http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25505.shtmlGREGORY WILPERT, New Left Review, may-june 2003
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However, after appearing to have all but forgotten this burning social issue in the first phase of his Presidency, on 4 February 2002—the tenth anniversary of his original attempt to overthrow Carlos Andrés Pérez—Chávez announced a new decree, by which his government would transfer the legal ownership of the barrios to their inhabitants. The timing of his speech, coming between the first general strike against him in December 2001 and the attempted coup of April 2002, makes it clear that, under a vitriolic barrage of media and oppositional attack, the government realized it was losing popular ground and had to regain it with a dramatic initiative. Some 7,000 families have benefited from the programme in the past year and, by the end of 2003, about 500,000 plots are due to be transferred.
Barrios in credit
But the decree could transfer only publicly owned land. Iván Martínez, the director of the National Technical Office for the Regularization of Urban Land Tenancy, estimates that approximately one third of the terrain the barrios now occupy belongs to the state, one third is privately owned, and one third is indeterminate or contested. To transfer privately owned land to barrio inhabitants, a law has to be passed through Congress. Legislation to this end, a ‘Special Law to Regularize Land Tenancy in Poor Urban Settlements’, has been proposed by Chávez’s Fifth Republic Movement ( mvr), and is due to be passed after extensive consultation with the communities that are to benefit from it. For this purpose, ‘land committees’ have been created in every barrio, which send representatives to the National Assembly to discuss the law together with the legislators. According to Martínez, they have proposed numerous changes to the original draft, including provisions for the creation of communal property. This is one of the first laws in Venezuelan history that is being hammered out with those actually affected by it. Once in force, it will have a significant impact on the lives of more Venezuelan citizens than any other governmental programme save public education. As many as ten million Venezuelans, or 40 per cent of the population, could eventually benefit, even if Martínez reckons that the law could take up to ten years to implement in full.
The rationale of the transfer, as Martínez puts it, is first of all ‘a recognition of the social debt which the state owes the population’. For in the past half-century, the state constructed one million homes for its citizens; the private sector erected about two million; while the inhabitants of barrios, with infinitely fewer resources than either, built over three million. Considering that it costs about ten times as much to tear down a barrio home and build a new one somewhere else, it is clear that ‘the barrios are part of the solution, not the problem’, in Martínez’s words. Andrés Antillano, an organizer in La Vega, one of Venezuela’s largest, oldest and most politicized shanty-towns, who has worked together with Martínez on the draft of the new law, adds that it aims at ‘recognizing the barrio as a collective subject with legal rights and profound transformative potentials’. In other words, where De Soto and Primero Justicia view urban land reform as essentially a means to encourage the accumulation of capital in the barrios, Chávez’s supporters see it as a path to participatory democracy and self-help in the communities.
The land committees necessitated by the decree and proposed law are composed of seven to eleven individuals, elected by a gathering of at least half of the families in any given community, up to a maximum of two hundred. The committees are then free to choose the polygonal of land, the territory of the community, they represent. At first sight, their function looks similar to that of the Bolivarian Circles that Chávez had created in 2001. According to their literature, these Circles ‘discuss problems of their community and direct them towards the appropriate governing body, to find a rapid solution for them’. While the media and the opposition demonize them as the shock troops of a totalitarian regime, the truth is that for the most part they do exactly what their pamphlets proclaim—put on cultural events, paint murals of Simón Bolívar, organize workshops to discuss the constitution and build community centres. In this sense they have been a force for barrio transformation.
The difference between the Circles and the land committees, however, is that the former are, by and large, partisan groups of up to a dozen self-selected individuals who support the Chávez government and want to regenerate their country. The land committees, on the other hand, are democratically elected to represent a particular community of up to 200 families and do not have any political affiliation. By the summer of 2002 it was estimated that over 300 of them had come into being, representing about 150,000 people. They perform a wide variety of tasks, that fall broadly speaking into three areas: regularization of urban property titles; self-government of the barrio; and ‘self-transformation’ of the neighbourhood. Additionally, but more temporarily, they participate in the formulation of the urban land law.
In the regularization of property titles, the committees take an active part in measuring the plots of land that each family occupies, and adjudicating disputes between them. Since the surveys have to be accurate, government officials work with them, training slum-dwellers how to use the necessary equipment. The process can be tricky because barrio homes often have such irregular shapes. The process of registration also involves designating which parts of barrio land should be communally owned, to provide recreational space. Once the land is registered, each family can claim their titles by providing proof of ownership, usually in the form of receipts for building materials or utility bills. The National Technical Office then provides a certificate which, once the property is ready to be transferred and if no one else claims title to the land within three months, can be exchanged for the actual property deeds. However, only dwellings built on safe land—that is, sites that do not endanger their inhabitants by too unstable or precarious a location—are eligible for such ownership. Those who live on unsafe terrain have the right to exchange their claim to property for a government-built home in a different location. Likewise, land invasions that have occurred since the decree of February 2002 cannot participate in the entitlement process, but must look to the government’s public housing programme instead.
So far as the objective of self-government goes, the land committees embody much more manageable units than current administrative districts, which in Caracas can consist of over half a million citizens apiece. The committees provide partners for municipal agencies and utility companies, for joint improvement of public services—water, electricity, waste disposal or road access. They have even begun to form sub-committees to work on these different tasks, including the organization of cultural activities, enhancement of security, and embellishment of their neighbourhoods.
Finally, what is meant by ‘self-transformation’ of the community? Under this heading, the land committees are charged with drafting a charter for their barrio that tells its history, defines its territory, sets out its ground rules and explains its values. The charter is meant to strengthen the communal identity of the barrio. The idea is that only a strong sense of collective identity will lead to a real community, and hence to the possibility of a purposeful change of its conditions of existence. Government officials hope, of course, that some of the benefits that de Soto describes will take effect in the barrios, as a real-estate market develops that allows people to use their homes as collateral for small business loans and thriving mini-entrepreneurship. But when asked what they most want from this programme, slum-dwellers regularly mention ‘recognition’. Nora, a participant in one land sub-committee said, ‘we believe in the government here not because of the titles, but because we can now participate more in decisions that affect the community’. Still, she adds, ‘People are asking, why has it taken so many years for a government to meet this demand?’
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