Violence and land invasion, the scourge that oppresses Venezuelan peasants

Genesis Carrero Soto Caracas, 24 Mar So far this year, the Venezuelan National Federation of Livestock Farmers (Fedenaga) has recorded about twenty cases of “violence in the countryside”, which shows the worsening occupation and invasion of land, a problem that oppresses an agricultural sector that tries to raise its head despite threats and, even, the murders. “The whole of Venezuela is taken by the underworld and we demand that the military leave the barracks to do their work, because we are alone”, was the cry of Fedenaga President Armando Chacin, who, just this week, assured that 14 people were killed in less than a year, alone in productive units of the Zulia state, western Venezuela. One of the most recent cases occurred in the early morning of March 20, according to Gerardo Ávila, one of the directors of Fedenaga, who claimed that “a group of criminals” entered his farm and “brutally” murdered four of his workers. “In the early morning of this Sunday, around 1.00 am (05.00 GMT), four workers from the San Tomé farm, located at kilometer 48 of the Maracaibo-Perijá highway, in the municipality of La Cañada de Urdaneta, were massacred,” the federation reported in a press release. PEASANTS VS. CRIMINALS For Fedenaga's legal consultant Alexis Algarra, the 20 violent events computed so far in 2022 and the 480 that occurred in 2021 are the consequence of “there is no security policy geared towards rurality”. “In rural areas, the presence of the State through its security forces remains scarce, and not only scarce, but with very weak resources,” the lawyer told Efe. Algarra, who is also a farmer, pointed out that the violence faced by peasants “has different faces”, since, on the one hand, they are constantly attacked by the “common underworld that attacks production units” and, on the other, by organized criminal groups that invade private property and intimidate their owners. “We have the violence generated by organized crime groups, which are structured, organized groups, dedicated to violently invading production units, rural properties in rural areas,” he explained. He assured that, in the face of these events, landowners have had to deal with crime and add it to the difficulties that farmers must face to produce in Venezuela, a country in which the “rescue” of land called “invasion” was implemented as a State policy, following the arrival of Hugo Chávez. “The State has intervened more than 10 million hectares, according to figures from the National Land Institute itself. We dare to say that even 30% of those 10 million hectares, which were once productive, are not in production today,” said Algarra. On the other hand, the Government insists that “it has recovered more than 12 million hectares since 2003,” and that they hope to “close this 2022 with more than 600,000 hectares regularized to more than 22,000 farmers and producers”, as stated by the president of the National Land Institute (INTI), David Hernández, in an interview with the state channel Venezuelana de Televisión (VTV) this Wednesday. SURVIVE THE SIEGE In the same interview, Hernández said that “always” they will “reject any illegal occupation, on any type of land and in any state in the country.” But in practice, the owner of the San Roque production unit in Zulia, Daniela Pérez, attests to the irregularities experienced by those who, like her, denounce the invasion of their lands. “In August 2017, we were victims of an illegal occupation or an invasion by a group of people who entered violently and invaded 56 hectares of the 176 in total,” Pérez told Efe. Since then, she and her family have tried to get the State to support them in the eviction of the invaders, already ordered by INTI in 2018, but, far from getting the support they expect, they have been victims of extortion attempts on two occasions, two death threats and one attack that Perez survived. “On January 26, at approximately 9 am (1.00 GMT), a motorized man with a barbecue (companion) followed me from my house to the production unit and managed to hit the van with five bullets (...) I was in the van, alone,” she said. Despite the attack, Pérez remains firm in his demand for justice and continues to produce, while waiting for “justice to be done” and to be left “to work in peace”. CHIEF gcs/sb/lll (video) (photo)