Land Reform

The President of Venezuela’s National Land Institute (INTI), Luis Motta Dominguez, affirmed that more than 224,000 families have benefited from redistributed farmlands made available through the Chavez administration’s agrarian reform program.

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In this piece, Joe Emersberger and Jeb Sprague discuss filmaker Edward Ellis' documentary "Tierras Libres". The documentary explores the assassinations of peasant-activists killed by hired assassins for trying to implement the government's land reform project and their families' quest for justice within a judicial system that is still controlled in large part by the national elite.

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Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has ordered the immediate nationalisation of the British agricultural company Agroflora - a subsidiary of Britain’s Vestey Group which focuses on the commercial production of beef. 

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This past Wednesday, the Venezuelan government returned over 15,800 hectares of ancestral lands to the indigenous Yukpa people, as the country celebrated “Indigenous Resistance Day” with public events and marches across the country.

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It is not Hugo Chavez who endangers Venezuelans, but the greedy landowners killing peasant farmers with impunity.

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Joe Emersberger interviews Edward Ellis, director of "Tierras Libres," a documentary on the struggle for land reform in Venezuela. In this interview, Ellis discusses the murders of over 250 peasant activists and the Venezuelan government's response to these human rights abuses.

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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.

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A commune-under-construction, Paula Correa, in Aragua, is based on 360 hectares of land recovered by the Venezuelan government and handed over to the people to run, in 2007.  Using environmentally friendly techniques, the land is used to grow vegetables, which then go to the communities and to the government run distribution chains.The land was previously owned by large land holders (the Salazar family), who paid workers little, if anything at all, and  who only grew sugar on it, a product that doesn't take advantage of the land available.

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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.

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