Home > Morales Government Tackles Agrarian Reform
Agriculture - Fishery - Animals Governments South/Latin America
by Roger` Burbach
The government of Evo Morales is tackling the explosive issue of agrarian reform less than three weeks after nationalizing Bolivia’s natural gas and petroleum resources. In a country riveted with glaring land inequities, Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera proclaimed that large tracts of agricultural land would be redistributed to “peasants and indigenous communities.” While “productive lands” will be exempted from expropriation, Garcia stated that this would not be the case for large underutilized holdings, “the latifundias that are gangster-like systems of extortion based on commercial, mercantile and political coercion.”
Outlining a series of sweeping proposals for changes in the country’s agrarian reform laws, the Morales government is taking on the country’s elite economic interests located in the eastern region of the country. This is where most of the large landed estates are located, many of them acquired through political corruption and land speculation over the last three decades. According to Miguel Urioste, the director of the Land Foundation, an independent research center in La Paz, “Bolivia has a dual land system, the minifundias and subsistence agricultural plots in the west, and the capitalist enterprises tied to the latifundias in the east.” The prosperous estates produce soy beans, cattle and other agricultural export commodities that have enriched a bourgeoisie based in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s third largest city.
The devastating poverty that afflicts South America’s poorest country is bound up with this dysfunctional land system. Out of Bolivia’s 9 million inhabitants, 3.5 million people live in the countryside with about 80 % subsisting at the poverty level. Garcia Linera noted in his address on agrarian reform that 40 percent of the country’s peasants and inhabitants of the indigenous agricultural communities live in conditions of extreme poverty, earning less than $600 a year. Indian women suffer the most at the bottom of this chain of exploitation: The Vice President stated that “women will have special treatment” in the impending land redistribution program.
The ethnic character of this poverty fed the massive discontent that led to the triumph of Evo Morales as the country’s first Indian president. Many landless peasants, predominantly of Quechua and Aymara origins, have migrated out of the Andean west to the low lands in the east. There they often work in conditions of abject servitude on the large estates of non-indigenous owners, many of whom claim de facto possession of large tracts of idle or underutilized lands that they refuse to sell or distribute to the landless Indians.
The Bolivian landless movement in recent years has occupied some of these idle lands, meeting violent resistance from the large land owners. As Miguel Urioste of the Land Foundation notes, “a climate of violence and confrontation over access to land has lead to the injury and death of many peasants.” The Morales government will move this month to implement many of the changes it proposes in the agrarian reform law by executive decree and through legislation in Congress. “But if it meets with sustained opposition it will use the Constituent Assembly that will be elected in early July to restructure the country’s agrarian policies as well as its political institutions’,” says Urioste.
Sectors of the landed bourgeoisie in Santa Cruz have already proclaimed their staunch opposition to the proposed changes in the agrarian reform laws, even though the government has offered to discuss the legislation with them. Jose Cespedes, the president of the Chamber of Agricultural and Cattle producers of the East, declares, “the words of Alvaro Garcia Linera are overtly political. They are intended to capture votes in the Constituent Assembly and shape its agenda.” Cespedes adds, “If the rights of the land owners are violated, there will be a response using force.”
Even before Garcia publicly stated the governments’ position on agrarian reform, virtually all the business and entrepreneurial associations in Santa Cruz under the leadership of Branko Marinkovic of the Federation of Private Businesses issued a proclamation expressing their “deep concern with the measures of agrarian reform that are coming from the administration of Evo Morales.”
While many of peasant and indigenous organizations are roundly applauding the changes in the agrarian reform law, a few leaders express reservations. Felipe Quispe, the former head of the Union Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia who has often challenged Morales from the left, said: “The government is committing an error because it is offering to discuss the agrarian reform plan with the large landowners who have historically exploited the peasants.”
Militant indigenous movements are already staking out their intent to take over large estates. The Coordinator of Ethnic Peoples of Santa Cruz announced its determination to seize 14,000 hectares owned by Branko Marinkovic. “This land will automatically be taken because it is ours,” declared a representative of the ethnic groups. An official of the business coalition shot back, “this is an abusive assault and we are going to defend our private property with determination.”
The dye is cast with the historic initiatives taken in May. Evo Morales now faces two potent adversaries, the foreign energy corporations and the Bolivian bourgeoisie in Santa Cruz.
Roger Burbach is director of the Centre for the Study of the Americas, based in Berkeley, California. He is the co-author, with Jim Tarbell, of Imperial Overstretch: George W Bush and the Hubris of Empire, published by Zed Books. He is currently working on a book on the social movements and the new left in Latin America.