The New Agrarian Reform in Bolivia
Rusty buses lined the wide road, their roofs packed with men, sitting, crouching and lying down.
Families sat and stood in the back of old pick up trucks. The people arrived in droves, by truck, bus or on foot, carrying banners and flags. The Wipala, a flag composed of multicoloured squares, was held aloft, draped around shoulders and hung from the small trees in the grassy central divide of the road. It represents the indigenous people of Bolivia who make up nearly two thirds of the population, those descended from the people who inhabited the land before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Not only the majority, they are also overwhelmingly the poorest. As one of their leaders said, they are often condemned to work as “peons” or serfs for wealthy landowners, “latifundistas“. This is a situation generations have faced for five hundred years.
On Saturday June 3, 2006 thousands of indigenous campesinos, peasants and agricultural labourers, congregated around a small stage in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. Representatives of three communities were presented with the legal titles to their land by President Evo Morales, a former union leader of coca growers and now the first indigenous president of the most indigenous country in Latin America. In total sixty sets of papers were received by communities from different parts of Bolivia, from the Departments of Beni, Cochabamba, La Paz, Oruro, Pando, Santa Cruz and Tarija. The land titles represented over 7.5 million acres of land, for farmer communities as small as 103 acres, and designated native lands as large as 1.1 million acres.