Socialism or Theft? Bolivia’s Government Redistributing Land with Abundant Natural Gas to “Enslaved” Indigenous Tribes

The government of Bolivia announced plans on Tuesday to buy land and distribute it among landless indigenous groups in an effort to improve their lives.

One of these groups are the Guaraní people, who some claim are living in Bolivia in “a situation of servitude analogous to slavery.”

There are others who dispute that claim, including several prominent American ranchers. They claim that President Evo Morales’ government wants to confiscate their land using the bogus slavery accusation and redistribute it so that it can obtain rights to more of Bolivia’s profitable natural gas reserves.

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So who should we believe? As the New York Times‘ Simon Romero wrote back in May, “the reality… might be more complex than either side suggests.” Just several months later in September, the greater issue of how socialist ideas would translate into actions in Bolivia exploded into a fight over natural gas– that brought Bolivia to the brink of collapse. Perhaps now these flames of passion will be fanned further.

Evo Morales is Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and has made socialist themes the central platform of his presidency. He has said that he wants to make changes to Bolivia’s constitution in order to take actions that will help the country’s poor (who constitute 2/3 of Bolivia’s population), such as distributing profits from the country’s natural gas earnings more equitably. This has angered Bolivia’s wealthier elites, who generally tend to live in the country’s eastern areas that have the greatest abundance of natural gas reserves.

The United Nations claims that “Bolivia’s richest 100 rural families hold five times as much acreage as two million poor peasants.” These are the types of families such as the Americans discussed in the aforementioned article. These big land owners are the ones being accused by Bolivia’s government of using indigenous slave labor to work their ranches. At the American-owned ranch, the New York Times reported that “workers get work contracts, food, clothing, housing and education for their children at a schoolhouse on the ranch. But wages remain low, with senior farmhands earning less than $6 a day.” One worker was quoted as such: “We are not slaves, but we are not prospering. We just exist.”

The land owners think that the government would rather have indigenous people as land owners because the government would be able to negotiate more lucrative natural gas extraction contracts from people who supported the government’s overarching philosophy and had benefited from it. It does seem like a logical argument. Where the truth lies though is not entirely clear. For instance, I’m curious who owned the disputed land historically. Was the land in discussion ever stolen from indigenous peoples?

So what do you think? Is this a case of the long oppressed poor becoming the oppressors? Or is it a case of the powerful and corrupt calling foul when justice is served? Perhaps the answer does lie somewhere in the middle.

Photo Credit: nagillum on Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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