Land War in Bolivia: Conflict for Territory and Power

On a grassy hillside of the Bolivian highlands, on a sunny day in June of this year, hundreds of peasant farmers celebrated two years of liberation. A bullfight, dancing, and food for all. Close, but just out of sight, sat the solitary ruins of the ex-hacienda of Collana — “a sign,” according to the settlement’s own account of their anniversary, “that, here, not even a trace of a patrón (landowner) remains.”

The occupation two years ago of the large private estate, despite many obstacles the participants have faced, is in many ways a success story for the young but growing movement of landless peasants in Bolivia. Families who until 2003 had essentially been indentured servants in Bolivia’s near-feudal countryside are living for the first time on their own terms. “With or without papers, the land was our grandparents’ and now it is ours,” stated Collana leader Dionisio Mamani in a recent article. [2] “With this, we are assuring a better life for our children.”

Here in Bolivia, the words “la tierra” (the land) imply more than a piece of the ground. They have hidden meanings — power, racism, violence, suffering, struggle and hope — depending on who is speaking them.

Bolivia may have gained international recognition for recent uprisings around water and gas, but this Guerra de la Tierra (Land War) is a daily bloody backdrop to the mass mobilizations that capture the world’s attention. It’s a battle for survival and sovereignty being waged in every corner of the country; a power conflict that is, in essence, rooted in colonial history of the white elite and the indigenous majority.

The national, 50,000-member-strong Landless Movement (Movimiento Sin Tierra, MST) has led the fight to equalize land ownership in a country where 90 percent of the population owns 7 percent of the cultivatable land, where campesinos (peasant farmers) primarily work as peons for large estates or have been forced to leave the countryside altogether. Over the past five years, MST has centralized the issue of landownership in country’s political agenda primarily by taking over owned land.

Origin of the Conflict

Territory disputes between indigenous peoples and the ancestors of colonizers are a common occurrence in post-colonial nations. Often, the two groups argue over scant remaining sectors of fertile ground. Bolivia’s conflict differs remarkably because here, there is ample unused land.

This abundance of land is only part of the background necessary to understand the current conflict. Bolivia’s existing territorial relations — and the war waged around them — is rooted in the state’s failed attempts to equalize land ownership during the last 50 years. The first effort at land reform, the 1953 Agrarian Reform Law, aimed to eliminate forced labor, outlaw latifundios (large estates of as many as 800,000 acres), and give land titles to the country’s majority campesino population, which owned little of the country’s 417 million acres of land.

Campesinos had high expectations for true reform following the 1952 revolution. However, because of widespread corruption, the law “liberated [a select group] of campesinos in the west but gave them no more than a tiny piece of land… and in the east, [the law], ironically… opened the valves for the extension of the large estates,” found a study by the Bolivia-based Land Foundation in 2002. Between 1952 and 1996, 55 million acres were distributed to a few thousand large landowners while hundreds of thousands of campesinos had to split 45 million acres.

The 1990s brought a wave of reforms to end corruption and rectify what the Agrarian Reform Law had allowed to become the norm: single owner large estates, each ranging from 25,000 up to 700,000 acres, much of which is uncultivated land. Most significantly, Bolivia passed Law #1715, known as the “INRA Law” (from the Spanish initials for the National Institute for Agrarian Reform), in 1996, requiring that all plots of owned land be used for some purpose — be it for housing, livestock, community space or farming. The new law established a state-run process for the government to seize alleged unused land and redistribute it to campesinos.

But patronage and bureaucracy persisted. Exact figures are hard to come by, but even the most generous statistics show that between 1996 and 2003, 79 million acres were distributed (or redistributed) to 40,000 people in large parcels and only 10 million acres were awarded to 550,000 campesinos, meaning most are forced to live on plots less than 5 acres.

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