Peasant family celebrates landownership as Ven. govt. is urged to "follow through"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wolati0921,0,6597522.
story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines

Clash Over Venezuela Land Law
By Reed Lindsay
Special Correspondent

September 20, 2003, 11:42 PM EDT

Barinas, Venezuela -- Richard Padrón was born under democracy and into
modern-day vassalage.

"My dad worked on a cattle ranch," said Padrón, 25, in mud-coated
rubber boots and with a butcher's knife in a sheath at his side. "The
owner let him use five acres 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."

Padrón still lives in poverty; he and his wife and two children
survive largely off corn and sleep in hammocks with several other
families in a dilapidated, abandoned cement-block farmhouse.

But he is in high spirits. For the first time, Padrón says, the land
he is living and working on is his own.

In February, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez granted Padrón's family,
and 300 others, the right to farm more than 7,500 acres of land in the
heart of this verdant state southwest of Caracas. There are strings
attached, though, including the fact that Padrón can't ever sell the
property.

"I was going to be a worker my whole life," said Padrón. "Without
land, we had no future."

In this oil-rich and largely urban nation, gaping inequalities in land
ownership have long been overlooked by the ruling elite. According to
the country's National Land Institute, which oversees land
distribution, 60 percent of the arable property belongs to 2 percent
of its landowners, while hundreds of thousands of farmers scrape by on
small subsistence plots.

Now, in a bid to reduce poverty and bolster agricultural production,
Chávez is implementing land reforms that have drawn fierce resistance
from landowners, business groups and opposition politicians.

By the end of this year, Chávez says, the government will have
distributed 5 million acres 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," said Peter Rosset, co-director of the
Institute for Food and Development Policy, a San Francisco-based think
tank. "In the U.S., Chávez is often painted as a villain or crazy, but
this land reform, small and incipient as it is, shows that he is much
more on the side of the poor than other presidents in the region."

The issue has been an explosive one, though. Since Chávez passed the
"land law" in November 2001, the opposition has tried to oust him
through a short-lived coup, a two-month strike and calls for a recall
election.

He has held on, though, and in rural states like Barinas, known for
lush estates and chronic poverty, the government has marched apace
with its reforms, emboldening a farmers movement that has clashed with
wealthy cattle ranchers who claim the land.

The cattle ranchers accuse the government of illegally expropriating
privately owned estates in full production without compensating their
owners.

"They're going after the best ranches, not idle land," said Rogelio
Peña, the former mayor of Barinas city, who has sued the government
for forcing him off his $1.5-million cattle ranch. "Just like Fidel
Castro in Cuba, the government wants to take control of the productive
sector."

In this case, officials dispute whether the land was actually Peña's,
saying he had a false title to it.

Ranchers also accuse officials and pro-Chávez politicians of
encouraging farmers to occupy private ranches. Giovanni Scelza,
president of the Barinas Ranchers Association, says there have been 95
illegal occupations in the state since December, and authorities have
responded to only one eviction request.

Officials at the land institute say they have openly condemned illegal
occupations, attributing them to campesinos, or farmers, acting
independently.

Meanwhile, both campesinos and ranchers are armed, and threats abound.
"If they take away my ranch, I'll kill them all. . ." said Felipe
Corelli, 66, who says squatters stole his bulls.

But beyond the controversy surrounding squatters and expropriations
lies an 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 cooperatives and
collective farms, where the state is to provide housing, health care
and education.

Critics say the law violates the right to private property and is a
throwback to Communist economies. Government officials, though, say
forming peasant cooperatives -- rather than giving individual farmers
their own property -- is the only way the farmers can compete with
large-scale agribusiness.

Chávez defends the law in terms of social justice but also by
appealing to the need for "food security." In a presidential address
recently, he said, "We have excellent conditions... so how is it that
we're importing black beans?"

At a 3,500-acre collective farm called Jacoa, campesino Amable Soto
praises the reform efforts, saying, "Chávez has given us what no
government has." Others are more guarded, as they sleep in leaky
shelters with palm-frond roofs and say they are waiting for Chávez to
build housing and improve the rutted dirt road, which is impassable
when it rains.

"There are signs that the distribution of land in Venezuela is finally
being democratized," said Marino Alvarado, who is writing a report on
the land law's implementation for Provea, a Caracas-based rights
group. "But we have yet to see if the government will continue to
follow through . . ."
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.




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