MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bolivian Senate OKs sweeping land reform

Bolivia's Senate approved President Evo Morales' far-reaching land reform law on Tuesday, ending a weeklong boycott by opposition lawmakers who attempted to block passage of the bill.

The impasse ended after thousands of Indian demonstrators from around the country marched on the capital La Paz to support Morales' proposal to seize unproductive land held by wealthy elites and redistribute it to the landless poor.

Conservative leaders walked out of the Senate last week to block the land reform bill. Morales had threatened to circumvent Congress and impose the law by presidential decree if the Senate did not reconvene by Tuesday afternoon.

Morales hopes the ambitious proposal will eventually allow his government to redistribute some 77,000 square miles of land ? an area half the size of Japan.

"It is not possible, my friends, to have so much land in so few hands, and so many hands without land," Morales told about 10,000 supporters in a plaza in La Paz before the vote.

The bill passed 15-0 with the remainder of the 27 senators absent from vote.

The conservative opposition party Podemos holds 13 of the Senate's 27 seats. With help from two senators from minor opposition parties, Podemos previously prevented the body from reaching a 14-seat quorum. Morales' Movement Toward Socialism party, or MAS, has 12 Senate seats.

But Tuesday night, one Podemos senator returned to the chamber to vote for the land reform, joined by assistants filling in for two other opposition senators.

Bolivian senators' assistants are allowed to cast ballots for their absent senators, but only according to the senators' wishes. And it was not immediately clear whether the assistants' votes would hold up to legal scrutiny.

MAS controls the lower house of Congress, where the land reform bill passed earlier this month in a party-line vote.

Morales used a presidential decree in May to nationalize the country's oil and gas fields in an attempt to redistribute wealth in South America's poorest country.

On Tuesday, more than 3,000 Indian demonstrators, many in brightly colored woolen ponchos and straw hats trimmed with neon thread, filed down La Paz's steep streets to the city center.

Despite a journey which took some weeks, the marchers were in high spirits.

"We're exhausted, sure, but we are here to reclaim our rights from those speculators who have taken our lands all over the country," said Natalio Izaguirre, who hiked 18 days from his small village near Potosi, about 260 miles south, in sandals made from leather and old car tires.

Agribusiness leaders from Bolivia's eastern lowlands who oppose the bill have vowed to use force if necessary to defend their farms against government expropriation.

Morales has said the government will not seize productive land, but rather large tracts of Bolivia's sparsely populated east held by a handful of wealthy families.

The government has publicly accused some of Bolivia's most politically powerful families of large-scale land fraud, adding a layer of personal animosity to an already charged issue.

On Monday, an opposition senator from a prominent landowning family was caught on camera making an obscene gesture to pro-Morales demonstrators heckling him outside the Senate ? an act since replayed repeatedly on Bolivian television stations.