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A Communist Revival In Venezuela?
Tuesday, January 25, 2005   By: Juan Paxety

Land reform is hugo's latest.

There's a dangerous trend developing only a few hundred miles from the U.S. and we'd better be watching.  Of all things, it appears to be a resurgance of communism.

Looking at the hot beds of Latin American politics is like a return to my youth - the language just sounds so old.  The hot issues are land reform, food ration cards, U.S. imperialist strategy, unification projects, etc. the Marxist language I heard when I was young.  And that we thought had died with the collapse of the Berlin Wall 16-years ago.  Unfortunately, the ideas behind that language are alive and growning only a few miles away.

In Venezuela, hugo chavez seems to have taken over the communist revolution from fidel.  And Venezuela is more dangerous than Cuba - Venezuela has oil to export that Cuba has never had. What's hugo doing?  For starters, he's taking land away from rich people. The St. Petersburg Times reports that chavez's soldiers paid a threatening visit to a biological research station located in the far western part of the country:

The Hato Pinero eco-lodge might seem an odd place to begin an agrarian reform program. Set in the sweltering savanna, the sprawling 180,000-acre cattle ranch teems with exotic wildlife. Giant green anacondas, the Orinoco crocodile and an endangered species of jaguar roam free.

The Times goes on to report that the visit came only four days after chavez set up what he called land reform commissions.  He claims to be at war against large estates.

This is exactly the language I remember being used in Vietnam.  The communists, the Viet Cong, claimed to be taking land from the rich and giving it to the poot. But the poor were never to get actual ownership, not in the way we think of it in the west.  Under communist rule, the state owns everything.  The poor own land only in the sense that they are part of the state.

"Land for those who work it! Justice in the farmlands," he told an adoring crowd of red-shirted revolutionaries who packed a Caracas convention center when he signed the land reform decree.

The leader of the land reform commission is a man who was formely a secret police chief, and who was once a male stripper.

Chavez called the new land reform commissions a "leap forward" in his revolution for the poor, evoking Mao Tse-Tung's disastrous Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s.

Mao said his leap would make China's economy rival the United States' by 1988. Millions ended up starving to death. Chavez is almost as ambitious, pledging to eliminate poverty by 2021 by making Venezuela self-sufficient in food.

But experts warn that his policies are as misguided as were Mao's. "His plan won't work," said Carlos Machado, an agribusiness professor at the Caracas-based IESA business school. "The state is the worst farmer. All he can hope to achieve is a prize for preserving poverty."

Venezuela is the world's fifth-largest exporter of oil, and the U.S. gets 13% of its oil from there.  Despite the oil exports, Venezuela's citizens are dirt poor. The country imports 709% of it's food.

Part of the trouble is that Venezuela's soil is not very good for farming.  It's too acid and lacks nutrients.  That forces large farmers to rotate their fields giving the impression that some fields are not being used.  And that gives chavez an in to seize the land. He's declared that he will "rescue" the land he deems idle, and farmers fear that means the land they leave to lie fallow between crops.  From what little I know about farming, this seems a disasterous policy.

Another familiar sounding policy is one in which chavez is encouraging the slum dwellers in the cities to "rediscover" their peseant roots by moving back to small farms. Pol Pot did that in Cambodia.  While it may sound like a good idea, in the past, these agrarian reform movements have forced people onto plots of land too small to efficiently raise crops - leading to more poverty.

It all sounds too familiar. We'd better watch closely. Read the whole thing.

 

  



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