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

Seth R. DeLong,
Senior Research Fellow, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington DC, USA
25th February 2005

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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 1970-73 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.