The many peasants who participated alongside agricultural professionals were members of farming cooperatives awaiting title to land promised by the government. A number have occupied idle lands over the past year and turned them to productive use. Through the meeting proceedings, and in discussions with Militant reporters during and after the event, they spoke of their struggles and of the sharpening class confrontations in the countryside.

Held at the National Institute for Cooperative Education, the meeting was convened to discuss the implementation of Law on Land and Agriculture Development. Signed by the government in November of last year, this is one of the most contentious measures taken by the regime of Hugo Chávez.

Among other provisions, the new legislation allows the state to confiscate some idle private farms of more than 12,000 acres, and distribute the land to the peasants. It also lays out procedures for peasants and indigenous peoples to place claims for stolen land.

The law placed responsibility for land redistribution under a new department, the National Institute of Land (INT).

While peasants have attempted to use the law to press their fight for land, the landlord and bourgeois forces opposed to Chávez condemn it and call for its "reform." Victor Cedeño, a leader of COPEI--a conservative party that alternated in the government with the social-democratic Democratic Action party until Chávez’s ascendancy to power in 1998--complained in July that the law includes "unconstitutional provisions to arbitrarily intervene into private property."

In the wake of the U.S.-backed opposition coup in mid-April, which was defeated by mobilizations of working people, government officials have shown signs of backpedaling on the law. Late last year Chávez called on peasants to put a stop to land takeovers.

Meanwhile, governors, mayors, and other government officials who are part of the reactionary opposition--including the governor of the northeastern state of Cojedes--have used the police and private goon squads to push back attempts by peasants and their supporters to implement the new law. On July 12 Eduardo Lapi, the governor of Yaracuy state, ordered police to fire on dozens of peasant families who had tried to move onto land turned over to them by INT. Many peasants were seriously wounded.  
 
Conference discusses land reform
The featured speaker at the July 21 meeting was Adina Mercedes Bastidas, a university professor of agricultural economy. Bastidas served as vice president under Chávez until her dismissal as part of a cabinet shakeup following the failed coup. Denouncing opposition attempts to water down the law, Bastidas said that its full implementation is necessary to reach a "mixed economy" in Venezuela, that is, maintaining the capitalist market system with more intervention by the state to achieve "social justice." She encouraged peasants and others in the audience to keep up their struggle to enforce its provisions.

In the discussion, William Bitelio Delgado, one of the meeting’s organizers, reported that the ownership of more than half the nearly 5 million acres of arable land in Cojedes is in legal dispute. About 15 capitalist families claim ownership, he said, in opposition to demands that the land be nationalized and distributed to landless farming families.

"So far, INT has declared nationalized only 400,000 acres and has certified private ownership of large farms for about a similar area," he said.

Corn, sugar cane, rice, yucca and a variety of other vegetable crops, along with livestock, thrive in the fields that surround this city. While some of the land is cultivated by peasants, most--a good part of it idle--is owned by capitalist farmers, agricultural corporations, and other big landowners.  
 
‘We only had shovels and machetes’
Participants in the meeting were in the thick of a number of struggles for land rights.

"The thugs of the Companía Inglesa [English Company] started shooting at us," said Angel Sarmiento, 52, in an interview following the meeting. A landless peasant who survives through contract field work and construction jobs, Sarmiento had joined a land occupation by 400 families in La Palomita, some five miles south of San Carlos, in early 2001.

"We took the land peacefully," he said. "We only had shovels and machetes to defend ourselves. They killed several peasants and left many wounded."

Sarmiento explained that the land formed half the 12,000-acre property of the company, which used it to graze more than 40,000 cattle. One of the largest landholders in Venezuela, Companía Inglesa is run by British capitalists, he said.

The federal government heeded calls by the peasants for protection after the killings threatened to become a national scandal, he said. National Guard troops were sent to the area and stayed for a few weeks until things calmed down. The peasants moved the cattle off the area they occupied, formed cooperatives, and began cultivating the land.

"None of them have been tried, however," he said, referring to the police involved in the shooting.

Land titles in this area are now hotly disputed under the 2001 agricultural law. Members of the Yauques, a family of indigenous people, have produced documents showing a legal claim to some 153,000 acres--including the Companía Inglesa farm--granted to their tribe in the 19th century. Big landowners forcibly seized the land over the last half century, say the Yauques. Joining forces with peasant organizations, the Yauques have filed legal papers turning the land over to the state for distribution to landless peasants.

José Melisio Salmiento, 54, who has farmed for four decades, was one of a number of peasants at the July meeting who have been promised land in the area by INT officials. "I have 50 acres of land that doesn’t produce anything." he said. "I have been fighting for land in the Charcote zone. That land belongs to the ‘English.’

"Three years ago we tried to take it over but they threw us out with guns," he said. "The National Guard intervened to defend us. [The Yauques] gave us these lands. We have the certificates, but the goons took them back and put fences around. There are thousands of acres.

"We have now been waiting six years for these lands but the landowners don’t want to turn them over," Salmiento said. "Now that we have the support of the government and the new law favors us, we expect to get the titles."

At the end of the July 21 conference, most peasants lined up to sign up for cheap credit, supposedly guaranteed by the government under the new law.

"We can’t do anything, though, until we get the title," said Maximo Flores, who heads up a group of five families that have formed a cooperative called Los Inocentes.

After the conference, Sarmiento hosted Militant reporters on a trip to La Palomita. On the way, he made sure we stopped and took photos of thousands of acres of prime land that is left idle, noting that it belonged to a Venezuelan capitalist.

"Many peasants here are eyeing this land," commented Lijia Flores, another conference participant. "Why should it be sitting idle while he makes millions and we here have a hard time surviving?"  
 
Land titles are crucial
At Palomita, it became apparent that the situation is not easy even for those peasants who have occupied land and begun to farm. "We’ve been here for a year and a half," said Pedro Roja, who had joined in the takeover of the land from Companía Inglesa. "We use our hands, and some oxen. We don’t have tractors or other equipment. Without title to the land, there is no credit from the banks and we can’t claim insurance in the case of disaster. When rainstorms destroyed my melons and yucca earlier this year, I couldn’t ask the government for compensation."

In an interview a few days before the meeting in San Carlos, Braulio Alvarez, the general secretary of the Ezequiel Zamora National Agricultural Coalition, one of the main peasant organizations in the country, helped put these struggles in a nationwide context.

Militant reporters spoke to Alvarez, who has been appointed to INT’s national board, at the INT headquarters in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital. He explained that about 1,000 big landowners control 85 percent of land currently under cultivation--a total of around 75 million acres. Some 350,000 hard-pressed peasant families, who own between 3 and 50 acres each, produce some 70 percent of vegetables and other major crops, he said.

The government has now declared the nationalization of another 75 million acres of idle cultivable lands and promised to distribute them to peasants, Alvarez said, adding that "there are more than 2,500 peasant groups demanding land today."

"The land and its use has been nothing but a commodity," he said, "not a social activity to produce enough food for the nation." Nearly 85 percent of all foodstuffs are imported from Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.

The stance of the Chávez government following the failed coup has raised questions about its direction even among supporters like Alvarez. The peasant leader and INT official said he does not know whether Chávez will govern in the interests of the majority--the peasants, fishermen, and other working people--or will continue to appease the opposition and the privileged minority of capitalists and landlords it speaks for.

Others are concentrating on advancing the battles at hand. As José Luis Jiménez, one of the peasants who are part of the land takeover at Palomita, put it, "We showed it can be done in the face of violence by the powerful landowners and the police. At some point, we may have to help others in the area to do the same if the titles and credits promised don’t come through."

While the government still enjoys widespread support in the countryside, some fighters are looking to chart a course independent of reliance on Chávez or other figures in capitalist politics.

"They call it a Bolivarian revolution, but it’s not a revolution at all," said Miguel González, a peasant who took part in the July 21 conference at San Carlos, quoting the description used by Chávez and his followers. "We need to make a revolution. The crisis we face is part of an international crisis. There is no major difference between Chávez and his predecessors in the government, except that Chávez has more radical discourse.

"Our biggest challenge is organization," said González. "There is no force yet that defends the interests of the workers and farmers."

Carlos Cornejo contributed to this article.
 
 
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