Landless peasants with 80 families occupy and take over farm in north of Uruguay
The landless peasants’ movement has reached Uruguay: the self called “shaggy” ones with eighty families, have taken over a 400 hectares farm in the extreme north of the country Artigas, and have been occupying the land since.
“We have been through seven years of Broad Front government and very few peasants or paid farm hands have had access to a plot of land”, said Jorge Rodas president of the Union of Sugar Workers from Artigas, (UTAA).
The union was originally founded in the sixties by the Uruguayan urban guerrilla leader Raul Sendic and whose organization now as a political party belongs to the ruling catch-all Broad Front coalition which extends from the conservative Christian Democrats to Communists, Socialists, anarchists, Trotskyites and obviously the former guerrilla, whose current leader was elected in 2009 president of the country, Jose Mujica.
The idea of the ‘shaggies”, very similar to the MST, landless movement in Brazil and who have introduced the 80 families, is to remain for some time to send “a strong message to the government and the people of Uruguay”.
Rodas said that the organization keeps growing in number and is targeting farms minimally exploited or belonging to absentee landlords. “This is to tell government that if we have the strength to occupy private land, we will continue growing in the number of people who support us and are joining our movement”
“When we occupy a private farm is to tell government the problem faced by farm hands, by landless workers. We want government or whoever, to find a solution to the issue”, said Rodas who claims UTAA has 2.000 members.
Three leaders of UTAA have been summoned to court and in a brief release argue that the occupied farm belongs to a “money lender who gobbled the plots of small farmers”.
Artigas to the north of Uruguay and bordering Argentina and Brazil has an economy based on farming and non industrial mining, amethysts. However it also has sugar cane plantations and a sugar mill that has been exposed to political turmoil for over six decades.
The UTAA effectively was created in the sixties by Raul Sendic the founder of the urban Tupamaros guerrilla movement, and sugar cane planting since has been a sensitive issue in Uruguay. However the main fact is that growing sugar cane in the north of Uruguay is simply not profitable compared to the huge efficient crops of Brazil and Argentina.
However since winning the election in 2004 and repeating in 2009, the ruling Broad Front coalition has made it a political question to ensure sugar cane plantations, this time mainly for a bio-fuel project and has promised to distribute land to the “shaggies”, which so far has not happened.
So even when the occupation of farms in the north of Uruguay, in the sugar cane area of Bella Union can be interpreted as a repeat of the well organized Landless Movement in Brazil, it is in reality yet another infighting dispute among the different groups of the ruling coalition.
Some groups insist land must be distributed, as promised, while other underline that private property and the rules of the game must be respected if Uruguay is to keep receiving investments. To this must be added a local ingredient: the Governor of Artigas, Patricia Ayala who belongs to the ruling coalition has seen her standing in the public opinion polls plunge.
Meanwhile the Uruguayan Treasury is having to pay the bill of the dispute: most of the so called ‘shaggies” and belonging to the government bio-fuel project to boost sugar cane plantation in small farms or cooperatives have been incorporated as government employees.
Now apparently they are also pressing for plots of land.
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17 comments Feed
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You, sir, advocate nothing more than theft and try to justify it as for the greater good. That can only result in totalitarianism. Eventually, even those like you, will end up with no rights. If that attitude prevails, Uruguay will rot in its own garden, because no one in the world will desire to do business with a country willingly ignores and denies the rights included in your constitution. Eventually, your philosophy will degenerate into others having the right to “appropriate” any of a mans property, cars, trucks, tractors, horse, whatever, just because you think they are not putting it to good use.
Appropriation of another mans property, without just compensation is theft, plain and simple. You can dress it up all you want, but it is theft.
The issue in Uruguay is that when large tracts of land go unused, it can have a serious impact on the people and the nation because it is such a small country. Additionally, since few Uruguayans lack the financial resources to buy property, their is often no “local” interest involved. The land rush of a few years ago saw a lot of property purchased by Argentineans and Brazilians looking for a safe haven for their money.
Many of these foreigners have no interest in developing or maintaining their property. So the GDP drops and people who are already poor are now out of work. The Uruguayan government has instituted a “no use” tax on properties above a certain size to make this distasteful to foreign buyers, and the workers in this story are engaged in a kind of protest that is relatively common in South America.
I would add that there are no true property rights in many countries. For example, in the United States, if you don't pay your property taxes, you will lose your property, and furthermore the use of imminent domain in the U.S. is far more prevalent (and belligerent) than in Uruguay.
This is a difficult issue where the rights of the property owner, the people, and the interest of the country as a whole must somehow be balanced.
Many people in the world have occupied some land since before capitalist and colonialist laws existed.Some still occupy this land but without capitalist title deeds(many in USA & Canada),but the question.whose land is it?
I understand the impact that buying up large tracts of land might have on a country. But, there are alternatives to simply taking over another man's property. The owner must be compensated, appropriately, for using his/her land. One cannot justify the thievery, just because some countries, like the US, allow it. It already sounds to me like the government of Uruguay is taking reasonable action to “encourage” owners to make some productive use of their land, through the “no use tax”, as chewhat mentioned. But, for one man to simply decide it is okay to steal another man's property is wrong. Besides, it is obvious this is being done, just because some people, the “Shaggies”, think they can take something,when no one is looking. It is still theft. If you want to use that land, you must compensate the owner. Just because the owner may be rich is not justification to take his/her property.
Sounds to me more like some folks think they can just take something for nothing. It's still theft!
But you are insisting on ownership/wealth as being the defining point.That is a totally selfish position.It is your justification for doing whatever you please with the land.If it unused(or even underused),then it is being held as an investment.You are happy for others to be dispossessed while the owner gets richer doing nothing.You are entitled to have that position but it is not socialist or Marxist to not agree with it,and you need to justify it morally,ethically, ect not just with a capitalist legal order
One of the problems of a capitalist system,is that money is used as a commodity in itself.Hence we have finance capitalism.How does this practise benefit society.
Next time you visit your bank, just look around. You think they “earned” enough money to build that fine building by paying the depositors 1% on their deposits and loaning it out at 15-20% interest. That would be impossible. Every time a bank makes a loan, they count that loan as an “asset” and they loan out that same money to someone else... they print the money, by entering numbers into their computer. That is what causes people to become more poor every day. It is not the fault of that rich man, sitting on his veranda.
The educated children will have smaller families and add to the cultural vitality of Uruguay instead of being zeros, or negative. Investment in their education, sanitation, water and health will profit Uruguay immensely. A positive feed-back loop develops in this scenario and nature begins to heal and provide increased bounty. Uruguay becomes a rich nation by providing peace and justice to every citizen.
This outlines the economy of tomorrow and it will happen despite resistance because the cosmos is on the side of shelter, health, prosperity and happiness for the bloom of human spirit that is as valid as the bloom of any flower anywhere on Earth. Vivir bien.
Chao!
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