La cuestión agraria, la producción agroalimentaria y la apropiación de la tierra y del trabajo en Venezuela: una revisión histórica

This article relates the Venezuelan crises of the 19th, part of the 20th, and 21st centuries with the obsolescence of the form of appropriation of land and labor in the face of technological and economic transformations, the most outstanding feature during the Venezuelan crises registered in both periods. The essential sources used in the research were the compilations of historical documents made during the 1960s and 1970s by the Council of Scientific and Humanistic Development (CDCH) of the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), as well as by the Congress of the Republic in 1980. After the synthesis of the historical forms of production, the essential features of the exploitation, appropriation, and transmission of land ownership are analyzed, highlighting the expropriations by the opposing sides in the successive wars, the importance of looting in the appropriation of goods, racism as an ideological justification and the decline of slavery as a form of appropriation of labor in the 19th century. The study also showed that the forms of illegal appropriation of land (such as the illegal/informal market, occupations of all kinds, including the deviant application of legal texts) became the norm. Likewise, the will to prevent the realization of a reliable cadastre by successive governments in these centuries favored such de facto situations. Paradoxically, the most recent agrarian policies (in particular, the laws of 1960 and 2001) have not significantly influenced the evolution of land appropriation or the de-concentration of land ownership, but they have allowed the play of factors such as the informal market and local pacts. In terms of the appropriation of labor, at the beginning of the period studied, slavery and the coercive appropriation of manumiso’s labor predominated, and although there have been many subsequent regulations to regulate it, in practice it continues to be very complex and fluctuating. Therefore, the evolution of both the appropriation of labor and land has been obsolete in the face of the economic and technological evolution registered during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.