American Rancher at Odds With Bolivian Government

[Judi Lynn]

May 9, 2008
American Rancher at Odds With Bolivian Government
By SIMON ROMERO
CARAPARICITO, Bolivia

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Mr. Almaraz, a bearded official who shows up at meetings chewing coca leaves, said he was kidnapped and held for a day on Mr. Larsen’s ranch. He responded to the incident by naming the American rancher and his son Duston in a criminal complaint for “sedition, robbery and other crimes.”

Faced with a legal tussle over the standoff, Mr. Larsen now claims that he did not shoot at Mr. Almaraz’s vehicle. “The tires were punched out with sharpened screwdrivers,” Mr. Larsen said. “If I’d have been shooting at people that day, there would have been dead and injured.”

At stake is the 37,000-acre Caraparicito ranch, which Mr. Larsen bought in 1969 for $55,000, and other holdings of more than 104,000 acres, according to government estimates. Mr. Larsen, who as a protective measure transferred ownership of almost all his land to his three sons, who are Bolivian citizens, declined to say how much land his family owned.

With his reserved demeanor, Mr. Larsen, a descendant of Danish immigrants to the American Midwest, makes it seem as if it were the most natural thing in the world to light out for Bolivia in the 1960s, after he got bored working for a year as a manager at a J. C. Penney department store.

“A buddy of mine in the Peace Corps told me Bolivia was a good place to invest,” he said. “When I got here you could buy land as far as you could see.”
(snip)

Within months of his arrival in 2004, he won the Mr. Bolivia beauty pageant, after compensating for his American-accented Spanish at the finale by shouting, “Viva Bolivia!” before a stunned panel of judges. Shortly afterward, he was cast as himself in a Bolivian comedy about cocaine smuggling entitled “Who Killed the White Llama?”

Now Duston is focused on guarding the family’s land, ahead of his marriage to Claudia Azaeda, a talk show host and former beauty pageant winner. Depicted in newspaper cartoons as a gun-slinging “Mr. Gringo Bolivia,” he basks in the showdown with Mr. Morales, an Aymara Indian who is Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

“Evo Morales is a symbol of ignorance, having never even finished high school,” Duston Larsen said in an interview on the porch of the 19th-century ranch house at Caraparicito, amid the howls of his two pet spider monkeys, Harley and Tuto.

He vehemently asserted that ranch hands and their families were free to come and go, after the Larsens and other ranchers were faced with government claims that ranches in their region held their Guaraní workers in servitude; the government has used the charge to move ahead with land seizures.

The reality of life at Caraparicito and other ranches may be more complex than either side suggests. At Caraparicito, workers get work contracts, food, clothing, housing and education for their children at a two-room schoolhouse on the ranch. But wages remain dismally low with senior farmhands earning less than $6 a day.
(snip)

In 2004, the French energy giant Total discovered one of the largest unexploited natural gas deposits in Bolivia, called Incahuasi, on the ranch. The rights to such discoveries automatically go to the government in Bolivia.

But Mr. Larsen said he believed that one reason the central government was so interested in his land was because of its natural gas. President Morales could bypass the province of Santa Cruz in reaching deals related to the natural gas field if he is able to settle Indians on the land who are sympathetic to his government.
(snip)

Juan Carlos Rojas, the director of Bolivia’s land reform agency, said the battle got personal when Mr. Larsen issued a veiled threat against him and other officials when the American rancher referred to a well-known incident in the 1980s in which he shot dead three intruders inside his home.

“Larsen made it clear that he was above the law,” said Mr. Rojas, who emerged from another standoff at Caraparicito in April with his face bloodied from a rock-throwing exchange. Echoing comments by Mr. Morales, he said Santa Cruz’s newly approved autonomy was “illegal” in his view.

“The last I looked, the Larsens were living in Bolivia and not the Republic of Santa Cruz,” Mr. Rojas said. “Despite Ronald Larsen’s resistance, we are going to get into his ranch.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/world/americas/09bolivia.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=world