Bolivia’s Agrarian Reform: Coming Soon to a Home Near You?

Readers:

One of the issues that has dominated Bolivia in the past few months has been the plan by the Bolivian government for "land reform", giving title to some of the millions of people who have no land and who are demanding fields in which they can work and earn a living.

One of the young writers who contributes to our work, Wes Enzinna, recently looked at the issue and went to visit one of Bolivia's many landless settlements. Here is his report. We look forward to your reactions and feedback.

Jim Shultz


Bolivia’s Agrarian Reform: Coming Soon to a Home Near You?

Over coffee a Bolivian friend confided in me her fears of Evo Morales’ land reform, launched by executive decree last May.

“Because my family has two houses,” she told me, “we are very worried Evo is going to take one of them and give it to the landless peasants.”

The land reform effort, which Morales has called a “profound agrarian revolution,” aims to redistribute agricultural land to some of Bolivia’s 2.5 million landless peasants—in fact, the new reform law explicitly prioritizes such peasants, stating its goal as “the distribution of lands exclusively to peasants and indigenous communities without land or who possess insufficient lands.”

The new reform says nothing to the effect of re-distributing small-scale private property such as houses. Instead, as Morales explained on August 2 to a crowd of 100,000 peasants, “the goal of the reform is to break up land oligarchies, to break up latifundios.” Latifundios, or haciendas, are extremely large plots of land owned by one person or family, an arrangement left over from colonial times.

Bolivia's Land Ministry claims that 400 individuals own 70% of the nation’s potentially productive lands. Yet, despite the limited number of landowners that might be affected, the number of people who feel they might be targeted is much greater.

But who exactly are the landless poor Morales aims to help, and who instill such fear in the hearts of some Bolivian citizens? Recently, I took a trip to the Bolivian countryside to find out.

Near the city of Yaquiba, in the dust-covered Gran Chaco province of southern Bolivia, there are four landless peasant settlements: Los Sotos, Palmitos, Nuevo Amanecer, and Chirimoyal, all established within the last five years. Each is home to thirty to fifty families, all of them members of the Movimiento Sin Tierra (MST), the landless peasant movement.

Even though they don’t have deeds to the land, the peasants believe the land they live on is rightfully theirs. Their basis for this claim is an important 1953 law, the law of “Social Economic Function,” which says that land can only be owned by those who work it. Morales has said publicly that his reform aims to carry forward the spirit of this 1953 law, and to give titles to “those who work” the land.

Not surprisingly, wealthy landowners are not happy about this. Waiting with a shotgun for peasants he believes are coming to take his land is Choei Yara, who owns 1,400 acres in eastern Bolivia. He told the Washington Post in June, “I’ve worked this land for thirty years, and I have never had a problem until this past year….No one respects private property anymore, not even the government.”

In August, equipped with giant bags of coca leaves as gifts, and an “okay” from the MST national leadership, I set up my tent at Chirimoyal to spend some time there and get to know the people who my friend in the city, and Choei Yara, are so afraid of.

On the settlements, I was met by gracious hosts who went out of their way to make me comfortable, who thanked me endlessly for helping them pick a few weeds, and who at mealtime always gave me the biggest helpings. I lived with farmers who sold a quarter to a half of their monthly produce on the market, and who, in some months, earned little as $50 as a whole community. I knew proud women who, though they worked sometimes twelve hours a day in storm or sweltering heat and only owned two or three changes of clothes, fussed with their hair and skirts for a photo. I also found ingenuity and industriousness, exemplified by the two-room schoolhouse residents at Palmitos had built with no outside funds or assistance.

I also found violence. A woman from Los Sotos shyly showed me the thick scars on her hands from a May 13, 2001 attack. The land’s former owners sent men armed with guns and clubs to evict the squatters, and set fire to her thatch hut with her and her baby still inside. Another man showed me the scar that began above his belly button and slithered like a snake into his waistband, the result of being shot with a high-powered rifle during the same eviction.

I also did not find saints. The residents of Los Sotos told that several days after their eviction, which left at least three squatters dead, they happened to run into one of the men hired by the landowner on a deserted backroad. “We beat him to death,” they told me, their voices tinged with both shame and pride.

But perhaps most importantly, what I found on those four squatters’ settlement in the dusty Chaco, was patience and hope. Even as they wait for the titles and assistance the Morales government promised, they still feel a measure of legitimacy they never did before. “The President is on our side now,” a resident of Chirimoyal told me.

In the end Bolivia’s battle over land runs across the same fault line as so many other controversial clashes in the country—two visions of the nation and in this case two visions of what is just. For landowners "justice" means respect for private property. For landless peasants, "justice" means land for those who work it. How Bolivia will resolve these two perspectives remains, for the time being, unknown.

What is certain, though, is that my friend with the two houses will be keeping them both.

by Wes Enzinna: wenzinna@temple.edu