Venezuela´s land grab

Venezuela’s land grab

OUR OPINION: Taking land by force no solution to inequality

What a sad fraternity Venezuelan farmer Franklin Brito just joined.

Like Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo before him, Mr. Brito, 49, chose to starve himself to death over a question of principle. He shrank to 77 pounds and died last week rather than toe the line on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s dubious land reform program.

He’s the 250th person to die in a property redistribution dispute since Mr. Chávez first launched his land-grab program nearly a decade ago. Most of the others were peasants the plan ostensibly sought to help, murdered by farmers.

What a miserable brotherhood Mr. Chávez has joined: the clique of authoritarians who govern nations that lack a rule of law, where private property can be given, licensed and legislated away. Nations like Cuba, where men waste away in protest.

In his latest copy-cat move to have Venezuela be more like Cuba’s top-down, failed economy, Mr. Chávez seeks to take control of food production and distribution by offering a “Good Life card” that provides credit for groceries bought at state stores. The same government that let tens of thousands of tons of food rot at the port while prices soared wants a bigger piece of the land and food business.

Mr. Chávez argues that his land distribution is about equality. It’s more likely about his quest to centralize the economy and take swipes at property owners.

Case in point: Venezuela’s chief prosecutor Luisa Ortega Díaz assigned a prosecutor to determine whether anyone in Mr. Brito’s circle of family and friends encouraged suicide and should serve a decade in prison.

Talk about harassment. Some are right to wonder if Mr. Brito’s forced stay in a military hospital for nearly a year makes the government complicit.

`Not expropriation’

Mr. Brito had been on half a dozen hunger strikes since 2004, when the government gave his neighbors license to farm part of his land. (But don’t call that expropriation, the government says.) He cut off a finger and sewed his mouth shut while the government doled out more private property to landless peasants.

Mr. Brito was a proud, if stubborn, farmer. He kept fasting even after the government threw cash at him and gave him his land back, because it refused to give him official documentation stating the land was his.

Venezuela had one of the worst land equality rates in the Americas, and the United Nations says it’s now one of the leaders in reducing that historic poverty disparity.

But by confiscating land by force, the government failed to implement any fair form of appeal, at least not one where a farmer has a say about things like fair market compensation.

Already, the Chávez government has expropriated 772 farms, nearly 7.5 million acres. Despite mounting complaints and a rising death toll, in June the Venezuelan legislature expanded by law what Mr. Chávez had done by presidential decree. Now any property the government deems underutilized can be snatched in the name of social justice.

As the bodies mount and the president’s record on food production remains spotty, Mr. Chávez has accomplished little except to exacerbate the social divide that helps keep him in power.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/09/1815758/venezuelas-land-grab.html#ixzz0z80OWmNe