From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Nicaraguan Peasants Fight for Land Rights
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: PACH
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 03:33:25 GMT

/** reg.nicaragua: 133.0 **/
** Topic: Polarization in Countryside **
** Written  7:31 pm  Oct  7, 1992 by ttomasko in cdp:reg.nicaragua **
Nicaraguan Peasants Fight for Land Rights

by Aaron Ruby

From the Militant, October 9, 1992

SAN JUAN DEL RIO COCO, Nicaragua--Nicaragua's countryside is 
the scene of a polarization between large landowners and 
peasants who are either seeking land or fighting for the ability to 
farm on the plots they occupy.

        On each side of this polarization are leaders and supporters 
of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Also on both 
sides are members of the opposition movement know as the 
contras, which was organized by Washington and which for 
several years in the 1980s waged a bloody attempt to overthrow 
the Sandinista-led government.

        Visits to a number of farms in this region illustrated the 
process that is unfolding here. 

        El Carmen is a relatively large coffee farm, a 45-minute 
journey by jeep from San Juan, which is located 150 miles 
northeast of Managua. The farm used to belong to a colonel in the 
National Guard under the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. After 
the 1979 revolution led by the FSLN, it was seized by the workers 
employed there and became a state farm.

        The revolutionary government nationalized a number of 
farms. It launched an agrarian reform program that gave land to 
tens of thousands of landless peasants who mobilized to demand 
land, although tens of thousands more never received land. 
Nutrition, health, and educational programs were also instituted, 
relieving some of the brutal living conditions and increasing the 
self-confidence of the rural toilers.

        El Carmen, vigorously defended by the workers during the 
contra war, was severely damaged during one of two major 
attacks.

        Today El Carmen is private farm again. Now it belongs to 
formers majors of the Sandinista army, who received it as part of 
the demobilization accords following the contra war. Under these 
accords, members of the former Sandinista People's Army 
received 14 percent of the former state property; the contra 
forces, known as the National resistance, received close to 16 
percent; and 33 percent was designated as property of the 
workers. Of the original state-owned property, 37 percent has not 
yet been privatized.

        For four months the 120 workers and their families on El 
Carmen farm have not received their daily wage of $1.35 plus 
meals. They are living on what food they can grow on small plots 
that belong to the landowners.

        On April 4 of this year the workers sent a letter to 
Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, in which they demanded 
25 percent of the profits from the crop, along with 25 percent for 
social benefits such as the day-care center and food program for 
children. The eight former army majors would receive the 
remaining half of the profits.

        The majors say the 35 houses to which the workers had 
received titles from the Sandinista government in 1985 do not 
belong to them, and have threatened action against the workers.

        Ernesto Gutierrez, one of the workers on the farm and a 
long-time member of the FSLN, said the majors were "only 
Sandinistas on the outside." He complained that his union, the 
Association of Rural Workers (ATC), was not helping to defend the 
workers.

IN DEFENSE OF PROPERTY

        According to Alba Palacios, secretary of international 
relations for the ATC, the association has concentrated on 
organizing workers on former state farms and is not attempting to 
organize workers on private farms where there is strong 
resistance by the owners. The ATC has lost half of its membership 
of 70,000 over the past two years.

        The ATC backs the call by the FSLN for workers to support 
those landlords who belong to the FSLN. In the words of FSLN 
general secretary Daniel Ortega, these owners are not "savage 
capitalists." The central slogan of the FSLN is "In defense of 
property."
        "The struggle is for the democratization of property, the 
road toward preserving the revolution. We want to create an even 
stronger group than COSEP [the large capitalists' council in 
Nicaragua] based on Sandinista property," said Jose Angel 
Bermudez, a national leader of the National Employees' Union 
(UNE) and the Sandinista Workers Federation (CST).

        At La Dalia, a coffee plantation in San Juan del Rio Coco, the 
formal ownership by the workers has meant that some gains and 
rights, not available on private farms, have not been completely 
lost for the moment. Roger Riva, union secretary at La Dalia, 
explained, however, that after the coffee farm was given to them 
the workers were obliged to hire the previous administration. The 
administration was given the right to hire, fire, and set wages, 
with the agreement of the workers. Subsequently a number of 
workers were laid off. They were also obliged to use their first 
months' wages to pay for coffee seedlings. Child care, including a 
daily meal, which was an important gain for women workers 
during the initial years of the revolution, had been free but now 
costs $4 per child every month out of a $27 monthly wage. Some 
workers have left La Dalia to participate in land occupations.

        "If the agrarian reform is not deepened there will be war in 
the countryside," Palacios warned. "It is an explosive situation."

LAND SEIZURE

        On May 20, not far from El Carmen farm, 45 families 
occupied the 440-acre private farm called San Pedro, located in 
the town of Cerro Blanco Abajo. Visitacion Torres Gonzales, who 
was a farmhand at San Pedro, explained that the farm had been 
abandoned since 1982.

        Like Danilo Ramos, who was renting three and a half acres 
nearby, most of the families had been squatting on the land of 
family and friends in the area, some with as little as one-third of 
an acre.

        After appealing for land at the offices of the Ministry of 
Agrarian Reform, to no avail, the families decided to occupy the 
farm.

        The farm is being divided into individual lots, with each 
family receiving three and a half acres. The rest of the land is 
used communally. Forty acres have already been planted with 
corn, beans, and other subsistence crops. There are 10 families 
now living on the farm with the rest living elsewhere while they 
worlk the land. Torres said they may organize a cooperative to 
pool their resources.

        "The fight right now is to get legal ownership of the land," 
Ramos explained. Without a title of ownership they are not 
eligible for loans that the farmers need to bridge the seasonal lull, 
obtain seed and tools, make payments, and otherwise maintain 
the farm. 

        The police made one attempt to evict them a month after 
the occupation. To avoid a violent clash the workers agreed to 
leave. Once the police left however, they reoccupied the land and 
have remained since.

        Like Gerardo Rodriquez, who spent 10 years in the 
Sandinista army, and Danilo Ramos, who was in the National 
Resistance for 5 years, there are a number of war veterans among 
the squatters.

        "The main thing is that we are all poor peasants," Ramos 
explained. "None of us are happy with the current government 
and its policies," he continued as the others nodded.

        This is not the first occupation in the area. In 1990 27 
families occupied 1,140 acres of Los Cedrales farm in the Ojoche 
area. They have been granted provisional titles to the land.

        Ramos stated that many in the region do not have any or 
enough land. A few days before, he said, 40 families attempted to 
occupy the nearby 500-acre El Dolores farm.

OPPOSITION BY LANDOWNERS 

        "I agree with taking the land that belongs to the state, but 
they have to respect private property" said Gonzalo Abarca, 
owner of Los Milagros, a 90-acre coffee farm bordering San Pedro. 
Abarca, a small capitalist farmer who opposes the land seizure, 
has owned Los Milagros for 35 years.

        Aside from seasonal labor, which sometimes reaches 100, 
Abarca currently employes 8 workers year-round and wants to 
hire 10 more but has not been able to find any willing to work at 
the current very low wages. "Why work if they can steal 
someone's land. The problem is that people don't want to work 
anymore. The previous government didn't teach them the work 
ethic and now they don't want to work hard," Abarca complained.

        Referring to the low wages he pays--$1.20 a day including 
food--Abarca maintained that, "the biggest problem both for the 
employer and the worker is the lower price of coffee on the world 
market. I didn't even make enough to cover costs and to reinvest 
in upkeep of the coffee fields during the last harvest."

PRESSURE ON COOPERATIVES

        Quibuto is a hamlet of 1,700 people, located southeast of 
San Juan, which has two cooperatives and one collective farm.

        Through the agrarian reform, some peasants established 
cooperatives and collectives to cushion themselves from the 
market fluctuations through credits and guaranteed markets 
supported by the state.

        "Establishing legal ownership of the land is the main 
problem the cooperative faces," said Miguel Hernandez, the 
president of the Zacarias Padilla Cooperative of 40 members, 
which was founded in 1980 with 230 acres of coffee and some 
basic grains. They are members of the National Union of Farmers 
and Cattlemen (UNAG).

        The current government does not legally recognize most 
cooperatives, under the pretext that the titles that were granted 
under the agrarian reform law during the first years of the 
revolutionary government are not valid. The disputes are being 
decided by the government on a case-by-case basis.

        Members of the cooperatives as well as other small farmers 
in the area have been forced to sell land in order to meet bank 
payments and to obtain some cash to live on.

        As a result of these pressures there is increasing 
differentiation within and between the cooperatives, as well as 
among other landowners.

        Hernandez said the goal was to form a local association of 
cooperatives to strengthen them economically.

        Another cooperative in Quibuto, called Armando Zeledon, 
was founded in 1986. The land was given in exchange for the land 
the occupants lost when they were relocated by the army to 
Quibuto from an area of strong support for the contras.

        When asked about the past conflict between Sandinistas 
and contras who now appeared to be getting along together in the 
farm, cooperative president Pedro Quintero said, "The contras and 
the Sandinistas who were poor remain poor; as peasants we have 
the same interests."

LAND CONFLICT

        According to Reynaldo Laguna, secretary for the FSLN and 
for UNAG in San Juan del Rio Coco, in that area there are 1,130 
unresolved cases of land ownership without titles. A government 
commission is projected to resolve 150-500 of these cases. The 
government says, however, that it will not decide in several cases 
where the ownership is in dispute.

        According to Laguna the commission's decisions "will only 
generate further problems because it will reinforce the idea that 
the only way to resolve the problem is with a gun."

        In the San Juan area, scene of heavy fighting during the 
contra war, there are a number of groups of former Sandinistas 
called recompas, and groups of former contras called recontras. 
They have taken up arms and in some cases united to demand 
that the government fulfill the agreements and that they be 
granted land. Some bands have been assaulting travelers. On July 
20 recontras machine-gunned vehicles at a cooperative outside 
San Juan.

        "There are 40,000 landless peasants in the northern region 
and the government doesn't have any more land to give," said 
Miguel Hernandez of Quibuto. "Further land can only be obtained 
through pressure; only those who are strong enough will get 
land."

        Hernandez, who described the land occupations as acts of 
desperation, said, "UNAG seeks to resolve the problems of the 
land peacefully in terms of the cooperatives." Daniel Nunez, UNAG 
national president, declared earlier this year that "the land 
seizures provoke instability in the countryside that affects all of 
us."

        According to the ATC, in the period since the military 
demobilization and the January 1990 election of the new 
government, some 6,000 families have occupied 70,000 acres, 
mostly on the 37 percent of state lands that hand not been 
privatized. These occupations have declined and as of July there 
were only 45 across the country. In 1992 there have been 12 
evictions by the army and police. One hundred workers and 
peasants have been arrested in the course of these evictions.

        According to the ATC there are currently 100,000 
unemployed in the countryside, bringing the combined 
unemployment and underemployment to 60 percent. Many poor 
peasants and workers explain that they see obtaining some land 
as the only means of survival in the worsening crisis.
________
The Militant newspaper is a socialist newsweekly.  An 
introductory subscription costs $10 for 12 weeks. Write to The 
Militant, 410 West Street, New York, N.Y. 10014. 



** End of text from cdp:reg.nicaragua **