Massimo's photoblog

Alejandro and Anabela, Merida, Venezuela (Dec 27, 2004)

The last day in Merida, we went to la Finca for lunch, to say goodbye to Mayli’s grandmother. There we found some of Mayli little cousins, among which Alejandro and Anabela (in the photo above). When I proposed a photo session they were initially shy, but then didn’t want to stop and start fighting to be in front of the camera. I filled one full 512MB card (50 photos).

We left in the afternoon, stopping by the Merida market, which is the combination of a farmer’s market with little shops selling local artisan works. Mayli’s mother wanted to give me a T-shirt as a present, but we couldn’t find any I liked, so we got a very nice “gres” cup which I can use in my office for my liquorice tea. We also got two small T-shirts for Alice and Mililla (Letizia), my baby nieces in Italy.

Back at Mayli’s mother home we listened to some stories about the land reform, that the government is implementing in Venezuela, from Mayli’s father that had met a cousin unhappy with the government. As many other south american countries, Venezuela suffers the problem of the best land being owned by a handful of families and multinational corporations, who use their extensive land holdings to raise cattle for meat export (this is one of the root causes for Venezuela dependence on food import, as the best land is used for foraging and is lost for farming). In many cases legal ownership titles of these holdings do not exists, as these lands have been accumulated during the turbulent historic processes leading to Venezuela independence and subsequent civil wars, at the expenses of displaced indigenous populations and small farmers. These violent processes have strongly contributed to the creation of the the huge slums crowning Venezuelan large cities.

Attempts to reform the situation have been made by successive governments during the 40 years of Venezuelan democracy, but have never succeeded to seriously dent the problem. Land distributed to would-be farmers without proper training and resources have been left unused, and ultimately sold back to the same large land owners then returning to the city, exacerbating the problem. The current government is trying to reverse the trend with a new reform, aimed to limit the maximum size of land holdings by purchasing or expropriating unused land from large owners, and then assigning small parcels to cooperatives of farmers trained in professional schools part of the “misiones” program, and granting them loans to purchase equipment and seeds.

The problems with this scheme is that the legal process for the expropriations is lengthy, and so far not many parcels have been assigned. This situation has triggered spontaneous occupation of land by landless peasants, at the expenses of the large land owners, resulting in some cases in a violent and deadly conflict.

After the last elections, emboldened governors of rural areas from the president’s party have decided to push forward the process by promulgating local decrees facilitating the process of expropriation, with the idea of forcing large land owners to negotiate a settlement. Among such governors is the re-elected governor of the state of Cojedes. In Cojedes, a dozen families and one british corporation own most of the land. The case of the british corporation is emblematic, as 90% of its land has been occupied by peasants that, without a legal title, are unable to cultivate the occupied land and cannot be included in the government program.

This initiative has naturally sparked yet another national controversy with the opposition press, accusing the government of communist measures by not respecting the land owners rights, and the president himself had to release a communicate, just before a state trip to China, saying that they have no intention of abolishing the private property. At least for now, as the opposition newspaper “El Nacional” reports that, in a speech at the beginning of November Chavez commented on the private property in Venezuela saying that: “Is communism the alternative? No! It is not pursued right now, as our reference point is the bolivarian Constitution of the state, and our social economic model. We are not proposing to eliminate the private property. We are not proposing this extreme. Nobody knows what will happen in the future, but in this moment it would be madness”. Is impossible to say if in the future Venezuela will become a communist country, but despite what the opposition claims, the current policies of the president Chavez are far from being totalitarian. The social programs so far are very respectful of individual freedoms, and the economic policies are not much different from the ones of the current governments of Brasil or Argentina, and have been actually lauded by international organizations as the International Monetery Fund and the international press like the Wall Street Journal who are far from being communist entities.

Go to the next installment of my Venezuela travel diary.