal avenue. Practically, they are taking over the farms. This is like Zimbabwe," said Manuel Cipriano, head of Barinas ranchers association, referring to the African country's controversial seizure of white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks. "We're going to have to get these invaders out ourselves and if they don't leave, we could see clashes."

INVADERS OR AGRARIAN REVOLUTIONARIES?

Venezuela has been rocked for more than a year by bitter conflict over Chavez's self-styled revolution which cobbles together socialist ideas with the nationalism of 19th century South American liberation hero Simon Bolivar.

His foes say Chavez is a demagogue edging Venezuela toward Cuba-style communism under the guise of social reform. More than 50 people have been killed in political clashes since April 2002 when the president survived a brief coup.

Under an agrarian reform program, the government plans to give out 3.7 million acres. The National Land Institute, run by the president's brother Adan Chavez, has already handed out 1.8 million acres and 20,000 titles granting peasants land the institute rules is idle and belongs to the state.

Government officials deny they sanction invasions and only authorize land to those who have received deeds. But they acknowledge rural workers sometimes go beyond the law.

"We want to solve the problems of the peasant movement but we have to so within the law," said the land institute's legal adviser Rodolfo Vilchez. "We're not going to get to the absurd point of giving titles for land that is private property."

But as with many subjects in polarized Venezuela, the law appears vulnerable to political interpretation .

POLITICAL TIDE

In Barinas in the rolling Los Llanos plains, ranchers say they are fighting against the political tide. The president was born there and his father is state governor.

They say at least 94 farms have been invaded by squatters, some with quasi-legal documents from the government; others with no paperwork. At three farms visited by Reuters, rural workers on the land had no deeds from the state or said they were waiting for one.

At Hato Viejo, farm administrators say peasants have forced them to abandon some pasture land and have starved cattle to death. But peasant cooperative leaders deny they are to blame and counter they have been threatened.

At the nearby La Batalla farm, where employees busily process milk into cheese, three men have taken over a small plot in a clutch of trees. Farmers say appeals to regional authorities that the land is in use have gone unheeded.

For some peasants, though, necessity takes precedence over law. A few yards from a desolate roadway that weaves through Barinas, Jose de la Rosa Lugo has taken over a plot of land near his shack to sow maize.

The leather-skinned 70-year-old appears to have little time for legal squabbles or politics forged in the distant capital.

"These people have so much land and they don't want to let people work," he said. "Everyone has to have a piece."

[Cincinatus' Wife]

U.S., Europe work on Latin crises - First on Otto Reich’s agenda – Venezuela ***Last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio spent ''quite a long time'' discussing Latin America and possible areas of U.S.-European cooperation, Palacio told me in a telephone interview from Washington.

And the Bush administration is sending its special ambassador to Latin America, Otto J. Reich, to Spain, Italy and France next week to discuss the region's hottest crises, as well as lingering financial troubles in Brazil and Argentina, White House officials and Palacio told me.

Among the people who have been asked to meet with Reich is French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, the diplomat whose public criticism of the Iraq war so exasperated the White House. Others will be Spanish Ibero-American Cooperation Minister Miguel Angel Cortes and Italian and Vatican officials.

The most pressing issue on Reich's agenda will be Venezuela, U.S. officials say.

The administration fears that Venezuela's populist leftist President Hugo Chávez will renege on an internationally brokered agreement to convene a national referendum on the duration of his term, and that he will provoke a violent clash with the opposition in order to suspend constitutional guarantees and radicalize his ``Bolivarian revolution.''

''He is trying to create an incident where he can call out the military and say that democracy has been threatened,'' a U.S. official says. ***

Hugo Chavez

Fidel Castro

[livius]

Chavez has apparently decided to use the Zimbabwe technique.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

And Castro's communism is their model.

[greasepaint]

VIVA the early squatters.(the landowners)
MORTE the latter squatters.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Let's take it to court.

[Ff--150]

fyi

[Free the USA]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[FITZ]

They say at least 94 farms have been invaded by squatters, some with quasi-legal documents from the government; others with no paperwork.

There seems to be a real problem in most hispanic countries about land ownership and land use. They've got to find a way to allow the peasants to earn enough money to buy land, they've got to find a way to bring in middle class capitalism. When you have very few landowners and many landless peasants, you can't have stability. It's terrible what is happening in these countries ---but there is no innocent side.

[AAABEST]

I won't put my arm around you, only real communists like Dan Rather do that.