MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Landholdings, another Bolivian/Brazilian dispute

In spite of the agreement to tone down the energy dispute, another area of tension is brewing between neighbouring Brazil and Bolivia: landholdings.

Bolivian President Evo Morales' administration is threatening to start enforcing a constitutional provision preventing foreigners from owning land within 50 km of its borders, a move that could mean the expulsion of thousands of poor Brazilian subsistence farmers who have lived for decades in Bolivia.

Taking into account what has happened with the oil and gas industry, Brazil this week sent a high-ranking diplomat to the city of Cobija in the Bolivian province of Pando to protect the interests of Brazilians living in the area just across the border from the Brazilian states of Acre and Rondónia.

President Morales has said his government is also eyeing large Brazilian-owned farms in Bolivia's eastern Santa Cruz province, the country's wealthiest, as it gears up to confiscate unproductive land and redistribute it to poor Bolivian farmers and Indians.

While Morales didn't provide more details, Brazilians who have been farming in Bolivia for more than a decade were unsettled to learn they had been singled out even though they say they keep their land productive and provide jobs for Bolivians.

??The uncertainty is huge right now because we just don't know what's going to happen,'' said Denis Barbieri, who employs 70 Bolivians and grows corn and soy on 5,500 hectares in Santa Cruz province.

The escalating rhetoric between Bolivia and Brazil marks a level of tension not seen since the two countries almost clashed over a huge swath of land in the Amazon that Bolivia eventually sold to Brazil in 1903, recalls David Fleischer a political scientist from the University of Brasilia.

"That was the only time the two countries have ever had great difficulties; it was almost to the point where Brazilian troops were going to be sent in".

However, according to Fleischer the presence of Brazilians in Bolivia never seemed to be an issue for previous Bolivian administrations because the Brazilian farmers made an economic contribution to the country and became absorbed into Bolivian society.

??They were filling a niche that the Bolivians never got around to, farming and soybeans,'' he said. ??A lot of these Brazilians who have been farming in Bolivia have had children born in Bolivia, so their children are Bolivian.''