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Headlines : InternationalMorales threatens Bolivia land reform by presidential decree
Forget the awful headline – this is positive news from Bolivia. Evo Morales is carrying through on a campaign promise to his supporters to begin the redistribution of land in Bolivia.
After years of struggle, and miles of marching, people like Natalio Izaguirre have demanded this, and now are ready to fight the landowning aristocracy for a slice of Bolivia’s land:
“We’re exhausted, sure” he said, “but we are here to reclaim our rights from those speculators who have taken our lands all over the country.”
This is a welcome move in a nation where 63 percent live in poverty, with a poverty rate of 79 percent in rural areas. In the east, IPS reported in May that “A study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) found that in this region, just 100 families own 25 million hectares, while two million families of small farmers have barely five million hectares.”
[Posted By Szamko]Republished from International Herald Tribune
President Evo Morales said Tuesday he was preparing to decree a law that would allow the government to redistribute as much as a fifth of the country’s land as thousand of Indians marched into this Andean capital in support of the agrarian reform.
Conservative lawmakers are boycotting Bolivia’s Senate to block Morales’ land proposal, which would grant the government power to seize unproductive land held by a wealthy elite and redistribute it to Bolivia’s landless poor.
Morales said he had “no fear” of using a presidential decree to circumvent Congress and impose his ambitious agrarian reform bill, which eventually aims to redistribute some 77,000 square miles (18,130 sq. kilometers).
“It is not possible, my friends, to have so much land in so few hands, and so many hands without land,” Morales told an estimated 10,000 people gathered in a plaza in the city center.
Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.
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Bolivian Senate OKs Sweeping Land Reform
Bolivia PASSES SWEEPING land law
Bolivia’s Senate met in a surprise session late on Tuesday and quickly passed a controversial land redistribution bill after OPPOSITION UNITY COLLAPSED IN THE FACE OF MARCHES FOR WEEKS BY THOUSANDS OF LANDLESS INDIANS in support of the measure.
The vote came after conservative legislators ended their week-long boycott of the 25-member upper house, as three opposition members established the necessary quorum for voting along with the ruling party’s 12 senators.
The bill had been passed by the chamber of deputies two weeks ago.
The Senate about-face came amid political tensions between Morales and the opposition. Civil society leaders in eight of nine provinces have called for a general strike on Friday.
Government officials said that large landowners from the eastern region of Santa Cruz, the country’s agricultural heartland and a bastion of the conservative opposition, had been behind the Senate protest.
Evo Morales, Bolivia’s leftist president, told the protesting landless Indians this week that he would issue a presidential decree to redistribute idle land to poor peasants if the boycott continued.
Morales’ “land reform”, a key campaign promise, aims to redistribute some 48 MILLION ACRES, or almost a fifth of Bolivia’s territory, within five years.
The plan, which calls for redistribution of idle land to poor peasants, enjoys widespread support.
But estate owners in Santa Cruz, where vast cattle ranches and soy plantations abound, are fearful their land might be confiscated.
Morales has ruled out mass expropriations, saying only unproductive or illegally owned land will be targeted.
But, analysts say, some of his plans are fuelling economic and racial tensions between the European-descended minority of the eastern regions and the indigenous majority that populate the Andean highlands.
Landowners’ protest
Earlier this week thousands protested in the city against against the measure. The protesters also called for more autonomy from the central government.
A former opposition presidential candidate is on a hunger strike, and opposition legislators walked out of the Senate to protest against Morales’ drive to control an assembly that is rewriting the country’s constitution.
Dozens of indigenous activists attended the Senate session and celebrated outside the legislative palace when the bill was passed.
Morales’ drive to nationalise the energy industry has enjoyed widespread political support, but his plan to redistribute what he calls idle land to the poor, indigenous majority that forms his power base had been blocked by opposition senators.
“We are not afraid to issue a decree to put an end to large estates,” Morales told supporters shortly after returning to Bolivia from a two-day visit to the Netherlands, and before heading to Nigeria for a summit of African and Latin American leaders.
At the rally in La Paz on Tuesday, the crowd called for him to close the Senate, but Morales ruled this out.
I cannot close down the Senate … those that have [already] closed it are dealing a blow to democracy,” said Morales, the country’s first indigenous president who gained prominence as a protest leader and head of a nationwide coca leaf growers’ group.
Source: Al Jazeera
I’d like to hear more about that Summit of African and Latin American leaders. Anyone heard anything about that?
Protests spark clashes in Bolivia (BBC 15/12)