By Thor Halvorssen
NEW YORK, NY -- Last May, a private farm amidst Venezuela's rolling green countryside was expropriated by the country's president, Hugo Chavez. As Chavez later described, the farm's owner "is out there crying and saying he is going to get his land back. Well, he'll have to topple Chavez to get this back, because that farm belongs to the revolution now."
The farm's owner is Diego Arria. While Chavez has labeled Arria an "unburied corpse" of Venezuela's past, Arria has hardly been a lifeless corpse.
Seventy-year-old Arria has served as Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, and as a personal advisor to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Arria captured the world's attention when, as president of the U.N. Security Council, he condemned the failure of the international community to act against Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for his brutal treatment of Bosnian Muslims. He was a star witness during the prosecution of Milosevic for the genocide at Srebrenica. Prior to his UN tenure, Arria had been a leading political figure in Venezuela, serving as governor of the capital Caracas in the 1970s.
In 1988, Arria purchased the farm - named "La Carolina" in memory of his deceased daughter - for $300,000. The property was then in ruins. Arria renovated and restored the property, developing it into a farm complete with an organic coffee plantation and grass-fed cows producing 600 gallons of milk daily.
Under the pretext of confiscating "unused land," Venezuela's National Land Institute stormed onto the property on May 1 with a platoon of soldiers. The uniformed men raided the farmhouse at gunpoint. They took Arria's clothing and even his horse-riding boots as trophies.
Thirty-eight families depended on La Carolina for their livelihoods. They were told to find employment elsewhere. The cows, which Chávez claimed on television were "starving," were given away as gifts. One of them ended up on a barbeque spit, cooked for President Chavez himself. I contacted a former employee at La Carolina who told me that the farm's horses were slaughtered and sold as "beef." The seizure of Arria's farm and the plundering of his property has nothing to do with Venezuelan law or "reclaiming unused land." In fact, the Venezuelan government is the largest landowner in the country and most of its holdings lie unused.
I feel partially responsible for Arria's current predicament. I extended an invitation to him in April to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum, a human rights conference in Norway that this year included Lech Walesa, Rebiya Kadeer, Anwar Ibrahim, and Garry Kasparov.
It was Arria's participation in this conference that compelled him to speak out against Chavez's human rights violations. Arria had told media covering the event that Chavez would one day face international justice for his crimes against the Venezuelan people. The reaction of the Chavez government to Arria's statements was swift and implacable.
This expropriation was punishment for Arria's criticism of Chávez. Chavez even presented photos of the farm on Venezuelan state television. He gloated that "It looked like Falcon Crest" comparing Arria's farm to the winery estate featured on the American television show from the 1980s and underlined the presence of a swimming pool was a sign of its "bourgeois" nature. This sort of comment seeks only to sow resentment in the minds of those who believe inequalities of wealth represent an injustice that requires correction through theft.
The epic irony is that Chávez's own family started with little wealth when he became president in 1999. His father and brothers now own extensive landholdings in the Venezuelan state of Barinas. They have acquired so much ill-gotten wealth - and display it with so much ostentation and vulgarity - that various European media outlets have called the Chavez's "Venezuela's Royal Family." A rarely reported story was the internal fallout among Chavez's cronies, when Stanford Bank collapsed amidst fraud so did several billion dollars worth of funds ransacked from the Venezuelan treasury.
Despite the new wealth for the Chavez family and Venezuela's governing clique, the country suffers from elevated amounts of "critical" poverty and is currently one of the most violent countries in the world. Venezuela's economy is in ruins, but Chavez continues to fund various international controversial projects. He provides support for the FARC terrorist army in Colombia (which recently includes the public revelation that he has kept them well-stocked with Swedish missiles purchased by Venezuela). He was also recently exposed in Spain as having facilitated training for Basque ETA terrorists in FARC camps. His penchant for villains and rogues extends to alliances with Belarus, Iran, Libya, Syria, Zimbabwe, and especially Cuba. Chavez also continues to send billions of petrodollars in aid to prop up the governments of Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua - all despite the desperate needs of many of Venezuela's own citizens.
Since 2006, Venezuela has carried out more than 800 expropriations across industries and involving all sorts of property: farms, radio stations, television studios, factories, private residences, banks, butcher shops, sandwich shops, steel mills and, most probably in the near future, the main Venezuelan beer company. There is a clear intention to terrorize a population with the fear of being expropriated in case of dissent or criticism of the government. From a legal perspective, there is an intention to replace jurisprudence surrounding the concept of private property with the term "social property" meaning: it belongs to everyone but will be controlled by the state.
Despite facing the wrath of Chavez, Diego Arria will not give up. He spent the month of May visiting government officials and organizations across Europe, discussing the seizure of his farm and denouncing the Chavez government. Upon realizing the lethargy and ignorance in the international arena about the abuses committed by the Chavez government, Arria has become the most eloquent and tenacious spokesman for those affected by the expropriation abuse. In June he met with the Council of Europe, the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, the Spanish parliament, and even the International Criminal Court at the Hague. As a result of Arria's efforts, Chavez ordered another one of Arria's properties seized in mid-June: a 90 acre orange orchard. Once again the employees were kicked off the land. Undaunted, Arria's one-man effort continues and this month he will be visiting Canada, México, Colombia, Chile and Brazil.
In order for world opinion to mobilize against Chavez, he must be revealed as the petty authoritarian and enemy of individual rights that he is. This is a far more accurate view than the heroic champion of the poor and enemy of capitalism and Yankee imperialism as his apologists (most recently Oliver Stone) have tried to disguise him. Venezuela has lived under 11 years of Chavez. He has declared that he will rule until 2030. What will become of Venezuela in the next twenty years?
Despite an attachment to his farm La Carolina, Arria told me that he is willing under one condition to give up his farm to Chavez. That is, "so he can retire there now - provided that he gives us Venezuelans our country and our peace back."
Thor Halvorssen is president of the Human Rights Foundation and founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
It's beacuse Chavez refuses to play house latino for his big neighbour up north that he is routinely depicted as some kind Stalin.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/09/venezuela-hugo-chavez
Then again, I notice how due process and legal guarantees are never important when ithey're being violated by leftists...only when the right does it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-kryt/one-year-after-coup-hondu_b_636830.html
How do you like them apples, Richard Pearce?
(Yes, I know you then scrambled to save face, saying that the correct method to depose a leader asking the people for their views involved getting a newly appointed supreme court to hold a Burmese style trial, but calling asking people their views 'undemocratic' undermines the idea that you are truly concerned about democracy and peoples rights)
Thor, did you really think I'd have asked the question if I hadn't had an idea of what you were going to say?
I have no more interest in defending the landowners of Venezuela than defending the imprisoned journalists, the dissidents who have been persecuted, the students who are the constant targets of the state-owned television, the human rights advocates who have been expelled at gunpoint (including two Human Rights Watch officials), and the victims of Venezuela's crime wave.
Many people there simply want to live a peaceful live in a democracy rather than having to choose between a revolution that goes by the motto: "Fatherland, Socialism or Death" or being neutral and then being classified as part of the "corrupt" "coup-plotting" "oligarchy" this Chavez government-created Manichean construct inevitably will lead to social conflict and more human rights violations.
http://www.njea.org/pdfs/TheCartelMay2009.pdf
I hate the US, Chavez hates and bashes the US, therefore, I admire Chavez. All other considerations are meaningless.
Keep up the great work uncovering all those inmoral paid "academics".
In that, they are very much like their hero, Hugo Chavez. Prepare to have your allegorical farm attacked before your eyes.
Good luck, Mr. Halvorssen.
Many of the Pajamahadeen who post responses on here seemingly have nothing better to do than to google, post some crackpot theory, and think this passes for intelligent debate. It can be entertaining though.... TH
Now, when you compare the 'gloom and doom' of the article to the economic picture of the data, you get a pretty large contrast.
"As can be seen in Table 3, there has been a huge decline in poverty and extreme poverty during the current economic expansion. The percentage of households in poverty declined by more than half, from 54 percent in the first half of 2003, to an estimated 26 percent at the end of 2008. The percentage of households in extreme poverty fell by even more: a 72 percent decline, to seven percent of total households. This is a significant achievement, and puts Venezuela within reach of eliminating extreme poverty altogether. It is worth noting that the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals call for a reduction in extreme poverty by half over the period 1990-2015."
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-2009-02.pdf
Same source, though if you look at the World Bank data, you will see that indeed the GINI did indeed drop (which is an indication of movement in the right direction).
Perhaps Thor thinks he's in another of Orwell's works, and trying to show he's a good candidate for the Ministry of Truth.
A lot of talk of "corporations" that "make profits" and "exploit." Assuming all business is "exploitation" is what leads to the perpetuation of poverty. Poverty isn't reduced through expropriation of other people's stuff but instead through wealth creation in a framework where individual rights are respected.
In Venezuela the "growth" of the economy is fallacious: it is all thanks to revenue in the oil sector. Everywhere else Venezuela is contracting--to the point it has to import 70% of its food. It is imploding, in fact.
Fear of public exposure of the truth is why Chavez's government continues to violate human rights and limit freedom of expression--It is also why they disqualify opposition candidates from elections, rig elections, jail journalists, shut down opposition media, and, shockingly, pay off foreign "academics" to serve as public relations agents.
The study cited by Richard Pearce is put together by the Center for Economic Policy Research. Who are they? They employ several former Venezuelan government employees in their DC office (and do not disclose this) and their head honcho, Mark Weisbrot, got a sizable payoff for writing the Oliver Stone hagiography of Chavez. They don't disclose that, either... Their stats are fraudulent. But even if they were accurate--what about the human rights violations?
Venezuela is a rich (and corrupt) government with a very poor population.
One wonders, who your group hires, who gives it money, and if any of them have ties that lead to those who created the third world conditions Venezuelans endured?
As for the human rights violations, I'm still waiting for the reality to match the rhetoric. Anyone disappeared yet? Are the prisons filling up with Chavez's critics? Uribe to the west just racked up thousands of dead civilians (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8038399.stm) yet he's hailed as a democrat!
Ah, but he isn't upsetting the long-entrenched oligarchy that has kept its boot on the throat of the Colombian population for over a century, so we can excuse his tens of thousands of picadillos.
The rhetoric doesn't match the reality. It's painfully clear that the international think-tank community wouldn't bother mentioning Chavez's name were it not for the fact that he was sitting on a sea of oil. This is no different than the tactic used against Mossadegh, except this time it isn't working.
Please tell Mr. Arria to be extremely careful when traveling, especially if there are russians or cubans present. Over the years bad ad things have happened to much less important people.
Hopefully soon The People will take back from Chavez and his family everything that he stole/expropriated, and as far as Chavez himself and his family - perhaps the reenactment of the French Revolution would not be totally out of place!
(see my posts above)
A few years ago Venezuela was one of the great coffee producing nations. Now they import coffee.
Chavez's price controls are supposed to guarantee everyone's right to low-cost food. Instead it guarantees everyone's right to low-cost non-existent food.