Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced Sunday the nationalization of 300,000 hectares (741,313 acres) of idle
farmland marking the beginning of a war on huge landholdings.
The land seized by the State involves 16 estates, Chávez explained during his Alo Presidente television and radio program broadcast from Barinas in western Venezuela.
“The agrarian revolution, agrarian socialism to be more precise, is one of the biggest internal challenges facing the country,” said Chávez. “It’s about ending the huge estate and recovering these lands under the guidelines of the law to put them to use to breed cattle for beef and milk production,” he added.
Later in the program Chávez said, “This land becomes social property as of today, which is what it always should have been … Social property and production, and satisfying the people’s needs,” are the strategic cornerstones of the revolution taking place in Venezuela.
