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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
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<h1 class="reader-title">Venezuela’s Campesino Struggle: A
Conversation with Kevin Rangel of the Bolivar and Zamora
Revolutionary Current</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Cira Pascual Marquina –
October 2, 1018<br>
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<p><em>Born in Caracas, Kevin Rangel joined the Bolivar
and Zamora Revolutionary Current (<a
href="http://www.crbz.org/">CRBZ</a>) in 2005.
Today he is the organization’s national coordinator,
working from the city of Calabozo, Guarico State, in
Venezuela’s rural heartland. The CRBZ has been in
the forefront of the intense struggles taking place
in the Caribbean nation’s countryside where a rural
population eager to till the land confronts an old
and new landlord class aiming to expand its
extensive holdings.</em></p>
<p><strong>Two years into the Bolivarian process a new
legal framework for the land was put in place. The
2001 laws opened the way for a more equitable
reorganization of the rural areas, redistributing
idle land to small and mid-size </strong><strong>campesinos</strong><strong>.
The Venezuelan oligarchy reacted furiously,
assassinating </strong><strong>campesinos</strong><strong>
who were beginning to produce on once-idle land.
Could you give us some background on how the
Bolivarian Process impacted the rural areas?</strong></p>
<p>The <a href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5432">Land
and Agricultural Development Law</a> [2001] laid out
the basis of the agricultural revolution as proposed
by Chavez at a time when the strategic path of the
Bolivarian Revolution was being defined. A central
element of that project is sovereignty. To have
sovereignty, of course, one has to make the country
produce, i.e. stop being a “port” economy.</p>
<p>The first step in making the country productive –
producing the food we need and raw materials for the
country’s industry – involved the land. Land tenure
has important historical dimensions in Venezuela.
Since the country’s independence, the latifundio
[large estate] was established as the model that would
dominate rural Venezuela during its whole history.
That was the cause of the Federal War [1859-63] led by
Ezequiel Zamora. The interests of the oligarchy, which
governed Venezuela for many years, were there: in the
land. They accumulated a lot of riches, a lot of land…</p>
<p>The campesinos have historically been the most
combative sector of our population. They were the ones
who fought with Bolivar. In fact, Bolivar was only
able to triumph in the Independence War after he
united with the Venezuelan peasants, the poor, and the
black people. The same with Zamora: the main group
that accompanied him and carried out the Federal War
was the peasants. That is because it was for that
group that injustice and inequality was expressed in
the most radical way...</p>
<p>The oligarchy’s response [to the 2001 legislation]
was to initiate – and continue during all of these 18
years – a whole process of conspiring and bringing in
paramilitaries as part of a plan to strike at the
Bolivarian Revolution. Where they did it most was in
the rural areas, because it was the campesinos who
best understood Chavez’s call for a total war against
the latifundio.</p>
<p>Of course, it wasn’t as if the campesinos weren’t
doing anything before Chavez arrived. There were
conflicts over the land and they had developed
projects. As an organization, we too date from before
Chavez’s arrival to power, but it was in the context
of the Bolivarian process that brought the campesinos
into a new scenario of struggle.</p>
<p>A struggle emerged in the rural areas, and the
oligarchy responded by contracting paramilitaries. The
“demobilization” of Colombian paramilitaries coincided
with the incorporation of paramilitary cells in
Venezuela. They began to operate in the Sur de Lago
[Zulia and Merida States]. Thus there began a war, a
war against campesinos which today has left a body
count of more than 300 campesinos murdered. Those
[killed] were people who were at the front of the land
recovery struggle. They wanted to make the campesinos
afraid, and they hoped our movement would stop
struggling. Thus, on our end, justice for the fallen
is one of our most important rallying cries. There
must be an end to impunity!</p>
<p><strong>The Bolivarian Revolution once had its
epicenter in the urban barrios, but now the
countryside seems to be more combative. It is there
that the contradictions of the process seem to be
most intense. First, there are the longstanding
contradictions that pit the small to medium
producers and the rural communes against the
interests of old landowners and agribusiness. On top
of that, now tensions have intensified between the
rural communes and the small to medium peasants, on
the one side, and the state, on the other. Also,
it’s no secret that the judicial system favors old
and new landlords and that <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13857">Agropatria</a>,
the state company that distributes agricultural
inputs, is permeated by an anti-popular logic. What
do you think is happening?</strong></p>
<p>Chavez proposed not only a new Land and Agricultural
Development Law but also a new institutional framework
for rural development and food sovereignty. That was
to be a central goal of those struggles. After the
lapse of almost 18 years, the struggles have been
changing, mutating. Elements of the dispute have been
broadening. In 2001, we struggled against the“Adeco[1]
institutional [logic].” We struggled to remove the
Adecos and Copeyanos[2] from the Land and Agriculture
Ministry and to get the Venezuelan Agrarian Federation
out of the IAN [pre‐revolutionary land institute] and
later out of the INTI [Chavez‐era land institute] and
the FONDAS [National Agricultural Fund].</p>
<p>One of the main contradictions of the Bolivarian
process is with the bureaucracy, bureaucratism, and
the corruption that has been penetrating all the
state’s institutions, even putting at risk the state’s
functioning is some cases. For us, this is part of
what explains the economic crisis that Venezuela is
now experiencing. It is not only the enemy’s actions
and not only imperialism’s actions, but also a
question of corruption and inefficiency in government.</p>
<p>With regard to the campesino and agrarian
institutions created by the revolution, agrarian
mafias have embedded themselves, which is taking away
force as well as revolutionary and transformative
potential from those institutions. The logic of the
bourgeois state took hold of those institutions… We
have an outstanding task which is transforming and
overcoming of capitalist state.</p>
<p>That is precisely something that is entering in the
struggle today: the struggle against hired killings,
against impunity, and also against the agrarian
mafias. That’s because those mafias have been
infiltrating institutions, not only in the Ministry of
Agriculture and Land but also the Supreme Court and
the Attorney General’s Office. There are members of
the security apparatuses, the Attorney General’s
Office, the courts, and judiciary that protect the
landlord class today. We didn’t succeed in getting the
Adecos and their culture out of our state’s
institutions. Today, that is one of the main problems
we face.</p>
<p>It is necessary to overhaul and restructure the
institutions. We need to reorganize from the bottom up
institutions such as INTI, FONDEN, and Agropatria.
Agropatria was once the transnational Agroisleña.
Elements of that transnational stayed there,
sabotaging the institution from the inside. This is
the result of a policy that derives from a lack of
leadership from those who headed up those institutions
– all of them, not just the current ones. There are
people who, for many years, were at the head of the
agrarian institutions that are also responsible for
not having transformed them, and they share
responsibility for the situation today.</p>
<p><strong>Sometimes it seems as if we can’t find a
popular tendency – one that favors the working
people – inside the institutions!</strong></p>
<p>There, public functionaries are totally déclassé.
Their raison d’etre – the concept of a public servant
– has disappeared. There are people in the agrarian
institutions that are in the service of cattlemen’s
associations and landlords rather than of the
campesinos.</p>
<p>But there is something we need to ask: Who is the
main interested party? Who has an interest that in
this country there should be no production? The import
sector. We need to identify that sector and make it
visible. They have been interfering and have lobbies
inside the revolution, so that nothing works. Then if
things don’t work there will be chaos, there will be
no production, and they will go on importing. So
that’s why we say there is a need to look a the way
funds are assigned, so that our first priority becomes
agricultural production.</p>
<p><strong>More than 300 </strong><strong>campesinos</strong><strong>
have been killed since 2001 and five since May of
this year. The most recent victim is a 16-year-old
boy in the Sur del Lago, which is a hotspot in the
dispute between the agrarian cooperatives and the
new landowning bourgeoisie. The state has been slow
to act in many of these cases, while in others <a
href="https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13743">the
institutions themselves have become accomplices</a>.
How should </strong><strong>campesinos</strong><strong>
organize in these circumstances?</strong></p>
<p>Class struggle is intensifying in the rural areas. We
are facing a new wave of violence and threats against
landless campesinos who have recuperated idle land.
The truth is that the situation is even more complex
than it was before. As opposed to the earlier wave of
violence [in 2001 to 2003], we are not only facing
paramilitarism at the service of the old landowners,
but also an emerging sector that uses state forces and
the state’s institutions to protect and further their
private interests.</p>
<p>For instance, in Barinas State, there have been
campesino evictions from the land where they produce
and other human rights violations. These were carried
out not by the hired guns of the old landowning class,
but by the state apparatus. We can even identify a
[Barinas] state policy at the service of the new
sectors that are acquiring land. Additionally, there
has emerged a practice of criminalizing the campesino
bloc, as a way of justifying what is happening. Thus,
some sectors are implicitly granted permission to jail
campesinos without due process, and to carry out other
human rights violations.</p>
<p>There is another element: the historical enemy of the
revolution is seeking to fuel contradictions between
those who are in the government and the popular base.
Those in the direction of the revolution must
understand this. There is an active attempt on the
part of the old oligarchy to generate an internal
conflict.</p>
<p>The revolution’s most active and loyal sector is the
campesinos. Campesinos vote for this project even when
they are the victims of aggressions from public
institutions. Campesinos are committed to the
revolution and loyal. The livestock oligarchy – and
especially FEDENAGAS[3] which is associated with
FEDECAMARAS[4] – have been working with paramilitary
leaders. We know that representatives of the landlords
have been in meetings in the Norte de Santander
department of Colombia with sectors of uribismo[5].</p>
<p>This bloc is responsible for fueling the violence in
Sur del Lago, a situation that is near the boiling
point, or rather, it has already reached it! In that
territory there are constant threats, mobilizations,
and public meetings that the cattle-owning oligarchy
has been organizing. Intimidation has become
quotidian. There have been threats against members of
our organization to the effect that we must abandon
our struggle for the land in that territory.</p>
<p>This is serious stuff, since we are talking about
more than 10,000 families who are participating in the
struggle in Barinas state and almost 11,000 families
who are struggling for their right to the land in Sur
del Lago. Thus, in Sur del Lago, the hottest spot, we
are preparing our response. We are not going to stay
put and let our people die. There cannot be more
campesino masacres. The people and the Bolivarian
Revolution have given us the tools to defend
ourselves.</p>
<p>The recent assassination of Kender García, a
16-year-old son of some campesino leaders, is yet
another example of the cattle oligarchy’s modus
operandi. To paraphrase Sandino: The masses are
patient and, for a while, will wait for justice to be
made, but if that doesn’t happen, then the people will
take justice into their own hands. We don’t want this
to happen because the battle that could take shape
would be worse than the one in 2001, 2002 and 2003.</p>
<p>Campesinos are more conscious and more organized
today than they were before and they have now many
more tools, tools that the revolution gave them. In
this regard, we have been making a plan so that the
people are aware of what we may have to do. The
government must act in a much more forceful manner
against the landowning class, both old and new. We
believe that the revolution, in this moment of
struggle, must take radical actions in regard to the
property of those who threaten campesinos, who
criminalize them, saying that campesinos are robbing
the land.</p>
<p>It is urgent that the Bolivarian Revolution close
ranks and act in a unified manner to confront the
growing attacks from the old and new landowning class.
Regarding the latter – the new landowning class who
wear red shirts – those have to be expulsed from the
Chavista bloc. We cannot let them continue in the
party and at the head of state institutions!</p>
<p><strong>In today’s crisis, the law that Chavez put
forward in 2001 calling for an agrarian revolution,
seems more relevant than ever! The CRBZ has been
promoting self-organization among </strong><strong>campesinos</strong><strong>
for years and it has many projects, from the Simon
Bolivar Communal City in Apure, a project in a
process of consolidation, to the National Productive
Alliance, a project that is still being born. Let's
conclude the interview by talking about these
experiences.</strong></p>
<p>Our organization has a campaign to defend the
achievements and advances of the revolution and to
carry out the revolution’s pending tasks for
campesinos. We don’t limit ourselves to work among
landless campesinos. We believe that the revolution
must incorporate campesinos with small plots of land,
the conuqueros[6] and the collectives that have
rescued land, as it has, but it should also
incorporate medium producers who aren’t enemies of the
people, people who are not conspiring and whose only
interest is to produce, because the key interest of
the nation now is to produce, thus satisfying the
population’s needs.</p>
<p>Alliances have to be made with these sectors, which
joined the right because the revolution did not know
how to connect with them and didn’t know how to keep
them with us. With this in mind, and with the
objective of generating conditions to produce for
small and mid‐size‐farmers, we are building the
National Productive Alliance, which is a space of
confluence and work. Those midsize farmers that are
committed to producing and are not conspiring should
be incorporated.</p>
<p>The revolution has negotiated with large capitalists
who don’t produce but just import: groups in line with
longstanding logic of corruption and who are not going
to produce anything. The government sits at the table
with them and not the real producers: the small and
medium farmers. Unfortunately the latter are not
invited to sit at the table. Why? I think it’s
obvious!</p>
<p>So we have been developing the National Productive
Alliance to boost agrarian production. We are
committed to building an ample alliance of small to
medium producers. Our main objective now is to
generate conditions for production, to organize from
below and form territorial networks. All of
Venezuela's productive potential must be brought
together and unified.</p>
<p>That is something, which the leadership of the
process should do, but isn’t doing. The Agriculture
Ministry lost its focus. Yet campesinos are working
from below to unify and generate conditions for
agricultural production, voicing the sector’s demands.
Their demands are many, ranging from the landless
campesinos’ historical claim to the land to access to
seeds, agricultural implements, and fuel and machinery
parts for small to medium sized farmers.</p>
<p>The truth is that the revolution has to build a
national majority. It cannot be that the revolution
has political power and it doesn’t represent a
national majority. The project of the Bolivarian
Revolution is a project of societal consensus, and
Chavez succeeded at building that consensus. Most
especially, the foundation of the Bolivarian
Revolution is participative and protagonic democracy.
That should be our political focus now and it’s where
the CRBZ is working. That is also why we are now also
in a process of giving new impetus to the “Simon
Bolivar” Communal City project, which fell by the
wayside when the communal project became the domain of
the Ministry of Communes. We believe that the
comuneros are the revolutionary subject, and we place
our hopes in the commune as the path to build
socialism in Venezuela.</p>
<p>Now, we see the commune as something that is not
ethereal. It shouldn’t be a mere slogan or mural. We
believe in the commune-as-government, as people’s
territorial power. It is the revolutionary government
that will transform the society from below,
constituting what Chavez called the “new shoots” of
socialism.</p>
<p>The “Simon Bolivar” Communal City is just that: a
space where production, organization, and political
revolution take front stage. Regarding the latter, it
must be clarified that the economic war shouldn’t be
an excuse to halt the political revolution. That is
one of the issues that the leadership must come to
terms with: the continuation of the political
revolution. The economic war is an unavoidable feature
of the present, but the emergence of new values, of
new forms of organization and of popular empowerment –
all these things are more important than ever if the
Bolivarian Revolution is not to lose its
transformative force.</p>
<p>As for the CRBZ movement, we are working on the
Communal City, on the National Productive Alliance,
and we are also developing a current within the PSUV,
a current that will work from within. It is absolutely
necessary that a revolutionary current take shape
within the historical party of the revolution, as a
force that will help to rebuild Bolivarian
Revolution’s strategic objectives and reorient us
towards them.</p>
<h2>NOTES</h2>
<p>[1] “Adeco” refers to the clientist and corrupt logic
established during the Democratic Action (AD)
governments prior to the election of Hugo Chavez in
1998.<br>
[2] “Copeyano” refers to the Christian democrat COPEI
party, the second half of the two‐party system that
governed Venezuela between 1958 and 1998.<br>
[3] FEDELAFAS is the national association of large
livestock owners.<br>
[4] FEDECAMARAS is the Venezuelan business association
or chamber of commerce. It is directly responsible for
the 2002 coup that ousted President Chavez for 47
hours before he was returned to office by a mass
popular uprising.<br>
[5] The fascistoid current in Colombian politics that
continues the project of former President Alvaro Uribe
Velez.<br>
[6] “Conuquero” refers to subsistence farming or very
small campesino production.</p>
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