There is a reason besides lack of property why poor people do not have land

Washington Post:

Choei Yara sleeps in a boxy room in the back of his roadside dry goods store, and the lump under his thin pillow is a loaded .45-caliber pistol. It is intended for a specific emergency: an attack so sudden that he'd be unable to reach the pump-action shotgun that leans against a bare concrete wall, just five feet away.

He's not afraid of the store being robbed, but he believes that the piece of paper stating that he owns about 1,400 acres of fertile soil is the kind of thing that can drive men to violent extremes. Property in Latin America is more unevenly distributed than anywhere on the planet, and Bolivia is no exception. But this month the country began a project to shuffle ownership rights affecting 20 percent of its land area, giving most of it to the poor. And tensions are starting to boil.

Those with land are starting to dig in to protect their turf. Those without it, emboldened by the recent government announcements, are taking over more properties on their own, without government approval.

"I've worked this land for 30 years, and I have never had a problem until this past year," said Yara, 63, whose family was among the Japanese immigrants who founded this community in eastern Bolivia after World War II. "But now I get death threats from the landless peasants, and they are threatening to kidnap my family. No one respects private property anymore, not even the government."

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Bolivia appears headed toward repeating the idiocy of Zimbabwe, taking land from producers and giving it those who are not. The poor people will then keep on doing the things that made them poor to begin with and land productivity will fall dramatically and Bolivia will have less food as well as a shrinking economy and rampant inflation. Insanity is continuing to do something that does not work and that fits the current Bolivian government.