Venezuelan troops grab farms from "Lord Spam"

Don

I. BACKGROUND

Prior to American acquisition, Hawaii developed an exten-
sive feudal land ownership system that has proved remarkably
resistant to change. Although Hawaiian leaders and American
settlers have repeatedly attempted to divide the large Hawai-
ian land estates, the results have generally been unsuccessful.
As of the late 1980's, the largest eighteen landowners in the
state owned 40% of the available land. L.A. Powe, Jr.,
Economic Make-Believe in the Supreme Court, 3 Const.
Comm. 385, 389 (1986). The seventy-two largest landowners
owned 47%. Id. With the federal and state government own-
ing 49% of the land in the state, id., little is left for the rest
of the population. As might be expected in an area of desir-
able real estate with little land for sale, the price of owning
land in Hawaii has grown exponentially over the past several
decades.
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Venezuela to seize aristocrat's cattle ranch
By Andy Webb-Vidal in Caracas and Henry Tricks in London
Published: January 7 2005 22:04 | Last updated: January 7 2005 22:04

Venezuelan authorities backed by troops are on Saturday expected to seize a 32,000-acre ranch owned by Lord Vestey, an English aristocrat and meat tycoon.

The move, the first in what is likely to be a number of Zimbabwe-style expropriations of big estates, appears to signal a renewed radicalisation in the leftwing government of President Hugo Chávez.

Lord Vestey, known as “Spam” to friends because his family's wealth comes from the meat trade, is one of Britain's richest men and a close friend of Prince Charles.

With interests that have ranged from overseas cattle ranches to a chain of butchers' shops, his fortune was estimated last year at £750m ($1.4bn, €1.07bn).
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Chavez commission to examine land reform in Venezuela
07/01/2005 - 07:10:38

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez plans to form a special commission to examine what Venezuela could do with its farmlands amid a major land reform effort, the agriculture minister said yesterday.

Chavez is expected to announce measures on Monday to ”reorganise the use of agricultural land” in the country, Agriculture and Lands Minister Arnoldo Marquez said.

He said the presidential commission’s duties will include studying the best uses of agricultural lands and defining actions the government will take in the cases of idle lands.

Few other details were immediately available, and Chavez did not mention the land issue when he spoke at a ceremony marking the opening of the legislative session.

Under the Land Law enacted by Chavez in 2001, the government can seize land if it deems property is not being used productively for agriculture, or if it was obtained illegally.
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Venezuela Weighs Seizing British-Owned Cattle Ranch (Update1)
Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuela will begin weighing this weekend whether to confiscate a 32,000-acre, British-owned cattle ranch under a government plan to give land to poor farmers, a state official said.

The ranch, located in Cojedes state 200 kilometers (124 miles) southwest of Caracas, would be the first private property seized under the plan should the London-based Vestey Group fail to prove it owns the land legally and uses it productively, said Rafael Aleman, general secretary of Cojedes state.

``This is the first property to be assessed by the state in its war on large land holdings,'' Aleman said in a news conference today in Caracas.

President Hugo Chavez said in August, after he defeated an effort to oust him in a recall vote, that he would target land holdings of more than 25,000 acres for possible seizure and distribution to landless farmers. A decree Chavez issued in 2001 gives the government the power to expropriate private property it considers unused or poorly managed. The directive is one of 49 Chavez after Congress gave him a year, starting in October 2000, to make laws with legislators' involvement.
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Chavez also met with U.S. President Bill Clinton, spoke at the Brookings Institution think tank and addressed leaders of the Organization of American States.

He said the impetus for reform in Venezuelan society is the result of "a powerful internal force, like a volcano, that has been maturing below the surface."

"It is an absolutely democratic and legitimate process, from beginning to end," he said.


'We are more confident about him'

Clinton's special envoy for Latin America, Kenneth MacKay, who attended the meeting between Chavez and Clinton, said that "we are more confident about him," although the jury was still out on the direction Venezuela was taking.

Analysts said the Clinton administration appears to be willing to give Chavez a chance.
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Chavez sits atop a reserve of crude that rivals Iraq's. And it's not his presidency of Venezuela that drives the White House bananas, it was his presidency of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC. While in control of the OPEC secretariat, Chavez cut a deal with our maximum leader of the time, Bill Clinton, on the price of oil. It was a 'Goldilocks' plan. The price would not be too low, not too high; just right, kept between $20 and $30 a barrel.

But Dick Cheney does not like Clinton nor Chavez nor their band. To him, the oil industry's (and Saudi Arabia's) freedom to set oil prices is as sacred as freedom of speech is to the ACLU. I got this info, by the way, from three top oil industry lobbyists.
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Arturo Valenzuela, the Latin America national security aide in the Clinton administration, accused the Bush administration of running roughshod over more than a decade of treaties and agreements for the collective defense of democracy. Since 1990, the United States has repeatedly invoked those agreements at the Organization of American States to help restore democratic rule in such countries as Haiti, Guatemala and Peru.

Mr. Valenzuela, who now heads the Latin American studies department at Georgetown University here, warned that the nations in the region might view the administration's tepid support of Venezuelan democracy as a green light to return to 1960's and 1970's, when power was transferred from coup to coup.

"I think it's a very negative development for the principle of constitutional government in Latin America," Mr. Valenzuela said. "I think it's going to come back and haunt all of us."
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Henry Kissinger will present the award
Women Protest US Award to Venezuelan Coup Leader Gustavo Cisneros

Thursday, Jan 29, 2004

By: Global Women’s Strike / Venezuelanalysis.com

Philadelphia, Jan 29 (Venezuelanalysis.com).- The U.S. based NGO Global Women’s Strike issued a press release today protesting an award expected to be given by the Inter-American Economic Council to Gustavo Cisneros, a Venezuelan billionaire identified by sources such as Newsweek, local Venezuelan publications and analysts as one of the protagonists and financiers of the April 11, 2002 coup d’etat against President Hugo Chavez.

Cisneros is also credited with being a driving force behind the December 2002 nationwide lock-out and sabotage of the oil industry, which instead of ousting President Chávez from his elected office, drove the Venezuelan economy into the ground by causing a historical drop of 27% in the country’s GDP in the first trimester of 2003.

Cisneros is the owner of AOL, Coca-Cola, DirecTV and Pizza Hut in Latin America, Univision in the US, and Venezuela’s biggest TV network Venevision.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who according to declassified documents headed the CIA operation to overthrow Chilean democratically-elected President Salvador Allende in 1973, will be in charge of awarding fellow coup plotter Cisneros.

The Global Women’s Strike statement follows:

The Global Women’s Strike condemns the outrageous decision of the Inter-American Economic Council to honor Latin American media tycoon Gustavo Cisneros at its 2004 Winter Gala on Thirsday January 29h. It shows once more the total contempt of the US administration for people’s right to elect their own government. To recognize as a person who “has consistently sought to create an environment where business and government can work together in meaningful ways for the betterment of society,” a man who has systematically used his corporate wealth and media monopoly to illegally and violently attempt to force from office the democratically-elected government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, is particularly cynical. It is women in particular who elected and have overwhelmingly defended President Chavez, and women from the poorest areas who have most to gain from and have been most involved in the economic and social reforms Venezuela is undertaking to tackle poverty and corruption despite constant coup and assassination attempts from the likes of Cisneros.
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In November 2001, Chávez passed a set of 49 laws by decrees, shortly before the enabling law expired. One of the most controversial of these laws was the Ley de Tierras ("Land Law"), which created the Plan Zamora to enact land reforms in Venezuelan agriculture: taxing unused landholdings, expropriating unused private lands (with compensation), and giving inheritable, unsellable land grants to small farmers and farm collectives.
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Authorities say the 32,000-acre (13,000-hectare) El Charcote cattle farm operated by Vestey subsidiary Agroflora in Cojedes State is using public land that must be handed over as part of an agrarian reform campaign by President Hugo Chavez.
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The law allows the government to take over and redistribute property judged to be idle, under-used or belonging to the state. Private owners will be paid compensation at market price for expropriated idle land, according to the law.
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The Land Reform law provides for expropriation with compensation of idle farmlands, as well as arable lands exceeding 12,350 acres in areas of poor soil (350 acres in areas of rich soil), to be redistributed to landless workers. It is also important to note (though Hadden doesn't) that in the 1960's big landowners and ranchers expanded their fences to expropriate most of the state-owned marshlands the government intended for redistribution. Current stats on land concentration are appalling: One percent of farms account for 46% of farmland, one percent of the population owns 60% of arable lands, and 40% of all Venezuelan farmlands lie fallow. As a result, Venezuela is agronomically undiversified and chronically dependent on oil and imports, while the urban population has exploded, causing crime, unemployment, and pollution rates to soar. Even the middle-class Chavez foes I spoke to said the need for land reform is a no-brainer. Does this make them Castro-communists? The mere suggestion is ludicrous.

Hadden would likely respond that he didn't have enough airtime to discuss the law's particulars. Fine, but why not couple the word "expropriation" with "idle farmland"--both concise and precise--instead of the buzzwords "private property," unless he specifically intends to associate Chavez with communistic distribution of wealth?
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A 1998 census found that 60 percent of Venezuela's farmland was owned by less than 1 percent of the population. The survey said 90 percent of farmland given to the poor under a 1960 agrarian reform had since returned to the hands of large landholders.
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