It’s happening in three countries of the Americas, simultaneously at this very moment: Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba.

In at least two of the three cases, Venezuela and Bolivia, there’s a rapidly building case for civil war as productive land owners seek to defend their life’s work from the Mugabization of it all into smoking ruins. Bloodshed will follow.

Land wars are nothing new in Latin America but they haven’t happened in about two decades, so this is a negative new development powerfully signalling a spread of tyranny.

In every land war, a dictator seeks to destroy the very concept of private property. Once he does that, human beings are his next target. The prototypical model in this hemisphere is El Salvador, where the U.S. mistakenly supported a land-confiscating regime, that of Jose Napoleon Duarte, because it positioned itself in the middle between the landowners of the Arena Party willing to defend their land, and the Marxist guerrillas who massacred everything in sight in the name of Castroite collectivism. The U.S. got itself 2 million Salvadoran refugees as a result and El Salvador got itself a monstrous war that it’s still trying to recover from. Make no mistake: the impact of a land war is vast.

But El Salvador wasn’t the only one. Argentina’s Dirty Warriors first went after land, and then, feeling comfortable with that, went after human rights, murdering 30,000 people, supposedly leftists, in the Dirty War, which was only halted by their expansion of their ongoing land war, to the Falkland Islands, which Britain under Lady Thatcher stopped at a cost of blood and treasure in 1983. There is a word for this phenomenon: Lebensraum

It’s a cardinal law of human affairs that once land confiscations start, property rights end, and once property rights end, human rights will be destroyed.

It’s happened in Zimbabwe, it’s happened in every single communist regime from Kiev to Hanoi. And it’s happened in virtually every country in Latin America in smaller degrees by tinpot generals of the past. Latin America has the most urbanized population in the entire world. The precise reason for that is land grabs, which have driven peasants from land, and created horrible shantytowns that surround major metropolitan centers, from Tijuana to Mexico City to Caracas, to Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires. Pick a shantytown, any shantytown, and see if you can’t find a land grab behind it. Odds are, you will. Now, even with this knowledge, the land confiscations are stepping up in the communizing countries of the Americas. They aren’t even trying to hide it.

In Venezuela, the land confiscations have stepped up in Yaracuy state, where productive sugar-farming land is being taken for collective farms in a Jim Jonesian romantic vision of peasant self-sufficiency. It will have exactly the same success as Jim Jones as insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. As land confiscations step up, so do arbitrary arrests, including that of a governor who had the election stolen from him a few months ago. Note the correlation between land and human rights in Daniel’s frightening story here.

In Bolivia, citizens are arming themselves and Evo Morales is sending in secret paramilitaries from Venezuela and Cuba, infiltrating over the Paraguayan border. Boli-Nica has the whole terrifying story – some of the most disturbing things on a blog I have ever read – here and here. This will get worse.

Alvicho has an equally horrific post, describing the lack of accord between land owners and the expropriating hands of Evo Morales and all his hardline communist acolytes. Talks have broken down and now civil war seems likely. Read it here.

In Cuba, I got this email from a source with sources in Havana:

I know this comes up every 6 months but something VERY wacky is happening in Cuba right now. They are collecting deeds of properties that were given out during the Urban reform. In other words they are again taking back the houses the gave to some people 40+ years ago. Why? Castro’s hissy fit with his fortune is way outta proportion based on the fact that this was never a big topic around Cuba, but it is now with the news all over Cuba thanks to the interest section billboard.

The bastard commited the terrible mistake of threatening to sue Forbes. Forbes on the other hand is putting together a very detailed case against Castro which when made public knowledge will forever unmask him as a thief.

The recollection of the property deeds seems to be an effort to account for what was indeed
taken by Castro and pretty much taking away any rights of current property residents to claim ownership of anything given to them by Castro. In other words the prick can just claim they are all squatters!

All three of these land confiscation breakouts are happening in a correlation, as Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, and Fidel Castro draw closer to each other. Interestingly, the renewed trouble in Brazil I described here also has a land-war connection, as the violence in Sao Paulo seems to have had close links to the ‘landless’ movement.

I think they are all linked and it’s going to get worse.