American Rancher Resists Land Reform Plans in Bolivia

From the New York Times available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/world/americas/09bolivia.html?_r=1&ei=5070&en=3498246bd5037226&ex=1210996800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=all

American Rancher Resists Land Reform Plans in Bolivia

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times
Duston Larsen, center, son of Ronald Larsen, on his family’s ranch in Bolivia, where the central government wants to break up large holdings and redistribute the land to farmers.

By SIMON ROMERO
Published: May 9, 2008

CARAPARICITO, Bolivia — From the time Ronald Larsen drove his pickup truck here from his native Montana in 1969 and bought a sprawling cattle ranch for a song, he lived a quiet life in remote southeastern Bolivia, farming corn, herding cattle and amassing vast land holdings.

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times
The Larsen family patriarch, Ronald, an American, has clashed with Bolivian officials over the working conditions of the Guaraní Indians he employs.
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Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times
Guaraní Indians employed by Mr. Larsen.

Ronald Larsen bought his land in Caraparicito in 1969.
But now Mr. Larsen, 63, has suddenly been thrust into the public eye in Bolivia, finding himself in the middle of a battle between President Evo Morales, who plans to break up large rural estates, and the wealthy light-skinned elite in eastern Bolivia, which is chafing at Mr. Morales’s land reform project to the point of discussing secession.
After armed standoffs with land-reform officials at his ranch this year, Mr. Larsen made it clear which side he was on, emerging as a figure celebrated in rebellious Santa Cruz Province and loathed by Mr. Morales’s government, which wants to reduce ties to the United States.
“I just spent 40 years in this country working my land in an honest fashion,” said Mr. Larsen, who resembled Clint Eastwood with his weathered features and lanky frame. “They’re taking it away over my dead body.”
Mr. Larsen’s standoffs with the central government, replete with rifles, cowboys and Guaraní Indians, might sound like something out of the Old West. In fact, the battle playing out in the cattle pastures and gas-rich hills of his ranch, amid claims of forced servitude of Guaraní workers in the remote region, exemplifies Bolivia’s wild east.
Tensions here erupted one day in February when Alejandro Almaraz, the deputy land minister, arrived before dawn at the entrance to Mr. Larsen’s Hacienda Caraparicito to carry out an inspection, a step usually taken before the government seizes ranches and redistributes them among indigenous farmers.
Both sides differ as to what happened, but everyone agrees that some violence ensued. “I didn’t want this guy making any trouble, so I shut him up with a shot at one of his tires,” Mr. Larsen was quoted as saying last month by La Razón, Bolivia’s main daily newspaper.
Mr. Almaraz said he was kidnapped and held for a day on Mr. Larsen’s ranch. He responded to the incident by identifying the American rancher and his son Duston in a criminal complaint for “sedition, robbery and other crimes.”
Faced with a legal tussle over the standoff, Mr. Larsen now claims that he did not shoot at Mr. Almaraz’s vehicle. “The tires were punched out with sharpened screwdrivers,” Mr. Larsen said. “If I’d have been shooting at people that day, there would have been dead and injured.”
At stake is the 37,000-acre Caraparicito ranch, which Mr. Larsen bought in 1969 for $55,000, and other holdings of more than 104,000 acres, the government estimates. Mr. Larsen, who as a protective measure transferred ownership of almost all his land to his three sons, who are Bolivian citizens, declined to say how much land his family owned.
With his reserved demeanor, Mr. Larsen, a descendant of Danish immigrants to the Midwest, made it seem as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have moved to Bolivia in the 1960s, after he got bored working as a department store manager.
“A buddy of mine in the Peace Corps told me Bolivia was a good place to invest,” he said.
His quiet style contrasts with that of his oldest son, Duston, born in Bolivia, reared in Nebraska and educated at Montana State University. While Mr. Larsen prefers to lie low at the family home in Santa Cruz, the provincial capital, Duston, 29, has been in the spotlight since moving here in 2004.
Within months of his arrival, he won the Mr. Bolivia beauty pageant. He compensated for his American-accented Spanish at the finale by shouting, “Viva Bolivia!” before the stunned judges. Shortly afterward, he was cast as himself in a Bolivian comedy about cocaine smuggling entitled “Who Killed the White Llama?”
Now Duston Larsen is focused on guarding the family’s land, ahead of his marriage to Claudia Azaeda, a talk show host and former beauty pageant winner. Depicted in newspaper cartoons as a gun-slinging “Mr. Gringo Bolivia,” he basks in the showdown with Mr. Morales, an Aymara Indian who as Bolivia’s first indigenous president has made land reform a top priority in his efforts to reverse centuries of subjugation of the indigenous majority.
“Evo Morales is a symbol of ignorance, having never even finished high school,” Duston Larsen said.
He vehemently asserted that ranch hands and their families were free to come and go, after the Larsens and other ranchers were faced with government claims that ranches in their region held their Guaraní workers in servitude; the government has used the charge to move ahead with land seizures.
The reality of life at Caraparicito and other ranches may be more complex than either side suggests. At Caraparicito, workers get work contracts, food, clothing, housing and education for their children at a schoolhouse on the ranch. But wages remain low, with senior farmhands earning less than $6 a day.
“We are not slaves,” said Oscar Robles, 52, a ranch hand for almost two decades. “But we are not prospering. We just exist.”
In 2004, the French energy giant Total discovered one of the largest unexploited natural gas deposits in Bolivia, called Incahuasi, on the ranch. The rights to such discoveries automatically go to the government in Bolivia.
But Mr. Larsen said he believed that one reason the central government was so interested in his land was its natural gas. President Morales could bypass the province of Santa Cruz in reaching deals related to the natural gas field if he is able to settle Indians on the land who are sympathetic to his government.
The combination of oil, guns and land becomes even more combustible when mixed with Bolivia’s volatile politics. In a sharp rebuke of Mr. Morales’s socialist-inspired policies, Santa Cruz Province approved measures on Sunday that would halt land redistribution and allow provincial officials to renegotiate some energy deals.
Such a vote, which some people in the province consider a possible precursor to secession, might be expected to halt the maneuvers around Caraparicito. Indeed, Mr. Larsen’s battle is being watched closely throughout Santa Cruz, where foreign agricultural settlers include Brazilians, Canadian Mennonites, Okinawans and a handful of Americans.
Each side is digging in its heels for the next stage in the fight.
Juan Carlos Rojas, the director of Bolivia’s land reform agency, said the battle got personal when Mr. Larsen issued a veiled threat against him and other officials when the American rancher referred to a well-known incident in the 1980s in which he shot dead three intruders inside his home.
“Larsen made it clear that he was above the law,” said Mr. Rojas, who emerged from an April standoff at Caraparicito with his face bloodied from a rock-throwing exchange. Echoing comments by Mr. Morales, he said Santa Cruz’s newly approved autonomy was “illegal” in his view.
“The last I looked, the Larsens were living in Bolivia and not the Republic of Santa Cruz,” Mr. Rojas said. “Despite Ronald Larsen’s resistance, we are going to get into his ranch.”

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Bolivia's Morales faces a challenge from fellow Indian

Indigenous activist Savina Cuellar, governor in the key province of Chuquisaca, has fallen out with the president and become a figurehead for those opposed to his socialist policies.
By Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 7, 2008

SUCRE, BOLIVIA -- Renowned as the cradle of Bolivian independence, this colonial town in the south-central highlands has become a front line in a new battle that is threatening to rip this South American nation asunder.The pugnacious prefect, or governor, Savina Cuellar, a former livestock herder who proudly dons the broad-brimmed hat and billowing skirt that mark her indigenous origins, has become a symbol of the country's deep divisions.

Her peasant background inevitably evokes comparisons to the humble history of leftist President Evo Morales, the coca-leaf cultivator who in 2005 was elected Bolivia's first indigenous president.But the two allies have become bitter adversaries. Their differences say much about the schisms of class, region and ethnicity that some fear have left Bolivia on the verge of civil war. Five of Bolivia's nine governors, including Cuellar, are lined up against Morales and his controversial plans for a new constitution.'Evo says there is a democracy, but what I see is a dictatorship,' says Cuellar, seated inside the ornate government palace on the scenic plaza, her sentences interspersed with phrases from her native Quechua. 'For me, Evo doesn't represent the indigenous people, because they're dying of hunger.'
She defiantly rejects the class-warfare rhetoric of Morales, who accuses a U.S.-backed, racist 'oligarchy' of conspiring to topple his socialist vision of nationalizations, land reform and Indian empowerment.'Evo is the racist: He is dividing Bolivia,' asserts the diminutive, ever-combative Cuellar. 'I don't have anything against the rich. Thank God there are rich! They give us work, so we have something to eat.'The government and its allies deride Cuellar as a sellout: a puppet of the right-wing, white and mixed-race aristocracy that has long dominated Bolivia. The Morales government says it is the first to champion the country's indigenous majority, though others say most Bolivians are in fact of mestizo or mixed-race origins, and not pure Indian..'Savina has become a tool of the powerful,' says Esteban Urquizu, head of a pro-government federation, as he and others chew coca leaves in the group headquarters here. 'She is being used, manipulated.'An account in a Mexican newspaper labeled Cuellar the 'Bolivian Malinche,' after the widely reviled Indian woman who aided the Spaniard Hernan Cortez in his 16th century war of conquest.Cuellar, a former domestic servant and mother of seven, had little formal education. Her mother died when she was 2, and from an early age she helped care for her siblings, while also minding the family's cows and sheep in her native village of Ichupampa. She showed early leadership skills, however, eventually developing a regional reputation as an advocate for rural women.A turning point on her path to political activism,Cuellar says, were the killings seven years ago of her father, her husband and her brother-in-law in a robbery. She successfully pressed for authorities to track down the killers and send them to prison.'From then I fought for justice, for change,' says Cuellar, who became a partisan of Morales' Movement to Socialism party. Morales swept to the presidency in December 2005.But Cuellar split with the central government last year during a raucous convention held here to rewrite Bolivia's Constitution, Morales' top priority. She had served as a delegate for the ruling party.The proposed overhaul of the constitution has become the focal point of Bolivia's fractious national political debate. Critics say it will perpetuate Morales' power and drown dissent. But the civic leaders of Sucre had one overriding demand: to return national capital status to this city of 250,000, restoring the glory it had lost in the 19th century to the western highland city of La Paz.For Morales, whose political base is La Paz, there was little choice but to reject the notion of moving the capital.The debate took a belligerent, bloody turn. Supporters of moving the capital to Sucre clashed violently with police officers and troops on the streets of this normally laid-back town, a popular tourist destination. Three were killed and hundreds wounded in days of rioting.Cuellar, an ardent advocate of the capital switch, broke with the government. The opposition turned to her as an alternative to head Chuquisaca province, of which Sucre is the capital. She won the governor's seat handily against a Morales surrogate, getting overwhelming backing from the urban, educated middle class and elite, mostly of mixed-race and European origins.As Bolivia's national political drama appears to be headed toward a climax, Sucre now stands defiantly in the opposition camp that Morales labels seditious. With the president seeking a referendum in December on his proposed constitution, the national atmosphere is so poisoned that traveling here or to other rebellious states poses a security risk for Morales.'The government in La Paz needs to recognize its errors,' Cuellar says. 'I became an activist trying to do away with injustice. But now there is more injustice than ever.'patrick.mcdonnell @latimes.com