PROLESA is a small dairy cooperative in the Venezuelan state of Tachira. It is located in a river delta about 50 kms from San Cristobal. The community is made up of about 250 farming families and 25 of those families are involved in the PROLESA Dairy Cooperative.
By Federico Fuentes - Green Left Weekly, May 24th 2011
Having arrived back in Caracas after more than two weeks visiting various rural communities, leaders from the National Campesino Front Ezequiel Zamora (FNCEZ) told us that the bodies of two of their comrades, missing since April 12, had been found.
Venezuelan agrarian land reforms continue. Publicly owned land has already been given to hundreds and thousands of farmers. Based on a 2001 land law that allows the government to expropriate land if judged either idle or unproductive, the Venezuelan government is now seizing privately owned farms in the country's agricultural heartland.
More than 500 Colombians worked in near-slavery conditions on recently expropriated estates in northeastern Venezuela, Caracas’ minister for Agriculture and Land said Monday.
The Venezuelan government handed land titles to 41,600 hectares to three communities of around 500 Yukpa Indians on the western border with Colombia. However, the question of the demarcation of the broader ancestral territory of the entire ethnic group, made up of around 10,000 people, is still pending.
By Zachary Lown – Venezuelanalysis.com, Sep 2nd 2009
In
Merida, Venezuela socialist governing officials clashed last June with families
that took over unproductive farm land. This clash illustrates an apparent
contradiction within the Chavez government's "participatory and protagonistic
democracy" which calls on citizens to seize control over their communities and
lives yet must also ensure political stability in strategic regions of the
country.
The governor of Venezuela's Portuguesa state, Wilmer Castro, along with the leaders of four national farmer rights fronts created a State Farmers' Council on Thursday to defend small and landless farmers against attacks by large estate owners who oppose the government's land reform measures.
Police in Portuguesa state, Venezuela, forcibly evicted more than sixty landless farmers and three National Institute of Land (INTI) workers on Friday from a section of a privately owned estate that the INTI had marked for re-distribution.
