Venezuela's self proclaimed revolutionary government and it's president Hugo Chavez is using state power to enact land reform in the interests of the country's rural poor peasants. Squatters have been getting progressively more assertive reclaiming land, which has lead to a number of bloody clashes with landlords since Chavez took office in 1999. Many of the nation's wealthy ruling class are threatening a greater showdown in the face of these latest reforms. Chavez's government was nearly unseated, by right wing military and private forces, in a 2002 coup which the US government was party to. In contrast the US government uses state power to dispossess poor land owners of their legal property from New London, Connecticut to Brooklyn, New York.