San Vicente Assembly Weighs Tenant Protections After Smallholder Outcry

The case of Mariana Quispe, a seventy-nine-year-old coffee farmer who lost access to her family's plot after a dispute with her cooperative's board, has crystallised a wider anxiety in Tierra Verde's interior. Three weeks ago, after the Cooperative Council voted to reassign her land to a younger member-family with higher yields, Quispe was given fourteen days to vacate. The decision sparked protests in San Vicente and a cascade of letters to the Tierra Verde Assembly demanding legal safeguards for long-term smallholders.

On Tuesday, the assembly's agriculture committee advanced a proposal that would require cooperatives to obtain a regional court's approval before terminating a member's land-use rights, and would mandate a ninety-day notice period for any such termination. The measure, sponsored by three assembly members from the interior districts, now moves to a full floor vote within thirty days. Cooperative leaders have signalled both support and concern: support for protecting the most vulnerable members, concern that the rule could calcify membership and slow the rotation of land toward higher-productivity farms.

The proposal sits at the intersection of two principles that have defined Tierra Verde since the Federation's founding — the cooperative ethic of mutual aid and the need to sustain productivity in a region where coffee and yerba mate prices are set by forces far beyond the valley. Assembly members acknowledge the tension but say the current practice leaves elderly farmers exposed.