The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  The deal, of course, was a variant on a theme popular among land grabbers today: land in return for economic development. But bananas and railroads proved a profitable combination. Keith repeated the trick in neighboring countries, and cemented his success with an audacious series of land purchases and corporate mergers, including the marriage with Andrew Preston’s Boston Fruit and its Caribbean plantations that finally created United Fruit. By the turn of the century, Keith had hundreds of thousands of acres of banana plantations in Colombia, Cuba, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Fearing banana saturation in the United States, he created a shipping line that gave him access to European markets. And, for an encore in the new century, he moved into Guatemala, taking over the postal service, then the telegraph lines, then the railroad, and finally much of the land to grow yet more bananas.

  Keith had a rival: another banana empire run out of Honduras by Samuel Zemurray, an emigrant from Russia. Following Keith’s land-grabbing motif, Zemurray had persuaded the Honduran government to give him 400,000 acres, around a quarter of the agricultural land in the tiny country, along with the railroads. Zemurray’s domination of his Honduran hosts inspired O. Henry, an American writer resident there, to coin the term “banana republic” in his 1904 book Cabbages and Kings. Six years later, Zemurray seemed determined to live up to the fictional image. Fearing U.S. bankers wanted to force Honduras to tax his business to pay off national debts, he hired mercenaries to carry out a coup that put his man, Manuel Bonilla, in charge—and secured yet more land for his company.

  In 1930, following Keith’s death, Zemurray’s empire and Keith’s United Fruit merged. The years that followed were the glory days of monopoly and profit. But, after the Second World War, rumblings of discontent and demands for land reform grew across Uncle Sam’s backyard. In Guatemala, a reformist president, Jacobo Arbenz decided to take on the landed elite, including United Fruit. His reforms began by expropriating 150,000 acres of unused land that the company held along the Atlantic coast. Zemurray was having none of it. United Fruit lobbied against Arbenz, particularly in the United States, where it branded him a Communist fifth columnist. The lobbying was so successful that this time the company didn’t need to hire mercenaries. Instead, in 1954, in one of the more notorious cold war episodes, the CIA sponsored a coup to get rid of Arbenz. And, no doubt coincidentally, to stifle land reforms. One of the coup’s chief architects was Howard Hunt, later famous for his involvement in both the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon.

  There followed four decades of civil war, during which Guatemala nurtured state terror, right-wing death squads, and what amounted to genocide against Mayan indigenous groups. A U.S.-brokered peace finally broke out in 1996. The peace accords promised land reforms. But the entrenched power of the major landowners has ensured that the reforms have never happened. Less than 2 percent of the population still own 70 percent of the land—bad even by Latin American standards. The world of Keith and Zemurray persists.

  Today, Guatemala’s fast-growing population of 16 million, half of it Mayan, is mostly penned onto ever smaller plots of land in the southern highlands, while agribusiness dominates the fertile northern lowlands. Poor farmers are often forced to become seasonal laborers on the plantations, or cross the border into Mexico in the hope of making it into United States. Guatemala is among the world’s leading exporters of sugar and coffee—and, of course, bananas. U.S. companies like Dole, Del Monte, and United Fruit (now renamed Chiquita) are still there. Agribusiness and its representatives in parliament continue to rebuff land reforms. But there are new land grabbers, too. Drug traffickers, made rich by the huge fortunes to be gained from selling their products to North America and Europe, have moved in from Mexico and elsewhere.

  The traffickers have bought huge areas of lowland cattle ranches, both as a convenient way of laundering their profits and as a means of hiding the airstrips where cocaine going north and east can be switched from one small plane to another. The U.S. State Department reported in 2010 that “entire regions of Guatemala are now essentially under the control of drug trafficking organizations, the most visible of which is the Mexican group known as the Zetas.” Thanks to a toxic mix of corruption and intimidation of officials, they enjoyed a “prevailing environment of impunity.” The land is theirs.

  Along the way, drug gangs have trashed an estimated 740,000 acres of forests. Conservationists trying to protect the giant Maya Biosphere Reserve, the conservation crown jewels in the north of the country, told the New York Times: “There’s traffickers, cattle ranchers, loggers, poachers and looters. All the bad guys are lined up to destroy the reserve. You can’t imagine the devastation that is happening.”

  Too much of Latin America is like this. And it is hard to avoid the conclusion that unfairness in the distribution of land is a central reason for it. Peasant movements demanding reform have rarely gained traction. The big landowners are bolstered by their connections to financiers, industrialists, and agribusiness, but they remain in charge. Tin-pot generals and weak and unscrupulous politicians of all hues have not helped. But often, of course, the politicians and generals are big land owners themselves.

  What land redistribution there has been is often being rolled back. Peru has seen a revival of mega-farms in its fertile Pacific coastal zone. Investment has surged since the repeal of 1960s land laws that limited land holdings. Today in the coastal provinces, thirty-four owners hold 555,000 acres, including a series of sugar complexes that resulted from privatization of state assets. Besides domestic companies, the Dallas-based Maple Energy has acquired 32,000 acres of what it describes as scorpion-infested desert in the Chira River valley—plus exclusive use of the river’s water. Maple expected to begin production of irrigated sugar to make ethanol for the United States in late 2011. Altima Partners, a British-owned hedge fund, has teamed up with Peru’s COMISA Corporation for a similar project on 64,000 acres in Piura.

  Next door in Bolivia, some two hundred Brazilians and Argentines have in the past two decades quietly bought more than 2 million acres of the giant eastern province of Santa Cruz to grow soy, and as much again for cattle ranching. In theory, the resource nationalism of Bolivia’s indigenous llama-herder-turned-president, Evo Morales, should be holding back the capitalist tide. But the province’s 1,200-mile border with Brazil is impossibly porous. And, as in Paraguay, Brazilian farmers have found that rules limiting any new land holdings to under 12,000 acres are no impediment to buying out land-rich local elites, says Lee Mackey of the University of California at Los Angeles, who is studying how Brazil is spreading its industrialized agriculture around the tropics. Land titles are often dubious, but with prices a quarter those in Brazil, “the profitability [for the Brazilians] is so high that in the short term it is worth the risk,” says Miguel Urioste of Fundación Tierra, a Bolivian NGO. Brazilians own a quarter of the country’s soy farms, and repatriate most of their profits. The largest covers 115,000 acres. “There is a progressive foreign hoarding of the best agricultural land,” he concluded in a report for the UN. Anti-Brazilian sentiment reached a peak in Bolivia in late 2011, when protests against a planned Brazilian-built road through indigenous territories forced Morales to abandon the project.

  In the fevered environment of land grabs, there have been reports of isolated indigenous Guarani groups being subjected to forced labor on Bolivian ranches and plantations. It sounds like a reversion to the horrors of the nineteenth-century rubber boom in these parts, when what is now the Brazilian state of Acre was part of Bolivia but in practice run as an independent fiefdom by Brazilian rubber tappers. In the 1880s, a syndicate of U.S. bankers and rubber barons wanted to annex the state and turn it into what amounted to a U.S. colony. The plan failed, but in the end Brazil simply bought Acre.

  Land grabbers in the remote headwaters of the Amazon ran rubber outposts as tyrannous as anything contrived by the agents
of Belgium’s King Leopold in his Congo Free State in Africa. Perhaps the worst was Julio Cesar Arana, a Peruvian rubber trader who controlled a slice of rain forest the size of Belgium, on the border between Peru and Colombia. He sent thugs through the forest setting fire to crops and raping women, as a way of intimidating the tribes into joining his rubber-tapping work camps. Once there, the men were put into chain gangs where the price of not meeting your latex quota could be death, and the women joined breeding farms to provide the next generation of slaves. By the time the camps were shut down, amid growing international scandal, an estimated fifty thousand Indians had died.

  In Colombia, a modern combination of cattle ranchers, cocaine barons, and paramilitary groups is scarcely less toxic. A peasant army known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), launched as far back as 1964, took over parts of the country in an effort to wrestle back the land from ranchers and others. Its methods were often vicious. But to defeat them, the government resorted to giving a free hand to the landed elite and some insalubrious friends. Right-wing paramilitary groups set up to fight FARC often turned out also to be drug barons.

  Most notorious were the Castano brothers, Fidel, Vicente, and Carlos. They came to rule huge areas of Choco province in northwest Colombia. According to Teo Ballve of the University of California at Berkeley, the brothers formed a paramilitary force after their rancher father was kidnapped and assassinated by FARC. Initially called the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Cordoba and Uraba, the eight-thousand-strong private militia was trained by the Colombian military to conduct a “dirty war” against FARC in the 1990s. That war involved slaughtering thousands of people suspected of harboring FARC fighters, and the displacement of millions of others, many of them from the Afro-Colombian community of former slaves who formed the majority in Choco.

  For their assistance in fighting communism, the brothers “received generous logistical and financial support from businessmen, wealthy landowners, drug traffickers, and members of the army,” says Ballve. They “bought vast estates during the narco land rush of the early 1980s. The violent momentum of their growing war machine became driven by its own internal metabolism, gaining vast amounts of land, businesses and weapons while eliminating political opponents and protecting their most lucrative activity, drug trafficking.”

  FARC, which also came to rely on taxing coca farmers in areas under its control, is a diminished force today. But that has left the narco-militias as the big winners. Worse, Ballve says the gangsters are now being laundered back into legitimate society through the fast-growing and lucrative oil-palm business, which the government sees as the likeliest route of recovery for an economy wrecked by decades of conflict. “Palm is a perfect way to consolidate their militarized social control over a territory and invest capital accumulated from drugs into a profitable business,” says Gustavo Duncan, a security analyst in Bogota. More than 50,000 acres of the Afro-Colombian land in Choco’s Curbarado river basin have so far been expropriated and “carpeted with palm oil,” says Ballve.

  This rebranding of the drug barons comes with some unlikely assistance. Many of those moving into palm oil production have in recent years received financial help from USAID’s anti–drug trade program. Its Colombia Plan was intended to wean poor farmers off the cultivation of illegal crops like coca by introducing them to other cash-generating substitutes. But, almost inevitably, the cash has often ended up in the wrong hands. Ballve says that one recipient, to the embarrassment of USAID, was Carlos Mario Jimenez, widely known as Macaco, who has confessed to killing many civilians in his pursuit of FARC and who is, at the time of writing, awaiting trial in Washington, D.C., on narcotics and terrorism charges.

  Maybe this is all in a good cause. In many ways, Colombia is one of the more civilized countries of Latin America, with good health care and schools in much of the country. Ministers in Bogota hope Colombia will be the next Brazil. They say 10 million acres, much of it recaptured from FARC and its sympathizers, is available for legal crops now. But have they really weaned the drug barons off drugs and into legitimate agriculture? Or are they further institutionalizing the narco-state and the massive illegal land grabs that took place during the dirty war? Elisa Wiener Bravo of the International Land Coalition, which fights for the land rights of the poor, called the new concentration of land ownership in Latin America “reminiscent of the period of the banana plantations.”

  And not just reminiscent. In 2011, the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, a Colombian human rights organization, reported that thousands of poor peasants were being recruited to invade Afro-Colombians’ land in Choco to grow bananas for sale to a Medellin-based company, which sells to Europe and the United States. Fancy a banana, anyone?

  Chapter 13. Patagonia: The Last Place on Earth

  Doug Tompkins and his wife Kris once sold the world backpacks, outdoor gear, and high fashion. North Face and Esprit were his companies; she was CEO of eco-fashion pioneer Patagonia. Then he went on a camping holiday to Patagonia, and decided to buy the place. Well, not all of it, but he now has a chunk of the wild, empty, and much-mythologized “cone” of South America that is around 250 times the size of Manhattan. And if the couple gets lonely, there are plenty of similarly minded superrich a short executive flight away. The idiosyncratic Benetton clothing family from Italy owns an even larger estate. The American media mogul Ted Turner has a patch of Patagonia ten times the size of Manhattan. Next door, when he is not supervising his Argentine vineyards, lives the Texan inheritor of a potato-chip fortune. Then there is the secretive Brit who made his fortune betting against his own national currency on Black Wednesday in 1992.

  Patagonia occupies the emptiest, southernmost part of South America. It is the planet’s most surreal backwater, but also a place of transcendent beauty: of endless fjords; of glaciers amid fungi-covered rain forests; and of Tierra del Fuego, the “land of fire” where Charles Darwin was transfixed by super-intelligent natives. It is a land of tales about human giants, sea monsters, and horned burrowing rodents that inspired my favorite travel book, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.

  There are not many places where a couple can have their own private, erupting volcano. But Doug and Kris Tompkins have one, named Chaiten, which has been spewing ash and gas since 2008. It is 600 miles south of Santiago, at the farthest end of their rain-forest-covered Pumalin Park. The 740,000-acre park, with its own airstrip beside the Renihue fjord, almost divides Chile in two.

  South of Pumalin Park, they had the 190,000-acre Corcovado mountain estate—bought with close friend Peter Buckley, another rich American outdoor-loving clothes entrepreneur who became a green philanthropist—until donating it to the state. They still have a 210,000-acre spread in the nearby Chacabuco Valley. Surrounded by glaciers, the Chacabuco sheep ranch was first fenced by one of Britain’s great imperial land grabbers. Lucas Bridges was a child of British Anglican missionaries. He grew up with the native tribes of Tierra del Fuego, an upbringing he chronicled in his 1948 book, Uttermost Part of the Earth. We discover more of Bridges’s footprint in Zimbabwe in chapter 23.

  The Tompkins couple say that the tens of thousands of sheep on Bridges’ ranch have almost turned the area to desert. So they are reducing the flocks, tearing down the fences, and returning the land to wilderness. Some Chilean politicians see them as vandals for dismantling the work of the great (albeit also foreign) nation builder. Doug calls this “nothing more than a temporary opposition.” Conservation, he says, is “the most elemental form of patriotism.”

  Maybe, but Doug’s environmentalism transcends all boundaries. Over the Andean mountains in Argentina, the couple has another series of holdings. They include El Pinalito, a reserve for pumas and other wild cats originally set up by a Briton named Peter Moore; El Rincon, a mountain summit nobody has ever climbed; almost 500,000 acres of the Ibera swamp in the Argentine Chaco; and 235,000 acres around Estancia Monte Leon on the Atlantic coast, home to sea li
ons and Magellanic penguin rookeries.

  The Tompkinses are serious about the environment. Though they made their fortunes selling clothes to those willing to pay top prices for the perfect soft-shell jacket, they are now proponents of anti-materialist green philosophy. The Foundation for Deep Ecology is led, funded, and housed by them in California. Doug has a strict Malthusian view that there are “too many of us.” He calls Greenpeace’s wet-suited eco-campaigners “wimps,” and spends part of the year helping to crew the Sea Shepherd, a ship that regularly rams Japanese whalers in the iceberg-strewn waters of the Southern Ocean. The couple are serious too about protecting Patagonia from all comers. They have been opposing plans for roads and dams in their area of Chile, to the anger of many locals.

  Altogether, they have more than 2 million acres of Chilean and Argentine Patagonia, most of it owned through trusts registered back home in Sausalito, California. His is the Conservation Land Trust, and hers is Conservacion Patagonica, which receives money from her old company. They dream of seeing their landholdings in both countries eventually form the core of a giant transboundary park stretching from the Pacific fjords of Chile to the Atlantic shores of Argentina. Should I be opposed to such elite jet-setters buying up such a place on such a scale? Is this altruistic conservation or land grab? I wasn’t sure.

  Buying wilderness is increasingly popular among the green-minded super-rich, in Patagonia and many other places. Most of the big Patagonian purchases happened in the 1990s, after the fierce winds of free-market economics had blasted through the cone of South America. Chile, under General Pinochet, more or less invented Reaganomics. The Argentine government of Carlos Menem oversaw the sale to foreigners of an estimated 20 million acres of homeland. “Land is very cheap, property rights very stable—and the locals often want to sell,” says George Holmes, a British academic from Leeds University who has followed the gringo trail. “One reason the Tompkins and others have been able to buy is because no one else wanted the land.”