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Venezuela Peasants
The majority of peasants were wage laborers,
sharecroppers,
or squatters on private or state-owned lands, and their
meager
income placed them at the outer margins of Venezuela's
general
prosperity. Rural life has changed little since colonial
times,
in spite of concerted efforts by governments committed to
agrarian reform. The best land still belonged to a
relatively few
owners, many of them absentees, while the dwindling rural
population eked out a miserable subsistence on inadequate
tracts
of less-than-prime farmland. Even the agrarian reform,
which had
distributed millions of hectares of land since 1960, had
not as
of 1990 gone on to the essential next step of providing
the
peasants legal title to their parcels
(see Land Policies
, ch. 3).
Regional variations in settlement patterns reflected
geographic conditions, land-use practices, and historical
traditions. In the northern mountain region, the heart of
Spanish
colonial influence, most peasants lived in small, dense
settlements. In areas where wage laborers or sharecroppers
still
worked on large plantations, workers lived in small,
centrally
located clusters of houses. In the forests of the Orinoco
plains,
the pattern was usually one of isolated farms and cattle
ranches.
Although most peasants were poor, there were gradations
determined by such variables as land ownership or job
security on
a plantation or a ranch. The poorest peasants migrated
from farm
to farm or from crop to crop. In strict economic terms,
the small
number of tribal Indians represented the poorest group in
Venezuelan society; this characterization, however, was
misleading because Indian communities have never been
fully
integrated into the nation's economy, and therefore the
concepts
of individual earnings or the use of currency were foreign
to
their way of life.
For centuries, Venezuelan peasants supported rebel
leaders in
return for promises of reform. At the time of
independence, they
were much closer to their own José Antonio Páez than to
the
aristocratic Bolívar. Since 1958 many have joined the
peasant
leagues affiliated with the AD and have become much more
influential in political terms. Nevertheless, peasants
continued
to migrate in massive numbers to the cities to escape
their poor
rural conditions.
Data as of December 1990
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