...Entitlements to land
The second fundamental issue that has put the opposition onto red alert is land. Prominent in the package of 49 decrees in November 2001 was a major agrarian reform. In itself, land reform is no novelty in Venezuela, which -- like many other Latin American countries in the days of the Alliance for Progress, when Washington was fearful that the example of the Cuban Revolution might spread -- passed a modest law in 1960 that eventually benefited up to 150,000 small farmers. This programme, however, quickly fell apart in the 1970s, when the government lost interest in it during the oil bonanza. The original measure had in any case failed to provide adequate credit, technical or marketing assistance to the peasants who received land, and did little or nothing to change the overall picture of Venezuelan agriculture.
In the forty years that have elapsed since this timid experiment, Venezuela has become an overwhelmingly urbanized society, in which 87 per cent of a population of 25 million live in towns. [6] Over the same period, agriculture's share of gdp declined from 50 per cent in 1960 to a mere 6 per cent in 1999, the lowest figure in Latin America. Venezuela, in fact, is the continent's only net importer of agricultural products. The main reason for this dramatic change has, of course, been the distorting effect of oil rents, which have long been responsible for a wasting 'Dutch disease' -- generating a high exchange rate that makes local products, agrarian or industrial, uncompetitive on international and domestic markets, and shifting labour into non-tradeable services.
This does not mean, of course, that land in the countryside therefore loses all value. But it has lowered the pressure for any serious redistribution of a fantastically unequal property structure. No less than 75 per cent of the private agricultural land is owned by 5 per cent of proprietors, while 75 per cent hold only 6 per cent of the land. [7] Furthermore, it is estimated that 60 per cent of Venezuela's rural producers work the land for themselves -- that is, are not day-labourers -- yet have no title to the plots they till.
The Ley de Tierras passed by Chávez seeks to redress this dismal scene in three ways. Firstly, it sets a maximum legal size of farms, ranging from 100 to 5,000 hectares according to respective productivity. Seeking to put an end to latifundia that are not used for agricultural purposes, it levies a special tax on any holding that is left more than 80 per cent idle, and allows for the redistribution of certain lands to landless peasants who commit themselves to their cultivation. Only high-quality idle land of over 100 hectares or lower quality land of over 5,000 hectares, however, can be expropriated -- at market value. Chavistas maintain that there is abundant government-owned land that can be redistributed before any private property needs to be transferred. Any Venezuelan citizen who is either the head of a family or is between 18 and 25 years old may apply for a parcel of land and, after three years of cultivation, acquire a title to it that can be passed on to descendants, but not sold: a provision that has drawn strong criticism, as discriminating against peasants who, if they need to sell, will be driven to do so at heavily -- 40 to 60 per cent -- discounted prices on a black market for sub-legal transactions. [8] By redistributing land to smaller family farms, however, the government hopes not only to mitigate the huge social injustices of the present pattern of ownership, but also to increase agricultural output, in the belief that modest-sized units are generally more efficient than vast estates or ranches. [9] With the long-term objective of making Venezuela self-sufficient in foodstuffs, it aims to double the share of agriculture in gdp to 12 per cent by 2007.
As of April 2003, around 200,000 hectares (some 500,000 acres) have been distributed to 4,500 families. The government plans to accelerate the programme so that by August 2003 over 130,000 families will have received 1.5 million hectares -- an average of about 10 hectares, or 25 acres, per family. This pace, if it is kept up, would compare favourably with Venezuela's 1960 reforms. Land reform, however, is a notoriously uncertain affair. The fao reports that most land reforms carried out since 1945, throughout the world, have failed to assure either equity or efficiency, above all because there is typically a tremendous gap between theory and practice. Laws and intentions are one thing; implementation and results are another. Critics may legitimately ask: what is there to suggest that the Venezuelan programme, in a country which has neglected the countryside for so long, will succeed where others have aborted? The official answer is that the Ley de Tierras has created three new institutions to back up redistribution: the National Land Institute, responsible for land tenancy; the National Rural Development Institute, in charge of technical and infrastructural aid to producers; and the Venezuelan Agricultural Corporation, to provide them with marketing assistance. Above all, the Chávez administration insists that it has what was always wanting in the past -- the political will to force through real change in agrarian relations.
That this is not an empty threat can be seen from the violence of the reactions to the new law by defenders of the staus quo. fedecamaras was so outraged by what it termed this violation of the rights of private property that it highlighted the Ley de Tierras as the single most important reason for launching the first employer-led lock-out of 10 December 2001, just a month after the package of 49 decrees was announced by Chávez. The ctv joined the action with the somewhat unusual explanation -- for a trade-union federation -- that the land law and associated measures would impinge on employers' ability to do business. The 'strike' failed, but resistance to agrarian change soon found other and more deadly forms.
In August 2002, in a small town in northern Venezuela, a man wearing a ski mask drove up to Pedro Doria, a respected surgeon and leader of the local land committee, called his name and, as Doria turned, shot him five times. The committee Doria led was in the process of claiming title to idle lands south of Lake Maracaibo which, according to government records, belonged to the state and could thus be legally transferred to the fifty peasant families that had applied for ownership. However, a local latifundista also claimed title to the property, and on several occasions had refused to let Doria and government representatives inspect it. It is common knowledge in the region that this landowner is a close friend of former Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez, driven from office for corruption, who is himself said to own over 60,000 hectares through third parties throughout the country, the vast majority of it idle.
Doria was not the first peasant leader to be targeted by professional killers or paramilitaries. Another who escaped from death earlier this year was José Huerta. Shot in the shoulder, he barely survived. Huerta was working for the National Land Institute at the time and was in charge of processing the claims of Doria's committee. According to Braulio Alvarez, director of a coalition that links about a dozen peasant organizations, over fifty popular leaders have been assassinated in the past year. None of these cases has been resolved, mostly due to collusion between large landowners and the police. For example, in the cases of Doria and Huerta, the latifundista suspected to have hired the gunmen is Omar Contreras Barboza, former Minister of Agriculture in Carlos Andrés Pérez's government and brother of an ex-governor of the state of Zulia, where the disputed lands are located. If the most spectacular episodes of the class war raging in Venezuela have occurred in the towns, its deadliest front so far is in the countryside.
Shanty-town entitlements
Meanwhile, a very different sort of land reform has moved up the agenda, one that may decide the fate of the Chávez government. Nearly nine out of ten Venezuelans live in the towns. Of these, an estimated 60 per cent are camped in slums on land that they occupied by squatting or invasion, on which they have built ramshackle homes, of tin and wood, or rudimentary brick as the case may be. Many of these barrios cluster on unsafe terrain, like the hillsides that surround Caracas, at perpetual risk of sliding into the valley below whenever there are strong rains. Earlier governments had always argued that the only solution to the squalor and poverty of these shanty-towns was to tear them down and relocate their inhabitants to public housing elsewhere. Predictably, that was virtually never done, because it was prohibitively expensive. Instead, the real attitude of the old regime to the poor was cruelly displayed when they poured down from the hillsides in the tumultuous riots against the neoliberal package imposed by Carlos Andrés Pérez -- the famous caracazo set off on 27 February 1989 -- in which the police and military slaughtered anywhere between 300 and 1,000 people from the barrios nationwide. In the wake of this trauma, a movement known as the asamblea de barrios developed in the slums which, for the first time, made the legalization of their homes a central demand of Venezuela's poor. Eventually, this asamblea merged into Chávez's 'Bolivarian' movement and helped elect him President in late 1998.
However, once in the Miraflores, Chávez devoted his attention to other questions. So it was that the issue was taken up in the Congress elected in 2000 by one of the opposition forces, Primero Justicia, a recently formed party led by ambitious professionals from the rich suburbs, who hoped to inherit the space left vacant by the disgrace of the traditional dyarchy of ad and copei. Nimbly adopting ideas of the Peruvian writer Hernando de Soto, theorist of a kind of 'neoliberalism from below' in his books The Other Path and The Mystery of Capital, [10] this grouping submitted a draft law transferring land titles to slum-dwellers either where the state was the landowner, or where they had occupied the land for ten years or more (also known as usucapión). The draft emphasized the sanctity of private property, and imposed punishments of up to five years' imprisonment for land invasions.
However, after appearing to have all but forgotten this burning social issue in the first phase of his Presidency, on 4 February 2002 -- the tenth anniversary of his original attempt to overthrow Carlos Andrés Pérez -- Chávez announced a new decree, by which his government would transfer the legal ownership of the barrios to their inhabitants. The timing of his speech, coming between the first general strike against him in December 2001 and the attempted coup of April 2002, makes it clear that, under a vitriolic barrage of media and oppositional attack, the government realized it was losing popular ground and had to regain it with a dramatic initiative. Some 7,000 families have benefited from the programme in the past year and, by the end of 2003, about 500,000 plots are due to be transferred.
Barrios in credit
But the decree could transfer only publicly owned land. Iván Martínez, the director of the National Technical Office for the Regularization of Urban Land Tenancy, estimates that approximately one third of the terrain the barrios now occupy belongs to the state, one third is privately owned, and one third is indeterminate or contested. To transfer privately owned land to barrio inhabitants, a law has to be passed through Congress. Legislation to this end, a 'Special Law to Regularize Land Tenancy in Poor Urban Settlements', has been proposed by Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement (mvr), and is due to be passed after extensive consultation with the communities that are to benefit from it. For this purpose, 'land committees' have been created in every barrio, which send representatives to the National Assembly to discuss the law together with the legislators. According to Martínez, they have proposed numerous changes to the original draft, including provisions for the creation of communal property. This is one of the first laws in Venezuelan history that is being hammered out with those actually affected by it. Once in force, it will have a significant impact on the lives of more Venezuelan citizens than any other governmental programme save public education. As many as ten million Venezuelans, or 40 per cent of the population, could eventually benefit, even if Martínez reckons that the law could take up to ten years to implement in full.
The rationale of the transfer, as Martínez puts it, is first of all 'a recognition of the social debt which the state owes the population'. For in the past half-century, the state constructed one million homes for its citizens; the private sector erected about two million; while the inhabitants of barrios, with infinitely fewer resources than either, built over three million. Considering that it costs about ten times as much to tear down a barrio home and build a new one somewhere else, it is clear that 'the barrios are part of the solution, not the problem', in Martínez's words. Andrés Antillano, an organizer in La Vega, one of Venezuela's largest, oldest and most politicized shanty-towns, who has worked together with Martínez on the draft of the new law, adds that it aims at 'recognizing the barrio as a collective subject with legal rights and profound transformative potentials'. In other words, where De Soto and Primero Justicia view urban land reform as essentially a means to encourage the accumulation of capital in the barrios, Chávez's supporters see it as a path to participatory democracy and self-help in the communities.
The land committees necessitated by the decree and proposed law are composed of seven to eleven individuals, elected by a gathering of at least half of the families in any given community, up to a maximum of two hundred. The committees are then free to choose the polygonal of land, the territory of the community, they represent. At first sight, their function looks similar to that of the Bolivarian Circles that Chávez had created in 2001. According to their literature, these Circles 'discuss problems of their community and direct them towards the appropriate governing body, to find a rapid solution for them'. While the media and the opposition demonize them as the shock troops of a totalitarian regime, the truth is that for the most part they do exactly what their pamphlets proclaim -- put on cultural events, paint murals of Simón Bolívar, organize workshops to discuss the constitution and build community centres. In this sense they have been a force for barrio transformation.
The difference between the Circles and the land committees, however, is that the former are, by and large, partisan groups of up to a dozen self-selected individuals who support the Chávez government and want to regenerate their country. The land committees, on the other hand, are democratically elected to represent a particular community of up to 200 families and do not have any political affiliation. By the summer of 2002 it was estimated that over 300 of them had come into being, representing about 150,000 people. They perform a wide variety of tasks, that fall broadly speaking into three areas: regularization of urban property titles; self-government of the barrio; and 'self-transformation' of the neighbourhood. Additionally, but more temporarily, they participate in the formulation of the urban land law.
In the regularization of property titles, the committees take an active part in measuring the plots of land that each family occupies, and adjudicating disputes between them. Since the surveys have to be accurate, government officials work with them, training slum-dwellers how to use the necessary equipment. The process can be tricky because barrio homes often have such irregular shapes. The process of registration also involves designating which parts of barrio land should be communally owned, to provide recreational space. Once the land is registered, each family can claim their titles by providing proof of ownership, usually in the form of receipts for building materials or utility bills. The National Technical Office then provides a certificate which, once the property is ready to be transferred and if no one else claims title to the land within three months, can be exchanged for the actual property deeds. However, only dwellings built on safe land -- that is, sites that do not endanger their inhabitants by too unstable or precarious a location -- are eligible for such ownership. Those who live on unsafe terrain have the right to exchange their claim to property for a government-built home in a different location. Likewise, land invasions that have occurred since the decree of February 2002 cannot participate in the entitlement process, but must look to the government's public housing programme instead.
So far as the objective of self-government goes, the land committees embody much more manageable units than current administrative districts, which in Caracas can consist of over half a million citizens apiece. The committees provide partners for municipal agencies and utility companies, for joint improvement of public services-water, electricity, waste disposal or road access. They have even begun to form sub-committees to work on these different tasks, including the organization of cultural activities, enhancement of security, and embellishment of their neighbourhoods.
Finally, what is meant by 'self-transformation' of the community? Under this heading, the land committees are charged with drafting a charter for their barrio that tells its history, defines its territory, sets out its ground rules and explains its values. The charter is meant to strengthen the communal identity of the barrio. The idea is that only a strong sense of collective identity will lead to a real community, and hence to the possibility of a purposeful change of its conditions of existence. Government officials hope, of course, that some of the benefits that de Soto describes will take effect in the barrios, as a real-estate market develops that allows people to use their homes as collateral for small business loans and thriving mini-entrepreneurship. But when asked what they most want from this programme, slum-dwellers regularly mention 'recognition'. Nora, a participant in one land sub-committee said, 'we believe in the government here not because of the titles, but because we can now participate more in decisions that affect the community'. Still, she adds, 'People are asking, why has it taken so many years for a government to meet this demand?'...
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25505.shtml> & <http://www.newleftreview.net/PDFarticles/NLR25505.pdf>.] *****