Modernizing the countryside: Israeli rural planning expertise for the Venezuelan agrarian reform during the 1960s

This paper recounts the history of how Venezuelan expertise in rural regional planning was developed during the 1960s in the context of the Venezuelan agrarian reform. It explains the role that Israeli technical cooperation, which introduced Raanan Weitz’s ideas on rural development through regional planning, played in this process. This reform, promoted by the nascent Venezuelan democracy, aimed to eliminate the latifundia system inherited from the colonial era and redistribute land among poor peasants for economic and social emancipation. Venezuela’s commitment to the reform was significant, and in 1961, it received additional backing from the U.S. government through the Alliance for Progress, a foreign aid programme launched to curb the communist threat in the region. By analyzing the case study of Las Majaguas, a large-scale irrigation scheme designed to resettle 2,200 peasant families, this article will demonstrate how architects and planners, along with many other professionals, helped translate political, geopolitical, and economic objectives into specific forms of regional rural planning and social control. This article therefore offers a critical perspective on the history of the modernization of rural areas in Venezuela and the role played by architects and urban planners in this process.