Clash of Hope and Fear as Venezuela Seizes Land

By SIMON ROMERO
The New York Times
May 17, 2007

URACHICHE, Venezuela — The squatters arrive before dawn with machetes and rifles, surround the well-ordered rows of sugar cane and threaten to kill anyone who interferes. Then they light a match to the crops and declare the land their own.

For centuries, much of Venezuela’s rich farmland has been in the hands of a small elite. After coming to power in 1998, and especially after his re-election in December, President Hugo Chávez vowed to end that inequality, and has been keeping his promise in a process that is both brutal and legal.

Mr. Chávez is carrying out what may become the largest forced land redistribution in Venezuela’s history, building utopian farming villages for squatters, lavishing money on new cooperatives and sending army commando units to supervise seized estates in six states.

The violence has gone both ways in the struggle, with more than 160 peasants killed by hired gunmen in Venezuela, including several here in northwestern Yaracuy State, an epicenter of the land reform project, in recent years. Eight landowners have also been killed here.

“The oligarchy is always on the attack and trying to say you are no good,” Mr. Chávez said to squatters in a televised visit here. “They think they’re the owners of the world.”

Mr. Chávez’s supporters have formed thousands of state-financed cooperatives to wrest farms and cattle ranches from private owners. Landowners say compensation is hard to obtain. Local officials describe the land seizures as paving stones on “the road to socialism.”

“This is agrarian terrorism encouraged by the state,” said Fhandor Quiroga, a landowner and head of Yaracuy’s chamber of commerce, pointing to dozens of kidnappings of landowners by armed gangs in the last two years.

The government says the goal of the nationwide resettlement is to make better use of idle land and to make Venezuela less dependent on food imports. New laws allow squatters to manage and farm land that has now been placed in government hands.

Before the land reform started in 2002, an estimated 5 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the country’s private land. The government says it has now taken over about 3.4 million acres and resettled more than 15,000 families.

Poor farmhands and unemployed town dwellers who squatted on land here are as filled with optimism as wealthy land owners are with dread. On the outskirts of the town of Urachiche, for instance, is Fundo Bella Vista, a farming community inaugurated by Mr. Chávez during an episode of his television program broadcast here in April.

Bella Vista is one of 12 “communal towns” that Mr. Chávez plans to build this year. It has neat rows of identical three-bedroom homes for 83 families, a reading room, a radio station, a building with free high-speed Internet service, a school and a plaza with a bust of Simón Bolívar, Venezuela’s national hero.

With financing from state banks, the cooperative plants crops like manioc, corn and beans, which officials in Caracas say are better suited to soils here than sugar cane. By burning the cane during land seizures, the squatters prepare the land for other crops and give owners less incentive to fight for control. The state and federal government holds Bella Vista as an example of the ideological fervor Mr. Chávez is trying to instill in the countryside.

Lisbeth Colmenares, 22, was radiant as she showed a visitor her new home here, where she and her family live rent-free.

“Before Chávez, the government would have been happy to let us starve,” said Ms. Colmenares, holding her 6-month-old daughter, Luzelis. “We’ll never let what we have now be taken from us.”

But while some of the newly settled farming communities are euphoric, landowners are jittery. Economists say the land reform may have the opposite effect of what Mr. Chavez intends, and make the country more dependent on imported food than before.

The uncertainties and disruptions of the land seizures have led to lower investment by some farmers. Production of some foods has been relatively flat, adding to shortages of items like sugar, economists say.

John R. Hines Freyre, who owns Yaracuy’s largest sugar-cane farm, is now trying desperately to sell the property and others in neighboring states. “No one wants this property, of course, because they know we’re about to be invaded,” said Mr. Hines, 69, in English polished decades ago at Georgetown University.

Yaracuy’s sugar growers’ association says sugar cane production here has fallen 40 percent since Mr. Chávez set the land reform in motion.

Senior officials blame “hoarders” for the shortages. But agricultural economists say the government bureaucracy, which runs a chain of food stores, is also rife with inefficiencies and Venezuela is at a disadvantage in competing on international markets with larger economies, like China.

Carlos Machado Allison, an agricultural economist at the Institute for Higher Administrative Studies in Caracas, said demand for food had climbed more than 30 percent in the last two years with the oil boom, while Venezuela’s capacity to produce food grew only 5 percent.

He points to inconsistencies in the government’s approach, like having one ministry charged with redistributing land to reduce food imports while another is tasked with importing large amounts of food.

“The double talk from the highest levels is absurd,” Mr. Machado said. “By enhancing the state’s power, the reforms we’re witnessing now are a mechanism to perpetuate poverty in the countryside.”

Top-down land redistribution projects have a troubled history in Latin America, including Venezuela itself, which last tried it in the 1960s. Even neighboring countries like Brazil, with a flourishing agribusiness industry, still struggle with militant demands for land from the rural poor.

But Venezuela, unlike many of its neighbors, has long imported most of its food, and uses less than 30 percent of its arable land to its full potential, according to the United Nations.

A good part of the reason is the havoc that its oil wealth plays on the economy, with a strong currency during times of high oil prices making it cheaper to import food than to produce it at home. Meanwhile, vast cattle ranches take up large areas of arable land.

But no country in the region has currently hit the land distribution problem as aggressively as Mr. Chávez.

“By 2008, I predict no big landowners will be left in the state of Yaracuy,” said Franklin Ochoa, 23, a member of the cooperative committee that manages Bella Vista.

In fact, Yaracuy, one of Venezuela’s smallest states, is not filled with especially large holdings. With some of the country’s most fertile soil, the state has been home to immigrants from Cuba, Portugal and Spain who arrived after World War II and assembled relatively small sugar cane farms and cattle ranches.

Some of these immigrants or their children are now doing everything they can to leave. Fátima Vieira, the daughter of a Portuguese truck driver who moved to Venezuela 50 years ago, said she was struggling to receive compensation for a 170-acre sugar cane farm controlled by squatters. As on other seized estates, she said squatters burned much of her sugar cane in an attempt to intimidate her.

Ms. Vieira, 43, said she also feared for her life after a gunman shot her brother, Antonio, in the neck one balmy night in August in 2003, on the edge of his sugar cane farm. He died in the cab of his Ford pickup truck. After that incident squatters took over his property, she said.

“His killer remains free,” Ms. Vieira said in an interview at her home in San Felipe, the state capital.

“All I want to do is leave for another city, if I can get money for my land.”

So far only a small group of landowners in Yaracuy, most of whom were Spanish immigrants and maintained citizenship in their homeland, has received compensation for seized land, after Spain’s government pressed Mr. Chávez’s administration.

More than 30 ranches and farms have been seized since Carlos Giménez, a staunch ally of Mr. Chávez, was elected governor in 2004.

Activists here say landowners have struck back. Braulio Álvarez, a land activist and pro-Chávez deputy in the national assembly, was shot in the face last July after leaving a late-night meeting in San Felipe. Mr. Álvarez, who survived the attack, blamed landowners.

In an interview at the governor’s palace, where the halls are decorated with images of Che Guevara and Mr. Chávez, Governor Giménez said some friction should be expected on “the road to socialism.”

“The reaction of the oligarchy is perhaps logical,” said Mr. Giménez, a lawyer by training who is fending off charges of corruption related to state purchases of food and transportation equipment. He said the charges were politically motivated.

“The upper class had more than 400 years of benefits from the system,” Mr. Giménez said. “They need to understand we’re committed to the construction of a socialist fatherland.”

Landowners like Mr. Hines get the message. His aristocratic family, from Cuba, began investing in Venezuelan land in the 1950s before the Cuban revolution.

Showing a visitor the stately if barren plantation house where his family once lived, Mr. Hines said he had begun distributing furniture to the servants before the squatters arrive.

“I see Chávez in power for quite a while,” said Mr. Hines, who takes measure to ensure his safety, like sleeping in a different home each night, never telling employees when he is driving to Yaracuy from Caracas and dispensing with a flashy vehicle in favor of a nondescript used sedan. “It will definitely get worse for us in this country.”

Adam B. Ellick contributed reporting.