By Humberto Marquez
Updated Sep 16, 2003, 9:45 pm

CARACAS (IPS/GIN) - The Venezuelan government has distributed a million hectares of land to 41,000 families in seven months as part of a reform program whose five-year goal is to settle 500,000 families on 10 million hectares.

President Hugo Chavez recently visited the farming town of Cubiro in west-central Venezuela, where another 212,911 hectares were distributed to 10,263 families, and $3.5 million in loans were made available to small farmers. In addition, 19 tractors were delivered to 62 agricultural cooperatives.

The settling of more than 10,000 families on small farms around Cubiro marked the start of the second phase of the government’s reform program, during which 63,400 families are to receive a total of one million hectares.

But the government’s efforts have run up against staunch opposition from agribusiness and large landholders, and the rural workers’ struggle for land has been plagued by violence. A number of land activists have been killed by hired gunmen.

Despite several decades of attempts at agrarian reform by Pres. Chavez’s predecessors, Venezuela remains one of the countries in Latin America with the greatest concentration of land in the fewest hands, a legacy of the colonial era. As in most of Latin America, the majority of the farmland in Venezuela is divided among a few large estates or "latifundios" while campesinos are either landless or live on tiny subsistence farms.

According to the agricultural census of 1988, six percent of landholders owned 70 percent of the arable land.

So far, 31437 individual or collective "land charters" have been issued as part of the Chavez program, the president of the National Land Institute (INTI), Ricardo Leonett, told a news briefing at which he was accompanied by campesinos and indigenous leaders from several Latin American countries.

Evo Morales, the indigenous leader of Bolivia’s coca farmers and the head of that country’s leading opposition party, the Movement Towards Socialism; Rafael Alegr’a with the V’a Campesina movement in Honduras; Edigio Brunito with Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement; Juan Tiney with the National Indigenous Coordinator of Guatemala; and Blanca Chancoso with Ecuador’s Pachakutik Movement praised the program launched by Pres. Chavez early this year.

Just 14 percent—5.8 million—of Venezuela’s 24 million people live in rural areas, including 500,000 who belong to 31 different indigenous groups.

Federations of large landowners and stockbreeders claim INTI has fomented invasions or occupations of rural property that has been owned by their families for generations. They have also brought lawsuits before the Supreme Court to challenge the "land charters" issued by the government.

"The government is responsible for the lack of legal guarantees in the countryside," complained the president of the stockbreeders’ association, Jose Luis Betancourt.

The first anti-Chavez business-labor work stoppage, held on Dec. 10, 2001, was triggered by the populist, left-leaning president’s decree of a "land law" that paved the way for this year’s distribution program.

The business community, the country’s traditional parties and conservative trade unions opposed to Pres. Chavez then held a series of protest marches in Caracas and other cities demanding that the president resign.

In April 2002, they backed a short-lived coup d’etat that removed him from power for two days. And in December and January, a two-month work stoppage and business shutdown unsuccessfully attempted to topple him.

The government’s adoption of currency and price controls led to a scarcity of farm products this year, which was alleviated in part by imported goods.

According to the Bolivian leader Morales, "there is a parallel between the situation in Venezuela and that of Bolivia. But in the latter, it is the state that invokes the argument of a lack of legal guarantees, to defend the landowners and deny the rights of the 70 percent of the population who are Aymara, Quechua and Guaran’ Indians."

The update on the progress made by Pres. Chavez’s land reform program coincided with a report that a human rights lawyer, Joe Castillo, was shot and killed by a hired killer on a motorcycle in the town of Machiques in western Venezuela.

Mr. Castillo had accused a local rancher of organizing and financing the murder of two land activists a year ago. The human rights lawyer was also active in issues involving indigenous and refugee rights, in the Episcopal Vicariate of Human Rights, part of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Caracas.

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission put out a statement deploring Castillo’s murder, and the Venezuelan umbrella group Forum for Life, which links a number of local human rights organizations, said the murder "clearly occurred in the context of the pattern of killings by hired gunmen."

Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel said at least 60 land activists have been killed in the past four years.

"Selective killings are a common practice aimed at putting an end to the campesino struggle for land. In Brazil, 48 rural activists have been killed, and more than 30 are currently in jail," said Mr. Brunito.

But Mr. Betancourt said ranchers and large landholders have nothing to do with the deaths, arguing instead that "it is the government that is failing to live up to its obligations to guarantee legal and personal security in the countryside, as demonstrated by the fact that there are currently 20 ranchers being held by kidnappers," mainly in western Venezuela.

The governor of the southwestern state of Tachira, Ronald Blanco, said the government will suspend the constitutional guarantees of free transit, freedom of assembly, and the sanctity of home privacy along the western border as part of emergency measures aimed at clamping down on the violence in the area.

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