Agrarian Reform

From the Spanish conquests in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the early twenty-first century, both government and private institutions have instituted agrarian reform programs in Latin America. The extent to which calls for agrarian reform have been voiced over the past five hundred years is perhaps the best evidence of the failure, with a few notable exceptions, of most efforts at such reform. While land pressures in Latin America have been no greater than in other regions of the world, the fact that such a large proportion of the population still derives all or part of its subsistence from the land has pushed the issue to the forefront throughout the region. It is for this reason that throughout the history of Latin America, various political movements have called for agrarian reform.

COLONIAL PERIOD

The first efforts at agrarian reform were carried out almost as soon as the Spanish established their empire in the New World. The first land grabs of the Spanish conquistadors in the Caribbean led to the extinction of the indigenous population and the monopolization of land by the conquistadors. This in turn resulted in the emergence of both latifundia (the concentration of large tracts of land in the hands of a few Spanish landlords) and minifundia (the division of the remaining lands among peasants into parcels not large enough to provide subsistence for a peasant family). This land crisis led the Spanish crown to introduce land reform. The New Laws of 1542 abolished the encomienda, recognized the autonomy of the Indian community, and prohibited Spaniards from occupying the Indian lands or living in Indian villages. Encroachments on Indian lands, however, continued throughout the colonial period, and in the eighteenth century the Bourbon Reforms sought once again to enforce limited agrarian reform. In Brazil, the Portuguese crown grants, sesmarias, were extended to a few privileged settlers who dominated the good coastal lands for sugar production. As in Spanish America, colonial Brazil set the pattern of latifundia for the few and minifundia for the many.

INDEPENDENCE

After independence from Spain, most Latin American governments embraced classical liberal notions of agrarian reform, which argued that Indians and Latino peasants would be better off if they owned their own individual parcels of land and were free to partition and sell according to the dictates of the free market. Under this formula, lands traditionally controlled by the corporate Indian community were often divided up and sold, which only intensified the earlier trend of land concentration. During the latter half of the nineteenth century land was concentrated in this way throughout Latin America as the region embraced capitalist market relations. In Mexico, for example, both Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz oversaw and approved of the concentration of land by both the Mexican upper class and foreign investors.

To varying degrees this model was followed in other Latin American countries. In Brazil the government ceased granting lands in sesmarias in the mid-nineteenth century and sought instead to sell lands through the General Bureau of Public Lands, established in 1854, which resulted in further concentration of land-ownership. Land concentration resulted in landlessness and rural unemployment for many Latin American peasants, which in turn led to political unrest. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was in part a response to the free-market policies so cherished by Porfirio Díaz and his científicos.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

The combination of monopolistic control of huge tracts of land and foreign ownership of the mineral resources of Mexico mobilized millions to demand a nationalist strategy for land distribution. In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, agrarian reform was written into the Constitution of 1917. Encompassed in the ejido program, the Mexican government sought to redistribute lands to the small- and medium-size farmers. At its peak, during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), substantial redistribution of land was carried out, so that the proportion of landless peasants went down from 68 percent of the rural population in 1930 to 36 percent in 1940. After 1940, however, landlessness among rural dwellers steadily increased in Mexico at the same time that land became concentrated into the hands of private large landowners. Technological advances only widened the gap between large landowners and ejidatarios, since the former had more capital to purchase advanced machinery, seeds, and fertilizer.

In Brazil, which had no agrarian reform comparable to Mexico's ejido program, pressures on land were released by expansion westward into Brazil's vast interior. Brazilian strongman Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945, 1950–1954) encouraged westward expansion, since only 4 percent of Brazil's land was under cultivation as late as 1945. The opening up of western land helped reduce land concentration somewhat and vastly increased the number of farms.

Other Latin American countries experienced similar opposition to the concentration of land in the hands of the wealthy and landlessness among the rural poor. In Central America, elite control of arable land caused widespread unrest. In Guatemala, for example, the government of Jacobo Arbenz passed the Agrarian Reform Law (Decree 900) in 1952 allowing for the redistribution of over 600,000 hectares of land to over 100,000 Guatemalan families. The law was perceived by the United States to be a plot to expropriate lands owned by the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. Thus the United States planned and carried out the coup of 1954, in which the elected president Arbenz was overthrown and replaced by a Guatemalan leader acceptable to the United States, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas.

In El Salvador, where by the early 1990s virtually all of the prime farmland was controlled by the elites and where over 70 percent of the peasants had no land at all, decades of conflict between peasants and large landowners over land control and distribution continued into the early 2000s. The matanza (slaughter) of the 1930s, in which an estimated thirty thousand Salvadoran peasants were killed, was due largely to struggles between peasants and the elite over the land. In the 1980s further conflicts over land resulted in the estimated deaths of over 70,000, most of them peasants and small farmers. And while a truce was reached in 1992, the pressures on land promised to give rise to even more fighting.

In 1961 Brazilian president João Goulart called for the expropriation of all large and medium landholdings adjacent to highways, rail lines, and public projects as a beginning to agrarian reform. This was perhaps one reason that Brazilian elites and the military backed his overthrow in 1964 to be replaced by a military dictatorship.

Because efforts to legislate agrarian reform have proved unsuccessful in Latin America, agrarian reform has usually been forced through by revolutionary upheavals, as was the case in Mexico. In the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, peasants mobilized and expropriated farmlands while workers seized control of the mines. In both Cuba and Nicaragua, agrarian reform was achieved only after prolonged revolutionary struggles. In Peru, a left-leaning military dictatorship that came to power in 1968 oversaw the breakup of farmland controlled by Peru's traditional landed elites. Yet while agrarian reform in Peru resulted in the diminished power of the traditional landed oligarchies, it did not benefit the majority of the peasant class. Despite promises, Peru's peasants still lack access to arable lands in the twenty-first century. This has had two negative consequences: malnourishment, which plagues over 10 percent of Peru's population (and an even greater part of its peasant population); and landlessness. The lack of serious agrarian reform gave revolutionary organizations such as the Shining Path a base of support among many of Peru's peasants in the 1980s. As a result of government repression (over thirty thousand died in Peru's civil war), the Shining Path was finally defeated, but many of the issues that drove Peruvians to join the Shining Path remain unresolved.

In Brazil, pressures on land led to open conflict in the countryside, and the 1994 Workers Party candidate for president, Luis Inácio "Lula" da Silva, called for broad land redistribution. Despite Lula's election in 2004, however, land reform has largely been stalled, and Brazil's landless peasants number over 5 million in 2007. Thus, calls for land redistribution continue to have strong support among Brazil's poor.

In Mexico, efforts to end the ejido program written into the 1917 Constitution were one stated reason for a guerrilla uprising in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994. As of 2007 Zapatista guerrillas still held isolated positions in Chiapas in hopes of pressuring the government to institute agrarian reform. Despite this rebellion, the Mexican government has repudiated Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution and has ceased all land redistribution to poor Mexican farmers and campesinos.

In two Latin American countries, however, agrarian reform advanced further than elsewhere. In the wake of both the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions, radical land reform was carried out with mixed results. In Cuba the large sugar and tobacco fincas were taken over by the revolutionary Cuban government, while only the smallest landholdings were left in the hands of individual owners. Programs of education, health, and housing transformed the Cuban countryside, and Fidel Castro's regime still enjoyed considerable support among Cuba's rural workers into the twenty-first century. Cuba's state-run agricultural industries, however, have been noted for their waste and inefficiency in both production and distribution. This is especially true of the sugar industry, where between 1990 and 2005 Cuba has seen a steady decline in sugar output. Part of this is due to stated government policies to phase out Cuba's reliance on sugar production.

To stimulate the agricultural sector, the Castro government periodically allows for independent farming and market sales of goods produced by private farmers. In the past this policy has resulted in more efficient production and better distribution of agricultural commodities, but the downside for the Cuban government is that independent farmers and merchants who accumulate land and capital are considered a threat to the Cuban government's state-run economy. With the collapse of Soviet aid beginning in the mid-1980s and the severe economic crisis of the early 1990s, the Cuban government was forced to allow independent small farming and the spread of farmers' markets, both of which could strengthen the small business class in Cuba, which in turn could represent a threat to Castro's rule. More recently, urban gardens have sprouted in the towns and cities of Cuba as a way to alleviate chronic food shortages. Thus, despite the most radical agrarian reform of any Latin American nation, Cuba's agricultural sector has declined considerably since the revolution in 1959.

In Nicaragua, after the revolution of 1979 the Sandinistas expropriated lands owned by the Somoza family and its supporters. These lands were converted into collective farms, as were much of Nicaragua's previously uncultivated lands. This program aroused resentments among Nicaraguan peasants, who supported the revolution in hopes of receiving their own parcels of land. In response to a growing guerrilla movement (the Contras) in the countryside, the Sandinistas enacted one of the most comprehensive land reforms in Latin America. Beginning in the mid-1980s collectivization was deemphasized and peasants were granted individual tracts of land. To prevent latifundization the Sandinista government denied landholders the right to sell or divide up their land, thereby ensuring that land given to peasants would not later be sold off to large landowners. With the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections, however, efforts were revived to return expropriated lands to their former owners. Despite its political popularity, Sandinista land reform was unable to revive Nicaragua's agricultural sector. A ten-year civil war and a vigorous embargo by the United States ensured that Nicaragua's economy, including its agricultural industry, would stagnate throughout the 1980s. While land redistribution won the support of many peasants, it also angered urban dwellers, who suffered through constant scarcity of basic goods. After the elections of 1990, the conservative-dominated Nicaraguan legislature voted to turn back virtually all of the land reforms enacted by the Sandinistas during their rule.

See alsoAgriculture .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Janvry, Alain. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

Enriquez, Laura. Harvesting Change: Labor and Agrarian Reform in Nicaragua, 1979–1990. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Frank, Andrew G. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1971.

Furtado, Celso. Economic Development of Latin America: A Survey from Colonial Times to the Cuban Revolution. Translated by Suzette Macedo. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Stavenhagen, Rodolfo. Social Classes in Agrarian Societies. Translated by Judy Adler Hellman. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1975.

                                 Michael Powelson