The same day, a peasant leader named Luis Mora was killed some 175 kilometers away at his home in the state of Merida. The prime suspects in both shootings: local ranchers battling against President Hugo Chavez’s latest land-reform plans. The ranchers deny it, but peasant leaders blame them for at least a half dozen unsolved murders in land disputes since mid-1991. Some put the death count at 40 or more in the past three years. And now they worry that the back-to-back incidents on Jan. 10 mean the violence has entered an ugly new phase.
It’s one more area where Venezuela is in bad trouble. With the economy slowing to a crawl, furious business owners marching in the streets and opposition leaders publicly questioning Chavez’s sanity, even longtime supporters among the urban poor are turning against him. The rural poor are some of his strongest remaining friends–and Chavez gave them new reason to stay loyal when he issued a controversial land-reform decree late last year. Under the law, the government can confiscate agricultural land it deems “underused” and parcel it out to the poor in small farmsteads.
Venezuela’s big farmers and ranchers are refusing to comply. They say the government is trampling the rights of landowners. Peasant activists reply that some ranchers have more land than anyone has a right to. Both sides say the violence is almost sure to get worse. Huerta, a Communist Party member who helped write the final draft of Chavez’s decree, says the government should declare a state of emergency in the disputed region: “If they don’t suspend some [constitutional] guarantees and raid the ranches where the killers are supposed to be hiding, we’re heading for civil war.”
The center of the struggle is on Lake Maracaibo’s far side, 175 kilometers or so due south of the city. So far some 600 peasant families have received allotments of roughly 16 hectares each. Sixty percent of the country’s milk and meat are produced on the rich local soil, some of the finest in Venezuela. Ranchers say the average farm in these parts is only about 100 hectares, but they admit a few families have amassed vast holdings. “There’s one person with 20,000 hectares, while many lack even a small piece of land,” says Antonio Urribarri, ombudsman of Zulia state, which encompasses both sides of the lake. The inequality is a nationwide problem: nearly half of Venezuela’s agricultural land is owned by just 1 percent of the farmers.
The big property holders argue that many thousands of peasants voluntarily abandoned the land long ago, seeking easier lives in the cities. In fact, landless peasants are a tiny minority in Venezuela. Huerta says the government has no firm figures, but ranchers south of Lake Maracaibo say the area has fewer than 1,000 such families. Most of the agricultural workers there are Colombians, many of them illegal immigrants who came here to escape the civil war in their own country. Huerta says the government’s long-term idea is to resettle slum dwellers on farmsteads in the countryside. But they won’t even own their mini-farms. They can get only permission to live there and raise crops, while the government retains title to the land.
Still, more killing seems all but inevitable. Ranchers’ association president Ruben Dario Barbosa insists his members want to negotiate. But if that doesn’t work, he says, “we’re going to war.” Peasant leaders vow to respond in kind. So far no local ranchers have been killed. But two weeks ago pamphlets began to appear, signed by a group calling itself the Bolivarian Liberation Forces and warning: “Not a single comrade’s death will go unpunished.” Emma Ortega, a peasant leader and Chavez political ally, says she’ll fight back if she has to: “I’m not just going to let myself be killed.”
Even as Urribarri’s office tries to mediate the fight, he’s not optimistic. “The two sides are irreconcilable,” he says. “Blood and fire is what they are talking about. Some of them say, ‘The lake will be red with blood’.” Parliament is examining ways the president’s November land-reform decree might be modified, but Chavez insists the “essence” of his law must not be touched. Most peasants say they only want to live in peace–a dream that seems increasingly remote.
