Landowners’ Rebellion: Slavery and Saneamiento in Bolivia

[Judi Lynn]

Landowners’ Rebellion: Slavery and Saneamiento in Bolivia
Written by Alexander van Schaick
Monday, 28 April 2008

In recent weeks, cattle ranchers and landowners in Bolivia’s Cordillera province, located in the south of the department of Santa Cruz, resorted to blockades and violence in order to halt the work of Bolivia’s National Institute for Agrarian Reform (INRA – Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria). As a referendum on Departmental Autonomy for Santa Cruz draws near, the conflict calls into question the central government’s ability to enforce the law in the Bolivian lowlands.

The dispute centers on the region of Alto Parapetí, south of the provincial capital of Camiri, where INRA is currently trying to carry out land reform and create an indigenous territory for the Guaraní indigenous people. Additionally, it claims various communities of Guaraní live and work on white or mestizo-owned ranches in conditions of semi-slavery.

For nine days landowners and their supporters blockaded major highways and virtually sealed off Alto Parapetí. The blockades continued until Bolivia’s Vice-minister of Land, Alejandro Almaráz, left the region on April 18. At the end of February, Ronald Larsen, a major landowner in Santa Cruz, and other ranchers took Almaráz hostage at gunpoint for several hours when he and other government officials tried to enter the region.

An Incomplete Land Reform

In the 1990s and up to the present, the Guaraní Nation and Bolivia’s other lowland indigenous peoples mobilized to force the national government to recognize their right to their ancestral territories. In 1996, the first administration of Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada passed a land reform law that gave Bolivia’s indigenous people the opportunity to claim their Communal Territory of Origin (Territorio Comunitario de Origen or TCO).

The 1996 law – Ley N°1715 – reorganized the country’s land law and agrarian reform institutions. It also established INRA to resolve land conflicts and issue titles through a process called saneamiento. In this process, INRA would establish property limits, to look into whether property owners had obtained land legally and to investigate whether they were putting their land to socially or economically productive use. (Latifundios, or huge tracks of idle land used to speculate on rising land prices or as liens to obtain loans, are banned by the Bolivian constitution.) Finally, INRA would resolve land conflicts through mediation and legal processes, title TCOs for indigenous people, and establish parcels of state-owned land for distribution. In the end, landowners would own land with clear title. INRA was to carry out saneamiento throughout all of Bolivia between 1996 and 2006.

But after ten years, INRA had only completely finished the saneamiento process for 10 percent of its goal. Over half of the land INRA sought to have titled had not even begun the process. According to critiques from indigenous and campesino (peasant farmer) organizations, saneamiento was characterized by corruption, a lack of transparency and participation, and a bias in favor of large landholders.

In 2006, the administration of president Evo Morales pushed through several laws (laws N°3501 and N°3545) in order to improve the saneamiento process for the benefit of peasants and indigenous people. Among other changes, the new laws attempted to improve the control indigenous and peasant organizations can exercise over the process, tightened restrictions on what constitutes the productive use of land, and gave INRA the authority to nullify property rights of landowners found to use workers in a system of servitude, captivity, forced labor, or debt peonage. INRA and the Vice-ministry of Land have also been much more active under Morales: in the first two years of his administration, INRA has finished the saneamiento process for 10.2 million hectares as opposed to 9.2 million completed by the previous 5 presidents in the nine years since INRA’s founding.

http://www.upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1254/1/