Bolivia's movement of landless peasants, known by the initials MST like its powerful Brazilian counterpart, appears to have been dealt a double blow -by skilful government manoeuvring and by internal factionalism.
Last week a rebel faction, in defiance of the agreement reached between MST leader Angel Durán and the government (WR-03-27), moved a contingent of 200 peasants into a farm in the eastern department of Santa Cruz -only to leave without much resistance when the local authorities sent in a combined force of some 500 police and soldiers to evict them.
Their leader, Florencio Orco, proclaimed that the peasants were 'determined to continue their struggle for a piece of land.'
Durán's position has been battered by the publication of a report showing that his family was among the 80 who, a decade ago, benefited from the distribution of 70,000 hectares of land in his native Chaco region. His defence: it was poor land with no road access.
The government, meanwhile, played up its decision to accelerate the distribution of half a million hectares of state-owned land.
Land scenario. Durán's excuse highlighted one of the problems faced by his movement: that the availability of land and its endowments vary from one region to the next. In his own Chaco (where, as Che Guevara discovered 35 years ago) there are very few peasants, the semi-arid landscape is not easy to cultivate; it is mostly used for extensive cattle-ranching.
In the country's fertile valleys almost all the available land was distributed among the peasants by the 1953 agrarian reform -at a time when 65% of Bolivia's population was rural (now it is only 35%, which somewhat eases the relative demand for land).
The situation is similar for the good farmland in the high plateau, close to Lake Titicaca. Much of the rest of the Altiplano, towards the south, has been abandoned following the disappearance of lakes Poopó, Uru-uru and Coipasa.
This leaves the plains as the only remaining large reserve of available land. Anyone willing to meet environmental standards (or to promise to do so), and to pay taxes, can apply to the government for a land grant there.
Landless peasants are at a disadvantage there, vis-í -vis entrepreneurs with some money, and demand from the latter is likely to grow with the opening of the highway from La Paz to the Amazonian region. Only a well-planned government effort could conceivably ensure that the current landless peasants get their share.
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