LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivia's government took out full-page newspaper ads on Wednesday announcing its aim to redistribute nearly a fifth of the country's territory as angry landowners vowed to form land-defense groups.
Leftist President Evo Morales has pledged an "agrarian revolution" to redistribute idle farmlands to the impoverished country's landless peasants -- a move that has highlighted divisions between the poor majority and the rich elite.
Many landowners in the agricultural heartland of Santa Cruz are bitterly opposed to the land reform. At an emergency meeting on Tuesday, they resolved to "set up land-defense committees to protect our farming heritage."
Some said they would be willing to take up arms to defend their land. The government warned armed vigilante groups would not be tolerated.
"When the government is giving guarantees, it's impossible to understood why these business sectors ... are calling for illegal and delinquent groups to be formed," Alfredo Rada, a deputy minister in the Ministry of the Presidency, told local radio.
Morales, a coca farmer who comes from a poor, peasant family, announced the land reform plan on May 1, the same day he nationalized the South American country's energy industry.
While the energy nationalization has escaped widespread domestic criticism, his plans to redistribute unproductive lands to the poor, indigenous majority that forms his support base has drawn an angry response from wealthy landowners.
In their own newspaper ads published on Wednesday, farming leaders said they feared "confrontations between Bolivians" caused by peasant groups invading their land.
The government has said that as a first step in its self-declared "land nationalization," it aimed to distribute up to 5 million hectares (12 million acres) of state-owned property to indigenous groups and then identify unproductive private land for possible redistribution.
The government raised the total in Wednesday's ads, saying its eventual goal was to redistribute up to 20 million hectares (48 million acres) -- a little under a fifth of the country's entire territory -- in five years.
Government ministers have ruled out mass expropriations and say only unproductive land will be targeted, but that has failed to reassure landowners concentrated in Santa Cruz, where vast cattle ranches and soy plantations stretch across the tropical plains. They say the rules are not clear.
The land reform plan -- which still needs approval from a committee grouping landowners, trade unions and government officials -- has been welcomed by Bolivia's influential Roman Catholic Church.
A recent church survey found a small group of wealthy businessmen owned 90 percent of the country's territory -- the rest shared by 3 million indigenous peasant farmers.