Venezuelans Face Tug of War Over Arable Land

When a flood 2 1/2 years ago wiped out the crops that farmhand Oscar Gutierrez tended, he moved his family a couple of hundred miles to this big-sky cattle ranch with nothing but the clothes on their backs and faith in President Hugo Chavez’s promise of fertile land for those willing to farm it.

Like 400 other squatter families, Gutierrez; his wife, Jacqueline; and three children have carved a modest plot from the privately owned ranch’s 32,000 acres, making room for their crops and fencing their poultry off from the 6,500 head of cattle that graze here.

Authorities across Venezuela are reviewing more than 500,000 such farms and estates to determine if the owners are making the best use of the land, or if it should be formally handed over to the squatters. Several states are to decide over the next few months whether the squatters should be ejected from the land or allowed to stay.

Poor families began occupying the land in 2001, when the populist Chavez pushed through a land-reform bill and initiated a drive to reverse decades of migration to the cities. Chavez supporters regard the squatters as standard-bearers in his “revolution for the poor.” Opponents call them pawns in a political power play.

As helicopters sweep the landscape on aerial inspections and local authorities pore over ownership documents, some dating back to the early 1800s, tens of thousands of the landless poor on private farmland eagerly await a decision.

“For one family or company to have so much land in Venezuela -- it’s just not right,” Jacqueline Gutierrez said, as she cut her husband’s hair under a sprawling tree. The family arrived here in July 2003, and the tree was their shelter until they finished building their mud-walled hut. “We have to trust that the government will make the right decision and soon we will own this place.”

More than 80% of the country’s 25 million people live in poverty, most in crowded cities where many migrated in the mid-1900s to work in factories now being edged out by stiff foreign competition.

Venezuelans in the countryside face more dire conditions than the urban unemployed. Squatters such as the Gutierrez family say that as crude as their living quarters may be, they are better than where the families lived as sharecroppers.

Less than 10% of the population farms, and the country imports most of its food. More than 60% of the country’s farmland is owned by less than 1% of the population.

Settling on large estates has placated the poor masses and inspired some reverse migration of the cities’ unemployed. But it has also stirred fear among regional officials that they are losing control over land management and inviting anarchy. Six state leaders, including Gov. Jhonny Yanez of Cojedes state, where El Charcote ranch is located, have ordered a halt to the squatters’ planting and construction for 90 days to decide how much land should be up for grabs.

El Charcote is only one of the properties at stake, but has become a lightning rod. Its British owners, the Vestey Group, are being cast by local authorities as carpetbaggers.

Ranch manager Tony Richards, who has lived in Venezuela for 18 years, accused the government of justifying the occupation with “a huge myth” that Vestey exports the meat from the ranch. Endemic foot-and-mouth disease in Venezuela prevents export.

“We’re not here to do any huge injustice to anyone,” Richards said. “We’re here to produce meat for Venezuelans.”

The ranch is part of a network of Vestey breeding and grazing operations that covers nearly 1 million acres in Venezuela. Since squatters began arriving in 2001, the number of cattle on the ranch has been cut in half from 13,000 head, and the paid workforce has shrunk from 70 to 28, the ranch manager said.

Richards suggested that squatters might be targeting cattle ranches because they and local government officials know little about meat production and consider grazing to be an inefficient use of arable land.

The nine-mile road that crosses through the heart of El Charcote was lined by some houses and kitchen gardens before 2001, but is now flanked by crude shacks and barbed-wire fences delineating each family’s stake. Cattle have been gradually pushed out of much of their grazing area by the squatters’ fenced gardens. Many families have dogs to keep the cattle out, and patrol their plots with a machete to fend off wandering cattle.

“We came here and planted because no one was using the land,” says Blanca Roa, whose husband and three daughters huddle around a wood fire and boiling pot of root vegetables and fish heads. “It’s good land. Anything you plant here grows.”

Like the Gutierrez family a few plots to the north, Roa defends the gardens as a more equitable use of ranch land. Prairie wind whistles through the woven-branch walls of their one-room shanty and cows trample much of their crop of beans, squash, melons and corn, but they live better than they did as hired hands in the western state of Barinas, Roa’s husband, Herman Ardila, says.

The squatters’ leader, Jose Pimentel, advised them to be patient, Roa says, because “in three months we are going to get the land title.”

Pimentel carries a briefcase of dog-eared documents that he argues disprove Vestey’s claim that it is the ranch’s lawful owner. The ardent Chavez supporter organized the resettling of El Charcote.

He spread word among unemployed urbanites that farmland was here for the taking. Buses and pickup trucks brought the first squatters in early 2001 and a second, larger group arrived last year, boosting the number to about 1,000. Most of them have settled in plots of 15 hectares, or 37 acres, a size set by land-reform architects. Few of the plots are fully planted, but several families say they can grow enough food on just a few acres to feed their families. On plots larger than 30 acres, they could grow enough to sell.

Antonio Rivas and his family were among the first to arrive, and have transformed their land into a lush little plantation. Plump, shiny eggplants, papaya, peppers and zucchini thrive in carefully ordered patches enclosed by a split-rail fence.

“When we came here, the leader told us to plant as much as we could, that it was necessary to work the land to get it,” Rivas’ wife, Zaida, said as she shucked corn to feed the chickens or to grind.

Yanez, the state governor, rejects accusations from private land owners that the government is infringing on property rights by deciding what constitutes productive use of farmland.

“The right to private land is not an absolute right. It’s subject to the rights and interests of the general public,” Yanez said. “In Venezuela, there is no right to large estates, even if the owner has paid for the land.”

Critics worry that any curbs on ownership rights could drive away foreign investment in the country’s oil industry. At the British Embassy in Caracas, diplomats say they are withholding judgment in the Vestey case until Cojedes authorities decide whether the squatters stay or go.

“It’s too soon to say we are concerned about this investment and the wider signals it might send” if it is confiscated, said Steve Fisher, the deputy head of mission. “Of course, we’re watching the situation carefully.”

Chavez might have tipped his hand in a Jan. 10 speech in which he declared “war against the large estates,” and promised that “justice in the farmlands” would result in tens of thousands of Venezuelans gaining title to land that they farm.

“Large estates are contrary to the interests of the public,” said federal prosecutor Marisol Plaza, noting that “all measures undertaken for social justice are based on law.”

Albis Munoz, president of the Federal Chamber of Commerce, said it would be better to levy a tax on underutilized private holdings than to expropriate them, as the 2001 land law authorizes.

Ranchers accuse Chavez of steering the nation toward the kind of collective agriculture that has failed elsewhere.

“The government needs to make life in the countryside more attractive if it wants people to return to farming,” said Leopoldo Monterrey, a lawyer and rancher who owns 500 acres and 450 head of cattle east of Caracas, the capital. “You don’t just send people who have been living in cities all their lives into the countryside and expect them to be able to feed the nation.

“The discretion of public officials is total,” he continued. “Even if your property is fully productive, it can be expropriated.... Someone can come along and say it would be more productive if it was planted with cocoa or corn.”

Those driving the land reform from Caracas suggest that squatters will gain a limited title.

“They will not be owners. They won’t be able to sell the land,” said Eliezer Otaiza, head of the National Land Institute in Caracas. Last time Venezuela redistributed land, in the 1960s, most people resold it to the estates for quick cash. This time, he said, the government wants to create a new class of peasants.