La Paz – Bolivian President Evo Morales launched his agrarian reform plan on the weekend by announcing that at least 2.5 million hectares (6.25 million acres) of public lands will be redistributed to peasants and Indians.
In a downtown plaza in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, capital of the same-named province, Morales presided at a Saturday rally attended by thousands at which he said that the next step in the agrarian reform process will be for the state to appropriate unproductive properties with the aim of parcelling them out among the country’s poorest inhabitants.
“For victory in Mutun and for the launching of agrarian reform” was the slogan selected by Morales for the occasion, alluding to the decision last Thursday to give an indigenous firm the task of exploiting a gigantic iron ore mine in Santa Cruz near the border with Brazil.
In symbolic ceremony, Morales granted several of the people present at the meeting the first property titles to tracts of land, the kickoff to what he likes to call a revolution rather than a reform, because it is not limited just to redistributing land, he said.
The government move, which was accompanied by the promulgation of seven decrees, also presages the strengthening of the rural sector with technical and financial aid from Cuba and Venezuela.
Morales’ announcement on Saturday came one day after negotiations foundered between the government and the main agri-business and livestock organizations in the provinces of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, Potosi, Chuquisaca and Tarija.
At a meeting in Cochabamba on Friday, a government delegation headed by Morales himself was not able to reach agreement on how to implement the agrarian reform with the various organizations, foremost among which was the CAO agricultural chamber based in Santa Cruz.
La Paz announced in mid-May that it would eliminate idle land holdings and hand over 2.5 to 4 million hectares (6.25 to 10 million acres) to indigenous farmers.
Bolivia’s population is two-thirds Indian, and a like percentage of the public lives in poverty.
“I’m a part of you, I’m just like you, I come from among you,” Morales reminded the crowd before announcing the reform measure, by which he has said he intends to achieve what was not – in his opinion – accomplished in the country’s last agrarian reform in 1953.
Morales feels that the land redistribution in the early 1950s was insufficient and the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, the political party that carried it out, used it only to “legalize” the armed uprising that took the lives of many farmers and miners.
In his speech, Morales also mentioned the land occupations denounced by the property owners in Santa Cruz, the country’s largest and most prosperous province.
He denied once again that there had been any “expropriations” of land and added that in the talks with the businessmen he had proposed to prove it to them and they had refused.
“They, their grandfathers, have taken the land from us for 500 years. They have to return the land to its original owners,” the socialist president – himself an Aymara Indian – said to the crowd’s applause.
He said that he had had offers from China and Japan to buy soybeans and quinua – an Andean cereal – and that African nations had asked to buy sugar from La Paz, but he had not been able to authorize those transactions because of the country’s low production in those areas, a situation he said he wanted to change.
Morales, who rose to political prominence at the head of the coca growers’ union, said in his speech that he wanted to turn Bolivia into “an organic country,” by which he meant a provider of ecological products grown without fertilizers or chemicals, products that are highly valued in Europe.
