Bolivia launches 'agrarian revolution'

Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, took a first step on June 3 toward handing over a fifth of the country's territory to poor farmers, a day after angry landowners vowed to form self-defense groups. Morales chose the eastern city of Santa Cruz, the landowners' power base in Bolivia's agricultural heartland, to award 60 titles to 7.8 million acres of former government land to some of the poor peasants who support him. Thousands of Indians gathered to receive land titles, chanting "Evo!" and waving Bolivian and rainbow whipala flags, which represent 500 years of indigenous resistance. Morales told the crowd that Bolivia's big landowners had to accept that the lands their ancestors stole during the Spanish conquest five centuries ago would now be returned to their original owners. "The historical enemies of the poor must accept this land revolution," Morales said. "We want to change Bolivia together," Morales said. "Getting back the land means we're getting back all the natural resources, we're nationalizing all the natural resources." Morales, a campesino coca farmer, unveiled the land reform program on May 1, the same day he nationalized the oil industry in South America's poorest country. Although Morales' oil nationalization plans have worried foreign investors and stoked fears in Washington of a continuing leftward, nationalist trend begun by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, criticism at home has not been widespread. But his land reform plans have laid bare fault lines in a country where the Roman Catholic Church estimates a handful of families own 90 percent of all farmland, while three million poor indigenous farmers share the rest. Government pledges to redistribute only idle land and avoid massive seizures have failed to reassure landowners, and talks broke down between the government and landowners the day before the ceremony. Jose Cespedes, a leader of a farm group in eastern Santa Cruz, said that landowners would form committees to defend properties in the region, home to vast cattle ranches and soy plantations. "If the law of the land doesn't defend us, we have the right to seek defense mechanisms," Cespedes said. Cespedes did not say whether the groups would be armed. At first, the government said it planned to hand over up to 12 million acres of state property to indigenous groups. It then planned to identify idle private farmland for possible later distribution. The government said in newspaper advertisements on May 31 it had raised its target to 48 million acres, or almost a fifth of Bolivia's entire territory, within five years. The land handed out on June 3 was already owned by the state and set aside for that purpose before Morales took office in January. None of it has been confiscated from large landholders. The government plan is heightening long-standing tension between the prosperous residents of Bolivia's agricultural lowlands and the poorer, mostly Indian people of the western high plains. Much of the terrain targeted for reform is state land located in the fertile eastern lowlands. Alejandro Almaraz, Bolivia's vice minister of land, praised the initial hand-overs, saying the government will ensure the sustainable management of the land and no forests or protected natural areas would be touched. "It's land that has no legal problems," Almaraz said. "And we believe that it's not right to try to block this measure, when it's going to help many poor people that have been waiting and need this land to improve their life." Women and indigenous people are at the top of the list of intended beneficiaries of the first five million acres to be distributed. In the second stage of the program, registers of private ownership of land will be revised and updated, and lands that are unproductive and held merely for speculation and investment will be expropriated. The model of agrarian development now being implemented aims to protect and promote three modes of production, based on communities, small farmers and agro-industry. According to the latest figures available from the National Institute of Statistics, 63 percent of Bolivia's population of 9.2 million people live in poverty. The situation is even worse in rural areas, where 79.5 percent of the population is poor. Although the precise number of people demanding productive land is not known, Omar Quiroga, an analyst at the Center for Research and Advancement of Small Farmers, said that leaders of indigenous peoples' organizations had registered 22,000 families who were landless or land-poor, in Santa Cruz alone. Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera said the government urgently wanted to give productive employment to a sector that represents 40 percent of the economy in rural communities, and is made up of 650,000 families living on incomes of less than $600 a year.