Reply #5: God’s Land: Mennonites and land ownership in Bolivia

[Judi Lynn]

God’s Land: Mennonites and land ownership in Bolivia
January 20, 2009

http://liberalitas.files.wordpress.com.nyud.net:8090/2009/01/mennonites.jpg

Came across this excellent radio documentary which briefly reviews the current hardships Mennonites in Bolivia are experiencing as their way of life intersects with the current Bolivian political reality.

From the CBC:
Forty years ago, a group of Canadian Mennonites packed up and headed for Bolivia. They went in search of good farm land and isolation. And that’s what they got. But now, their quiet, comfortable existence has been caught up in a fierce political debate.

According to one study, the majority of arable land in Bolivia is concentrated on just 700 farms leaving many of the country’s indigenous people with little or nothing. Evo Morales has vowed to change that. He’s Bolivia’s first indigenous leader and he’s proposing a series of new laws on land ownership as well as a new constitution that Bolivians will vote on in two weeks. And if those laws pass, the Mennonites — and there are nearly ten thousand of them — could see their way of life disappear.

Freelance broadcaster Sarah Richards traveled to eastern Bolivia to visit these reclusive Mennonite communities. And she’s prepared this documentary about their uncertain future. It’s called God’s Land.

Listen to the documentary on the CBC website. Scroll down to Part 2.

http://liberalitas.wordpress.com/2009/01/20/gods-land-mennonites-and-land-ownership-in-bolivia/

~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.mennoweekly.org.nyud.net:8090/media/uploads/images/2009/04/17/klaueW.jpg



Mennonites in Bolivia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeeObNFv30s

Bolivian Reforms Raise Anxiety on Mennonite Frontier

http://graphics8.nytimes.com.nyud.net:8090/images/2006/12/21/world/600_bolivia_1.jpg

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: December 21, 2006

MANITOBA, Bolivia, Dec. 19 — With its horse-drawn buggies, farmhouses with manicured lawns and fields planted to the horizon with soybeans and sorghum, this Mennonite settlement in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands feels like a tropical version of rural Ohio or Pennsylvania.

That placid impression lasts until farmers here start talking about their fears of President Evo Morales’s plans for land reform.

One year into an administration that intends to reverse centuries of subjugation of Bolivia’s indigenous majority, Mr. Morales has plans to redistribute as many as 48 million acres of land, considered idle or ill gotten through opaque purchase agreements, to hundreds of thousands of peasants.

The project won approval last month in Congress, and thousands of Mr. Morales’s supporters marched in La Paz, the capital, in celebration. But it has shaken Manitoba and Bolivia’s 41 other Mennonite farming communities.

~snip~
Families in Manitoba and other Mennonite communities tend to be large, often with 6 to 12 children. With family farms generally limited to about 100 acres, population growth inevitably pushes families to search for new land to settle.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/world/americas/21bolivia.html