Murder of the campesinos

Over a year old but well worth rereading as rightwingers rage about the *violence*Chavez is responsible for in Venezuela

Murder of the campesinos
It is not Hugo Chavez who endangers Venezuelans, but the greedy landowners killing peasant farmers with impunity

Edward Ellis
The Guardian, Sunday 2 October 2011 21.59 BST



A farmer casts fertilizer in a rice plantation on the expropriated and now redistributed farm of El Charcote in the central state of Cojedes in Venezuela, October 2010. Photograph: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/REUTERS

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Perhaps the starkest example of this neglect concerns the Venezuelan countryside – an area that has been transformed into the battleground for a conflict occurring beneath the radar of both the international human rights community and the major media for more than 10 years.

Since 2001, when the Chávez government pledged to break up the country's vastly unequal land holdings that have stifled agricultural development for more than a century, a wave of reprisal killings have consumed rural areas as large landowners contract assassins to end the "invasions" by pro-government campesinos on their illegitimately acquired and many times fallow estates.

Many of the deaths have taken place in the Western region of the country, where paramilitary activity originating from Colombia has spilled over into the largely lawless border areas. Such was the case with Pedro Doria, a doctor and community activist who was gunned down in front of his home in 2002. Doria's assassination, the result of his support for a local land struggle occurring in the area South of Lake Maracaibo, was followed two years later by the murder of his father as he pressed for a comprehensive investigation into his son's death.

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While powerful anti-government ranchers hire paramilitaries or hitmen to eliminate peasant leaders, the upper class judges and technocrats who dominate the local tribunals systematically impede the effective implementation of justice. This alliance of interests has robbed the impoverished families of murdered farmers of any sense of justice and has permitted the deaths to continue.

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Until real reform is enacted in the Venezuelan judicial system in order to enshrine the rule of law and break up the power of local elites, the politically motivated murder of landless farmers will not end. And until the international and domestic human rights communities take notice of this issue, rather than employing all available resources to portray the democratically elected Chávez as a repressive dictator, the lives of many of the nation's most vulnerable residents will continue to be lived in peril.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/02/venezuela-land-rights-chavez-farmers?INTCMP=SRCH