Venezuela’s Land Reform: A Participant’s Perspective
On March 3, 2004, Jesus Guerrero, a poor and landless campesino from outside the small town of Tucaní in Western Venezuela, was clearing a previously neglected piece of land just south of Maracaibo Lake in one of the most fertile agricultural regions of his country. With his fellow farmers, he was preparing the land for the cultivation of sugar cane, oranges, yucca, and plantains. One moment he was sweating as he swung his machete in the oppressive lowland Venezuelan heat. A moment later, he was dead. Jesus, a husband and a father, was fatally shot by a mercenary contracted by a local landowner to eliminate the encroachment of landless peasants onto his massive, yet largely fallow, Venezuelan estate.
The murder of Jesus Guerrero did not come as a shock. In fact, Jesus has been just one of more than 150 farmers and campesino leaders who have been killed in a similar fashion in Venezuela over the past 5 years. Although news of peasant deaths does not always reach the public and prosecution of their killers is the exception rather than the rule, they are, nevertheless, the fallen soldiers in a war that is currently taking place in this country, a war referred to in official discourse as the ‘war against the latifundio’. Armed with machetes and the promise of land as guaranteed by the newly instituted Ley de Tierra, or Land Law, farmers with the legal-institutional backing of the ‘revolutionary’ government of President Hugo Chávez Frías and its growing state bureaucracy are settling on both public and private farmlands as part of Venezuela’s bold shift away from market-oriented development strategies and towards a ‘socialism of the twenty-first century.’
Currently, some 90% of Venezuelans live in cities, the product of a rural-urban migration that followed the industrializing efforts of the oil boom of the early twentieth century. It was during this time that fashionable North American lifestyles and popular conceptions of what ‘modern’ nations do and how ‘modern citizens’ behave were imported from cheap vacation trips to Miami. The seemingly endless tracts of rich farmland were forsaken – left to a handful of wealthy landowners and speculators who have had little incentive to use its potential as a way to diversify economic production.
The push for agricultural reform and ‘endogenous development’ is the government’s reported attempt to reverse these trends and reduce the vast poverty and inequality that has beset this petroleum-rich nation. With financial and technical support from the state and its various institutional mechanisms, the landless and the unemployed are being encouraged to re-populate the countryside and exploit the natural richness of Venezuela’s soil through cooperative work relations and shared titles to previously uncultivated land. The result has been a fortification of allegiances as new agricultural collectivities and communities grow up on these expropriated lands and earlier sacrosanct ideas regarding private property, entitlement, citizenship, and individual rights have become contested cultural terrains.
The real story of Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian revolution’ is to be found here – in the rich complexities of policies such as agrarian reform and how these policies take shape on the ground in local contexts. Yet, an overwhelming amount of the international media coverage of this country continues to focus on the personal characteristics and leadership style of the nation’s charismatic and bombastic president, Hugo Chávez. Due to his fiery rhetoric, his Bush-bashing, and his wide support from the ‘poor masses’, Chávez has been cast by pundits everywhere into that familiar, if not tired, category of Latin American populist. And it would not be an unforgivable error of perception to conceive that, in many ways, the entire population of Venezuela has been dragged with him into that same unfortunate category.
Much of the writing on populism, especially with regards to Latin America, employs the concept in often ambiguous ways with few commonalities other than the descriptive prominence given to the demagogic characteristics of populist political leaders and their extra-institutional ‘appeals to the people’. Scant attention is normally paid, however, to exactly who these populist ‘people’ are and to what degree they interact and negotiate on a daily basis with broader political and economic processes. Just who the Jesus Guerreros are in this drama seems to be unimportant. Instead, vague categorical abstractions, many times tinged with implicit references to Hobbesean fears of irrational mob rule, are the norm. Given the lack of clarity on what populism is or is not, it would be better argued that such portrayals do more to de-legitimize a certain type of political participation or citizenship practice than they do to elucidate a particular political form. In the case of Venezuela, local actors are too frequently cast into the role of the unsophisticated political subject, corralled into compliance by the mass patronage of a new ‘messianic’ president.
In an attempt to rectify this distorted perception of social change and politics in Venezuela, Venezuelanalysis sat down with one of the leaders of agrarian reform in the western part of the country to talk about development, cooperativism, and the government. Miguel Basabe is the Director of Education and Public Relations at the agricultural cooperative of Bevere, south of Maracaibo Lake in the state of Mérida. Bevere is comprised of 45 families who are currently cultivating close to 200 hectares on land, which, although the putative property of a single owner, was determined through technical inspections to be owned by the state. The cooperative is a part of the Fundos Zamoranos, a government policy named after the Venezuelan revolutionary hero and peasant advocate, Ezequiel Zamora. The Land Law of 2001 legally enabled the members of Bevere to occupy this land which they have been doing since 2003.
Edward Ellis: What does the idea of endogenous development mean?
Miguel Basabe: We have been hearing about endogenous development for some time. For me, the term endogenous development is to give potential to the vital capacities of the human being to improve his/her social wellbeing and after that, production coming from the resources that he/she has. What resources? Water, land, all of the resources that we have in this space. For example, in the case of Bevere, for me endogenous development of Bevere is the transformation of the human being. For me, it begins there, transforming ourselves first. What does that mean? Changing ideas, the way of thinking, ways of behaving, starting from the inside and with our potentialities – knowledge, ancestral knowledge, and diversifying production. In the case of Bevere, how does that translate? A diversified production with fruits, cereals, animal husbandry, with production of organic fertilizer, production of organic products, managing the ecology of cultivation promoting ancestral knowledge like artisanal works and culture that’s to say all the knowledge that will let us create from the inside. For me, this is endogenous development – creating from the inside towards the outside.
Could you explain what work is like on the cooperative?
From the first day that we occupied the land we have worked collectively. Not in any moment has there been any division of the land into lots and we are not thinking of parceling it. We distribute the activities we carry out by team. In this moment we have someone responsible for every area of land cultivated. This has been a very important experience for us because every one of those responsible carry a register of what they do, how they do it, how much they spend and on what do they spend it and the cost of man power. All of this is in the register. We also have someone who is responsible for where we keep our materials. This person has a list and keeps track of all the tools that are taken out and returned. This has been very successful for us. It has yielded excellent results, thankfully. The work has been totally collective and it has been a very beautiful experience for us. We didn’t have knowledge of collective work and in fact in Venezuela there is very little experience with collective work. We know that for many years there have been attempts to work collectively but in the way that we are doing it here at Bevere, this is the first time and it has been successful. This includes the distribution of the tasks and those who are responsible for each cultivated area. In relation to the director positions, this also has been very positive. Each one of the directors has a specific responsibility and each one completes his/her commitment. This has been a very important factor for us because it has permitted us to increase the level of commitment from every compañero, so that every compañero takes up a protagonistic role and is a principal actor, not a secondary actor. This, inside campesino organizations and cooperatives is fundamental – that every associate understands that apart from being an associate of the cooperative, they play a leading role, a protagonistic role.
Why have people become interested in working in collectivities rather than traditional capitalist work relations?
For us, one of the first things we had to do was accept the reality that we have now – that there is a process of change and that as a social organization we have to be framed or directed by the policies of the state. The Fundos Zamoranos are a policy of the state so as we are a Fundo, we have to put into practice what the policies of the state are telling us. What is it that we are pushing for? Collective work and organization. In this sense we, as directors, maintain a clear direction. And this has permitted what? This has permitted that the people who are behind us, the people who support us, also follow the same the path that we are following.
But you were a cooperative before this state policy. So was there an impulse to work in collectives before the Chávez government?
Before we had the land we did practically nothing as an organization. Everybody was in a different place and others worked. We began to function as an organization when we occupied the land. We began to live together and to learn how to live together because before we didn’t know. When we began to learn how to live together we began to see other types of social relations and this has strengthened us. So in reality, cooperativism marks a leading role right now politically in Venezuela to rescue these values. It’s the rescue of the values of mutual aid, solidarity, integration, cooperation, community interest. All of this we have been living little by little and we have achieved a cultivation of consciousness of community commitment, of commitment to the country, of commitment with the government with this process of change.
How did you know that this land was state land and not land that belonged to a private individual?
One of the first steps that you have to take in regards to the land is to make a declaration about the land. For example, I declare that in such and such a place, there’s a farm that is fallow. Then we request a technical inspection from INTI [National Institute of Land]. When INTI makes the technical inspection, there are some technical parameters that need to be taken into consideration to evaluate the productivity and the documental and legal part. So one has to make a comparison. And this decides whether the land is productive or not. If the land is productive then, of course, you have to respect the supposed owner, but if they do not produce sufficient documentation it can go to a negotiation. And if the land is not productive, the state proceeds to expropriate it.
Have there been many problems with supposed owners of these lands?
Yes. In some cases, yes. Because there have been some areas of the country where the supposed owners refuse to recognize that the land belongs to the state. Because before this government arrived, there was a government policy that was carried out very poorly where those with money had the land and they wanted to continue to obtain more land. Many government functionaries permitted them and they gave them land and they sold them land like crazy. Now it’s the opposite. When the government arrived, it said, look, we need land for the campesinos but how are we going to rescue it. First, we have to demonstrate to the supposed owners that this land belongs to the state. It’s like the airwaves, for example – the space of the state. Not like some communication media believe, that the airwaves are private property. It’s not like that. This is what happened with the land with some supposed owners that believed they are the masters of this land. But they never took into account the fact that the state never gave them proof of ownership and many of them didn’t have any documents. They were extending their property, impinging on state lands, renting and buying from small farmers and in some cases taking it for under the market price. In this way they won extension of their lands. And so, with many of these plots, the supposed owners could not demonstrate that this was their land. And this led to state intervention through an administrative process which resulted in the adjudication of the organized groups and the cooperatives. But in some cases the supposed property owners have refused to recognize that the property belongs to the state and this has led to the killing of campesinos, our compañeros. It has led to resistance, and to attacks on campesinos, attacks on the organizations. Still there are some cases where supposed landowners refuse to recognize because it is a cultural problem. For many years they believed that this was theirs and nobody could touch it. But a government arrived that doesn’t favor them but rather to those who are modest. And so they are not in agreement.
Why? Because they lost a piece of the political power that they had. Before this government the government was in favor of the powerful sectors. Now this government has arrived and says no. This government is for the people. And it is of the people. 80 percent of the Venezuelan people are poor. This is the reality. This means that it was 80 percent of the Venezuelan people who elected this government. This government owes itself to the people. There is a big confrontation between the government and the rich sectors, big business, the big communication magnates, the big milk processors, for example. So the people, little by little, are taking consciousness, organizing themselves, and now we have cooperatives, communal councils, communal banks, NGOs, that’s to say, a series of social organizations, the Bolivarian circles, that are dedicated to the strengthening of political consciousness and the strengthening of citizen consciousness.
And some people have said there have been 150 campesinos assassinated?
We in the campesino sector know that there have been 150 murders. The government has another number, less. But in one way or another it is related to the campesino sector and in one way or another, the murders have come from the landowning sector who are not in agreement with this government and much less with the policies of the government. So, in truth, there have been 150 killed by paid assassins where we know that there are landowning sectors responsible. Where we know that the landowners have paid a lot of money. So this has been a concern for campesinos. So we have maintained the struggle, the campesino front, to achieve the social redress for our people.
In your opinion, is the government doing enough to persecute those responsible for the murders?
In my opinion, the government has a great will, politically. But we have a big problem which is bureaucracy. Many institutions, still, have laws which are not in touch with the reality. They haven’t modified their laws. The bureaucratic paperwork is too convoluted. This impedes the execution of actions in a timely fashion. Because of this, in some cases, many of the campesino leaders who have been assassinated, their killers have fled. The same bureaucracy impedes the efficient action of the security corps. Political will, there is, from the President of the Republic who is a political example. We struggle so that the institutions that impart justice are efficient and are less bureaucratic. This is the reality.
Has the army aided in the protection of campesinos?
In the case of the army, of the Venezuelan armed forces, there have been many processes. So at the moment of the enactment of the Ley de Tierras, we didn’t have the support of the Venezuelan army. In truth, the support has been pretty scanty. But in these last years, in the past year and a half, yes, there has been a change at the level of the army. After the coup d’etat in April 2002 there has been a process of cleaning the armed forces and we are already have an armed forces more in line with the people, more in line with the constitution, and, of course, more subordinate to the President of the Republic. This has permitted, then, the creation of a consciousness at the highest military levels who are most identified with this process of change which didn’t happen in 2000, 2001 when the armed forces were not with the people. Today we can say that we can count on the armed forces.
There was a protest in Caracas a year ago over these assassinations, right?
Yes, a year ago. It was the 12th of July, 2005. The Frente Campesino Ezequiel Zamora led a march of campesinos in which we were able to mobilize close to 6,000 campesinos at the national level and this march had as its objective to solicit and demand justice from the government in the case of the 150 assassinated. Apart from this, an objective was the redress and social justice for all of the families of the campesinos who were assassinated. This opened a space. It opened a space of communication with the national government and it has been opening little by little. We have meetings, we are reaching agreements…
And there was a commission or something along those lines formed?
Yes. A special commission was created. A special committee made up of members of the national government and people from the national front of campesinos. We have already met and we are in contact.
Are they going to issue a report?
Yes, they are putting together a report at the current time. We have already seen some results and the national government is coordinating a process of redress for the families of the campesinos who have been assassinated. They are going to be beneficiaries with a kind of trust fund to help them.
