Sowing a Vendetta.(ranchers protest land reform policies, Venezuela)(Brief Article)

Jose Huerta is home from the hospital now, still recovering from an attempt on his life. You can count the holes from three .45 slugs in the side of the agronomist's battered old Dodge sedan. It's parked outside his modest ground-floor apartment in the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, just a few feet from the spot where Huerta was gunned down on Jan. 10. He nearly bled to death before surgeons could close his wounds.

The same day, a peasant leader named Luis Mora was killed some 175 kilometers away at his home in the state of Merida. The prime suspects in both shootings: local ranchers battling against President Hugo Chavez's latest land-reform plans. The ranchers deny it, but peasant leaders blame them for at least a half dozen unsolved murders in land disputes since mid-1991. Some put the death count at 40 or more in the past three years. And now they worry that the back-to-back incidents on Jan. 10 mean the violence has entered an ugly new phase.

It's one more area where Venezuela is in bad trouble. With the economy slowing to a crawl, furious business owners marching in the streets and opposition leaders publicly questioning Chavez's sanity, even longtime supporters among the urban poor are turning against him. The rural poor are some of his strongest remaining friends--and Chavez gave them new reason to stay loyal when he issued a controversial land-reform decree late last year. Under the law, the government can confiscate agricultural land it deems "underused" and parcel it out to the poor in small farmsteads.

Venezuela's big farmers and ranchers are refusing to comply. They say the government is trampling the rights of landowners. Peasant activists reply that some ranchers have more land than anyone has a right to. Both sides say the violence is almost sure to get worse. Huerta, a Communist Party member who helped write the final draft of Chavez's decree, says the government should declare a state of emergency in the disputed region: "If they don't suspend some [constitutional] guarantees and raid the ranches where the killers are supposed to be hiding, we're heading for civil war."

The center of the struggle is on Lake Maracaibo's far side, 175 kilometers or so due south of the city. So far some 600 peasant families have received allotments of roughly 16 hectares each. Sixty percent of the country's milk and meat are produced ...