Land Grab

[T]hugo Chavez is committed to destroying Venezuela, one socialist program after another.

This time, it's the forcible redistribution of land.

Mr. Chávez is carrying out what may become the largest forced land redistribution in Venezuela’s history, building utopian farming villages for squatters, lavishing money on new cooperatives and sending army commando units to supervise seized estates in six states.

The violence has gone both ways in the struggle, with more than 160 peasants killed by hired gunmen in Venezuela, including several here in northwestern Yaracuy State, an epicenter of the land reform project, in recent years. Eight landowners have also been killed here.

“The oligarchy is always on the attack and trying to say you are no good,” Mr. Chávez said to squatters in a televised visit here. “They think they’re the owners of the world.”

Mr. Chávez’s supporters have formed thousands of state-financed cooperatives to wrest farms and cattle ranches from private owners. Landowners say compensation is hard to obtain. Local officials describe the land seizures as paving stones on “the road to socialism.”

“This is agrarian terrorism encouraged by the state,” said Fhandor Quiroga, a landowner and head of Yaracuy’s chamber of commerce, pointing to dozens of kidnappings of landowners by armed gangs in the last two years.

The government says the goal of the nationwide resettlement is to make better use of idle land and to make Venezuela less dependent on food imports. New laws allow squatters to manage and farm land that has now been placed in government hands.

Zimbabwe's Mugabe tried that policy - and it resulted in the former breadbasket of Africa being turned into a basket case.

The Soviets did the same thing - causing misery and ruin and death for millions.

The Chinese did the same thing - with the same result - millions starving and dead.

Chavez thinks that this will end any differently? Fat chance.

UPDATE:
Astute Blogger also makes reference to the Chinese and Zimbabwean disasters resulting from land grabs and how the NYT focuses on the legality of such moves, despite the horrible toll that it will inflict on the country. Cato at Liberty also slams the Times for this article and questions how exactly is this legal other than because Chavez owns the legislature and deems it to be so.