· Mayor seeks compulsory purchase of elite courses
· Capital needs 1m houses but opposition cries foul

Che Guevara may have been famously photographed showing Fidel Castro how to play golf at the Country Club in Havana after the revolution in Cuba but the game has never been strongly associated with revolutionary politics.
Now two of Latin America’s most prestigious golf clubs could find themselves part of a revolutionary experiment, with their land expropriated to make homes for the poor in a move by the radical mayor of Caracas.
There is a major housing shortage in the Venezuelan capital and the city’s mayor, Juan Barreto, an ally of the president, Hugo Chávez, has been looking for ways to resolve the growing crisis.
Two areas in the city with wide expanses of undeveloped land are the Caracas Country Club and Valle Arriba golf club. The former, an elegant landscaped establishment founded in 1918, has long been frequented by the Venezuelan upper classes. The latter, founded in 1942, has a clientele which includes foreign diplomats and businessmen.
“It’s shameful to see people playing golf and just right there in front of them is a shanty town,” said Mr Barreto in an interview on state television. “We are following the policies laid out by President Chávez … to give a new social direction to the city, so the city can be enjoyed by everyone.”
This week the two clubs were listed in the Caracas official gazette as sites for “forced acquisition”. The eventual aim would be to build low-cost housing for the city’s homeless and shanty town dwellers.
The Caracas city attorney, Juan Manuel Vadell, told Associated Press that compensation would be paid. The amount would be decided by an appraisal commission, he added.
Mr Vadell said the owners would have 30 days in which to present themselves at the mayor’s office. This would be followed by a negotiation process for the eventual takeover of the properties.
A third golf course, further from the centre of the city, is also being considered for acquisition.
Estimates for the total number of homes that could be constructed if the compulsory acquisitions get the go-ahead range up to 50,000.
The president of the Caracas Country Club, Fernando Zozaya, said the intended acquisitions had created “great concern” among his members. He said he had not yet been contacted by the authorities.
Some critics see the moves as an attempt to win support ahead of the next elections in December. One opposition city councillor described the mayor’s plan as “electoral demagoguery”. Both golf courses lie in districts represented by members of the opposition.
“This isn’t an expropriation aimed at collective benefit,” Oscar Garcia Mendoza, a banker who lives at Caracas Country Club, told AP. “It’s a violation of private property rights that appears to be an extension of the communism these people want to impose on us.”
No one disputes that Caracas has a major housing shortage. The city needs more than a million new homes. The authorities have also considered the compulsory purchase of second homes or properties where the landlords are deemed to have exploited their tenants in the past.
Since he was first elected Mr Chávez has moved to expropriate land with the aim of redistributing it, with land reform one of his government’s main platforms.
Under laws introduced in 2001 limits were set on the size of landholdings that could be owned and taxes introduced for unused property.
Laws were also introduced that uncultivated land could be expropriated for redistribution.
The moves have angered opponents who claim that he is ignoring property rights in order to gain votes.
Source: guardian.co.uk