The plot thickens: Venezuela seizes private ranches and gives them to the poor, which has businesses--and environmentalists--worried.

Anthony Richards' business card describes him as the "administrator" of Hato Charcote, a 5,220-hectare ranch of plains, woods and wetlands in central Venezuela, where thousands of cattle are fattened to become steaks and hamburgers. But seated in his small office at the ranch's entrance, Richards' exasperated tone makes it clear he's administrating less and less these days. "It isn't easy living surrounded by people who don't like you," the British-born Richards says of the hundreds of government-backed campesinos, landless peasants who have squatted property on Charcote and now claim nearly all of it. Richards accuses the campesinos of shooting cattle, setting fires and cutting down trees.

Since 1999, soon after Hugo Chavez became president, between 1,000 and 2,000 campesinos have moved onto the spread. Agropecuario Flora, a subsidiary of U.K food company Vestey Group, has operated and--it believes--owned the land since 1920.

Today, Richards says, campesinos believe they own almost the entire ranch, forcing Agropecuario Flora to reduce the number of cattle to 5,000 from 13,000 head. Annual beef production has plummeted to 400,000 kilograms from 1.5 million.

The road through Charcote is now bordered by wood-and-mud cabins surrounded by small plots of corn and yucca. To the families settled on the ranch, who have begun farming, their actions amount to no more than simple justice. They were poor and landless while the region's lands were in the hands of a few powerful families. Companies like Vestey used the land to fatten cows while people around it went hungry, they claim.

Richards wonders whether the campesino farms can be economically viable on Charcote, most of which floods annually. Government officials have responded with an announcement of plans to drain the wetlands and make canals out of natural rivers--despite these projects' huge environmental costs.

"I got tired of living on a miserable wage," working for big landowners, says 50-year-old Pedro Jose Viva, who moved to Charcote two years ago. Since then, he says, the government has given his family papers for 20 hectares, as well as credits to purchase seeds and fertilizer to grow crops. A group of neighboring farmers has organized into a cooperative, purchasing a tractor on government support.

Campesinos such as Viva are at the forefront of one of the most impassioned Chavez crusades, a populist who has made breaking up the nation's large but idle ranches, known here as latifundios, a centerpiece of his presidency.

In a March speech, Chavez called on landholders to prove their property rights. Those who claim to own land must do so by producing the original land titles all the way back to 1848, something that many of them say is impossible. According to the government, a few rich and influential people have amassed huge amounts of land through often-corrupt means and forced the landless to work for them at near-slave wages.

As a result, the government charges, large, fertile and scarcely populated Venezuela buys most of its food abroad. Chavez has made achieving agricultural self-sufficiency a matter of national sovereignty. "You have a country which imports the vast majority of its food," says Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "There's no reason why it can't produce it."

For Chavez, and for the large landowners he has taken on, farm reform has gone far beyond mere economics. In mid-March, the president vowed to "fight to the death" against the latifundios, which he termed "a social crime." After a controversial land reform law passed in 2001, the government proceeded to distribute 2 million hectares of state-owned lands with little trouble. But controversy arose when the national land registry began "intervening" in private properties. Chavez has vowed not to leave a single latifundio--defined by him as a large land holding that operates below 80% of its capacity--standing in Venezuela. In just the first three months of 2005, the government says it redistributed 600,000 hectares of land and, as of June, it was investigating 200 cases of suspected latifundios.

The land-redistribution campaign has become intertwined with the government's verbal offensive against the United States, which Chavez believes could invade his country. In a March interview with the newspaper Quinto Dia, Eliezer Otaiza, then director of the land registry, called on Venezuelans to "hate the gringos" and predicted an invasion by the United States. He was injured in an automobile accident and replaced by Richard Vivas.

Chavez critics call the campaign a brazen attack on property rights. In Charcote's case, government officials don't dispute the Vestey group's 1920 purchase of the land from a wealthy family. Instead, the government claims that family failed to obtain the proper documents when it purchased the land from the government in the first place, which makes Agropecuario Floras title flawed. Officials also say that Vestey had too few cattle on the land to qualify it in terms of minimum use. Agropecuario Flora officials contest both points, saying that they have documents showing the chain of ownership all the way back to 1830, and that they put the number of cattle on the ranch appropriate for land which floods annually.

Leopoldo Lugo, who is in charge of Cojedes state's Mision Zamora land redistribution program, says the campesinos have been issued the necessary paperwork entitling them to stay on seized land while the registry office investigates ownership. "Do peasants have the right to plant food to survive, or is it the right of the big ranchers to make lots of money?" Lugo asks.

Land administrators wonder why the government does not use the vast amounts of land it still owns to resettle campesinos. According to Lugo, that was an option considered, but most government lands are remote and lack roads and electricity.

Big cats. Environmentalists, too, criticize the land-redistribution program. They argue that many large ranchers have preserved parts of their properties, providing habitats for threatened species, including large predators such as pumas, jaguars and caimans, a kind of tropical crocodile.

"As the large ranches are carved up into tiny landholdings the big cats will disappear," says Mel Sunquist, a wildlife ecology professor at the University of Florida who has researched pumas and jaguars at the 80,000-hectare Hate Pinero, recently declared idle and taken by the state. "Maintaining these large ranches is vital to the conservation of many valuable and rare wildlife species in Venezuela."

Environmentalists have rallied around a ranch known as Pinero, in Cojedes State. The Branger family, which purchased Pinero in 1950, has in recent decades reduced the number of cattle there and preserved much of the land, attracting eco-tourists and researchers from Venezuela and abroad.

The Brangers dispute the government's assertion that their land is idle and argue that eco-tourism and research constitute legitimate uses. In an open letter appealing for international support, Andre Branger said the family had been denied due process in defense of its rights. Branger said the government was disputing his family's ownership over a title transfer prior to 1856. National law, he argues, grants property rights on just 20 years of uninterrupted possession.

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Mike Ceaser * El Espinal, Venezuela