When Bolivia's own movement of landless peasants (Movimiento Sin Tierra, MST) last week launched a string of land seizures in various parts of the country, the government made a brief attempt to negotiate, then ordered in the troops to evict the squatters. More than anything else, this was out of fear that the MST campaign might link up with other peasant movements and trigger far greater disruption.
MST leader Angel Durán announced last week's seizures as the first step in a long-term campaign to be conducted under the slogan, 'Agrarian Reform from Below, with Land for All.' Their targets, he said, would be land left idle by the owners.
According to Durán, this was a response to the government's non-fulfilment of promises; the MST, he said, had no political agenda.
The seizures took place in widely distant places: Terebinto, in the lowlands some 500 kilometres east of La Paz; the high plateau near Lake Titicaca, 75 kilometres south of the capital; the hill-rimmed Yungas, 120 kilometres north of La Paz; and the Chaco in the far south, next to the border with Argentina.
Two sensitive spots. Perhaps the most politically sensitive was the closest to the capital: the 1,800-hectare Collana dairy farm in the Altiplano, which happened to be owned by the sister-in-law of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada's wife, and is mostly in use. It was there that the government initiated negotiations with the MST, only to walk out after the squatters refused to accept the precondition of leaving the place before moving on to substantial discussions. Some 120 troops were deployed there, and there have been reports of skirmishes with the squatters.
In the Chaco, the MST moved into a huge cattle ranch, La Palma, owned by the mother of Jesús Cardozo, president of the regional cattle-breeders' association, AGC. Claiming that the invading peasants were armed with rifles and shotguns, Cardozo got the AGC to muster its own armed counter-force and issued ultimatums to the government and the MST, to the effect that, if the squatters were still there by the beginning of this week, the cattle ranchers would move against them.
Force & climbdown. Interior minister Yerko Kukoc, a believer in strong repression, sent in the troops and police on 4 July to evict the MST members from the finca they had occupied in Terebinto. Tear gas and bullets were fired, but no injuries were reported. As this was happening, President Sánchez de Lozada was conducting a high-profile visit to Santa Cruz, to hand out the title deeds to lands formally ceded to several indigenous communities represented by the Confederación Indígena de Bolivia.
Kukoc vowed that similar actions would be carried out to evict squatters in other parts of the country. By the following day, MST leader Durán was announcing that the MST was 'willing to take a step back' -if the government agreed to the immediate initiation of talks about the MST's demands, which he said 'are very concrete: land, territory, development, technology and justice.'
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