I visited Yaracuy, Venezuela, a few months ago. It’s an agricultural state famous for its sugar and it looks like this:

A Yaracuy sugar farm

But the atmosphere was tense everywhere, for land wars were going on, and people were getting their farms confiscated.

That wasn’t the only fear. Every day, I witnessed people worrying about kidnappers grabbing them for ransom. Farmers cellphoned their wives every few hours from the fields and the pickup trucks to assure them so that they didn’t worry. Everyone tried to keep a low profile because fear reigned the day.

Still, the fear of the government was worse.

A road in Yaracuy

One tense and memorable incident was emblematic: Chavista inspectors interrupted my lunch with a friend at a roadside cafe, marching through in their redshirt uniforms, getting oily fake obsequious grins, smiles and bows from owners, and a noticible abrupt change of topic from the locals conversing over lunch, wary of what the Chavistas would mark down on their clipboards about them. Relief only came when the Chavistas marched out, single file. My companion compared it to scenes in the film, Cabaret, where Nazi inspectors would walk into the cabaret and then the tone would change. It was the same thing.

Land confiscations were a big problem there. People desperately did everything they could to prevent it from happening, probably enabling the Chavista elite to get rich in such one-on-ones, but for those who were targeted and confiscated, there was only documentation of their losses to make as thugs came through, smashed everything in sight in individual farmhouses, and burned sugar fields and killed cattle. So-called foreigners were specially targeted, industrious Spaniards, Cubans, Portuguese and Italians who settled the land in the 1950s when it was just jungle.

After the confiscators came though – mostly poor people from shantytowns bullied into doing it – on bright shiny red Iranian tractors like these here:

Iranian tractors rolling into Yaracuy to be used to confiscate land

they set up tent-like shantytowns which were traceable by their trails of garbage.

Squatter rubbish

They planted inferior crops, like yuca, beans and other items supposedly signifying self sufficiency, but which were ill suited to the uniqueness of the Yaracuy land, which has its own climate that’s ideal for growing sugar and other specialized tropical cash crops. The romance of Rousseauvian self-sufficiency, dictated from Caracas, was just too good to allow common sense. So the scraggly Jim-Jones-like fields planted by inexperienced squatters from slums like these

A slum on the outskirts of a Yaracuy town

began to dot the land of the once productive fields.

Now, arrests are happening.

The first target of the hammer-and-sickle government of Yaracuy was the leader of the opposition, a governor named Eduardo Lapi. He had the election stolen from him a few months back and now the government goons have come for him, on dubious charges as the current government fails. The current governor, a guy named Gimenez, is famous to local residents for the scratch marks he’s made on the governor’s mansion wall from the bumper of his car. Evidently, late at night, he’s not quite able to drive straight for some reason. Locals have their theories. But here is the evidence:

Yaracuy goverrnor’s mansion with scraped up side walls from a failing Chavista governor

Daniel was in Yaracuy at a local bank when the state organs marched in and took Lapi, and then the townspeople marched in protest. Goons shot into the crowd as Daniel watched in horror yesterday, and he wrote about it here.

A long local bank line in San Felipe, Yaracuy state, Venezuela