BOLIVIA: PRESIDENT EVO MORALES BEGINS AMBITIOUS LAND-REFORM PROJECT.
At the beginning of 2007, Bolivian President Evo Morales launched his program to seize land deemed unproductive or fraudulently acquired from big owners and convert those lands into communally run farms for thousands of poor Bolivians. In August 2006, Morales handed out titles for farmland and tractors made in Venezuela and Iran to Bolivian campesinos to drum up support for his ambitious agrarian reform. The new law regarding the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) then wound its way through Congress in November, with large protests in the capital pressuring lawmakers to pass the bill, which they did.
Morales seeks to convert almost one-fifth of the country into communal farms. The effort to break up latifundios, or large estates, resembles similar programs underway in Venezuela (see NotiSur 2005-03-18 and 2005-10-28).
Pueblos Unidos is first community in program
The hamlet of Pueblos Unidos became the first community founded on land redistributed by Morales in 2006, a crucial first step in his vision of lifting his fellow Bolivians out of South America's severest poverty.
But the village and its mosquito-choked fields also reveal the immense challenges facing the farmers, from competing with the giant soybean plantations next door to coming up with gasoline for the tractors. Still, the community founded in September 2006 is a dream come true for several hundred formerly landless campesinos--a 16,000-hectare spread, part of which lies on land expropriated from a soybean farmer.
"We're no longer talking about whether we can stay here, whether the legal papers might come through, whether it's time to move again," said Luis Velasquez, a leader in Bolivia's landless movement (Movimiento Sin Tierra) and Pueblo Unidos' unofficial mayor. "We're talking about something real."
Morales has pledged to redistribute a staggering 124,000 sq km--an area the size of Nebraska--among Bolivia's long-oppressed indigenous majority during the next five years.
A key difficulty in implementing the INRA law will be untangling centuries of muddled real estate records, overcoming resistance from landowners vowing to defend their land with force if necessary, and coming up with seed money for the new farms. In Pueblos Unidos, the farmers have new tractors but no gasoline to power them.
Morales' administration must untangle those records while building a government agency to monitor land use across a sparsely populated nation twice the size of France...
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