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Chavez’s Agrarian Land Reform: More like Lincoln than Lenin

By Seth R. DeLong, Ph.D.
Council on Hemispheric Affairs
March 1, 2005

* Land Reform is the traditional third rail of left-of-center governments and social reform movements.

* President Hugo Chavez’s plan is fundamentally different from other Latin American attempts at land reform. The proper historical parallel is President Lincoln’s Homestead Act.

* Chavez’s opponents, who see him as "another Castro," wrongly view his agrarian reform program as a total assault on private property.

* Land Reform is one of the most progressive aspects of Chavez’s "Bolivarian Revolution" as it seeks to alter the fundamental power structure of the landed versus the landless, reduce Venezuela’s dependence on foodstuff imports, and redress the country’s disastrous experience with the "Dutch Disease."

* The government should concentrate more on shoring up the agricultural base of the public lands it already has distributed to peasant cooperatives, rather than draw a premature bead on private lands.


President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is pushing full speed ahead with land reform, an issue that has been one of the most divisive and perennially debated topics in Latin America. Land reform poses perhaps the greatest challenge yet to Chavez’s stormy presidency, as it historically has been the Achilles’ heel of left-of-center regimes. Chavez’s daunting task is twofold: first, he will have to overcome problems that doomed past attempts at land reform throughout the region by other reformist governments, notably Jacobo Arbenz’s 1954 attempts in Guatemala and Salvador Allende’s 1970 - 1973 attempts in Chile. Second, he must grapple with the middle class’s opposition to agrarian reform, which it will continue to oppose more tenaciously than any other aspect of his "Bolivarian revolution." So far, he appears to have learned from his predecessors’ mistakes by implementing a host of cautionary institutional measures in order to avoid them. Although the rightwing wrongly considers land reform to be a carte blanche attack on private property, the opposition and business interests, such as the Vestey cattle ranch, do have some legitimate concerns that need to be addressed.

The Facts Regarding Chavez’s Land Reform
The Venezuelan leader first articulated his land reform plan, what he calls "Vuelta al Campo," (Return to the Countryside) under the Law on Land and Agricultural Development in November 2001. The goals of this legislation were as follows: to set limits on the size of landholdings, tax unused property as an incentive to spur agricultural growth, redistribute unused, primarily government-owned land to peasant families and cooperatives and, lastly, expropriate uncultivated and fallow land from large, private estates for the purpose of redistribution. On the last and most controversial goal, the landowners would be compensated for their land at market value. The National Land Institute (INTI) was set up to facilitate achieving these goals by establishing criteria to determine what land could be redistributed and the eligibility of those applying for new land deeds. Under Plan Zamora of 2003, both the INTI and its sister organizations, the National Rural Development Institute and the Venezuelan Agricultural Organization, have been tasked to administer agricultural expertise to the new peasant landowners and to provide markets for their goods. After a slow start, the Chavez government has redistributed about 2.2 million hectares of state owned land to more than 130,000 peasant families and cooperatives (1 hectare = 2.47 acres). So far, although not one acre of private property has been expropriated by the government, tensions are beginning to mount as Chavez extends his reform program from government-owned land to the latifundios (large, privately owned estates of more than 5,000 hectares, roughly 12,350 acres).

Chavez Emulates Lincoln
In the history of land reform, the most accurate analogy to illustrate what is transpiring in Venezuela is not Zimbabwe or Cuba -- Chavez officials have repeatedly emphasized that they are not emulating the Cuban model of land reform -- but the U.S.’ own Homestead Act. Signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the measure declared that any U.S. or intended citizen of at least 21 years of age could claim up to 160 acres of government land. Like Chavez’s Vuelta al Campo, there were many restrictions in the Act which benefited the recipients by ensuring that the new reform could not be manipulated by entrenched, moneyed interests. Under Lincoln’s legislation, the land could not be sold to speculators or used as debt collateral, and only after five years of "actual settlement and cultivation," according to Section 2, could the homesteader submit an application for a land patent. Similarly, in Chavez’s plan, only after three years may the peasants obtain legal ownership of the land, and only then after they have rendered it productive. The Homestead Act was one of the most progressive and far-reaching government initiatives in U.S. history insofar as it helped to develop and secure an agrarian-based middle class, which had an epic impact on the future democratization of the nation. That Chavez is trying to emulate it in his own country, as part of his plan to extirpate Venezuela’s entrenched inequality, is an effort that all right-minded people should applaud.



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