Free Republic

In a region beset by runaway food costs, the socialist government of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela and its leftist allies appear to have found fertile ground to plant the seeds of revolutionary discourse. At an emergency food-security summit held Wednesday in Managua, Nicaragua, 14 Latin American and Caribbean nations convened under the umbrella of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), the leftist trade bloc founded in 2004 by Cuba and Venezuela as an alternative to United States free-trade agreements. The summit was supposed to focus on how the countries can prevent food shortages and unrest as the global food crisis...

President Hugo Chavez Frias has called on Chinese leaders to share Venezuela's "resurrection after decades of financial crisis." Speaking at a special economic seminar in Beijing, Chavez Frias said his country is "finally lifting itself up ... just as China, 50 years ago, lifted itself up by the hand of Mao Tse-Tung, the great navigator!" Earlier, Chavez Frias had paid homage at Mao Tse- Tung's tomb, writing "To the great strategist, to the great soldier, to the great statesman and to the great revolutionary" in the mausoleum's special guest book for visiting dignitaries. The Venezuelan President chided the United States...

SAN CARLOS, Venezuela -- State governors and the rural poor are moving quickly to implement President Hugo Chavez's vision of a social revolution, carving up and redistributing large landholdings and threatening to take over the premises of internationally owned companies. There has been none of the violence and mayhem that accompanied land seizures in Zimbabwe in recent years, but economists and angry land owners fear that -- as in Zimbabwe -- the takeovers will destroy a productive agriculture sector and undermine the economy. In the cowboy country state of Cojedes, however, triumphant farmworkers are hailing Mr. Chavez as a hero...

Financial analysts are smiling on South Africa. In January Moody’s upgraded the country’s sovereign risk rating from Baa2 to Baa1 on the strength of the country’s steady economic expansion and continued growth in consumer demand. Capital inflows are predicted to remain strong in 2005, largely because South Africa’s growth since 2000 has exceeded 3 per cent a year – a considerable improvement over the stagnation of the late 1990s. But a significant downside political risk looms as recent developments in land reform programmes in neighbouring Zimbabwe and Namibia bode ill for what may soon become a bitterly divisive 2008 South...

Venezuelan authorities have identified more than 500 farms, including 56 large estates, as idle as it continues with its controversial land reform policy. Under a 2001 land law, the government can tax or seize unused farm sites. A further 40,000 farms are yet to be inspected, the state's National Land Institute has told Associated Press. Vice president Jose Vicente Rangel has said farmers and ranchers with their titles in order and their lands productive have "nothing to fear." Critics of the land reform policy claim president Hugo Chavez is trying to enforce a communist-style economic programme that ignores property rights...

JOHANNESBURG - Yelling "land for the poor", tens of thousands of protesters took to South Africa's streets on Saturday to demand a quicker handover of white-owned farms to landless blacks, organisers said. Some 10,000 people marched on the offices of the country's biggest farming union in Pretoria calling for better rights for farm workers and faster land reform -- by force if necessary -- 10 years after the collapse of apartheid. Landless blacks and farm workers also took their grievances to other farming unions they say represent white interests in nine marches across the country, organised by the South African...

Cape Town - The African National Congress has publicly welcomed the SA Communist Party's Red October campaign in support of accelerated land and agrarian reform. In a statement on Tuesday, national spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama said: "The ANC supports the broad objectives of the campaign and commends the SACP for its efforts to mobilise South Africans, particularly workers and the poor, in pursuit of this critical national goal. "While much progress has been made in the last 10 years in redressing the apartheid legacy of land dispossession and rural underdevelopment, the challenge of land reform remains significant and pressing. "The ANC...

WHITE farmers in Namibia are increasingly divided over how to respond to the government's plans to expropriate some of their land, with a splinter group urging members to fight to stop the process. A group of 30 farmers met at the eastern town of Gobabis this week under the banner of the Namibia Farmers Support Initiative and agreed to pool resources to prevent the state from dealing with individuals. They expressed fear that if they ignored the plight of individuals, the Namibian government would deal with all of them singly, as had happened in Zimbabwe. While the main farmers' body...

PRESIDENT Robert Mugabe's government announced plans today to nationalise all Zimbabwean farmland after forcing more than 5000 white farmers off their properties in an often-violent redistribution program. Title deeds to all productive land will be cancelled and replaced with 99-year state-issued leases, the state-run Herald newspaper reported. "In the end all land shall be state land and there shall be no such thing as private land," Land Reform Minister John Nkomo was quoted as saying. Since 2000, the government has been seizing white-owned commercial farms for redistribution to black Zimbabweans. The controversial program, combined with erratic rains, has crippled the...

<p>PARANAPOEMA, Brazil — Members of Brazil's most controversial political movement last month occupied 135 private farms — their largest action since 1998. Their leaders promise more land grabs unless the government transfers expropriated farmland to 400,000 poor families by 2006.</p>

<p>MANGARATIBA, Brazil (AP) -- Leaders of Brazil's landless movement are vowing not to give up any of the hundreds of farms seized by thousands of peasants this year.</p> <p>They also will keep pressing for sweeping reform that, if carried out, would radically change the land ownership map in Latin America's biggest country.</p>

There has been a sharp increase in the number of illegal farm seizures by landless peasants in Brazil. Across the country, more than 50 properties have been invaded since mid-March by rural people who want the government to speed up land reform. The governing Workers Party has traditionally been seen as an ally of the agrarian Movement, or MST. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has vowed to help the landless, now finds himself in an awkward position. He has announced plans to resettle more than 100,000 landless families this year - but the MST says the pace...

Starving North Koreans are foraging for wild grasses to augment scant spring food supplies, a World Food Programme official said today. Gerald Bourke, a spokesman for the UN agency in Beijing, said there was insufficient food coming in for WFP to feed hungry North Koreans. But he said the situation was a bit less dire than in February, when cereals were cut off from all but 85,000 of the four million women, children and elderly people who are the WFP’s “core beneficiaries.” “It’s the middle of what we call the lean season between harvests,” Bourke said. He described a period...

Namibia calls in Zim land pros 02/04/2004 14:06 - (SA) Harare - Namibia has invited six Zimbabwean land experts to evaluate expropriated land and assist in Windhoek's farmland reform programme, its envoy to Harare was quoted as saying Friday. "We have started implementing our land reform and in that regard we have a lot to learn from the Zimbabwean experience," Ndali-Che Kemati, Namibia's ambassador to Zimbabwe told the state-owned Herald. The six experts are due to leave for Namibia on Sunday, the paper said. Namibia's Lands, Resettlement and Rehabilitation Minister Hifikepunye Pohamba announced last month that officials had started identifying...

It's a slogan that the Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) called hate speech last year and it has resurfaced in the flurry of party propaganda in the run-up to the elections. Earlier this year, the Freedom Front Plus lodged a complaint against Mangaliso Kubheka, national organiser of the Landless People's Movement, claiming he had said "kill the farmer, kill the boer" during a speech. The SAHRC investigated the complaint and ruled that the LPM apologise publicly via the newspaper Rapport, which had reported on the offending speech. They have until March 23 to respond. However, a defiant Mangaliso Kubheka told Saturday...

The Namibian government announced on Wednesday that it will expropriate a select number of white-owned farms to accelerate its efforts at redistributing property to landless blacks. "The land possession pattern in our country has been designed by colonialism to benefit a small group of minority settlers, at the expense of the majority," Prime Minister Theo-Ben Gurirab said in an address to the nation aired on state television. "Our young nation still struggles to bring about balance and undo the effects of the unjust land redistribution." Most of the wealth in this southern African country remains in the hands of whites...

For nearly five decades the left has been trying to impose a socialist and confiscatory land reform on Brazil. From the beginning, the so-called Catholic left, and particularly the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB), has been the leading proponents and the most important driving force of that policy. With strong links to this Catholic left, the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made land reform one of its main goals. For this purpose it designated Miguel Rossetto from the Workers Party's most radical wing as the Minister of Land Reform. The party also gave the government posts...

Private property rights are under siege in Brazil. Since leftist President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva took office in January, farmland has been invaded by radical Marxist movements almost every 24 hours. Lula has turned a blind eye to farm invasions, Robert Mugabe style. Mugabe, a notorious African strongman who encouraged land invasions in Zimbabwe while declaring the “economy is the land” made good on his promise to redistribute his country’s farms. As a result, Zimbabwe’s economy, once among Africa’s strongest, is in freefall. Could this really happen in a democracy like Brazil? Occupations have spread to Brazil’s cities. On...

Over the last few weeks, Brazil suffered two institutional crises with far reaching consequences. They were sparked by statements and attitudes of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose image was inevitably damaged. Political analysts point out Lula’s growing messianic and populist tone. He has now shed his moderate image adopted during his election campaign and first few months in power. They also note a growing climate of intolerance and confrontation in Brazil. The first crisis was unleashed by a speech in which Lula confronted both the Judiciary Branch and Congress, breaking the most basic rules of any democratic state....

British Labor Party foreign affairs guru Jack Straw recently flew to South Africa. There he handed over 30 million pounds to the ANC for “land reform and justice.” This was reported as a one line item in the prestigious South African Mail & Guardian newspaper. The question begs: Why should the hardworking, decent British taxpayer have to finance the on-going genocide of the South African farmer? Since the ANC took power in 1994, more than 1450 farmers have been murdered, with another 8000 attacks. This does not include maimings. The South African farmer is the highest at-risk murder group on...