To reach the heart of Venezuela’s agrarian revolution, you drive west of Caracas towards the Andes, deep into tropical countryside where it is always hot, and stop at the end of a dirt track where a sign says ”Mixta Aracal”.
As far as the eye can see rolls a patchwork of fields, maize, bananas, black beans and tomatoes, dotted with stooping figures in red T-shirts, and some tractors from China and Iran.
This used to be a tycoon’s sugar-cane plantation, but in 2001 it was taken over by peasants and turned into a cooperative and now hums with socialist ideals.
A poster of President Hugo Chávez in the canteen smiles down on a neatly typed report detailing rising crop yields. ”We are all equal here. This is about humanism,” said Alonso Rodriguez (44), the financial coordinator.
Labourers do not own the land because that would be capitalism. The state owns it but they are in charge, earning a salary and voting on key decisions. They trundle to work on a bus with a slogan emblazoned on its side: ”Revolutionary production and cultural transformation”.
Government officials praise Mixta Aracal, a tract of 690ha outside San Felipe, the capital of Yaracuy state, for giving justice to landless peasants and boosting the country’s food production. They call it a vision of the future.
To critics it is exactly that, a glimpse of what is to come, and they are appalled. The image of a successful cooperative built on the ashes of a private estate — literally so, since it was burned — is as false as a Potemkin village, they say.
The cooperative and the policy driving it is a folly that exposes a government with more ambition and oil money than sense, said Vladimir Rodriguez (43). He was head of Yaracuy’s sugar-cane producers until peasants chased him off his own plantation, similar to that which Mixta Aracal replaced, earlier this year.
”Sure, they are growing some food. But look at the cost, it’s not viable.” He claimed the cooperative is haemorrhaging losses and will collapse when subsidies run out. He predicted ruin similar to that which followed Robert Mugabe’s land seizures in Zimbabwe.
Which side is right? Since Chávez announced a land revolution, headlines have focused on expropriations and sporadic violence that reportedly has claimed dozens of lives. A question seldom asked is whether the reforms are widespread and working.
Success would enhance claims that this corner of Latin America is forging a radical and successful alternative to neoliberalism. Failure would bolster sceptics who say chavismo is blowing oil wealth on old-style left-wing populism.
Simple reason
There is no conclusive answer for the simple reason that the reforms have not started in earnest.
In much of the country nothing has happened: no expropriations, no cooperatives, no bold experiments. Since a 2001 land-reform Act, 200 000 families, about a million people, have been settled on to 2,5-million hectares, according to the government, with part of a ranch owned by the British firm Vestey among property seized.
Given a colonial legacy that left nearly 5% of landowners owning 80% of the land, that redistribution is modest — and a relief for Fedenaga, the ranchers’ federation. ”The revolution doesn’t exist. It’s all slogans,” said its leader, Genaro Mendez, beaming.
The unexpectedly slow rate of change has been attributed to constitutional wrangling, fumbling bureaucracy and weak peasant organisation. But Chávez, first elected in 1998, has promised that things will speed up after the December election, which he is expected to win. He says he hopes to rule until 2021.
”There is revolutionary intent,” said Alberto Garrido, a historian and commentator. ”It’s probable land is the first thing they will turn to.”
Yaracuy should give some indication of what to expect, since under an energetic chavista governor it has surged ahead of Venezuela’s other 22 states by redistributing about a fifth of cultivable land, mostly sugar-cane plantations, to cooperatives.
Typically, the sequence is for peasants and officials to identify a plantation deemed underproductive, or allegedly lacking proper title deeds, and give the owner a few weeks to quit.
Mixta Aracal’s peasants fought a pitched battle with police in 2001, leaving 23 people injured, to claim their prize. Since then the police and army have started supporting the invaders, who claim the land-reform Act puts the law on their side.
This year, when peasants moved in on Rodriguez, the state’s former sugar-cane leader, he obtained a court order upholding ownership, but the police ignored his calls. The farmer fled in April after his fields were burned and men with machetes surrounded his car. He is now an unemployed city dweller.
Mixta Aracal had bumpy beginnings. From 783 members five years ago, only 157 are still active. The rest quit because work was tough, returns poor and they wanted to own their own plots. ”They were individualists,” said Rodgriguez, the financial coordinator. ”It’s impossible to have socialism and capitalism side by side, so they left.”
With government credits and subsidised tractors, the cooperative’s maize and tomato yields have risen to 45 tonnes each and members draw a weekly salary that is decent by local standards. ”We still have a lot to do, but it’s working,” said Rodriguez.
Yaracuy’s farming associations disagree. They say most cooperatives collapse into corruption and idleness and those that survive end up milking the state rather than cows.
Neither side’s claims can be confirmed. One certainty is that if Chávez wins in December, land redistribution will accelerate. It will soon become clear if the revolution works. — Guardian Unlimited