Bolivia's Morales Hands Out Titles

by Dan Keane
President Evo Morales handed out titles for farmland and tractors made in Venezuela and Iran to Bolivian peasants on Wednesday as he drummed up support for his ambitious agrarian reform.

Morales drove into town on a Chinese tractor bedecked with flags and covered in confetti. Behind him followed a convoy of tractors manufactured in a joint venture between Venezuela and Iran and sold to Bolivia by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The government announced plans to distribute as many as 500 tractors - made in Venezuela, Iran, Spain and China - as well as 2,000 individual land titles. At least 50 tractors were handed out Wednesday.

The trip to the symbolic center of Bolivia's land reform movement was intended to celebrate a proposed law that is part of Morales' far-reaching "agrarian revolution," but Congress has yet to vote on the controversial measure. It was in this dusty farming town on the high plains near Cochabamba where Bolivia's first agrarian reform was launched in 1953.

"The idle lands in eastern Bolivia that have been run by political interests and powerful families, these lands must be returned to the Bolivian state so that they can be redistributed," Morales said. "That is our great desire."

Morales kicked off his reform effort in June by giving about 9,600 square miles of state-owned land to poor Indian groups. On Wednesday, he handed out only about 15 titles, without indicating the amount of land.

Morales used Wednesday's event to press Congress to allow the government to seize private lands found to be unproductive, obtained illegally or used for speculation. Morales' proposed bill would alter the bylaws of the National Institute on Agrarian Reform.

"I've talked with some of the union and indigenous leaders," Morales said. "'If they don't change the INRA law in order to expropriate idle lands and return them to the Bolivian people, then what good is the Congress?' they ask me. 'If they don't change the INRA law, the Congress should shut down.'"

Congress has invited peasant farmers, indigenous groups, and agribusiness leaders to debate Morales' bill and other proposals to change the INRA on Thursday.

Just under 90 percent of Bolivia's productive terrain is worked by only 50,000 families, leaving millions of Bolivians with little or no land, according to the government.

The government plan is heightening long-standing tension between the prosperous residents of Bolivia's agricultural lowlands and the poorer, mostly Indian people of the western high plains. Much of the terrain targeted for reform is state land located in the fertile eastern lowlands