MANITOBA, Bolivia, Dec. 19 — With its horse-drawn buggies, farmhouses with manicured lawns and fields planted to the horizon with soybeans and sorghum, this Mennonite settlement in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands feels like a tropical version of rural Ohio or Pennsylvania.
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That placid impression lasts until farmers here start talking about their fears of President Evo Morales’s plans for land reform.
One year into an administration that intends to reverse centuries of subjugation of Bolivia’s indigenous majority, Mr. Morales has plans to redistribute as many as 48 million acres of land, considered idle or ill gotten through opaque purchase agreements, to hundreds of thousands of peasants.
The project won approval last month in Congress, and thousands of Mr. Morales’s supporters marched in La Paz, the capital, in celebration. But it has shaken Manitoba and Bolivia’s 41 other Mennonite farming communities.
“I read El Deber — I know what’s taking place in this country,” said Gerardo Martens, 22, referring to the leading newspaper in Santa Cruz, the provincial capital 100 miles southwest of here, a long trip on dirt and asphalt roads for adherents to a faith that prohibits driving automobiles. “We simply want to know what will happen to us and our land.”
Mennonites have been carving new settlements out of the thick jungle of eastern Bolivia for more than 40 years, helping to create an agricultural frontier. Multinational companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland rely on their soybean and sunflower harvests to produce cooking oils and animal feed. These exports have transformed Bolivia’s 40,000 Mennonites into a bloc of relatively prosperous landowners.
The country’s German-speaking Mennonites trace their origins to the 16th century, with their name and Anabaptist beliefs derived from a Dutch Protestant reformist, Menno Simons. They migrated earlier to Russia, the United States, Canada, Belize and Mexico, and then some came here, for the farming opportunities and religious freedom. Names of the communities here, including Alberta, Belice and Campo Chihuahua, are testament to this past.
While the degree of observance of Mennonite customs varies in each of these colonies, as they call them, the 2,500 people in Manitoba stitch their own clothing. They also eschew electricity for their homes and rubber tires for their tractors. Their only schooling is the study of the Scripture and other subjects in German until the age of 12. They continue making yellow corn tortillas, which some residents came to love while living in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua.
Families in Manitoba and other Mennonite communities tend to be large, often with 6 to 12 children. With family farms generally limited to about 100 acres, population growth inevitably pushes families to search for new land to settle.
This practice, often in areas where land titles are of murky provenance, is the main source of the Mennonites’ concern about the government’s plans. Farmers in Manitoba and nearby Chihuahua shuddered when speaking of the situation in El Cariño, a community more than six hours to the north where squatters have tried to occupy land owned by Mennonite farmers.
“We’re fine because the title to our land is clear,” said Franz Schmidt, an attendant at the bustling general store in Chihuahua. “But those people on the margins are the ones we’re worrying about.”
The Mennonites in Bolivia are citizens, but they generally avoid any involvement in politics, preferring to farm and practice their faith far from the prying eyes of outsiders. Mr. Martens, the farmer, guided a rare visitor around Manitoba in his buggy on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon when the temperature reached 95 degrees. He said he had gone only once to La Paz.
“We try not to say anything negative about the decisions made at the presidential palace,” Mr. Martens said haltingly in German-accented Spanish. “We’re afraid of being expelled from Bolivia.”
The Mennonites are not the only ones worried about the land bill. Hundreds of foreign farmers, mainly from neighboring Brazil, have started industrial-scale soybean farming on huge tracts of land in this region. A potential requirement to review land titles every two years is already restricting access to financing for costly farm equipment and fertilizers, these farmers say.
“Expropriations would be disastrous for a government that refuses to understand that some farming has to take place for profit in a capitalist system,” said Jocélio Edegar Rodríguez da Silva, 29, a Brazilian who manages a large soybean farm bordering Manitoba for investors from southern Brazil.
While details of Mr. Morales’s land program remain somewhat vague and subject to changes in an assembly convened to rewrite Bolivia’s Constitution, the main thrust of the proposal would require its beneficiaries, though not the current landowners, to own land on a communal instead of individual basis. In communities like Manitoba, farms are owned by single families.
A previous government tried agrarian reform in 1953, though subsequent lethargy and corruption in the distribution of land grants effectively concentrated nearly 90 percent of Bolivia’s arable land among its wealthiest 10 percent of families.
With no television or Internet access in Manitoba, news of developments in the capital often reaches the farmers through word of mouth. Sometimes they stop to chat at the general store operated by Abraham Martens, where buggies line up outside on a dirt parking lot.
Looking somewhat astonished when asked what the future held, one farmer, Abraham Wall, started out by describing the odyssey that brought him here. Describing himself as “mexicano,” he explained that he was born in northern Mexico and brought to Bolivia at age 2 by his parents. He moved from settlement to settlement before arriving in Manitoba in 1993.
“Whether we stay in this spot,” said Mr. Wall, 40, as he was surrounded by six of his eight children, “that depends on Evo Morales.”
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