By Stephen Bartlett, Agricultural Missions and Family Farm Defenders board member
During an August visit to Venezuela, after all the meetings where I worked interpreting for North American delegates to various social movement assemblies, I finally got to go out with Venezuelan, Peruvian and Ecuadorean campesino activists to learn what was happening with the Agrarian Reform Program now on-going in the Revolutionary Bolivarian Venezuela. Getting control of Venezuelans oil production and channeling the profits for the benefit of the impoverished majority was not the only thing going on in Venezuela these days, although a huge breakthrough; the Chávez government was also in the midst of a very confrontation, dangerous and truly revolutionary process of land redistribution and policy reform through an agricultural cooperativism movement and government support of sustainable agriculture to feed the nation.
I hooked up with Lesbia Solorzano, Ramón Vásquez and Migdalia Pérez of CANEZ (Coordinadora Agraria Nacional Ezequiel Zamora, or National Agrarian Ezequiel Zamora Coordination), the Venezuelan organization that participates in the Vía Campesina movement, to help me understand the realities for rural Venezuelans in a country awash in petroleum and that has come to import more than 70% of its food. The government led by President Hugo Chávez was determined to reverse this and undergo profound and thorough agrarian reform, and to work toward food sovereignty to add to its other sovereign characteristics as a people.
Excerpt from trip diary:
The days spent with CANEZ conditioned myself and a Peruvian water union organizer to wonder what state of existential stagnation we had been entrapped in. We were told our experience of Venezuelan logistics and bureaucracy was par for the course, but I began to imagine I was a character in an existentialist play like Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot.' The much-awaited visitor or promised outcome is always just short of arriving, and might never appear.
Happily, the hours and days of waiting to make the excursion to the countryside payed off with excellent visits with newly hired government bureaucrats, agrarian reform advocates, agrarian organizers, and agronomists trying out an agenda of egalitarianism and radical redistribution of wealth/land. Sometimes it appeared that the ideals and goals of the Chávez government concerning agriculture might appear to the Western-educated specialists in the employ of government bureaucracies to be in another dimension, hard to visualize at first glance... Surveyors were busy working out equitable plot delineations. Agronomists were being asked for help transporting manure. Pesticide and soil specialists were being asked where seedlings of the neem tree could be located in order to produce organic pesticides, or what bait plants one could use to control bugs on their pepper hedges. A spanking new 'Sustainable Agriculture' course is being developed now as part of an agreement between the Venezuelan government and state of Paraná in Brazil. After conversations with members of Vía Campesina, Chávez himself is now a stalwart opponent of genetically modified propietary seeds. He has become a dyed in the wool food sovereignty advocate! Not only that, he openly says Jesus Christ was a rebel and a revolutionary, turning the tables on the elites of his day. I hope more US progressives have a chance to hear him speak!
Jumping ahead in my narrative, when we finally did get out to the countryside, the campesinos we ran into out in the now beautifully tended soils of a previously unproductive latifundio out in Miranda province (a couple of hours from Caracas) were producing food in abundance despite being armed only with machetes and hoes and some credit to pay for supplementary labor (paid about $7 USD equivalent per day, without lunch), and Cartas Agrarias. Cartas Agrarias (Agrarian Decrees) are the Executive Branch of the Venezuelan government's way to push past the bottlenecks caused by landed Congressmen opposed to agrarian reform, who having engineered the repeal of important articles in the land law, would in effect have foot dragged to a situation of requiring complete legalization in order for land to be redistributed and put into production. The Carta Agraria is a governmental decree issued through the National Land Institute (INTI) and Ministry of Agriculture to particular cooperatives who apply for them, allowing for cooperative farmers to begin production on lands being expropriated but still shy of the final legalities of title transfer. This has greatly accelerated the movement of landless producers into productive lands. For example, we saw a 1.5 hectare (about 3.5 acres) field among about 93 such parcels head high in corn, two or thee ear to a plant, cassava plants nearly wrist thick at the base and head high (some 15-20 kilos of sweet manioc sometimes comes up from underground when pulled) and peppers bushes shoulder high, a jungle of peppers: we are talking highly fertile ground. Omar Guerra, the cooperative coordinator, is a big strong man of 55 with the alert intellect and massive hands of a longtime community organizer and farmer.
While walking the fields with old Quito indigenous acquaintance (brother of Doris Trujillo) William Trujillo of CONFEUNASSC in Ecuador, video interviewed Omar, while our CANEZ hostess Migdalia Pérez expertly took a two edge bladed machete and began slashing at weeds under the corn while Ramón Vásquez and I harvested maize and cassava to take back to Caracas.... We heard that the worker on this field was an elderly campesino who hires a nephew and a neighbor to work his fields each day until midday, and that the harvest was too large for the trucks that come to fetch, without making multiple trips.
All of those present were happy to see land being used to grow food for the local populace, and that the government of Venezuela had taken the difficult step of breaking up idle latifundios in order to redistribute wealth and the means of production (there is a Marxist concept US citizens rarely get to think about). Andrea Encalada, also of CONFEUNASSC in Ecuador, took notes for the documentary film she and William are producing about Venezuela.
At the time some 49 latifundios had been identified so far and actions are being taken to break up 20 of them. I knew this because there was an INTI publication with Chávez on the cover saying: “We will not rest until not a square meter remains of unproductive latifundio.” What more could landless farmers ask? (Well, we did learn that 130 small farmers had been killed during the process of actually occupying those lands, and so far no one had been convicted for these crimes.) Together the 49 latifundios comprise lands amounting to hundreds of thousands of hectares. People are asked to call a hotline telephone number if they think they know of lands that were settled under irregular circumstances, in order to identify more.
The INTI (Instituto Nacional de Tierra) is responsible for carrying this policy out. This doubtless has the wealthy absentee land owners with plots the size of Connecticut and land usurpers and speculators concerned for their “properties.” So you can imagine their media campaign in the elite newspapers that dominate Venezuelan print media and their reactionary television stations. The newly hired INTI director, Antonio Albarrán, said all the right things to us, but was frank that cracking the impunity issue for campesinos shot by hired assassins would not be easy, given the corruption in the judicial system still not sufficiently reformed at provincial and local levels... he has only been at work with the INTI one month, after the previous director (running counter to the spirit of the new agriculture and land law) was badly injured in a car accident “after drinking too much” according to Lesbia Solorzano (the former INTI director was driving his Mercedes, I was told).
His assistant, Javier Ibarra, asked me in passing to see him after our meeting with the director to ask about contacts with the MST, since I was wearing an MST t-shirt. In exchange for contacts with the international relations office of the MST, he provided us a CD of documents from the INTI with lots of background pieces and hard data, admitted he was not familiar with agricultural matters, but was more of an organizer. I told him he should read up on the Via Campesina and gave him contacts and the website. He was young and full of ideals and might take advantage of a fast learning curve, I thought.
Dynamic and upbeat also was Fanny Febles, director of public relations... the abundant media resource distribution person. She had it all, videos about Bolivar and Agrarian Reform, latest newspapers of the INTI, political analysis, and non-stop contact with solidarity entities. She was happy to be doing what she was doing, and it was contagious.
Another woman was at her desk busy in a never-ended task of formatting and downloading onto her hard drive surveys of lands up for redistribution. Local agrarian councils had been organized across the country to debate in public forums the merits of agricultural projects and policies for each municipality. Lots of false starts and unpreparedness were still evidently impeding the full flowering of this movement, but some committees were reportedly working well and starting sustainable agriculture projects and collective marketing structures and providing some extension to newly producing campesinos. For a good part of the week, my Peruvian water activist friend Isabel and I sat around at a downtown office visited by campesinos involved in getting lands of their own, a kind of stop to get advocacy and help from agrarian reform advocates employed by the government. Atención Campesina. We can attest that at all times we were there a steady stream of Venezuelan would-be campesinos in groups conferring with counselors, who were on the phone with bureaucrats, at maps looking hard at surveys, discussing strategies for navigating the Venezuelan bureaucracy, making phone interventions or even going on visits with particular bureaucrats, etc...
Meanwhile, after days of waiting around aimlessly it seemed, before we actually got to get out to the countryside, the local CANEZ organizers were not doing well getting the INTI to provide a vehicle and driver for our excursion to the countryside (CANEZ has few resources of its own), so after a two day wait, trip companion Isabel Peru, took measures and talked her way to results. (I would not have been so bold, but Fanny Febles and others helped provide her the necessary access to ask for the favor.) So it was Isabel Díaz Ubillus, organizer of a Peruvian water worker union, who miraculously got us the vehicle we needed to visit the countryside, promising we would buy lunch for the driver, and that the vehicle would be back before 4 p.m. (The latter did not work out due to delays, but the Peruvian woman was en route to Peru by then, after we dropped her at the airport on the coast.)
I generously tipped the driver for getting us home alive much later that day, after a 2 mile stretch underground in what I call “the tunnel from hell,” full of carbon monoxide and particulate poisons hanging under dim yellow lights. In the midst of the tunnel of death, our indigenous companion William Trujillo nodded his head gravely and said: “A dangerous place, full of unearthed demons.” A valid take, I thought, to describe the contaminants of fossil fuels unventilated and under a mountain where we crept along in stop-and-go traffic. I couldn't have imagined a more dangerous situation. The air was chocking us and I was thinking fast about how to get out of the tunnel on foot if necessary if the traffic gridlocked, crouching down low to the ground to get out of the worst of the smog. Could one walk a mile under such conditions?
Never have we been more relieved when we burst out finally into the evenings light, into the normal Latin American city smog that seemed like a holy giver of life. We would live to breath smog another day in Caracas. Everything from here on in is gravy, is what I thought at the time and still do. Hence the spiritually regenerative ending of “In Caracas and Waiting for Godot.” Long Live Agrarian Reform in Venezuela! If you buy at CITGO stations, you are now bankrolling health and education and even agrarian reform in Venezuela whose government owns those 14,000 gas stations and whose land and farmers are eager to feed the nation, and getting a new crack at it for the first time since the oil boom and US dependency economy consolidated and maintained since the 40s. It is a new day and a fresh wind blowing in Venezuela.
